What a wet coating line does that a dry one removes
A battery electrode is the layer inside a cell that stores charge, made by coating a thin sheet of metal foil with active material. The usual method mixes that material into a wet paste using a liquid solvent, coats it onto the foil, then runs the foil through ovens that can stretch for hundreds of feet to dry it out, before the solvent is captured and recycled for reuse. Dry electrode manufacturing removes the solvent and the ovens entirely, and coats the electrode as a dry powder instead. The idea is not new, but an independent, peer reviewed comparison now puts numbers on what it saves a factory.
The independent number this article rests on
Researchers writing in the journal Materials modeled a wet production line against a dry one, for 2 separate battery line scenarios. The dry line needed 13.1% to 16.5% less floor space and 14.2% to 19.0% less spending on capital equipment, the machinery a factory buys to build the line. The dry line also needed 16.2% to 21.6% fewer direct labor hours a year. The same study puts a number on 1 cost the dry process removes entirely. Recovering 1 kilogram of the solvent, a chemical called NMP, takes 10 kilowatt hours of electricity, energy a dry line never spends because it never uses that solvent at all.
These are 2 modeled production lines from the same peer reviewed study. The source does not name a gigawatt hour output figure for either one, so none is invented here.
Show the numbers
| Wet line 1 | 12,569 |
| Dry line 1 | 10,918 |
| Wet line 2 | 15,958 |
| Dry line 2 | 13,326 |
Bigger numbers exist, but belong to the company naming them
Bryan Steinhoff, technical lead at Navitas Systems, an industry partner building a dry electrode pilot line with Oak Ridge National Laboratory, gave a larger estimate for what a dry process saves at the scale of a full size factory costing billions of dollars, not the modeled lines the peer reviewed study measured. That is his own estimate rather than an independent count, and the smaller, independent numbers above are the ones this article rests on.
If you can use a dry process instead, you can reduce your footprint by up to 40 or 50%, saving hundreds of millions of dollars.
Bryan Steinhoff, technical lead, Navitas Systems. Source 1.
The low value is the smaller saving found across the 2 modeled line scenarios in the same peer reviewed study behind chart 1, the high value is the larger one.
Show the numbers
| Capital equipment | 14.2% to 19.0% |
| Floor space | 13.1% to 16.5% |
| Labor hours a year | 16.2% to 21.6% |
Already in cars, already built, and one just funded
Tesla says, in its own words, that its 4680 battery cell now uses the dry process for both electrodes, the anode and the cathode, and that cells built this way are already inside certain Model Y cars built at its factory in Austin, Texas. LiCAP Technologies has already commissioned a 300 megawatt hour dry coating line in California. On August 31, 2026, the United States Department of Energy awarded 50 million dollars to Coreshell Technologies and AM Batteries to build a plant meant to reach about 2 gigawatt hours of electrode manufacturing capacity and 1.5 gigawatt hours of cell assembly capacity, capacity that does not exist yet. Bonne Eggleston, vice president of 4680 batteries at Tesla, confirmed this.
Both electrodes use our dry process.
Bonne Eggleston, vice president of 4680 batteries, Tesla. Source 5.