Ever since I first met the West Coast Battery Forum team, it has been on my list to make it to one of their events. So when I read the schedule for the ‘Nordic BESS day,’ packed with interesting speakers talking on topics I wanted to learn about, I bought my ticket and packed my bags.

The energy did not disappoint. I arrived to Spike brewery, 1 tram stop north of the central station in Gothenburg, at 8:30 in the morning to a gloriously Swedish sunny day. The bare brick building was already half full of earnest battery discussion, so I collected my name tag and a coffee, and dived straight in.

Bo Normark, Swedish energy legend behind the European Battery Alliance, opened the event with a keynote that walked through the whole battery landscape. The biggest market for batteries is EVs, but the fastest growing market is stationary storage. He described how Chinese battery success has come from consistent industrial support, with 2% of their GDP given in state support, but 90% of that support coming from regional governments which causes competition within China. In contrast, Sweden spends 1% of its GDP in subsidy, but mostly to subsidise electricity for industry and not to produce stuff. In China, the competition is extremely fierce, with 170 Chinese EV brands now down to 109 in the past few years.

Then he moved onto talking about the grid, how the BESS revenue stack is evolving, V2G from both AC and DC charging as well as distributed energy examples like balcony solar power exploding in Germany and how the grid has gone from 0 to 30% generated by local PV panels in Pakistan. It set us up well for the rest of the day’s discussions.

After a coffee break, there were talks from Lex Energy, who design and build scalable & modular charging hardware with batteries and a grid connection. Their product is covered in wooden panels to help the infrastructure integrate into the built environment. Then it was CheckWatt, an aggregator who gathers assets and manages energy virtually in a virtual power plant, who advocate for in front of the meter storage that is visible to the grid. Next up was a talk from consultancy firm Sweco, who discussed the merits of colocating BESS with solar/wind behind the meter to do energy arbitrage, which can give up to 10-40% operating savings on a large energy project. This tension between advocates for front of the meter for distributed energy vs behind the meter for individual control was super interesting, with each playing a slightly different role. Finally, there was a talk from KanEL, which is a platform that trades individual energy storage assets on the market, with a dashboard showing the different revenue streams.

With that it was lunch, which was several trays of delicious focaccias and festival style parmesan chips. It was dry, so we sat outside, but the famous Gothenburg weather did its very best to blow away every napkin on each table.

After lunch, we kicked off again with a talk from Vattenfall, who operate 158 MW of BESS assets with 121 MW under construction. They contract companies like Return or Terralayr to build BESS projects, and they themselves focus on optimisation and steering. Next on the stage was Stockholm’s own Flower, who are an energy trading company that trade both their own assets and partner owned assets. Their speaker hammered home the point that EU energy prices are not competitive for industrial energy, and only solar and wind provide sufficiently cheap options, but with intermittency as a problem. Until now, the volume risk of intermittency was shared across the sector rather than mitigated, but this is where BESS assets are stepping in to mitigate that risk. Finally, a BESS builder Capture Energy took to the stage, talking through how the market is growing and evolving, with today being all about revenue value stacking.

The last session of the event was a series of start up pitches from:

• Rivus Batteries, who do flow batteries with organic molecules instead of vanadium based systems,

• Ertzy, who develop EMS and PCS in a chemistry agnostic way,

• Drev, an industrial vacuum cleaner for gigafactories,

• Energy Node, who have plans to coat cells in their material to help the heat management,

• Echion Technologies, who make high power anode material,

• Westra, developers of PFAs free binder polymer,

• and finally Endre, who make digital twins which help plan assets around real world behaviour.

Overall, this event was great fun. I chatted to industry veterans, people looking for advice and others just up for sharing stories, and it was the perfect size of conference for me with around 50 attendees. The name tags didn’t have companies on them, which I actually felt made for better discussions, encouraging you to lean in to getting to know who someone was rather than staring intently at their badge trying to piece some of it together yourself.

The energy at this BESS event felt lively, excited and like there was lots happening in the industry. If you ever get the chance to go to a West Coast Battery Forum event, I cannot recommend it more highly. Thanks to my gracious hosts!

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Lithium metal solid-state batteries (SSBs) have been heralded as the prodigal successor to lithium-ion battery (LIB) technology since the 1970s but are yet to take the world by storm. Famously, every decade since then, they are consistently positioned as a technology that is still a decade away.

