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Everything Electric Podcast
From Solid State to Sodium - THESE are the next Big Battery Breakthroughs!
00:27:32
In this special episode of the Fully Charged Show Podcast, we’re coming to you live from the Giga Stage at Everything Electric Live London! With electric vehicles and stationary energy storage now firmly in the mainstream, what's next for battery...
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- [00:00]
Nuria Tapier
Foreign.
- [00:05]
Dave Borlace
Welcome to another episode of the fully child show podcast, where today we're bringing you something really, really special. We always get requests about filming our panel discussions and talks at our live shows. And your wish today is our command because you're about to hear one of the panels that was recorded at the London XL last week, all about the future of batteries. This was hosted by the wonderful Dave Borlace, who you may recognise from his channel J. Just have a think, so sit back and we hope you enjoy.
- [00:41]
Moderator
Right, good afternoon, everybody. Thank you for coming along to this session all about batteries. I hope you've been having a good day so far. I've certainly been learning a lot from these sessions. We've got a wealth of knowledge here about not only the history of batteries, but the future of batteries amongst these experts. So I'm looking forward to this session. What I'm going to do, first of all, because they know more about each other themselves than I do, I'm going to get you all, like I did last time, Ewan, to introduce themselves and just tell you a little bit about their careers and what they're about. So if I could start with you, Ewan, please.
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Ewan McTurk
Good afternoon, everyone. I'm Dr. Ewan McTurk, consultant battery electrochemist from Plug Live Consulting and the creator of the YouTube channel PlugLife Television.
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Vanika Kraval
Hi, I'm Vanika Kraval. I'm senior research analyst at Romotion, which is a company acquired by Benchmark Middle Income Intelligence over the job. I work on the EV ess, charging, recycling infrastructure and just understanding how batteries work.
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Nuria Tapier
Afternoon, everyone. I'm Nuria Tapier. I'm an associate professor in the Department of Chemistry at Imperial College London and I've been working on materials for batteries for more than 10 years now.
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Aaron
Hey, everyone, thanks for coming. My name is Aaron. I work at a startup called Gaussian and what we do is we apply magnetic fields to batteries in operation and this gives up to 6x improvements in charge time and cycle life.
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Moderator
Excellent. Thank you all very much. So I thought we'd just very quickly, just for anyone who's been under a stone or in a cave for the last 30 or 40 years, Ewan, just give us an idea of what are lithium ion batteries? When did they start, when were they invented, what were they designed for and how far have we come and why are we looking beyond them now?
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Ewan McTurk
Yeah. So the first commercial lithium ion cell was used in a Sony camcorder in the early 1990s and that consisted of a graphite carbon negative electrode or anode and then the positive electrode, the cathode, was lithium cobalt oxide. So that's lithium heavy metal oxide is generally the theme that you would have for the positive electrode. And it's all about lithium ions shuttling between the two. The reason that has been so popular is because lithium is the lightest metal and, and it means that you can have really good energy density. In other words, you can squeeze the maximum runtime into the smallest space. So, funnily Enough, fast forward 15 years or so and the founders of Tesla thought, okay, you know, you've got these little laptop batteries that are lithium ion. If we stuff several thousands of them into a car, then, you know, we can actually power an electric car to over 200 miles per charge. And since then there's been a diversification of that kind of broad church of chemistries that make up lithium ion. So we've got the great diversification within the car sector just now. Nmc, lithium nickel, manganese, cobalt oxide. We've been reducing the amount of cobalt and replacing it with generally cheaper and more ethical materials whilst keeping that maximum energy density. And then we've got lithium iron phosphate, which is ethical, lower cost, safer, and it's basically made from rust and fertilizer. In fact, actually slug control pellets are ferric phosphate tablets. So lfp, basically.
