GM and Korean chemicals company Posco have announced plans to construct a new $500 million battery materials plant in Quebec.
The new facility, which will be built in Bécancour, Quebec at an estimated cost of US $400 million, will produce cathode active material for GM’s Ultium lithium-ion batteries and will open in the 2024 calendar year.
Cathode Active Material, or CAM, is a critical battery component that makes up roughly 40 percent of the cost of an EV battery cell. GM first announced its manufacturing joint venture with Posco last December, at the time laying out plans to construct a new CAM processing facility at an undisclosed location in North America.
GM and POSCO Chemical have signed a non-binding term sheet to create the new joint venture and “expect to execute definitive agreements soon,” the two companies said in a prepared statement released Monday.
Doug Parks, GM executive vice president, Global Product Development, Purchasing and Supply Chain, said GM and Posco will receive support from the Quebec provincial and Canadian federal governments to set up the new CAM processing site.
“GM and our supplier partners are creating a new, more secure and more sustainable ecosystem for EVs, built on a foundation of North American resources, technology and manufacturing expertise,” Parks said. “Canada is playing an important role in our all-electric future, and we are grateful for the strong support we have received from local, provincial and national officials to grow a North American-focused EV value chain.”
GM Ultium Cells battery plant rendering
GM entered a joint venture agreement with Korean battery manufacturer LG Energy Solution in 2020, creating the new Ultium Cells LLC entity, which will operate various GM-LG battery cell plants in North America. With this move, GM is bringing yet another aspect of the battery manufacturing process in-house, allowing it to send processed CAM to its own Ultium Cells plants. Battery cells would then be sent to GM’s own battery assembly sites before being installed in its vehicles.
Some of the other strategic partners that will supply parts and materials for future GM EVs include MP Materials (rare earth magnets), VAC (magnet factory), General Electric (rare earth and other materials), Wolfspeed (silicon carbide), and Controlled Thermal Resources (lithium).
The vast majority of future GM EVs will utilize Ultium battery cells with Posco-processed cathode material, including the GMC Hummer EV, Cadillac Lyriq, Chevy Silverado EV and Cruise Origin robotaxi. GM is currently constructing three separate Ultium battery cells plants in North America, including one in Lordstown, Ohio, one in Spring Hill, Tennessee and one in Lansing, Michigan. A fourth Ultium Cells site is expected to be announced in the near future, as well.
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Comments
This is all well and good, but we need a lot more CHARGING station. Go to a good dealer and ask them how many would buy an EV ?? Most over here just laugh. The tow company’s should charge extra for the weight to pull them out of the ditch’s. But then again most of the country calls us the fly over states.
Do you have electricity at your farm? If you do, there’s 90% of the charging you’ll ever need. For the other 10%, Electrify America has the interstate highway system fairly well covered today with complete coverage coming by 2025.
Not everybody stays on the Farm. Once it’s planted it’s time to go south to fish. As for the Electrify highways they can’t even fix the potholes. You must watch too much false news.
A long time ago, they challenged and some dismissed Nikolie Tesla. Yes, he was way out there but he was way ahead of his time. It was the powers that be at the time that overpowered his ideas much like the VHS tape recorder and player. Many think that BETA was better, but several companies ganged up to make VHS the dominant player. EVs may be seen now as something that we’re not ready for on a large scale right now; but they’re not only coming, they’re here. U can’t put the Genie back in the bottle. We say the “communicator” being used by Capt. Kirk in Star Trek in the 60s; it then resurfaced as the Flip phone. Electric cars were invented in the early 1900s but the battery technology was not developed at the time to make them economically feasible; and the Oil companies monopoly led by The Rockefeller’s and Standard Oil put a kabash on it similar to the way they tried to stop or slow the advent of the widespread use of electricity many years ago. I believe that EVs will be the mainstream; it’s just gonna take some time. What’s going on now with oil supply due to the Ukraine invasion should be a bell weather that it’s over for big oil sometime in this century.