This meeting took place in Shanghai – the first time in China for this conference which has gone into most corners of southeast Asia in years past. The first time was 1986 and it is essentially a bi-annual meeting. It has been, and is, principally a lead-acid battery meeting, beginning as an assist to the smaller factories in providing technical know-how. The same Australian metals supplier has been the prime sponsor throughout, beginning as Broken Hill, through “Pasminco” and Zinifex, to its present incarnation of NYRSTAR.

This conference was assembled by Dr. David Rand of CSIRO in Australia and by Mark Stevenson of NYRSTAR, who also handled the numerous arrangements and logistics. Allan Cooper of Lead Industries Association in London assisted in setting up program contributions, particularly from Europe. It is truly an international meeting. From its attendance of 138 souls in the beginning it is now pegged at over 500 engineers, managers and vendors. A large exhibition is a feature of the meeting.

While important technical matters were covered – battery processing, design, research results, and so on – there are also metals industry statistics and trends, and environmental subjects. Since this meeting was in China, the rapid growth of both the automotive and battery industries in this country featured heavily in discussions. Particularly in some areas of China there is much work ahead for those factories which may be less than current in regard to waste disposal contaminants and the care of workplace avoidance of personnel intake of either airborne or liquid metal poisons.

Since the recent steep rise in the price of lead, part or much of it due to the influence of the much-increased volume of lead battery production in China and other Asian areas, this occupied a great deal of discussion. Some degree of relief in the near future was predicted, but a generally higher level was thought to be with us, perhaps indefinitely. But lead batteries will be starting automotive engines for a long time, apparently – as long as the petroleum supply holds out and there are cars to start. The other battery metals: nickel, manganese, cobalt (ouch), and so on, have also been escalating in price. Everything is a moving target.

It seems to be a general agreement that alkaline nickel-based batteries will dominate the largest part of the hybrid passenger car market for the near and fairly-near future. Lead-acid might occupy a niche market. But some have suggested that hybrids themselves are basically a niche market, so we may be looking at a niche in a niche for lead batteries.

Lithium battery predictions are faced with the difficulties of uncertain estimates of what solutions are best for safety and reliability problems in automotive-size batteries, gradual capacity fade and/or cycle life limitations, and battery first cost, which is presently quite high. And then there is the need for cell-level state-of-charge control in some chemistries. And this is just the presently obvious short list.

There were a number of quite good papers on processing and design. For those of us in the R&D end of the business, two talks drew particular attention: Dr. Lan Lam’s ultrabattery and Dr. Karel Micka’s work on comparing carbons and inert materials for additions to the negative plate. Dr. Lam (CSIRO) has combined in each cell negative lead plates and negative supercapacitor (double-layer capacitance) negative plates. Furakawa (Japan) has made a number of these and they are showing good results on a race track in the U.K. Dr. Micka wondered if it is really the electronic conductivity of carbon that is making negative plates perform better, and so he used inert powders and got similar results. This idea should be watched further.

The Asian Battery Conference alternates with another bi-annual meeting in Europe sponsored by Lead Industries Association. Attendance at both provides one with valuable windows into current work devoted to improving the breed of the oldest rechargeable battery. The geographic diversity is also a valuable asset. The next Asian meet is located in Macao and will be in 2009.