NEWS
Two invest in iron phosphate
Two European-based speciality chemicals firms have separately announced advances towards local production of iron phosphate, with Kemira starting pilot operations at its site in Helsingborg, Sweden, and Lanxess opening a new battery laboratory at its Krefeld-Uerdingen site in Germany.
Iron phosphate is a core building block for lithium iron phosphate( LFP) batteries, widely used in electric vehicles, energy storage systems, data centres and other industrial applications. Demand is growing globally due to their safety, durability and cost-competitiveness.
In China, about 75 % of electric vehicles already use this type of battery. In Europe, management consultancy Roland Berger forecasts that LFP’ s market share will rise from 10 % now to 50 % by 2030. Meanwhile, value chains are emerging in Europe
Testing at a Lanxess battery cell laboratory
and North America to reduce dependency on Asian suppliers.
Kemira said its new pilot facility bridges the gap between labscale development and potential industrial-scale production, producing larger volumes for testing, product qualification and process development. If customer qualification is successful and market conditions remain favourable, it will evaluate commercial-scale production.
Kemira described iron phosphate production as a“ natural extension” of its experience in inorganic chemistry, iron-based chemistries, industrial process development and scaling up technologies. It added that it would be among the first European producers serving Western battery markets.
Meanwhile, Lanxess will use its new lab to test and develop battery materials based on iron oxide and iron phosphate directly in battery cells. This will enable it to assess the impact of different grades on cell performance, processability and suitability for specific applications more rapidly. The equipment is also suitable for other batteries, such as sodium-ion batteries, which use sodium iron pyrophosphate as their cathode material.
Lanxess has developed iron phosphate production using iron and phosphoric acid, generating far less saline wastewater than traditional methods. It also offers ionexchange resins to process and purify battery raw materials.
Homochirality behind Nobel Prize
Henri Kagan of Université Paris-Sud and Kenso Soai of Tokyo University of Science have won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry 2026“ for the discovery of non-linear effects and autocatalysis in asymmetric organic synthesis”. This recognises discoveries that enabled chemists to drive chemical reactions that lead to homochirality.
Living organisms are homochiral: they only contain one of the‘ mirror images’ found in many natural molecules. How this chemical asymmetry emerged was for many years unknown and chemists struggled to produce homochiral molecules that would interact with living beings in desired ways, most notably in pharmaceuticals
In 1968, Kagan discovered a way of manipulating chemical reactions to create a greater excess than had previously been thought possible of one of the two‘ mirror images’. Soai published the first potentially homochiral chemical reaction in 1995 and succeeded in presenting it eight years later.
“ Henri Kagan and Kenso Soai have provided a solution to a chemical mystery that is over a century old: how homochirality can emerge spontaneously. The chemical reactions they have developed are spectacular,” said Heiner Linke, chair of the Nobel Committee for Chemistry.
10 SPECIALITY CHEMICALS MAGAZINE ESTABLISHED 1981