Brisbane battery innovator gets first chunk of funds towards giga-scale production plans

Brisbane headquartered battery innovator Li-S Energy announced on Tuesday that it has received the first $1.9 million tranche of funding from the Australian Renewable Energy Agency (ARENA) to build a gigawatt-scale factory to produce its lithium-sulfur batteries.

ARENA awarded Li-S Energy $7.86 million in funding in November of last year to undertake manufacturing optimisation, a feasibility study, and front-end engineering design (FEED) for a proposed manufacturing facility to mass produce battery cells.

The proposed factory would be built in stages up to a total production capacity of 1 gigawatt-hour (GWh) per year – 500 times the capacity of Li-S Energy’s current facility, which is based at the Geelong campus of Deakin University in Victoria.

On Tuesday, Li-S Energy confirmed that it had received the first $1.9 million tranche of funding, awarded under ARENA’s Advancing Renewables Program (ARP).

Li-S Energy also confirmed that it had appointed Hatch as engineering consultant to deliver the Phase 4 Front-End Loading (FEL-1) feasibility study for Li-S Energy’s large-scale lithium-sulfur battery manufacturing facility.

The Phase 4 FEL-1 feasibility study will define the early-stage technical, infrastructure, and commercial framework necessary to support a credible manufacturing scale-up pathway beyond Li-S Energy’s existing Phase 3 automated production line in Geelong.  

“We are pleased to have received the first $1.9 million tranche of ARENA funding under the Advancing Renewables Program,” said Dr Lee Finniear, CEO and managing director of Li-S Energy.

“This funding supports the critical engineering work required to progress our Phase 4 manufacturing scale-up pathway toward large-scale production readiness.

“The appointment of Hatch is an important step, bringing demonstrated global battery manufacturing expertise and relevant FEL study execution experience, including work across gigafactory-scale battery projects and lithium-sulfur chemistry.”

Li-S Energy was founded in 2019 through the collaboration of two teams of specialist nanomaterials scientists, one located at Deakin University’s Institute of Frontier Materials, and the other at Brisbane based BNNT Technology.

By embedding nanomaterials, Li-S Energy has developed a 20-layer battery cell using a third-generation (GEN3) semi-solid state lithium sulfur technology, which boasts current energy densities of 456 Wh/kg – around 45 per cent more than competing technologies – and which is also safer and more reliable than lithium-ion batteries.