Volklec Raises £1.3M to Develop Low-Carbon Battery Technology for Electric Vehicle Manufacturing
May 20, 2024
Volklec, a UK battery technology company, has raised £1.3 million from Frontive Group to develop its low-carbon battery manufacturing technology for the electric vehicle industry. The company is working on production processes and battery chemistries that reduce the environmental impact of manufacturing EV batteries — addressing a significant sustainability challenge at the heart of the energy transition, where the carbon cost of producing the batteries that power electric vehicles is a meaningful fraction of their total lifecycle emissions.
The lifecycle carbon footprint of an electric vehicle is substantially lower than that of an equivalent petrol or diesel car when measured across its full service life. However, the manufacturing phase of an EV — particularly the production of the battery pack — is more carbon-intensive than the manufacturing phase of a comparable ICE vehicle. Battery cell production is energy-intensive, uses materials that require energy-heavy mining and refining processes, and often takes place in regions where the electricity grid has a high carbon intensity. As EV penetration grows and the automotive sector's attention shifts from tailpipe emissions to total lifecycle impact, the carbon footprint of battery production becomes an increasingly important sustainability metric for manufacturers, policymakers, and consumers.
Volklec's technology addresses this by developing manufacturing approaches and battery designs that reduce the energy consumption of the production process, minimise the use of materials with high upstream carbon footprints, and potentially enable manufacturing in contexts where low-carbon energy is available to power production. The company is developing this within the UK, which has the opportunity to establish a competitive advantage in the production of lower-carbon batteries if domestic gigafactory capacity can be combined with manufacturing processes that leverage the UK's increasingly renewable electricity grid.
Frontive Group is an investor focused on the sustainable mobility and industrial decarbonisation space. The funding will be used to advance the technology development, conduct manufacturing trials, and build the technical evidence base needed to attract commercial partners and larger follow-on investment.
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