Three decades at the commercial heart of the battery separator industry.
Dr Graeme Fraser-Bell, Vice President of Lithium Sales at ENTEK, has spent more than thirty years at the commercial heart of the battery separator industry.
Dr Graeme Fraser-Bell has spent more than three decades at the commercial heart of the battery separator industry, and the separator, the thin membrane that keeps a cell’s electrodes apart, is one of the components the industry depends on most. He has spent his career helping to build its market.
Depth, and breadth
His grounding is unusually deep. He holds a degree in Applied Chemistry from Newcastle University, a D.Phil in organometallic chemistry from Oxford, and an MBA gained with Rolls-Royce, a rare combination of genuine scientific depth and commercial training. He has also completed the Financial Times Diploma in Non-Executive Director Studies, extending that experience into corporate governance. He sits on the Board of EUROBAT, the Association of European Automotive and Industrial Battery Manufacturers, and serves in a non-executive capacity on the Remuneration Committee of Linacre College, Oxford.
It is the kind of background that lets someone understand a material at the molecular level, sell it to the world, and contribute at board level to the institutions and industry around it.
Built at ENTEK
His career has been built at ENTEK International, the separator manufacturer, where he was one of the ‘gang of eight’ who completed a management buyout of the company. As Vice President of International Sales through to 2012, he was instrumental in establishing ENTEK’s foothold in the lithium-ion separator market, and along the way secured three Queen’s Awards for Export and International Trade. He retired in 2012, having earned it.
Out of retirement
He did not stay retired. As demand for lithium separators surged, ENTEK asked him to return, now as Vice President of Lithium Sales and Market Development, helping lead the sales and marketing function worldwide for the group’s lithium battery separator business. That business now sits at the centre of one of the more significant stories in Western battery manufacturing. Backed by a US Department of Energy $1.3 billion loan, ENTEK is building the first integrated base-film and coated separator facility in North America, in Terre Haute, Indiana.
He describes the scale of it plainly: at full capacity it will produce 1.4 billion square metres of separator a year, enough, in his words, to cover 730 US football pitches every day, every square metre made to exceptional tolerances. Fraser-Bell is helping drive its commercial growth.
The hinterland
There is a hinterland to him worth knowing, because it says something about the mind. Between his ENTEK roles he co-founded and led a games company, invented multiple award-winning board games, and once appeared on the BBC’s Dragons’ Den. The quote he says has resonated most through his career is telling: ‘you can achieve anything in life as long as you don’t mind who takes the credit for it.’ It is not the motto of someone chasing the spotlight, which is perhaps why he has been so effective for so long.
The battery industry rightly celebrates its cell makers and its chemists. It thinks less often about the people who build the market for the unglamorous components that make the cells possible, and who do it with real scientific understanding rather than salesmanship alone. Dr Graeme Fraser-Bell has been doing exactly that for over thirty years. That belongs on the record.
In his own words
We put a few questions to Dr Fraser-Bell. Click any to read his answer.
01ManufacturingOn scaling from kilo to mega to giga.Read answer +
“Scaling from kilo to mega to giga is never a straight line. Scaling before optimising your existing efficiencies simply embeds those inefficiencies into larger, harder-to-fix systems.
At ENTEK we’ve built more than 43 battery separator production lines over 40-plus years, and even so, the scale of our Indiana facility is daunting. The essential stepping stone wasn’t a pilot line. It was a 70-million-square-metre coating operation at our Oregon HQ, a 1/20th-scale model of the full facility, using the same technology, integrated into the campus so the whole company’s engineering, production and R&D could support it around the clock.
The essential component is a C-suite entrenched in years at the coal face of the actual technology, not investment gurus, property magnates, mining executives or, regrettably, distinguished academics. Fail fast and frequently. It’s not a setback, it’s a developmental stepping stone. Adapt and adopt the recommendations of your target customers, don’t defend your existing dogmas. The companies that spent decades making unglamorous parts to tight tolerances are exactly the ones equipped to make the next generation of them.”
02Science & TechnologyOn where the technology is heading.Read answer +
“To see where we might be going, I went back to my conference notes from the IBSE and AABC in 2011. Some of what the industry confidently predicted then: that prismatic would be the form-factor of choice and cylindrical unlikely; that the Chinese couldn’t meet cell-quality consistency for six cells in a PC, let alone automotive; that LFP was under 10% of cathode material. Thirty-five years in this industry has taught me that anything is possible.
In the short to medium term, dry electrode coating, as proven by Tesla, is the processing disruption that will have the greatest impact on manufacturing cost and environmental footprint. I expect single-crystal NMC to gain ground as its cost premium falls, LMFP to successfully bridge the value proposition between NMC and LFP, and platform-sharing structural battery packs to become far more common.
What we report at conferences today will probably look just as amusing in fifteen years as the 2011 notes do now. So we design our products to be agnostic to chemistry, application and form factor. That’s how we intend to stay relevant.”
03Markets & CommercialOn the market, and the China question.Read answer +
“One signal I watch rigorously is my own confirmation bias, the constant vigilance not to favour the information that supports what I already believe. Can solid-state be scaled? Can the US deploy LFP cathode at scale, at pace, at acceptable quality? Is sodium-ion complementary to lithium-ion in storage, or cannibalistic?
I keep re-framing what business we’re actually in. Are we a maker of coated polyethylene separators, or a developer of porous membranes that enable the energy transition? What capability do we have today that could become tomorrow’s enabler, the Post-it note or bubble-wrap hiding in our portfolio?
The last decade showed that technology transcends borders, and China’s control of much of the lithium-ion value chain is the clearest example. The battery war is arguably lost in Europe and much of the rest of the world, but with sustained trade protection, manufacturing incentives, and rapid expansion of US separator, graphite and LFP production, the United States could fully decouple its lithium-ion supply chain from China by 2030.”