Integrals Power has secured UK government funding through the DRIVE35 Scale-up Feasibility Studies competition to assess how its lithium iron phosphate and lithium manganese iron phosphate cathode materials can be taken from pilot manufacture to commercial production in Britain. The company’s Project CATMAN will examine the route from its existing 20 tonne-a-year pilot line to a 100 tonne-a-year demonstration facility, while preparing the engineering case for a future 1,000 tonne-a-year plant.
The programme gives more structure to a part of the battery supply chain that the UK has often discussed in strategic terms without yet building at useful scale. APC says the latest DRIVE35 feasibility rounds are intended to strengthen domestic capability across batteries, power electronics, materials, critical minerals, vehicle systems, and advanced manufacturing, and Integrals Power’s project sits squarely in that industrialisation gap between laboratory validation and bankable production.
Integrals is pitching LMFP as the more consequential part of the story. The company says its manganese-rich formulation lifts energy density by around 20% over conventional LFP while retaining the safety, cycle life, and cost advantages associated with phosphate chemistries, and without relying on cobalt or nickel. It has also pointed to independent testing by QinetiQ and Cranfield University, including cycle-life data beyond 1,500 charge-discharge cycles at 1C with close to 80% capacity retention, and cold-temperature performance that it says exceeds current LFP and LMFP benchmarks.
The timing is favourable for any company trying to localise cathode supply. China imposed controls on some battery, lithium, and gallium processing technologies in 2025, tightening the export environment around key know-how, while UK-EU trade rules apply stricter electric-vehicle battery rules of origin from 1 January 2027. EU battery passport requirements also begin from 18 February 2027 for EV batteries and industrial batteries above 2 kWh. Against that backdrop, CATMAN is more than a technical study. It is an attempt to show that cathode production capacity can be designed, financed, and located closer to where cells and packs will increasingly need to prove origin and traceability.
