XBM USA and Tanac partner to transform sustainable EV and aviation battery sector

XBM USA and Tanac, a sustainable tannin bio-product manufacturer from Brazil, have collaborated to harness the power of sustainable vegetal extraction constituents — such as tannin, for use in sustainable electric vehicle (EV) batteries.

Most EV lithium batteries produced today use hard-to-find, expensive materials such as nickel, graphite, and cobalt, while typically using coal to power their battery production facilities leaving behind a large ESG carbon footprint. Over the past few years, a team of U.S. advanced lithium battery material and technology developers from XBM has been working in America and Brazil on an ultra-low carbon battery material and an aviation, EV, 3C, and BES battery technology platform named CarbonX.

Recently, at a workshop forum at the CTNano Research Institute in Belo, Horizonte, Brazil, XBM presented its most recent CarbonX Lithium-Sulfur Battery (LSB) cell performance findings as part of a partially funded Brazilian government research project.

The CarbonX LSB test results over the past six months showed that the XBM team had produced and demonstrated a lithium-sulfur battery prototype made in part from biomass materials and sulfur industrial byproducts with almost double the energy density (420Wh/kg) than other EV batteries used today (180-230Wh/kg).

The tannin in the CarbonX Li-S battery was supplied by Tanac, a Brazilian forest-based manufacturer of sustainable tannin biosolutions. The preliminary research results were published in a 2022 Electrochemistry Communications article: “A biomass-based cathode for long-life lithium-sulfur batteries.”

At the end of the CTNano workshop presentation, XBM and Tanac signed a MOU for Tanac to supply XBM with optimized tannin samples leading to large supply volumes of Tanac tannin material for use in the XBM CarbonX Lithium-Sulfur Battery. The specific details were not disclosed.

According to XBM CEO P.K. Roberts: “XBM chose Tanac as its exclusive tannin supplier because of the outstanding sustainable ESG practices Tanac employs to produce their biomass-based materials.”