Anaphite’s Dry Coating Could Make EV Batteries Cheaper And Greener
British company Anaphite is revolutionizing electric vehicle battery manufacturing with its dry-coating technology for lithium-ion electrodes. This innovation eliminates the solvent-heavy process and massive ovens, which constitute 80-85% of electrode production costs. By removing these energy-intensive components, Anaphite's method promises significant cost reductions (over 10% for LFP cells), substantial energy savings, and the elimination of toxic solvents. Anaphite's approach not only cuts manufacturing costs and environmental impact but also offers potential for improved battery performance. The company aims for industrialization by major battery manufacturers, acknowledging the need for further validation.
The next big advance in electric vehicle batteries may not require revolutionary new battery chemistry. Instead, it could come from changing the way the batteries we already have are manufactured. That is what British battery technology company Anaphite is trying to achieve. I talked to CEO Joe Stevenson about how the company aims to change battery manufacturing.
Key to Anaphite’s innovation is developing a way of producing lithium-ion battery electrodes without the solvent-heavy coating process used by most of the industry today. The Bristol-based company believes its dry-coating technology could cut the cost and energy required to manufacture batteries while potentially improving their performance - and could become even more valuable as the industry moves towards solid-state cells.
This wasn't where Anaphite started, however. The company’s technology grew out of research into one of the most hyped materials of the last two decades: graphene. “The company was set up by two young men who met at the University of Bristol,” says Stevenson. Co-founder and CTO Sam Burrow arrived at university already investigating ways of applying graphene to other materials, after research experience at the University of Manchester funded by Google. “Sam's process, which he developed alongside his studies at Bristol, was around how you apply graphene effectively and efficiently.”
Burrow met Alex Hewitt, who was studying for a doctorate in semiconductor physics, and the pair founded Anaphite in 2018. Even the company's name comes from its graphene origins: its original product was a composite of graphene and anatase titania, with “Anaphite” combining anatase with graphite, the source of the graphene.
But Anaphite’s most interesting intellectual property turned out to be less about graphene itself than the process chemistry required to combine conductive, high-surface-area carbons with other materials in a controlled way. By 2021, the company was focused entirely on lithium-ion batteries. Since 2023, it has concentrated on materials and processes for manufacturing battery electrodes without solvents.
To understand why this matters, we need to look inside a conventional lithium-ion cell. The cathode consists of a thin aluminum foil coated with active material such as lithium iron phosphate (LFP) or nickel manganese cobalt (NMC). But the active material alone isn't enough. “It's ironic that the things that are very good at storing lithium are not electrically conductive,” says Stevenson. “You have to put carbons in there to carry the electrons in and out.”
A binder is also required to hold everything together and attach it to the foil. Conventionally, these ingredients are mixed with solvent to form a slurry that is coated onto the foil. The solvent must then be removed again, requiring one of the most imposing pieces of equipment in a battery factory. “If you ever go around a cell factory, the thing that dominates everything is an oven,” says Stevenson. These ovens can stretch for as much as 100 meters along each electrode production line. Stevenson says they account for between 80% and 85% of the capital and operating cost of making electrodes.
Anaphite’s objective is remarkably straightforward: get rid of the ovens. “What we've demonstrated here is a process for sticking the powder onto the foil without solvent,” says Stevenson. “If you don't have the solvent, you don't need the oven.” The potential savings are considerable. Stevenson estimates that for an LFP cell, eliminating the conventional wet-coating process could reduce the total cost of the cell by more than 10%. The percentage is smaller with NMC because the active materials themselves are more expensive. At vehicle level, Stevenson estimates dry coating could reduce manufacturing costs by around 1% to 2%. “In automotive, saving one percent at a vehicle level is transformative.”
Cost isn't the only potential advantage. Those enormous ovens consume enormous quantities of electricity. Stevenson estimates a large electrode-drying oven requires around five megawatts of power. Removing it would therefore change the economics not merely of operating a gigafactory, but of finding somewhere to build one.
Anaphite investigated the issue with a UK electricity distribution operator. Stevenson says that within the region studied, only three locations had sufficient available grid capacity for conventional cell production, all associated with former power stations. Remove the electricity requirement of the ovens, he says, and that number rises to 65 potential sites.
This has potentially important implications for attempts to build domestic battery industries in Europe and elsewhere. Governments may want gigafactories, but the enormous electrical connections they require considerably restrict where they can be located. Dry coating could reduce that constraint while simultaneously cutting the carbon footprint of cell manufacturing.
There is also another environmental issue: the solvent itself. N-Methyl-2-pyrrolidone, or NMP, is commonly used in cathode manufacturing. Stevenson describes it as a neurotoxin that is expensive and difficult to recycle. Although properly operated factories contain and recover it, he says a full-size cell factory can have around 200 tons of NMP on site. Anaphite’s process doesn't require it at all.
If eliminating the solvent offers so many advantages, the obvious question is why battery manufacturers haven't already done it. They are certainly trying. Tesla has invested heavily in dry-electrode technology following its 2019 acquisition of Maxwell Technologies. Volkswagen's PowerCo is pursuing dry coating, while LG has also announced ambitions to manufacture dry-coated cells.
The challenge is that removing the liquid also removes something that makes manufacturing the electrode considerably easier. “There are three quite different types of materials in these things,” says Stevenson. “They need to be perfectly mixed, because otherwise you get an inconsistent electrode and you get a substandard or even a dangerous cell.”
One approach is simply to mix the ingredients mechanically until sufficiently homogeneous. But Stevenson says that introduces another issue. “The problem with that approach is you put a lot of energy in,” he says. “You can’t get the energy out because you've got no solvent anymore. You end up melting your binders, your glues.”
