Electrode potential: How dry coating can cut the cost of electric vehicle batteries

June 24, 2025 EV battery 8 min read

Electric vehicles are firmly established in many countries, but they need to become more affordable before they can become mainstream worldwide. Part of the solution is adopting a state-of-the-art dry coating process to manufacture electrodes, which reduces the cost of battery cells and the gigafactories that produce them. Joe Stevenson, CEO of Anaphite, explains their proprietary dry coating technology and discusses its potential to achieve better cost efficiency for electric vehicles.

Development and commercialisation of lithium-ion battery technology from 1970s research project to launch of the first series production application in 1991¹ is a milestone achievement, and one that has transformed entire industries. Almost at a stroke, incumbent power sources for devices such as phones, laptops, and power tools were rendered obsolete, and today lithium-ion batteries are near-universal in all of them.

The automotive industry, however, is proving more resistant to change. 1998 saw the launch of the world’s first EV equipped with a lithium-ion battery², and although technology has improved considerably since then, adoption rates today vary considerably from country and to country, and consumers in many markets remain hesitant to make the switch. So, while in Norway – one of the world’s pioneering EV markets – EVs accounted for nearly 90% of all new cars registered there last year³, corresponding figures for Germany, the US, and India were 13.5%, only 10%, and just 2.4% respectively. ^(3,4,5)

Cost is a major concern for consumers; for many, it is simply too expensive to buy. Considerable improvements have already been made, with the International Energy Agency reporting that in 2024 the price of a pack fell below $100/kWh for the first time⁶. Reductions in raw material prices, greater production capacity, and growing adoption of cell chemistries such as Lithium Iron Phosphate are all driving cost down, but much more must be done.

Batteries account for around 40% of an EV’s cost⁷, most of which is taken by the cells themselves, so cell suppliers are key to continued improvements. But they face considerable challenges.

The complex cell production process begins with the electrodes, requiring the dosing and mixing of component materials (chemical engineering), coating and drying (fluid dynamics and coating) and densification and slitting (mechanical engineering most closely related to textile processing). The electrodes are then wound with separators, then fixed and inserted into cell cases (more mechanical assembly with metal joining technology). The final step sees the cells filled with liquid electrolyte and then prepared for use in their first charge and discharge cycles (electrical engineering and back again to electrochemistry).

Every part of this process is being optimised. Of all of them, the manufacturing of electrodes offers the greatest opportunity for improvements, in particular, the method used to apply the active materials to the metal foils that serve as the current collector and support. Wet coating is the process used today: it’s been developed and proved over decades and virtually every cell supplier relies on it, but its energy efficiency is extremely poor.

Wet coating sees active materials, electrically conductive additives, and binders – the compounds that electrodes are made of – mixed in a solvent and then coated onto the metal foils using slot dye casting in a roll-to-roll process. The coated foils then pass through ovens to dry them. The ovens are up to 100 metres long and run at around 300ºC for Nickel-Manganese-Cobalt cathodes. As a result, they require some 5MW of power and occupy around 15% of the floor space within a gigafactory.

Removing the ovens and the drying stage would make production less wasteful, and this is the goal of the dry coating process. Dry coating can best be described by analogy with pasta making: dry ingredients are mixed and kneaded to form a dough, which is rolled or extruded to make a film. This film is laminated onto the metal foil to make the electrode. Of the two parts of the process, the mixing and the forming, it is the mixing that presents the greatest technical challenges that prevent it from being introduced in mass production.

Dry mixing complex powders together is incredibly difficult: much energy is required to mix the three very different types of material, and the heat and friction generated during high energy mixing can significantly alter the properties of the active material, binders, and additives. It’s also hard to achieve a fully homogeneous mixture. Poor mixtures are hard to form into electrodes, and that impacts yield, and therefore manufacturing cost. When electrodes can be made, performance and lifetime are inferior, and any compromise to those key attributes are unacceptable to the cell suppliers or their OEM customers because they translate into warranty costs.

The solution that Anaphite has spent the past seven years developing from first principles offers a genuine breakthrough that realises dry coating’s full potential. Instead of mechanical mixing of the electrode components, we use chemistry to combine the materials to produce a well-structured, homogenous composite.

This process consumes no more energy than existing dry mixing techniques and produces a dry powder ready for coating onto the foil. We call this the Dry Coating Precursor (DCP ®). As well as the inherent reduction in energy consumption, DCP ® delivers better and more consistent adhesion than existing dry coating processes, resulting in better cell performance and greater production yields. It also has the advantage of being cell chemistry agnostic and can be tailored to each OEM’s particular specifications and requirements.

Our dry coating technology could enable a cost reduction of up to 2% at the whole-vehicle level if used for both anode and cathode production – a remarkable saving. Savings extend into the gigafactories as well, because our technology can be retrofitted into existing plants and has the potential to pay for itself within a year. And given that new gigafactories are extraordinarily expensive to build and typically take five years from start of construction to coming online⁸, integrating our technology from the outset enables them to be smaller, ready sooner, and therefore less costly overall.

Another advantage is that the plants require less power: this opens up more flexibility over where plants can be built because many local grids are already constrained and therefore not suitable for additional megawatts of demand. And less power also means fewer emissions and reduced operating cost.

A quarter of a century sounds like a long time, but that’s all that there is between now and 2050’s net zero ambitions. Some industries are making greater progress than others, and hard-to-abate sectors such as shipping and aviation must redouble their efforts to decarbonise and find alternatives to fossil fuels.

While a range of technical solutions will likely be needed, the lithium-ion battery is shouldering the greatest burden in reducing tailpipe emissions from the automotive industry, and will continue to do so for the foreseeable future. Reducing cell cost and making EVs more affordable in all world markets will help to accelerate the transition to e-mobility. We believe that dry coating has a key role to play, and can start making a difference.

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