Producer
BASF SE (Battery Materials / Catalysts)
German chemical company (XETRA: BAS, HQ Ludwigshafen; ~€69B revenue); Battery Materials division produces NMC cathode active material at Schwarzheide, Brandenburg (former East Germany; site of a Nazi-era synthetic oil refinery, now a major BASF specialty chemicals site). BASF's Schwarzheide plant produces NMC622, NMC811, and high-voltage NMC cathode active materials for European and Korean battery manufacturers. BASF is the largest European-headquartered CAM producer. BASF also holds a stake in Norilsk Nickel (Nornickel) — Russia's largest mining company — through its Catalysts division which uses Nornickel palladium and rhodium in automotive catalysts: the same BASF that makes NMC cathode material also sources precious metal catalysts from the Russian company whose nickel and cobalt feed into battery supply chains. BASF Battery Materials won a production contract with BMW for its Neue Klasse EV battery cathode — one of the most important European CAM contracts of the 2020s.
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2 inputs BASF SE (Battery Materials / Catalysts) supplies
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Battery Materials (CAM)
8%Catalysts (Automotive & Chemical)
22%Chemicals & Intermediates
20%Materials (Performance Polymers)
15%Agricultural Solutions
14%Nutrition, Care & Industrial Solutions
21%
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Did you know2021
BASF's Schwarzheide facility in Brandenburg, Germany — where BASF produces NMC cathode active material for BMW's Neue Klasse EV battery — is built on the site of the Schwarzheide synthetic oil plant, one of Germany's largest fuel synthesis operations during WWII. The Schwarzheide plant used coal hydrogenation (Fischer-Tropsch process) to produce aviation fuel and synthetic oil for the German military — and used approximately 10,000 concentration camp prisoners from the Auschwitz camp system for forced labor, of whom thousands died. After WWII, the site became a VEB (East German state enterprise) petrochemical complex. After German reunification, BASF acquired the site in the 1990s. Today, on the same East German soil where slave labor produced fuel for WWII German aircraft, BASF produces the cathode material for BMW's electric vehicles — arguably the most material industrial transformation of a single site from fossil fuel war production to clean energy transition in European industrial history.
BASF SE ↗Origin2023
BASF entered battery cathode materials through its Catalysts division's deep relationships with the global automotive industry. For decades, BASF Catalysts supplied palladium and rhodium catalytic converters to every major automaker — the same precious metal chemistry that reduces NOx and CO in exhaust. As automakers began building EV platforms requiring NMC cathode materials in the 2010s, BASF leveraged these automaker relationships and its chemical process expertise to enter cathode active material production. BASF's Schwarzheide site (Brandenburg) was chosen for the first BASF CAM plant because the former East German petrochemical site offered large industrial infrastructure and Germany's government offered transition subsidies for eastern Germany's deindustrializing regions. The Schwarzheide CAM plant represents BASF's strategic bet that European automakers will prefer a European-headquartered cathode supplier over Korean or Chinese alternatives — a bet anchored by the BMW Neue Klasse supply contract announced in 2023.
BASF SE ↗