Plenty of treatises have documented experimental progress in solid state batteries: solid electrolytes (SEs) with favorable electro-chemo-mechanical properties; manufacturing thin Li metal and defect-free separators etc. pushing them towards commercial viability. Alongside, physics-based models that can guide experimental SSB design (aka continuum models) through rigorous validation and predictive insights, have been developed since the 2000s but haven’t always stood the test of time. This is in sharp contrast to something like the pseudo-2D Doyle-Fuller-Newman (DFN) model developed in 1993 that still serves as the most useful predictive electrode optimization model for lithium-ion batteries (LIBs). A well parameterized DFN model or its kiddie equivalents like single particle model provide a wealth of knobs for beginning of life and lately, cycle life optimization, for higher energy/power density while minimizing degradation. Li-ion P2D models are available commercially in GT-AutoLion, COMSOL, ANSYS, MATLAB etc. and the development of the open source software PyBaMM has been leveraged by startups like Ionworks for accelerated cell design optimization.

So, what’s the hold up in solid state battery models? The big challenge is mechanics, a whole new dragon that needs to be tamed alongside electrochemistry. The liquid electrolyte Li-ion DFN model can be modeled as coupled species, charge and thermal transport partial differential equations (PDEs) on a fixed mesh with closure relations provided by thermodynamics and kinetics. As we move from the liquid to a solid medium and swap small volume expansion intercalation electrodes in Li-ion (e.g. graphite) with high volume expansion Li metal plating/stripping in SSBs; stress fields, moving interfaces, point contacts, crack propagation etc. add humongous complexity to this relatively benign model. This requires moving-mesh techniques alongside unraveling the impact of stress on each of the existing field variables (concentration, potential, temperature). There have been attempts to tackle this problem, with varying degrees of success. Let’s walk through some of these models starting off with a focus on the Li metal|separator side of things (1-3), then focusing on composite solid state cathode microstructure models (4) and then finally bringing it all together for a DFN equivalent for a Li metal SSB (5).

1. Deposition Stability models: Kinetics is King

Monroe-Newman (M-N) (yes, the same Newman from DFN model for LIBs fame) first gave a stability model, circa 2004/’05, on deposition stability at the Li metal - SE interface incorporating how mechanics induced stress alters the interfacial electrochemical potential (e⁻) and provided a formalism for updated Butler-Volmer reactions kinetics at the Li-SE interface (see figure below: the additional exponential term shaded in blue). Model assumptions involved include elastic mechanics and perfect contact. It’s a tour de force theoretical work, deriving complex thermodynamics-mechanics-kinetics relationships that distills the kinetics impact into a simple equation that can be readily implemented in electrochemical models based on molar volumes (V), interfacial shear stress (τ_d) and interfacial hydrostatic stress (also known as pressure, p).

Using this, the paper argued that with appropriate SE material properties, current density at lithium domain peaks can be manipulated to be lower than the current density in the surrounding areas (for stable deposition) resulting in one of the biggest unfulfilled prophecies in solid state battery modeling literature:

That is, as long as the shear modulus of the SE separator is twice that of Li metal:

then stable deposition is achieved.

Experimental observations have shown this to be incorrect, and the dendrite propagation problem persists. Over the past 20 years, different versions of this model have come out. Researchers have enhanced the mechanics complexity adding plasticity, creep for Li metal, etc. (with conformal contact) while focusing on the stress impact on Li kinetics at the interface. Experimentally, Li metal still penetrates through the separator for all known SEs and causes shorting; whether it’s polymer electrolytes that are soft, ceramic electrolytes that are stiff, sulfide electrolytes that are in-between or any concoctions of hybrid/new electrolytes researchers are cooking. Death by Li penetration is one of the cardinal truths of Li metal SSBs.

A widely known aphorism goes, “All models are wrong, but some are useful”. It can be safely concluded that papers that directly use the elastic limit M-N correlations can be binned under the “these models are wrong and minimally useful” category, especially when it comes to providing any predictive insights. Furthermore, stresses at the interface need to be at the 100s of MPa levels for the mechanics impact on kinetics to be substantial. For commercial solid state battery systems that are aimed to be operated under low stack pressure ~1 MPa, and bulk Li metal yielding around similar values, it is unlikely that interfacial stresses would ever go beyond 10s of MPa even with stress localization at contacts.

