Finnish Minerals Group signs MoU on new plant
Finnish Minerals Group has signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) with a potential partner for the cell production plant project. An environmental impact assessment for two variants with 27 or 40 GWh production capacity will follow.
The Finnish company is not disclosing which company the potential partner is. The next step will be for the battery company Finnish Battery Chemicals Oy, which is wholly owned by Finnish Minerals Group, to begin preparations for the environmental impact assessment (EIA) process for the plant. A “reasoned conclusion on the EIA report” should be available by the summer of 2024.
If the environmental impact assessment (EIA) for the plant is positive, the new plant will be built in the southern Finnish port city of Kotka, east of the capital Helsinki. Finnish Materials says the city has already offered an area of about 140 hectares from the Keltakallio industrial estate. The location has additional synergy because the company is already planning a cathode material factory in the area with Beijing Easpring Material Technology. Of course, the parts of the cell – cathode, anode, electrolyte and separator – are assembled in a cell production plant, which would happen in the new plant in Kotka.
Finnish Minerals has a number of projects on the go at the moment located elsewhere in Finland. Late last year, Finnish Minerals Group and Epsilon Advanced Materials began looking into building a production plant for almost 50,000 tons of anode material per year in Vaasa, Finland. A year earlier, in 2021, British chemical company Johnson Matthey announced the construction of a new factory to produce its nickel-rich eLNO cathode materials as part of a strategic partnership with the Finnish Minerals Group (FMG) in Finland.
For this latest endeavour in the City of Kotka, the two implementation variants to be examined in the EIA procedure assume 27 GWh and 40 GWh total capacity per year. The Finnish battery company says that for cell power plant projects, the investment costs for a capacity of ten gigawatt-hours are “typically around one billion euros”.
Parallel to the EIA, negotiations on the cell factory are to continue with the unnamed technology partner. “We have been in talks with our technology partner for some time about the cell investment to be located in Kotka. Although our partner has not yet made a final decision on the location of its next cell plant, we are very motivated to work towards getting the investment here,” says Matti Hietanen , CEO of Finnish Minerals Group. “This is the right time to start looking at the plant’s environmental impact and ensure the conditions for the implementation of the project.”
The above-pictured site is the company’s site in Vaasa, not the proposed site in Kotka
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