POSCO Future M seeks to reduce reliance on China for graphite for anodes

Chung Kwang-yeol, head of the No. 2 anode plant, explains the process at the anode plant in Sejong City. [Photo provided by POSCO Future M]

POSCO Future M Co., the battery materials unit of South Korea’s steel giant POSCO, is in talks with battery manufacturers to produce anode materials with graphite from a Tanzanian mine in Africa this year, a move that will allow the company to reduce its dependency on China for the material.

POSCO Future M, formerly POSCO Chemical, operates an anode plant in Sejong City, located 144 kilometers south of Seoul, where it transforms imported graphite from China to anode, a key battery component.

POSCO Future M, formerly POSCO Chemical, is hoping to reduce its reliance on China for graphite imports as it is in discussion with battery manufacturers to produce anode materials made of graphite from a Tanzanian mine this year.

Maeil Business Newspaper visited the anode plant in Sejong City on Thursday. It is the only commercial anode plant in operations across the country.

At the entrance, there was a 20 meter-high iron-based facility designed for the storage of raw materials and finished products. “We have cranes that use barcodes to move products automatically,” said Chung Kwang-yeol, head of the No. 2 anode plant. “There is little to no work for humans in the entire production. A total of 270 people work for the plant including those from our supplies but only four people are enough to operate the plant.”

For quality control, the plant uses a so-called “air-shooting” technology, which delivers raw materials and finished products through pipelines installed in the facility to prevent them from being exposed to the air.

Production of anodes consists of three steps – mixing, baking, and post-processing. In the first step, the surfaces of graphite, which undergoes some sort of processing, are coated with pitches, a material derived from coal or petroleum. Graphite anodes are prone to swell in use, which explains their limited capacity for fast charge and discharge.

POSCO Future M, however, has the technology that prevents the self-swelling of anodes. It uses pitches to improve the charge and discharge capacity and life-cycle of batteries.

Following the first step, graphite is baked at a high temperature of 1,000 to 1,300 degrees Celsius for ten hours. During the “plasticity process,” the material travels 40 meters in the pipeline, electrically heated along its route. The baked graphite becomes chunks and looks like gravels with a diameter of 2 centimeters. The final process involves grinding the surfaces of the chunks and removing residual iron left on the finished products. The natural graphite anodes produced by the two anode plants of POSCO Future M amounts to 74,000 tons a year.