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Moderator
Fair enough. Well, on that theme, lithium ion phosphate varnica, that's kind of your area of expertise. So just give us a little bit more, just expand on what Ewan's been saying there. What are. Because I read somewhere, I don't know if this is true, that something like nearly half the world's lithium ion batteries now are lithium ion phosphate. We've kind of moved that far already from the nickel, manganese, cobalt that you were talking about, Ewan. So is that a reasonably accurate statistic? And why are particularly Chinese manufacturers moving so quickly towards that technology and chemistry?
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Vanika Kraval
So globally we are looking around 49% LFP deployment and most of it is coming from China, which is approximately 77% of LFP deployment. And the reason is the low cost. Whereas the European and the North American players are still struggling for it. For example, we have different generations of LFP and China is already on Gen 4, so it can have approximately 205 watt hours per kilogram. That is the energy density stuff in LFP, which compared to, compared to, compared to earlier, 160, 180 watt hour per kilogram that they were looking. So that is just how fast China is progressing towards lfp. Whereas like North American and European players are still pushing for the nmc, but now they're seeing that the LFP is becoming so low in price that they want to catch up. But there's no supply chain at the moment, so they're still reliant on China for it.
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Moderator
So. And this, this, this compulsion to, from some quarters to keep hanging on to NMC as a concept is, is that because they like their big sporty cars and they think that NMC is going to give them the biggest bang for the buck. And is that still a preconception?
- [05:32]
Vanika Kraval
That is still a preconception. That is why that high energy density LFPs, they want people. But now there's another high voltage medical that is becoming popular that can replace the expensive NMC but still give high energy density. So there's definitely technological innovations happening because Korean players have just announced that they're going to have LFP from like LGS is saying 2025, Samsung SGI 2026. So there's announcements coming from Korean manufacturers as well. It's just a matter of time when they're going to ramp up.
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Moderator
Yeah, okay. And interestingly, I don't know if you heard this, but recently Jim Farley, who's the chief executive of Ford, who as you probably know, are struggling to find their way in the electric world. I think he's got the vision, but whether he's got the application and whether the people around him are allowing him to do that is a different question. But he said recently that Ford's future in electric vehicles relies very much on putting all their capital into making smaller, more affordable electric vehicles. So, and that's where sort of the argument would be. Well, in that case, LFP is presumably a good candidate for that. But then we come on to even newer technologies, which again, presumably the Chinese are pushing a lot, but everywhere in the world we're working on this, which is the next element down in the periodic table, neria, which is sodium. So that's where you come in. So tell us a little bit about sodium and why are we thinking about that?
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Nuria Tapier
Yes, so sodium ion batteries are a very interesting technologies. So they work in a very similar manner compared to lithium ion batteries. And so we can consider that as a drop in technology. And because of the abundance of sodium and also the fact that we can use current collectors which are cheaper than copper, which we use in cathodes for lithium ion batteries, then we have a very affordable technology and in that way we can think about applications that perhaps compete with LFP in terms of electric vehicles. Now we have announcements from catl talking about Gen 2 of sodium ion batteries with energy densities that can surpass LFP going above 200 kilowatt hours. Yeah, it's an interesting technology. Also very useful for stationary storage as a replacement of lead acid batteries, making them more sustainable.
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Moderator
Can you give us a bit of a steer on some of the technical. Have there been technical challenges developing sodium ion to a stage where it's. Where it is competitive with lithium ion phosphate?
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Nuria Tapier
Right. So challenges, obviously you're having a heavier element sodium compared to lithium. And so we need to push energy density a lot if we want to make it comparable. And here there's been some strategies looking at improving energy density through tweaking the cathode side of the battery. So looking at for example, triggering reactions beyond transition metal redox reactions, going oxygen redox. Also looking at anode free batteries where we are removing completely. These are quite new approaches looking at removing the anode completely. In our case we have hard carbon rather than graphite. Actually sodium will not work with graphite. And yeah, this is a new thing. So removing completely this anode. And so we have just a current collector and a cathode and our organic liquid electrolyte and even making a solid state sodium ion battery which is also anode free. So there's many different ways to push that energy density. So it's competitive with lithium ion.
