Sibanye-Stillwater has announced that it intends to exercise its pre-emptive right to increase its shareholding and take ultimate control of Finnish mining and battery chemical firm Keliber. Sibanye is set to become the second-largest shareholder alongside Finnish Minerals Group (a state-owned holding and development company). Keliber is positioned to be Europe’s first fully integrated lithium producer at 15,000 tonnes of lithium hydroxide annually.
According to Sibanye, this investment responds to Finland’s “National Battery Strategy 2025”, which gives the nation that gave us the Nokia cellphone access to the European market. Europe is becoming a hub for the manufacture and sale of batteries and electric vehicles. In the Finnish national battery strategy, there is recognition and mapping of not only Finland’s capability in mining, refining and smelting capacity of battery materials, but moreover an engineering, ICT and electronics capability built over the years.
This is instructive for SA, not because a local mining behemoth has spotted the opportunity in new-age materials and energy storage technology, but the kind of innovation, industrial and technology policy and co-operation implied by this strategy.
As Terebinth Capital MD Nomathibana Matshoba suggested on MetroFMTalk last week, SA’s abundant reserves of manganese and other minerals crucial to battery storage for use in mobile applications, electrification and motor vehicle industries could deepen the complexity and sophistication of our existing car-assembly activities, to cover upstream energy storage solutions wider in application than just for motor vehicles.
The Council for Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR), our leading scientific and technology research organisation, is also involved in battery materials development research. As former CSIR scientist and chemist Michael Thackeray has mentioned, SA has a long history not only in mining manganese but since the 1970s in lithium and sodium battery research linked to manganese, with a considerable patent portfolio.
Increasing attention
Much of this work had been supported initially by Anglo American, which later pulled out of the initiative alongside Daimler-Benz after two decades of support. This research was to be commercialised for industrial application in the form of the “Zebra Battery”. Some of this technology was used in electric vehicles, and some now suggest it may be well suited for application in home-based energy storage. With all the drama at Megawatt Park and across the coal belt, such innovations may come in handy.
Thackeray asked in a 2011 paper: “What would have happened if Anglo-American and CSIR had decided to invest in sodium and lithium battery technologies over the long term?” He correctly and presciently asserts that improved electrochemical energy storage is receiving increasing attention, which it failed to garner in the 1990s in SA and elsewhere.
The following can be learnt from this episode:
- Make use of raw material endowments, engineering and ICT capability and downstream markets in automotive, electronics, renewable energy and related sectors, to build a vibrant and reliable energy storage sector that makes use of what you mine and the knowledge and national patents that have been developed over time.
- Ensure the policy environment provides for the transfer and acquisition of skills, clearly identifiable processes (Finland’s battery strategy earmarked a single point for, and digitisation of, permitting processes for new investments), and incentives for the adoption of new technology for firms, households and consumers through complementary trade, tax, subsidy and financing instruments.
- Build a collaborative and co-operative environment between the government, workers, universities and industry actors that can ensure that social champions such as Anglo and Daimler-Benz in the 1980s can support our national system of innovation and the path to commercialisation. That they later pulled the plug on the partnership is a lesson on the opportunity cost of making such partnerships a short-term undertaking.
One does hope Sibanye’s investment in Keliber and the work of a Swedish stationary storage start-up using CSIR patents from the 1980s, for example, will lay the basis for such partnerships and joint ventures, which can make what is often the obscure work of our scientific community a major mantlepiece of our economic reconstruction and journey towards an inclusive energy transition.
• Cawe (@aycawe), a development economist, is MD of Xesibe Holdings and hosts MetroFMTalk on Metro FM.
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