Britain is falling behind in the race to develop an electric battery industry, a House of Commons committee heard on May 9, as it received evidence from an expert panel on battery materials.
Business consultants and executives told the MPs during a Business and Trade Committee session that Britain has “missed the boat” in the first wave of the electric battery revolution and failed to boost development of a successful supply chain. When questioned about the reasons for poor performance, chief executive of Benchmark Mineral Intelligence Simon Moores said: “You have to ask what the automotive companies here, the big chemical companies like Ineos in the UK, were doing.”
He then compared Britain’s performance to that of other countries.
“They weren’t plugged into batteries when China and Japan was, when Korea, the U.S., and the EU was. They have not even been talking about lithium-ion batteries as a serious multibillion-pound industry when it is exactly that for everyone else in the world,” Moore said.
Without the rapid creation of a supply chain, Britain will lose its automotive industry, the panel warned, suggesting that it could migrate to central Europe.
Chief executive of the taxpayer-funded Advanced Propulsion Centre, Ian Constance, said that without “keystone” volume plants in the UK, the automotive industry would be significantly affected.
Large-scale electric vehicle battery manufacturing plants are also known as gigafactories. Moore told the MPs that unless the UK makes its own batteries and has chemical plants to fuel them, it isn’t involved in the industry and the “energy storage revolution.”
“When you build a gigafactory, you have the critical mineral supply deals, the contracts, the partners in place to see that lithium ion in the ground go all the way through to that battery plant. And that’s really the crux of this global battery arms race. It is not just about making cells, it is about the whole supply chain,” Moore said.
Mark Pawsey MP suggested to the panel that while Britain may have “grand plans” to build electric batteries, it may be restricted in doing so due to the “strangle hold” China has on the market.
The founder of the Critical Minerals Association Jeff Townsend agreed: “[China] can already manipulate the prices. They can raise or drop prices as they deem fit. They have legislation in place to stop the export. They have control of the midstream.”
He continued to stress that the UK’s role in the world is heavily dependent on critical minerals.
Out of Time
Chairman of the business select committee Darren Jones suggested that if Britain fails to match what other electric battery industry leaders are doing, the car companies will choose to relocate “new production lines in other countries where these supply chains exist.”“I sadly think that’s true—and that’s 800,000 people’s jobs on the line and we just can’t accept that,” Townsend said.
Stephen Gifford, chief economist of the Faraday Institution, said investment and initial planning for the development of battery production plants are urgently needed. The industry projections showed a requirement for ten 20GWh battery production plants by 2040 with five in production by 2030.
The UK currently has one small 1.9 gigawatt-hour (GWh) Nissan plant in Sunderland, northeast England.
Moore suggested that Britain currently doesn’t have a strategy, “so we don’t have a runner in the race.”
“The UK missed the boat in the first round of the supply of these critical materials and probably in the second round too. We have to make sure we don’t miss the boat in the third and final round from about 2030 onwards,” he added.
Gifford, however, disagreed that the UK had missed the boat, but said that “time is running out.”