- [09:23]
Moderator
And as you say it's. Well, there are car. I think the, I think the. Is it the seagull, the little BYD seagull? Hasn't that got a sodium ion battery? But also as you mentioned, this idea of stationary energy storage where you're not actually using motive power, so it doesn't really matter what your energy density is. That's a very, very interesting avenue for this rollout of energy storage across the world to regulate the grids and make the whole renewable thing happen. That's going to be batteries really, isn't it? Mostly. And so that's very interesting avenue of discovery. And then Aaron, from a Gaussian point of view, you're obviously aware of all these technologies going on and then you take a bit of a helicopter view of the industry and the markets. So what do you see being the chemistries are going to be embraced in the future.
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Aaron
So I think what's really important to kind of put in perspective is which different countries adopted chemistries and why. So if we look at the kind of Western lens, the traditional approach was NMC is the battery chemistry to go to because at a cell level the energy density is far higher than Perhaps what LFP is, but what Chinese companies did very well was think not just at the cell level, but at the pack and system level. So then when you think at this pack level, your energy density is not just your cell, it's all your other components. And what BYD in particular did is they did something called cell to pack, where in a traditional electric vehicle battery you do your cells, then you go into modules, then you go into packs. So BYD skipped this middle step and went straight from cells to package. So this means you remove a bunch of excess components and therefore the energy density at the pack level for LFP now approaches where some of the lower nickel NMC is. This was quite a few years ago and BYD pioneered this. And then a lot of the Chinese market have adopted and are using these blade batteries. And what we're seeing now is really Western companies that had previously committed to NMC are now starting to rethink their strategy. So, so what we saw last year a lot of was companies saying actually as the kind of stuff mentioned earlier, LFP is cheaper, it also lasts longer. But if at the vehicle level I can get similar energy density, I can get the same level of range. So what we're seeing now is kind of this pivot for a lot of Western companies to move towards this LFP technology. And then there's additions on top of that. So next generation lfp. But there's also something called LMFP where you add manganese to your LFP and this enables a higher voltage that again enables a higher energy density. So there's big lifetime issues with this currently. But we're seeing a lot of these Western auto manufacturers kind of copy the Chinese and move towards this LFP technology. Even in kind of solid state applications, where traditionally NMC was kind of the go to cathode, we see a lot of these solid state companies saying, hey, wait a second, we can also work with nfp. It's not just exclusively nmc. So from my perspective, I think there's been a big shift towards LFP and I think this will continue just because of the robustness of the material.
- [12:28]
Moderator
Excellent. Okay, we will come to solid state batteries in a minute, but I just want to probably address perhaps one of the elephants in the room, which is the sourcing. We hear a lot, I don't about you, but we're always hearing about these problems. People who are perhaps have a negative view of these sorts of technologies often steer us towards the problems, the perceived problems of sourcing and ethical difficulties in certain parts of worldview. And I know that's something you, you've looked at a lot in the past and you've spent some time trying to address those sometimes myths. Can you just give us a steer. An overview of what that's all about?
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Ewan McTurk
Yeah. So looking at what's actually in any lithium ion cell, there are no rare earth elements first and foremost. If you look at the periodic table, look at the rare earth elements and then look at literally any variant of lithium ion chemistry, there's absolutely no overlap. What there are are one or two elements that may have ethical concerns or environmental concerns, depending on how they're extracted and where they're extracted. And if we look at lithium, I was reading only yesterday that Chile has found 28% more resources for lithium than it previously thought it had, which I think means there's something about 9.3 million tons of lithium in Chile alone, which is enough for about three. So it's about. Yeah, three quarters of a billion 40 kilowatt hour Nissan Leafs.
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Moderator
Right.
