Kurdish engineer’s battery tech gets endorsement from German automotive industry
ERBIL (Kurdistan 24) – Belgian-Kurd Noshin Omar, the founder and president of Avesta Battery & Energy Engineering (ABEE), has revealed a new type of car battery that has been endorsed by major German automotive corporations.
The engineer, who also holds the title of professor, stated he cannot reveal the identity of the automotive companies due to "confidentiality reasons."
Prof. Omar also told Kurdistan 24 that he is delighted that he has been able to create an “environmentally-friendly and safe invention.”
While details have not been revealed as to the exact type of battery, ABEE has been a pioneer in the field of solid-state battery research, a technology superior to the lithium batteries found in electric vehicles (EVs) in markets today.
The European Union is supporting the Kurdish inventor by signing several contracts for the construction of factories in Romania and Macedonia, worth more than 1.4 billion euros, with the potential to create up to 8,000 jobs.
"Battery production is crucial for the [European Union] due to the current market situation where China dominates the supply of lithium batteries," a senior ABEE official told the Romania-based Agerpres news agency in June.
Later this month, an ABEE battery factory in Belgium is scheduled to open in the presence of European and Belgian officials, employing 50 people from 25 different nationalities. Him Omar, a board member of the company, also of Kurdish descent, said they plan to provide jobs for more than 120 people in the future.
Prof. Noshin Omar had been a lecturer at the University of Brussels for more than 10 years before the founding of ABEE. In 2020, he was able to build an environmentally-friendly battery factory in Belgium with the help of the European Union.
The engineer’s invention, although not yet on the market, is scheduled to be launched in 2025.
ABEE, founded in 2019 by Prof. Noshin Omar, is a dynamic engineering company specializing in energy technologies for automotive and stationary applications. The company’s expertise includes battery system design, validation & feasibility analysis related to advanced lithium-ion and next generation solid-state battery technologies manufacturing.
The invention of the modern rechargeable lithium battery in the late-1980s is mostly attributed to Japanese chemist Akira Yoshino, a technology that has remained relatively unchanged since. Solid-state technology is similar to lithium, although there are no liquid electrolytes, making it less of a fire hazard.
Yet the real superiority of solid-state technology is the much larger energy storage capacity it has over lithium. The current drawback is scalability and affordability as, indeed, the difficulty lies in costly mass production.
Additional reporting by Kurdistan 24's Europe-based correspondent Barzan Hassan.