Lithium-ion battery separators an ‘inflection point' for Entek

Henderson, Nev. — Lithium-ion battery separators aren't a new product for Entek Manufacturing Inc. The company has been making them from polyethylene using a "wet" process with a proprietary nonchlorinated solvent since 2001.

The company had primarily supplied electric vehicles made in China, which has been an early adopter of EVs. When the Chinese government altered rules to severely limit the ability of non-Chinese companies to compete, however, Entek saw its demand drop.

Then in 2022, with automakers rapidly investing in EV manufacturing in the U.S. — and the federal Bipartisan Infrastructure Law setting aside funding to support the growth of parts for EVs — Entek saw its chance, said CEO Larry Keith.

Its team scrambled to complete a bid for part of a federal grant program to finance battery production, winning $1.2 billion that will go toward two separator film production sites.

The first will be in Indiana, with a $1.5 billion plant expected to go into production by 2025 and a second plant to follow in Alabama. The exact location hasn't been set for either plant, Keith said, but the Indiana site likely will be near Terre Haute.

Entek has signed an agreement with Germany's Brückner Maschinenbau GmbH & Co. KG to supply 18 biaxially oriented film lines for the Indiana plant, he said. That facility will begin with 10 lines.

Separator film is part of every lithium-ion battery, located between the cathode and anode. At this point, there is only one other separator manufacturer in the U.S., Celgard LIB in Charlotte, N.C., part of Asahi Kasei Corp., but Keith says its dry manufacturing process doesn't support the battery format used in EVs.

Entek expects to make 1.4 billion square meters of separator film, enough to provide 1.1 terawatts of power storage. But supporting all of the lithium-ion battery projects announced so far will require more than 10 billion square meters of separators.

"So we're going to be less than 20 percent [of the demand] with phase one," Keith said. "There is just a massive amount of plastics and separator that's going to be required to support the industry. And it's not just electric vehicles. It's also energy storage systems for [wind turbines] and solar panels."

Because of that demand, Entek expects to see competitors entering the U.S. market. Those companies, though, will face pressure because most rely on chlorinated solvents during production, he said. Those same solvents are high on the list of chemicals facing possible limits from the Environmental Protection Agency. Entek spent years developing a process that doesn't use those solvents.

"If they ban that, every one of our competitors are going to have to go figure out how to make separator without methylene chloride," Keith said.

While he stressed that he doesn't want Entek to have a monopoly on the separator business, its status as an early adopter of alternative solvents and its investments in Indiana and Alabama will give it a competitive edge for long-term growth.

"We're pretty excited this," Keith said. "This is an inflection point in our company. This will change our company. There's going to be a tremendous amount of job opportunities within our company for people to grow."