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Ewan McTurk
So we're not quite kissing out the entire world with EVs, with Chile's reserves, but that's all right, because there's something like 100 million tons of lithium elsewhere on land, and that figure is continuously being revised upwards. And on top of that, there's 230 billion tons of lithium in seawater. So that's enough for about 18.7 trillion Nissan Leafs. So unless we're going for 1,000 EVs each, then I don't think we're going to have many issues. But the other thing to look at is how we actually extract that lithium as well. And we're getting increasingly efficient at that. If you look at the evaporation technique for lithium brines, it takes ages to do. You're literally waiting on the sun drying it out, and it requires a lot of fresh water as well. That's an ethical concern in added areas of the country. But there are amazing companies like Water Cycle Technologies, which is a UK startup, that have developed direct lithium extraction techniques, so they can desalinate seawater or lithium brines, and they can pick out the lithium from that. And then actually, one of the byproducts of that is potable water. It's incredible what you can do now. And of course you can recover lithium from the latest, most efficient recycling techniques, which EU battery regulation stipulates you need to recycle EV batteries and new batteries need to have a minimum of 6% recycled lithium, 6% recycled nickel and 16% recycled cobalt in new cells from 2031. So, yeah, we could go on for ages about this, but that gives you a fraction of how much rosier the situation is than the average person might think.
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Moderator
So you're saying that there is a potential scenario where in a country like in the Middle east somewhere, where they're already desalinating water for the drinking water, and, and at the moment they have a problem of what to do with the brine because it's a waste product that they can't put back in the sea because that's just pointless. Makes the sea more briny. They have to do something with it. I don't even know what they do with it that might actually be a product that could be used and scavenged and to produce the new raw material for what you're talking about.
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Ewan McTurk
100%. Yeah. You get lithium as a byproduct from your potable water that you needed to desalinate to, you know, to quench the thirst of your nation. And on top of that, you get a lot of sodium as well in the form of Maldon salt, which is the really fancy pyramidal stuff that costs a fortune. So it literally gets produced that way, which will be useful for Nuria and the gang for creating sodium ion batteries.
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Moderator
It seems amazing to me that no one thought of that before. I suppose we're human beings, aren't we? So we're both very, very clever and a bit stupid at the same. Same time. That's our, that's our dichotomy. So let's go back, let's get on to this, this whole solid state battery thing then, Vanika, because that's another. That's another one that I don't know about you, but I'm always reading about that as well. Solid state batteries are. I know, it's the old nuclear fusion thing, isn't? They're only 20 years away and they always will be. So how true is that? Is that starting to be debunked now as well?
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Vanika Kraval
So now I think solid state, there are at least timelines for, from the OEMs and more OEMs. So earlier in 2017, it was just Toyota saying, oh, we are going to have a solid state battery. And they were not a good example because they proved they were like 10 to 15 years early. But now most of the Chinese companies are coming up with a timeline for an all solid state battery for 2027, 2028. So first we need to understand what is a solid state battery. So in a solid state battery, your traditional liquid electrolyte is replaced by a solid electrolyte and you can use your lithium metal as an anode, which helps in increasing your energy density and maybe make it safer just because you don't have the flammable liquid electrolyte.
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Moderator
So can I just. So I understand it. So the electrolyte is the liquid normally in between the cathode and the anode, and the little lithium ions flow between the cathode and the anode or vice, depending on what you're doing, charging or discharging the electrons, go outside, kind of go outside and give you your electricity. And so that electrolyte is what facilitates the flow of the electrons, sorry, the ions. And so the solid state concept is to get rid of the liquid and replace that with something solid.
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Vanika Kraval
Solid, yes. In 2011 or 12 there was a solid electrolyte which was found which had high ionic conductivity as the liquid electrolyte. That's what gave a boom to the solid state field. But now there's semi solid state and an all solid state battery. In semi solid state you have some liquid either in a cathode or on the anode side just to come the issues around your interface. So in China, semi solid state is already in mass production. So there are companies like Nio and IM6, which is a brand of SAIC, which is doing mass production. But all solid state is what is really going to give you that high energy density push that solid state always promised, I would say.