This is where Anaphite’s origins in graphene and process chemistry become relevant. The company isn't simply developing another machine for coating electrodes. Its approach focuses on engineering the precursor powder itself, so the different materials are already associated in a controlled fashion before coating. “We were pulled into this application by people who were already trying this saying, you've got a chemical process, you know how to stick these things together in a controlled way. Can you make material for dry coating processes?” Stevenson says.
Anaphite is now developing and scaling these materials while maintaining its own electrode-making and testing capabilities. It can also send materials to companies developing their own dry-coating equipment, allowing the formulation to be adapted to their processes.
The manufacturing process produces some unexpected culinary analogies. One established approach to dry coating involves passing powders through rollers until they form a thin, cohesive film, like a pasta machine. The material therefore must exhibit apparently contradictory characteristics. It needs to flow freely enough to travel through manufacturing machinery but must become cohesive when processed.
“If it's too sticky it won't flow; if it's not sticky enough it won't form a film,” says Stevenson. Anaphite's engineers have found parallels in an older manufacturing industry: food. “One of our senior process engineers has a book about industrial baking on his desk,” says Stevenson.
The polymers used as battery binders can behave somewhat like gluten becoming elastic as dough is kneaded. Anaphite even refers to some intermediate materials as “doughs,” while its development machinery can resemble pasta-making equipment. “The companies that make the machines that the industry uses for the mixing generally come from the food industry,” says Stevenson.
Eliminating solvents, ovens and energy consumption provides a compelling manufacturing argument. But dry coating could potentially even improve the battery itself. With conventional wet coating, solvent must migrate through the electrode as it evaporates, affecting the structure of the resulting layer. Dry coating potentially provides greater freedom over electrode architecture.
This becomes particularly interesting when manufacturers attempt to make electrodes thicker. Increasing thickness allows more active material to be incorporated, potentially increasing capacity. But there is traditionally a trade-off because lithium ions and electrons must travel farther through the electrode, reducing power performance.
“With a dry-coated electrode, and we demonstrate this with everything that we make, we are able to go thicker,” says Stevenson. “We can make a consistent, thicker electrode without the same power handling penalty.” That could create another avenue towards higher energy density without requiring entirely new chemistry.
Anaphite is also deliberately avoiding tying its technology to one cathode material. It is working with NMC and LFP as well as existing and emerging anode chemistries. “This is a broadly applicable approach that we have,” Stevenson says. “It’s just not one trick for one material.” Instead, he describes it as a method of designing and manufacturing electrodes applicable across conventional liquid-electrolyte batteries and future solid-state technology.
Stevenson believes dry coating could become even more relevant if solid-state batteries achieve mass production, something BMW reckons could give Europe better competitiveness in the battery market again. Today's lithium-ion electrodes contain substantial empty space that liquid electrolyte can penetrate. A solid-state cell must instead incorporate solid electrolyte into the electrode structure. That creates an additional materials challenge, while the solvents and binders used in conventional electrode production may not be compatible with some solid electrolytes.
“When you're mixing not just three materials but four materials, one of which is very hard, the active material, and one of which is very soft, which is the electrolyte, it becomes even more difficult to get a good, well-structured, homogeneous mixture,” Stevenson says. This is precisely the kind of problem Anaphite's particle-level process chemistry is intended to address. Stevenson says the company is already working with “some quite big names” on solid-state applications.
There could also be geopolitical significance. China dominates lithium-ion battery manufacturing and has spent decades perfecting its processes. Stevenson argues that Western companies should stop thinking of Chinese battery manufacturers as newcomers. “The Chinese are the incumbents,” he says. “They've spent 30 or 40 years getting this absolutely right.”
Trying to beat that accumulated expertise at conventional wet-electrode manufacturing is therefore extraordinarily difficult. Dry coating, however, creates a relatively new technological playing field. Stevenson recalls Anaphite CTO Burrow discussing the subject at a battery conference alongside Tesla manufacturing executive Bonne Eggleston. Asked whether dry coating might be the technological advantage Western manufacturers need, Burrow reportedly offered a more nuanced assessment. “There's no way we can catch up on wet coating and the stuff that they've been perfecting for the last 20 years,” Stevenson recalls Burrow saying. “But this is a new technology, so we're all starting from the same point.”
Chinese companies are pursuing dry coating too, of course. Stevenson describes it not as a “killer weapon,” but “a new battlefield where we're all starting from the same place.” China is also already demonstrating cars with solid-state batteries, and semi-solid state is on track for shipping in 2026 by MG. Anaphite still has a long way to go before its technology is operating inside mass-production gigafactories. The company has grown to nearly 50 employees and possesses internal capabilities to manufacture electrodes and assemble cells for testing but doesn't intend to become a cell manufacturer itself. Its technology will ultimately need to be industrialized by the companies that manufacture batteries.
Stevenson is refreshingly clear about the scale of that challenge. “We've got a lot of validation work to do,” he says. “There is still quite a long road of showing that this is a completely reliable technology that people can invest large amounts of money in industrializing.” But that's also what makes Anaphite interesting. The battery industry has spent years looking for revolutionary chemistries capable of transforming electric vehicles. Anaphite is betting that a major advance could instead come from manufacturing existing chemistry differently.
Graphene provided the starting point. Dry coating is where that journey has taken the company. And if Anaphite can prove its process at automotive scale, getting rid of a 100-meter oven might ultimately matter more to affordable electric vehicles than adding another exotic material to the battery.