On October 27, the Economic Development Zone Branch of the Yantai Ecological Environment Bureau published a notice stating that, after review, it intends to issue an approval opinion on the environmental impact assessment documents for the 2,000 t/y sodium-ion battery anode demonstration project of Wanhua Chemical Group Co., Ltd. The notice is open for five working days, and applicants and interested parties may request a hearing within five days of publication. The project will be built in Wanhua's Yantai Industrial Park inside the Yantai Economic and Technological Development Zone's chemical industrial park. It is an expansion project filed as an environmental impact report form, with Shanhua Haiyue Environmental Technology (Shandong) Co., Ltd. as the EIA agency.
According to the EIA report form, the project will use phenolic resin and coal as precursors to produce hard carbon, covering both resin-based and coal-based hard carbon products. It will build a single sodium-ion battery anode material line with an annual capacity of 2,000 tonnes, equipped with 84 sets of domestic equipment including rotary kilns and roller hearth kilns, with actual output dependent on the order mix. The report form was accepted by the Yantai Economic Development Zone on October 20. The current notice is a pre-approval public comment stage, and the project has not yet received a formal EIA approval.
Wanhua Chemical designated battery materials as its second core business in July 2026. On the sodium-ion front, its cathode efforts focus on polyanionic sodium ferrous phosphate (NFPP) materials, with the Sichuan cathode project already in the civil works and auxiliary facilities tendering stage; on the anode side, the company is developing both coal-based and resin-based engineered hard carbon routes, and this project is its first thousand-tonne-scale demonstration unit for sodium-ion battery anodes. The stated capacity is a planned figure and no actual output has been produced yet.