Models incorporating complex Li metal mechanics (plasticity, creep) are truly commendable in their ambition to provide phase maps for deposition stability regimes as a function of mechanical properties. However, most of them use perfect interfacial contact as the inherent assumption which is incomplete. An intuitive answer for the inaccuracy is the disproportionate focus on stress-based reaction kinetics as opposed to contact loss dynamics.

2. Deposition Stability models: Contact is Crucial

Starting in the 2020s, solid-solid contacts and contact area loss models have been explored as the mechanism for current focusing and dendrite growth. This emulates the presence of surface roughness and defects which reflects the true nature of solid-solid contact. The first such paper by Steve Harris and coauthors suggested: “Preferred stack pressure be at least 20 MPa to maintain a relatively small interface resistance while reducing void volume for LLZO type electrolyte”. The gap between lithium and SE (g_Li-se, correlates to contact) is computed considering Li elastoplastic deformation (u_Li), roughness of both surfaces (s_equiv), Li surface morphology evolution due to plating/stripping (h_p/s-Li), Li creep (h_creep-Li) and relative rigid body motion between Li electrode and SE (δ_Li-se)

This is a step in the right direction, but experimental literature reports a wide variation in stack pressure magnitudes needed to reliably cycle the cells. Plus, there is an interesting mechanism at high pressure where Li metal can flow around the sides and short the cell alongside other issues of pressure induced material fracture and dendrite growth.

3. Li-Li Symmetric Cell Models

Symmetric cells are the basic experimental configuration that are used to understand Li metal-separator stability through critical current density measurements. Prima-facie, it’s a simple system where if we can model contact evolution and separator resistance, we should be able to predict the voltage through the test and when the cell will fail. Things get complicated because interphase growth happens even if there is no contact loss at high pressures. Plus, SEs are never completely devoid of voids and Li can penetrate through the grain boundaries and voids. For example, researchers have experimentally tracked the interface area evolution at plating/stripping Li|separator interfaces alongside voltage. Incorporating the area dynamics in a symmetric cell model allowed validation of the charge voltage evolution but significant deviation between model and experiments is observed in the discharge segment indicating other processes at play.

4. Microstructure Models for Effective Property Calculation of Composite Cathodes

Peering into the 3D arrangement of the cathode active material (CAM) and SE particle alongside conductive additive and binder (CBD) can reveal composite solid state cathode limitations. Researchers obtain this microstructure through two methods: imaging or virtual generation. However, realistic 3D microstructure visualization is a challenge for solid state battery cathodes as imaging is not generally done under any stack pressure. Also, the resolution needed to resolve point-to-point CAM-CAM, CAM-SE, SE-SE, CAM-CBD contacts is high. Intuitively, solid state cathode (SSC) performance is primarily dictated by contacts. A Li⁺ ion hopping through the SE phase (e.g. LPSC) in the cathode will preferentially move through the contact points between consecutive LPSC particles. Whereas, in the liquid electrolyte equivalent, the ions can freely move through the bulk as the electrolyte wets all solids and forms a percolating network.

The second approach: virtual generation of microstructure, is idealistic, but it has helped bring the liquid electrolyte Li-ion understanding to the next level using homogenization calculations to probe effective cathode properties like tortuosity and electronic conductivity. Softwares like MATBOX etc. can be leveraged to quantify these relations and architectures can be optimized computationally to improve these properties. However, they provide over-optimistic predictions for SSC properties as compared to experiments because of the same contact resolution challenges. Point-to-point contact in SSCs requires inclusion of additional contact resistance at each interface. Experimental liquid electrolyte cathode ionic tortuosities generally lie <10 and match model prediction. While SSC experimental tortuosities can reach 100, with standard homogenization calculations underpredicting it. As such, conflicting insights like smaller cathode particles vs larger cathode particles being optimal are prevalent in the solid-state modeling literature.

5. Li|Separator|NMC full cell models: The DFN equivalent.

All above models combine to form the equivalent of P2D model for solid state batteries. But it’s rare to see such validated models in literature, especially at current rates beyond 1C. In addition to the complexities in above sub-models, cathode particles also expand/shrink when Li is inserted/extracted causing imperfect contact in the cathode to evolve during discharge/charge. So, the single dynamic interface at the Li metal-separator interface combines with thousands of dynamic interfaces in the solid-state cathode for a single charge or discharge. The complexity gets magnified exponentially.

