Novonix plans to double employment over the next two years from its current roster of about 50, an expansion that begins when the company moves from Bluewater Road in Bedford to Burnside next month.
Renovations on the 35,000-square-foot facility in Burnside have been underway since the summer. It will house the equipment used to produce the materials that go into the company’s final products.
Doing business in more than a dozen countries, Novonix develops materials to go into batteries for electric vehicles, among other uses.
“We’ve been doing this at the kilogram synthesis level, and now we’re moving equipment that’s going to improve scalability to the tonnage-level production,” CEO Chris Burns said.
“We’re making the materials that go into batteries, primarily targeting electric vehicles and energy sources. We do a lot of our research and development work and material performance demonstration here in our Halifax facilities, then we have a division of the business (in Chattanooga, Tenn.) which is scaling up the production of graphite . . . that would be sold to cell manufacturers to go into electric vehicles and the energy storage grid.
“Our business unit in Bedford currently has a number of customers globally, cell manufacturers, automotive (original equipment manufacturers), consumer electronics OEMs. For our materials technologies, we’re really focused on the top cell makers and automotive OEMs in North America, the likes of Tesla, LG, Samsung, Sanyo-Panasonic.”
The total value of the project in Nova Scotia is close to $20 million, Burns said. It evolved from work Novonix did with Mark Obrovac, a chemistry professor at Dalhousie.
“We worked together on developing new process technologies for materials,” said Burns of the work with the university.
“This was really compelling technology that was developed within his group, and now we’re investing millions of dollars into proving it at scale.”
Partial funding comes from several government agencies and private investors, including NGen, an industry-led not-for-profit organization aimed at helping build advanced manufacturing capabilities in Canada, which has invested $1.675 million.