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Moderator
And is that purely because a solid electrolyte uses less space, Is that the only reason or is it just better ionic conductivity?
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Vanika Kraval
It's just because you can use your lithium metal, which is, which has almost 10 times specific capacity of graphite. So right now what is currently in the market is there's no lithium metal solid state battery. The semi solid state batteries are using silicon plus graphite as an anode material. So silicon is another thing that people like to talk when they're talking about next generation. So having that lithium metal, all solid state battery is what people are aiming for. And to be honest, we are looking at timelines of for mass production 20, 30, 32, because it's going to be an expensive solid state, like expensive chemistry initially.
- [19:29]
Moderator
Is that where quantumscape may be the most. I don't know about. It's the one I've heard of the most. Quantumscape. Put your hand up if you heard of quantumscape. So yeah, a good proportion of you here have heard of Quantumscape. They've been talking about their solid state battery forever and they've got this anode that grows, doesn't it?
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Vanika Kraval
Anode less anode, less anodeless.
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Moderator
And it creates the lithium metal as it discharges, I guess, or charges. Charges. Excuse my ignorance. So that's the sort of thing you're talking about, that solid lithium. And is the interphase thing because you get metal buildup that can cause dendrites. Is that a problem?
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Vanika Kraval
Is that completely separate in solid state? Because all the components are solid. So there's a mechanical issue because they are exerting that pressure. And then the other issue is dendrites and then the chemical compatibility of the solid electrolyte with your anode or the cathode as well. So both the sites have the chemical compatibility issues. So those are some of the challenges that solid state is trying to first understand. And you mentioned about quantumscape, it has a configuration, so it is still a semi solid state battery because they're using a liquid catholic in the cathode. So it's a semi solid state battery. But they don't have deposited lithium metal as an active anode material. They're using current collector directly with the solid electrolyte. And during the first charge, your lithium ions are coming through the solid electrolyte and then depositing on the current collector acting as lithium metal. Okay. So because you have a bit more space now because the anodol configuration, so you have higher energy density and it's easier to transport and stuff. So it's considered to be safer as well.
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Moderator
So. So that's. So it's a very exciting. It could be to use the old Hackney trays, a game changer if we can get that technology. Right. Aniri, you mentioned there might be a role for sodium in solid state. Is that possibility?
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Nuria Tapier
Yeah, it would be similar type of configuration that my colleague talk about. But rather than having a lithium based ionic conductor as the electrolyte, that will be sodium based.
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Moderator
Right, okay. So. But more research still to be done in that.
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Nuria Tapier
Yeah, yeah, of course, yeah. Also of course you have some problems with those sort of electrolytes because you will need higher temperatures perhaps than the lithium based solid state electrolyte. The sodium systems are not as conductor in the solid state as the lithium one.
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Moderator
Right.
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Nuria Tapier
So you perhaps need to go slightly above room temperature.
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Moderator
Okay.
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Nuria Tapier
For the system to work.
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Moderator
It's all very mind blowing to a layman like me, but it's fascinating stuff. What's your view there, Aaron, of the market of the future and how do you see it developing?
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Aaron
So I think perhaps I'm more pessimistic of where these Next generation technologies will come in and when we'll see them. So if we take solid state for example, there's two massive issues right now. One is on getting a cell to just work. Because there's no liquid, you need to exert very high pressure on the cell to keep the kind of interfaces together. So this may be okay for one cell but if you want to put it into a pack, it's quite difficult to keep this uniform pressure. And then this is even more difficult if your anode is kind of swelling and shrinking and disappearing because your cell is physically changing size. So then the pressure you exert is going to have to change. And then the second issue in solid state is the manufacturing. Manufacturing batteries is incredibly complicated. The Chinese Companies have about 20 years head start on anyone else and they're still struggling to kind of produce solid state batteries. I think many people may have seen in the news northvolt and how despite having $15 billion of investment, they still couldn't produce any batteries. Their factory was operating at about 1% of what it was supposed to because the yield of their line was very low. And also the throughput of their line was very low. So their machines were running very slowly and the output of their cells just wasn't very good and they had to throw them away. So I think it's quite easy to, well, quite nice to think where we might get to. But the kind of real world manufacturing challenge, especially of solid state, I think is huge.