The above limitations should both worry and excite researchers getting into solid state battery modeling research.

Here’s the solution to this challenge in my opinion:

1. Balancing acts between simple and complex models:

A quote attributed to Einstein goes: “A model should be made simple, not simpler”. My interpretation of this statement is “build as simple a model as you possibly can that can accurately quantify a phenomenon and be of predictive use”. In the solid-state realm, we directly started off with the complex M-N model as the baseline. For over 20 years since the M-N model came out in 2005, researchers (including yours truly) have been using stress modified Butler-Volmer kinetics in solid-state models (the article has over 2000 citations!). Nobody stopped to ask: did the M-N modification provide better accuracy in experimental Butler-Volmer rate kinetics data validation with the addition of stress based exponential term as compared to without it? To this date, experimental proof is lacking. No targeted experiments to evaluate Butler-Volmer kinetics as a function of stress at the Li metal/separator interface are available in literature that we can find. In addition to kinetics, researchers have proposed new theories for stress affecting electrochemistry: e.g. stress affects open circuit potential (OCP), stress affects Li⁺ diffusivity in the electrolyte. While some fundamental experiments have been done in this realm e.g. from Paul Albertus’ group that tracks how interface stress affects OCP, more is desperately needed to quantitatively validate the theories.

In retrospect, starting with a simple model, and slowly adding complexity as needed is a viable alternative. Complex models add more physics but also add more tunable parameters. (Not limited to just solid-state battery models). A model should not be made infinitely complex. And in the solid-state battery realm with coupled electrochemistry-transport-mechanics, it is already reaching the upper echelons of complexity. A case could be made to brute force the SSB experimentally with simple models providing quantitative insights, instead of relying on overcomplicated models that try to bring all aspects together while providing inconsequential qualitative insights.

2. Stop copying LIB microstructure models blindly.

While experimental solid-state cathode testing has limped to reproducible electrochemical data in the past decade, modeling works incorporating virtual cathode microstructure generation models and image-based generation filled the gap and have been Ctrl c- Ctrl v’d from the LIB realm. Nuances on imperfect contact between particles have often been glossed over. Microstructure based homogenization calculations of effective electronic/ionic conductivities need to be coupled with experimental measurements of the same for proof. Furthermore, imaging that resolves particle-particle contact and tracks the interface accurately under pressure should be conducted before moving towards image-based models.

3. Melding models with standardised, intelligent experiments

Recently, a lot of emphasis has been placed on reproducibility of solid-state electrochemical data. Lithium-ion cell testing has provided reliable electrochemical data with small error bars for decades now. This standardized fixturing and testing should pervade the solid-state battery community to generate good quantitative data for models to validate against.

Additionally, intelligent electrochemical couples can be paired to isolate electrochemical phenomena at the anode/cathode/separator. Use Li-In (lithium-indium) on both sides if you want to quantify the SE bulk as interfaces will be good. Use Li-In on one side and Li metal on the other to quantify what’s happening at the Li metal interface. Use Li-In full cells to explore what’s happening in the cathode. If grain boundaries are an issue, use an amorphous separator. And so on and so forth.

I will leave the reader with some useful reads for solid state continuum model reviews:

1. Modeling the chemo-mechanical behavior of all-solid-state batteries: a review

2. Models for the Interplay of Mechanics, Electrochemistry, Thermodynamics, and Kinetics in Lithium-Ion Batteries

Feel free to provide comments on this assessment. And keep an eye out for some solid state works in the symmetric cell and full cell paradigm tackling these challenges.

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Spiral Studios is a creative studio built for deep tech storytelling. Rahul and the team match world-class story telling to the companies building breakthrough technology.

We’ve been documenting the battery industry since 2020. Over that time, the United States has struggled to produce a clear winner in commercial-scale battery manufacturing. Despite around $100B of investment since 2020, any success at climbing out the valley of death to get to gigawatt-hour scale has remained elusive in the West so far, except Tesla.

The industry’s history has been sprinkled with academic breakthroughs that coexist alongside factory cancellations and bankruptcies, shifting political priorities, and difficult economics. We wrote about how state intervention could change the game, but there is no suggestion of it from this administration, while China continues to dominate the global battery market.

Yet entrepreneurs, scientists, and investors continue to build companies pushing battery chemistry, manufacturing, and commercialization forward. These are stories we wanted to tell.

