Sulfur instead of nickel: Nissan, Gelion and Oxford rewrite the EV battery recipe

A. Krivonosov

Nissan, Gelion and Oxford launch a three-year CoRe-SoLiS project — lithium-sulfur solid-state batteries with no nickel or cobalt. £3.4M budget, June 2026 start.

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Nissan bets on sulfur to make solid-state EV batteries cheaper than China's lithium chemistries — that's the gist of a fresh three-year UK consortium project.

The partners are Nissan Technical Centre Europe, British battery startup Gelion and the University of Oxford. The programme is called Cost-effective, Resilient Solid-state Li-S, or CoRe-SoLiS for short, and kicks off in June 2026.

The core idea is to swap pricey nickel and cobalt for sulfur. Gelion brings its NES cathode material based on Nano-Encapsulated Sulfur, Nissan adds its own solid-state know-how, and Oxford handles advanced anode materials and cell-level engineering. The target is a high-power, high-energy lithium-sulfur pack that is safer, cheaper and longer-lasting than current chemistries.

Project budget runs to roughly £3.4 million (around $4.5 million). Of that, £2.4 million comes as a grant from UK government agency Innovate UK under its Battery Innovation Concept Development programme, with £1.6 million going directly to Gelion's UK subsidiary. A Longspur Capital research note framed the project as a shot at making battery materials in the West more cheaply than China does today.

Nissan has its own solid-state roadmap to back this up. The company started running an all-solid-state battery pilot line at its Yokohama plant back in January 2025 and is also working with US-based LiCAP Technologies on a dry electrode process designed to drive costs down. The goal is to launch the first EV powered by an in-house solid-state battery in fiscal year 2028. The Gelion tie-up slots into the British EV36Zero programme built around the Sunderland manufacturing hub.

For buyers, the upshot is simple: if the tech makes it to series production, EVs could gain longer range, faster charging and less exposure to expensive metals. But mass market is still a long way off. China is already testing its own solid-state chemistries, and BYD plans limited batches of solid-state cells in 2027, ramping up to mass production closer to 2030.