Chinese battery manufacturer CATL has begun trial production on the first two lines of its new cell factory in Debrecen, Hungary.
The trial run began on 22 September after the company secured the required permits and fulfilled conditions attached to its integrated pollution prevention and control permit. It will be used to commission, optimise and validate the equipment and manufacturing processes before series production.
CATL did not give a timetable for commercial production.
The Debrecen plant is designed to produce both NMC and LFP lithium-ion cells, although CATL did not disclose which chemistry is being manufactured during the trial run.
The company received an occupancy permit for the first phase of the cell-manufacturing building on 25 August. An application covering the second phase, including production lines three and four, had been rejected because the completed building was not correctly represented on a submitted site plan, according to Hungary’s Hajdú-Bihar County Government Office.
The Hungary plant will be CATL’s largest outside China
The permitting process followed occupational-safety concerns at the plant. Hungarian authorities suspended work in three areas in August after biological monitoring identified elevated nickel exposure among nine employees. Inspectors found shortcomings in the provision of personal protective equipment.
CATL said the deficiencies had since been resolved. It said health, safety and environmental indicators would be monitored during trial production, with the results submitted to the authorities.
Construction of the first cell-production building began in summer 2023, with equipment installed by spring 2026. CATL has separately assembled battery modules in Debrecen since autumn 2024 and said the operation has produced 537,000 modules.
The company announced the three-phase project in 2022, with planned investment of up to €7.3 billion. Once fully developed, the site is expected to have 100GWh of annual capacity, making it CATL’s largest manufacturing base outside China.
Photo: CATL’s battery plant in Debrecen, Hungary
Credit: CATL