We partnered with Rahul Dhiman and the team at Spiral Studios to produce a short documentary on the current state of the US battery industry, with a focus on California’s innovative ecosystem. Whether these efforts ultimately translate into globally competitive manufacturing remains an open question: what will it take for the United States to build a globally competitive battery industry?

The documentary features six individuals helping shape that future:

From left to right, top to bottom: Kara Rodby (Investor at Volta Energy Technologies), Jonathan Tan (CEO at Coreshell), Brenna Teigler (Co-Founder and CEO, Electrochemistry Foundry), Richard Wang (CEO at Voya Energy, Co-Founder at Electrochemistry Foundry, Former CEO at Cuberg), Vivas Kumar (CEO at Mitra Chem), Asma Sharafi (CTO at Ensurge Micropower).

We explore China’s technological leadership in lithium ion batteries, what has worked in the USA (and not), and where the next opportunities may lie.

We hope you enjoy, and that it contributes to a conversation about the future of battery manufacturing in the United States.

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At the ISIS Neutron and Muon Source in Oxfordshire, UK, we work with groups from around the world studying the materials that make up the current and next generation of batteries, using intense pulsed beams of neutrons and muons to examine them at the atomic scale.

Neutrons and muons have many unique properties that make them extremely useful investigative probes. Their magnetic moment, high penetrating power, ability to interact with light elements such as lithium, and non-destructive nature have enabled the study of a diverse landscape of scientific challenges.

However, these are not tools that are accessible in a university laboratory or industry bench, and so may be unfamiliar to some. Over the last forty years of its operations, ISIS has enabled researchers from academia and industry to use these valuable techniques to study their materials: from buckyballs to bacteria. But, from the beginning, this has also involved the study of battery materials.

ISIS began operations in 1984, just as the main families of lithium-ion cathode materials were being discovered and developed. As neutrons are particularly sensitive to light atoms like lithium and oxygen, they are an ideal tool for studying these materials, and neutron diffraction was used to determine the structure of several candidate cathodes. As X-rays interact with an atom’s electron cloud, X-ray diffraction is not as good at studying smaller elements such as lithium, especially when in the presence of heavier ones.

As well as diffraction, neutrons can also be used for spectroscopic and imaging studies of battery materials. They can give a better view of how light elements such as lithium are moving around, and better resolution between some of the other elements that are commonly found in lithium-ion batteries such as iron, nickel, cobalt and magnesium.

ISIS also produces muons: fundamental particles that are found around us all the time after being formed naturally when cosmic rays interact with atoms in the Earth’s atmosphere. Like an electron, but with a much greater mass, muons act like tiny spies that travel deep into materials and help researchers better understand the processes taking place at the atomic level. Inside the material, they stop within a billionth of a second and then observe their surroundings in the brief time before they decay in only two millionths of a second.

Muons can ‘spy’ on the flow of ions in a battery by using their magnetic moment, which is flipped by ions like lithium and sodium that also have magnetic moments travelling past them. The resulting signal counts the rate at which these flips occur. Knowing the paths that ions can take from structural probes, like neutron diffraction, allows this to be compared with bulk measurements of the ionic motion.

Through this, we can compare materials, understand how they behave at different temperatures, and work out how they charge and discharge at an atomic scale. This is all with the goal of improving battery materials and finding cheaper, more sustainable alternatives with longer life spans.

Working with researchers from the UK’s Faraday Institution, ISIS scientists built a new cell to measure how fast ions are moving through the cathode in operando during charging and discharging. Initially, this was used to investigate the performance of a half-cell made with NMC811, which is commonly used in electric vehicle battery cathodes due to its competitive price and energy density properties. This material has a high capacity but often suffers an irreversible capacity loss between the first charge and discharge. It’s thought that this loss of capacity may be due to kinetic barriers to diffusion of the lithium ions in the material. Understanding this issue could lead to insights that inform the design of new and improved alternatives.

Interestingly, by combining the differing measurement properties of muon spectroscopy with electrochemical methods, they were able to see that this slow diffusion was more prevalent on the surface of the cathode, rather than in the bulk material. This suggests that processes that focus on stabilising the surface of the material are likely to be more successful at improving its properties.

The same in operando cell was then used for small angle neutron scattering studies, to investigate the sodium movement in a commercial hard carbon in a sodium-ion half-cell. (Read about it used for small angle neutron scattering studies.)