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Moderator
I just want to pick your brains you in a little bit first of all though, because beyond all this, this is all, this is all good stuff. But batteries aren't. Well, there's other battery chemistries like silicon anodes.
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Ewan McTurk
Yeah, silicon anode.
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Moderator
And there's other stuff like cryogenic air storage for example, which is an energy storage medium. So. And there are other things, that's what I'm sure in your mind more than mine. So can you just give us a quick overview of what those other options might be?
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Ewan McTurk
Yeah, I think some of the most exciting energy storage technologies for grid level applications are actually not batteries at all. And while some people might think, oh, hydrogen for long term storage, no, actually the best solution is to literally pull your storage medium out of thin air. So you already mentioned hiview. We'll come back to them in a minute. The cryogenic air solution. There's a fantastic company called Cheesecake Energy. I have no idea why they're called that, but it's memorable.
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Moderator
Why not?
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Ewan McTurk
And yeah, yeah, so they have a containerized energy storage system, a Bit like you have a shipping container full of lithium iron phosphate batteries normally, but in there they have a compressed air tank and they, they actually fill that up using the fact that old heavy, heavy duty vehicle diesel engines are compression combustion, so they'll never see diesel ever again. But they'll use an electric motor to power the pistons to compress air to send into the tank. And then when you need electricity again, you just run that air through the diesel engine, which then powers the electric motor, becomes a generator, sends about 750 odd kilowatts, whatever it would be, back to the grid. But Highview takes that sort of concept, but different. It's cryogenic air storage. So again, off the shelf gas handling components, just metal vats and things like that that we've had for decades. They're cheap as chips, they're incredibly reliable. We know what we're doing with them. And you just cryogenically freeze air using excess renewable electricity and then feed it back to the grid by expanding that cryogenic air through a turbine when you do need it. That is being deployed in the UK just now. There's four gigawatt hour scale systems being deployed, one of which is at Hunterstown Power Station in Scotland. It's a 2.5 gigawatt hour system which is enough to power a quarter of Scotland's homes for 12 hours. That's one unit. And we're deploying loads of these. That is going to be super cheap. There's no contentious materials. And I'll tell you what, the efficiency of that starts at 60% goes up towards 70%, which matches pumped hydro, and that kicks the stuffing out of hydrogen, which is only 30% efficient. So for every three electrons of renewable energy you throw at hydrogen, you only get one back and it throws two away. That kills that inefficiency. Stone dead. Compressed air for the win.
- [26:32]
Moderator
Well, as I always say on hydrogen, don't get me started. So we'll, we'll cover that another time. It's a whole different topic of conversation. But that's fascinating that there are other options and presumably that means, I presume all four of you are optimistic. Although you said there are some pessimisms, Aaron, but optimistic in general about energy storage's ability to make the renewable revolution happen. Fundamentally, I'm getting nods there. Okay, does that, do you share that? Hands up if you feel that same optimism. Feels like that's a good, good, good proportion of you from the crowd. Okay.
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Dave Borlace
So that's it. Thank you so much to Dave and his wonderful panelists for allowing us to record that particular session. If you are interested in various battery topics, then do of course make sure to check out all of our previous podcasts and various episodes across the Fully Charged show and the Everything Electric Show. And if you want to have the experience in real life, then of course come to one of our live shows later this year as well. But that's it. If you have been, thank you for listening.