According to BMW's official website report, on October 15, local time, German car manufacturer BMW announced that it has established a joint technical alliance with Swedish battery company Northvolt and Belgian material recycling group Umicore, and will work closely to continue developing electric vehicles in Europe. A complete, sustainable value chain for automotive batteries. The project is seeking to promote the sustainable industrialization of European batteries, and to obtain battery related technologies in the chemical process, research and development, production and final recycling. The R & D activities of the Pan-European Union will help create high-tech jobs and provide full support to the EU Battery Alliance founded by EU Commissioner Maroš Šefčovič.
The goal of the three companies is to design a "closed life cycle cycle" battery manufacturing process and commercialize this process, allowing electric vehicle batteries to gain secondary life as energy storage products before battery recycling.
BMW spokesman Niklas Drechsler told Reuters that batteries may be purchased from Northvolt in the future. As part of this partnership, BMW will provide its expertise in battery development, while Umicore will be responsible for the development and recycling of active anode and cathode materials.
Headquartered in Sweden, Northvolt was founded by Peter Carlsson and Paolo Cerruti, both of whom were Tesla employees. The company is seeking additional funding from the European Investment Bank (EIB), plans to build the largest lithium-ion battery plant in Europe, and plans to raise 4 billion euros (about 4.6 billion US dollars) to fund a battery plant construction plan with an annual production capacity of 32GWh by 2023 Battery.
In order to accelerate battery research and development and further progress in battery chemistry and design, the BMW Group has built a new battery center of excellence, which will be completed in the summer of 2019. In addition to battery research and development, other key technologies related to battery prototype production and production expertise according to drawings will also be gathered here.
Recently, Umicore also announced that it will begin construction of a cathode material manufacturing plant in Europe, and has built a lithium-ion battery recycling plant in Europe. Umicore facilitates the development of battery recycling technology and reuses the recovered resources for battery material production cycle, thereby making an important contribution to sustainable mobile travel in the future.