Swedish battery materials and cell manufacturer. Operates a 50/50 joint venture with Galp in Setúbal called Aurora, targeting 28,000-35,000 tonnes per year of battery-grade lithium hydroxide for the European EV battery supply chain.
Northvolt's most material commitment in Portugal is the Aurora joint venture, announced in December 2021 as a 50/50 partnership with Portuguese energy major Galp. The JV selected Setúbal's Sapéc Bay Industrial Park in April 2022 as the site for an advanced lithium conversion plant designed to produce battery-grade lithium hydroxide at industrial scale — with infrastructure access to railway, port and adjacent industrial users (cement, pulp & paper).
At full capacity the plant would deliver enough lithium hydroxide to support around 50 GWh of EV battery cell production per year — roughly 700,000 electric vehicles' worth of cathode material. As part of the JV agreement, Northvolt secured offtake for up to half of the plant's nameplate capacity. The European Investment Bank registered the project in its pipeline, and the project would represent an estimated €700 million capital investment with up to 1,500 direct and indirect jobs at full ramp.
Aurora is one of the largest pure-Nordic-Iberian industrial commitments outside the energy and shipping sectors. It anchors Portugal in the European battery value chain at the upstream conversion stage — the bottleneck between lithium mining and cell manufacturing that Europe has been racing to fill since the late 2010s. The project is closely watched by Nordic strategic investors precisely because it sits at the intersection of two trends: Iberian industrial reshoring and Northern European battery cell capacity build-out.
Northvolt entered Chapter 11 bankruptcy proceedings in November 2024, and the project timeline for Aurora has been pushed back — documents from the European Investment Bank cited in early 2026 indicated a roughly two-year delay versus the original 2026 commercial operations target. Lyten acquired Northvolt's energy storage systems business (including the Gdansk, Poland plant) in mid-2025, and the resurrected Swedish cell factory is now under new ownership. The Aurora JV's future is one of the most-watched questions in the Nordic-Iberian industrial calendar.
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