As the techniques at ISIS have developed, in operando experiments have become possible on more than just custom-built half-cells. Commercial coin and cylindrical cells have been studied using neutron imaging to see the distribution of the state of charge during operation and understand any capacity losses. What could be seen in pure materials forty years ago can now be seen within an operating cell, and long-duration cycling experiments are now underway. Another collaboration with the Faraday Institution has led to the study of unmodified pouch cells using neutron diffraction.

The instruments at ISIS Neutron and Muon Source will soon be undergoing a series of modifications to continue to meet the needs of UK industry and academia as part of the Endeavour programme. For example, the neutron diffraction instrument used for the first measurements in the 1980’s is currently being upgraded after 40 years of operation.

We make a lot of demands on batteries: wanting them to be smaller, safer, cheaper, longer lasting and faster charging. Key to achieving these is a better understanding of how the materials we use in batteries work, and how they can be improved. The research at ISIS has always played a key role in developing this understanding and will continue to do so in the future.

There are a few different access routes to using ISIS. Most commonly for academics is our Direct Access route, which is available for all ISIS instruments. Successful proposals are scheduled for beamtime by ISIS scientists, typically 3 to 8 months after the submission deadline, depending on the facility’s operating cycles. We also offer a range of access routes for businesses wanting to use the facility.

ISIS is based on the Harwell Science and Innovation campus, which itself has a rich history of involvement with battery research. In the 1970’s and 1980’s, the UK’s Atomic Energy Research Establishment (AERE), which was also based at Harwell, carried out research on sodium sulphur and lithium vanadium batteries. AERE also funded the patenting expenses for John Goodenough and Koichi Mizushima’s lithium cobalt and nickel oxide cathodes, after they’d had their funding request refused by the University of Oxford, and then licensed them to Sony Corporation.

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📈 Battery company stocks

Factorial Energy has started trading on Nasdaq following a massive SPAC merger that valued the company at approximately $1.3 billion. The capital raised will be used to bring their solid state tech to market outside of the automotive sector.

Taiwanese battery manufacturer Prologium is also going public later this year in New York through a $3.8 billion SPAC deal. The funds raised will be used to scale the production of its fourth generation solid state technology as well the construction of their gigafactory in Dunkirk. ZincFive, which makes nickel zinc batteries for data centres, also announced their intention to go public via a SPAC deal which gives their valuation at $752 million.

In other raise news, the tungsten niobium oxide anode pack specialist Nyobolt has closed a Series C round at $60 million raised, giving the company a $1 billion valuation. Redox flow battery company CMBlu has also raised a €50 million series C, bringing its valuation up to over €1 billion too, giving Europe 2 new unicorns this month.

🍬 Tidbits

🇨🇳 A really interesting read from Hans Eric Melin on the city of Yichang, which is rapidly becoming the LFP centre of the world, and his reflections after visiting.

✉️ The Faraday Institution in the UK is hiring a Digital Communications Co-ordinator! Apply by the 26th June.

🏭 Holyvolt owned Wildcat Discovery Technologies has signed a joint venture agreement with EnergyX that will see them build a 15,000 tonne LFP cathode plant in Texas. EnergyX is expected to supply the majority of the lithium with favourable pricing. All roads lead to LFP.

🇪🇸 Basquevolt, based in the north of Spain, has launched their NMC lithium metal cell, with a reported energy density of 402 Wh/kg.

🇩🇪 Tesla has announced that it will invest another $250 million into Giga Berlin, bringing the capacity up from 8 GWh to 18 GWh.

🍩 The Donut Lab battery is taking a hammering in the press recently, with an investigative journalist launching a 44 minute video debunking their claims, following months of evidence gathering.

🏎️ Porsche has shut down its subsidiary Cellforce, laying off the 50 remaining employees.

🔋 CATL has announced intentions to make BESS 50% of its global sales by 2030, signalling a strategic pivot away from its current focus on the automotive sector.

📦 In a similar vein, Ford has moved into BESS in the US, creating a subsidiary called Ford Energy and launching initial products of a 2 and 4 hour system. These products run on CATL licensed technology, so any price alterations due to a change in CATL focus will have a direct impact on Ford in the market.

