FREYR Battery Cell Pilot Plant

When FREYR submitted the project application to ENOVA in November 2020, FREYR had the very ambitious goal to establish Norway’s first lithium-ion battery cell factory based on the greenest, most energy efficient and most competitive large-scale battery cell technology solution. The strategy to achieve this was to provide the best industrial scaling solution for commercially introduced world-leading battery technologies. FREYR screened more than twenty technology companies to identify the best strategic fit for this strategy, and eventually secured a technology that has several advantages over current lithium-ion cell manufacturing technology. The chosen revolutionary technology for lithium-ion battery cell manufacturing greatly reduces the number of production steps compared to conventional manufacturing. The method for producing electrodes use no solvent and binder through directly mixing of the electrolyte with the active materials to form the slurry. This technology is far more energy and space efficient than conventional production processes, reducing energy consumption, investment cost and CO2 emissions drastically. Furthermore, the technology makes it possible to produce battery cells with thicker electrodes with more active materials, resulting in battery cells with higher energy density at a low cost and with a low carbon footprint. To verify the technology’s mass production potential, FREYR executed on developing a fully working pilot line. The pilot would represent the first step towards industrialization and scaling of the novel technology, and would ensure that the technology is scalable before building a giga-scale factory where the learnings and knowledge from the pilot would be utilized.