The India Energy Storage Alliance (IESA) has announced agreement with the Australian government- industry-academia collaboration Future Battery Industries Cooperative Research Centre (FBICRC), in order to build capacities for battery manufacturing supply chains in India.
Besides IESA and the FBICRC, the government of Western Australia, Australia’s largest state and the country’s mining heartland, is also a participant in the agreement, which is slated to run for three years.
The agreement focuses on raw materials and their integration into the supply chains of both Australia and India, and capacity-building in that regard, particularly with Western Australia being one of the world’s main sources of lithium-ion, crucial in battery manufacturing, including for mobility.
“Western Australia has a very good reach in critical minerals including lithium-ion and others. As the Indian government is now focusing on giga factories in India, IESA expects six to eight giga factories to come up in the next three to five years. For this giga factories lithium, cobalt and other raw materials are required to set up the factories. There are more than 20-30 companies as part of IESA’s India Battery Supply Chain Council who are interested in chemical processing and mineral refining process to support these gigafactories,” said Debi Prasad Dash, executive director of IESA.
“This MoU will be a milestone for the new partnership between Australia and India in critical minerals specific to energy storage and battery minerals,” said Roger Cook, deputy premier of Western Australia, also mentioning the lithium-ion reserves in his state.
