New Delhi: Epsilon Carbon, India’s leading coal tar derivates company, is diversifying into battery material business to develop and manufacture high performance and quality carbon products for anode components of Lithium Ion Batteries (LiB).
The battery materials business will be housed under a new subsidiary Epsilon Advanced Materials formed with the purpose of becoming a preferred supplier of synthetic graphite material to cell manufacturers and energy storage device companies across the globe. Graphite Anode’s consist of 25% volume of LiB cells and are the highest single material in a cell chemistry. Historically, China has been supplying more than 80% of the global demand for graphite anode’s to the global LiB supply chain. Epsilon Advanced Materials aims to be at the forefront of this effort and make India self-reliant in graphite anodes active materials for manufacturing LiB batteries.
Commenting on the new business foray, Mr Vikram Handa, Managing Director of Epsilon Carbon said, “The COVID-19 pandemic has brought to the forefront the importance of the India’s economic recovery based on principles of Atmanirbhar Bharat. As India pushes an aggressive EV policy which encourages and ensure that the country’s program keeps pace with the global developments. To make India self-reliant in e-mobility, India is aiming towards establishing manufacturing leadership in the EV space and Epsilon Advanced Material’s manufacturing leadership in graphite anodes will make India self-sufficient for a key raw material for LiB cells.”
Epsilon has commissioned its new manufacturing facility in Karnataka State of India to produce 5000 Tonnes anode material annually. It plans to triple this unit capacity to 15,000 tonnes in 2021 and further expand to 50,000 tonnes per annum by 2025.
Epsilon will be investing Rs 500 crore over the next 5 years to meet the capacity target of this unit. Apart from the anode material manufacturing facility, Epsilon Advanced Materials has also set-up a target-oriented research and development laboratory to cover a complete array of carbon material testing as well as cell and pouch lithium battery cell testing to improve the quality of the material further by continuous development.
