LG Energy Solution, a South Korean battery manufacturer, will have 520 GWh/year of global production capacity in 2025, over 2.6 times as much as in 2021, the company said April 27, 41% of it in North America.
To boost the expansion, LGES will increase its capital spending to Won 7 trillion ($5.54 billion) for 2022, a 75% jump from 2021. The investment will be for new plants in Canada, Indonesia, and the U.S. and expansion projects, it said.
LGES has a joint venture plant with Stellantis in North America at Windsor, Ontario, and has three other JV plants with General Motors Co., as well as two standalones, with one at Holland, Michigan, and the other at Queen Creek, Arizona.
Of the six plants, only two are operating at this time, one in Michigan and the other in Ohio which is a JV plant with GM, with production capacities of 4 GWh/year and 9 GWh/year, respectively.
Output at the Michigan plant will more than quintuple to 20 GWh/year in 2025, while the one in Ohio will more than quadruple to 40 GWh/year.
The Ontario plant is expected to go online in 2025 with 45 GWh/year of capacity, which would make it Canada's first large-scale electric vehicle battery manufacturing facility.
LGES’ other two JV plants with GM will also start operations in 2025, with 45 GWh/year in Tennessee and 50 GWh/year in Michigan. The LGES Arizona plant will be a standalone facility that will begin producing in 2025 and have 15 GWh/year of capacity.
When all of this adds together, those factories will provide a total of 215 GWh/year capacity in North America by 2025, which means a 16.5+ times increase from 13 GWh/year in 2022.
In South Korea, LGES will expand the capacity of its plant in Ochang to 33 GWh/year in 2025 from 21 GWh/year now. In China, it will raise production at its Nanjing and Binjiang factories to 145 GWh/year, a 55.9% increase from 93 GWh/year in 2022.
In ASEAN, LGES is establishing a JV plant with Hyundai Motor at Karawang, Indonesia, in 2025 with 12 GWh/year of new capacity.
In Europe, the output from LGES' plant in Wroclaw, Poland, will expand to 115 GWh/year by 2025 from 68 GWh/year in 2022.
Strategic Investments
To underpin its growth ambitions, LGES plans to either sign long-term agreements with or strengthen investment in suppliers of materials such as lithium, nickel, and cobalt in order to secure supply and price competitiveness.
LGES continues to work on increasing the thermal resistance of its batteries. In this vein, its sister company LG Chem has devised new plastics that can delay the thermal runaway of EV batteries. The process of thermal runaway occurs when the temperature rises high enough within a battery to cause chemical reactions to take place, leading to fires and explosions.
LG Chem said on April 25 that it would start mass production of the advanced plastic, which is made from polyphenylene oxide, polyamide, and polybutylene terephthalate, in 2023.
