The South Korean conglomerate Lotte is going to build a factory in Spain for the production of copper foils for use in battery cells for electric cars. Near Tarragona, up to 30,000 tonnes of copper foils are to be produced per year from 2025.

Construction will be carried out by subsidiary Lotte Energy Materials, which emerged in March 203 from Iljin Materials, the foil specialist acquired by Lotte. According to the new parent company, Lotte Energy Materials is the first South Korean company to have been accepted into the Volkswagen-led eMobility consortium ‘Future: Fast Forward’ in Spain.

Lotte Energy Materials’ new copper foil factory will be built in Mont-Roig del Camp, a Catalan town in the province of Tarragona in north-eastern Spain. An investment of 391 million euros is planned to complete the factory. Potentially, the site has room for expansion to 100,000 tonnes per year. The project is supported by the Spanish government under the PERTE funding programme.

The site itself covers 440,000 square metres. However, Lotte has already secured access to further land with an eye to the future. There is talk of 500,000 square metres of land for solar power generation. Site development is expected to start at het end of 2023.

Lotte Energy Materials produces about 60,000 tonnes of copper foil annually, with 20,000 tonnes coming from facilities in South Korea and 40,000 tonnes from  Malaysia. The company plans to reach a 30 per cent share of the global high-value copper foil market by 2028 with an annual capacity of 240,000 tonnes. With potentially 100,000 tonnes per year, the Spanish factory could contribute a large part to this.