LG Says It Stopped Manganese-Rich Cells Fading. The Fix Was a Lower Voltage.

Lithium-manganese-rich cathodes have been the battery industry's most tempting unfinished idea for a decade: high energy density, cheap raw materials, no cobalt. They also fade. LG Energy Solution and Seoul National University now say they have found out why, and the fix turns out to be a change in how the cells are charged rather than what they are made of.

The work was published in Nature Communications.

Where the extra energy comes from, and where it goes

In a conventional cathode, only the transition metals — nickel, manganese — store and release charge. In an LMR cathode the oxygen takes part too. That anionic redox is what buys the extra capacity, and it is also the problem.

On discharge, the oxidised oxygen does not fully return to its original state. What is left behind damages the crystal structure and generates gas. In a small laboratory coin cell that is tolerable. In a large-format automotive cell, the gas raises internal pressure and performance falls away.

The fix is a narrower voltage window

The team changed the operating window rather than the chemistry, and lowered the temperature of the formation step — the first controlled charge a cell receives at the factory.

Tested on 40 Ah cells — automotive-scale, not coin cells — the result was over 92.2% of original energy retained after 883 charge and discharge cycles.

What is genuinely not known

Two things are missing, and they are the two that would decide whether this matters commercially. LG has published no energy density figure and no charging-power figure for the stabilised cells. It has given no commercialisation timeline and no production date.

That absence is worth sitting with. Charging to 4.3 V instead of 4.6 V means giving up some of the capacity the higher ceiling was there to reach — the trade the team has made is durability against energy, and without a Wh/kg number nobody outside LG can say how good a trade it is. A cell that survives 883 cycles but delivers less energy than a high-nickel cell already in production is a research result, not a product.

The Tesla angle, and what reaches Europe

LG is one of Tesla's cell suppliers, producing 2170 cells used in Model 3 and Model Y production, so a chemistry LG can actually manufacture is a chemistry that could plausibly reach a Tesla. That is the honest limit of the claim: nothing here says Tesla has chosen LMR, and Tesla has not commented.

What LMR would compete for is the middle of the range. Tesla's European line already splits between LFP — cheap, durable, less energy-dense — and high-nickel cells in the longer-range cars. LMR aims at exactly the gap between them: more energy than LFP, materially cheaper than nickel-cobalt, and with the cobalt supply-chain question removed.

For a buyer in Europe, the practical read is that manganese-rich chemistry has moved from "promising but it degrades" to "degrades much less than it did, at a cost we have not been told". ProLogium's move to series solid-state production has a date attached to it. This does not, and until it does it belongs in the research column.