Reflections from AABC Europe

In the middle of May, I (Issy) went to AABC Europe in Mainz, Germany. Among the coffees, snacks and one very early morning run organised by the Breathe Batteries team, I made a lot of notes, which I have pulled together to give you a flavour.

There was a lot of reflection on the very recently bankrupted Morrow and also Northvolt, and much of it by people who had directly worked there. One talk by Scania’s Chris Wiak caught my eye in particular, as he works for the Northvolt Industrial Division that was bought by Scania to create their off road battery systems. They produce modular systems with different voltage ranges of up to 1000V in a module, and he talked about the need to be quicker developing systems in order to compete with Chinese companies. To do that they are building configurable platforms, owning the control points of the BMS hardware and software, and staying chemistry flexible. The need for chemistry agnostic battery platforms, also discussed as scalable architecture, was also touched on by Katja Brade, Head of Cell Development at Traton, and Alexander Fandakov, Technology Excellence Lead at IAV.

Brian Barnett, CTO of Nyobolt, gave an upbeat talk about their technology and strategy. Their anode material for niobium tungsten oxide is made in the UK, with cells designed in the US and contracted out to partners in Asia. They are targeting data centres, which need extremely responsive charge and slew rates, and robotics and automation in their partnership with their investors Symbiotic. More classic anode graphite was still a hot topic, especially for its recycling challenges, discussed in length by Robin Hansson from Vianode. The unit economics of recycling graphite are very low, and the feedstock needs to be tightly managed to ensure that it is all EV grade and not portable electronics graphite. He was keen to stress that a mix of natural graphite and synthetic is not an issue, as the thermal treatment upgrades the natural graphite, and that the end of life graphite can be blended with virgin materials to give the desired performance.

Repair and recycling were a key theme of the conference. One talk I attended by Cox Automotive, was about how any issue currently gets attended to by immediately recycling the whole pack, which is a deeply inefficient process that misses out the possible repair or remanufacture steps. They discussed how brand trust can be improved through repair and reuse, as repairability drives residual value particularly for second hand EVs. Replacing cells in packs is definitely something that can be done in Europe, in the same vein as any other standard repair.

One talk that I particularly enjoyed the narrative of was from Frank Kindermann, of NIO, that challenged my assumptions on battery swapping. In a world where BYD is developing packs that can charge in 5 minutes, I have never entirely been sold on battery swapping, but Frank positioned it as another layer of vertical integration that can also use the packs in the station for peak shaving and grid resilience. Of course, this is just a different kind of vehicle to grid, but it’s possible that this approach does make battery lifetime a little longer if they can always be charged slowly.

The key reflections coming away were that it does feel like Europe is innovating at a systems level, and companies are trying to own the important touch points like the BMS and control systems. However, whispers were that the attendance was down from 1200 last year to 700, and the footfall on the booths felt very low to me. That being said, it was a super interesting conference and a great place to meet and discuss, maybe see you at its next iteration next year!

📰 What else we covered at Intercalation

Some big stories this month:

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It was about time for us to do a deep dive on dry processing, and so Román & Issy caught up with Sam Burrow and Joe Stevenson from Anaphite, the Bristol based company commercialising dry processing, to get a well-rounded picture of where their tech is at as well as the business of changing an entire industry’s process.

Dry processing is quite literally removing the solvent from the production of electrodes. A wet coating process mixes a slurry, with cathode or anode active material, coats it onto foil and then uses ovens to dry off the solvent. The commercial solvent used in gigafactories across the world is NMP, which is non-volatile and can dissolve the binder PVDF. NMP is however a very nasty solvent, classified as a reproductive toxicant and skin, eye and respiratory irritant.

Dry processing removes the need for 1) solvent and therefore 2) drying, making it significantly lower cost, lower energy and also much better for the environment and workers by removing NMP.

Anaphite was founded back in 2018, so did the Tesla announcement back in 2020 change anything for you?

What they did was get the whole battery industry excited about dry coating. Saying, “Hey, we are going to do this really difficult thing” gave many people in the industry the confidence to pursue the technology as well. If you look at the patent filings before and after they made the announcement, it has led to an explosion in the field of lithium-ion batteries from other companies in Korea and increasingly in China as well. Their announcement and intent supercharged the rest of the industry.

Talk us through dry processing, how does it work differently to wet processing at scale in a factory?

Your raw materials come in and you make an electrode. The mother roll is then taken off to be slit and assembled into cells. What you are changing is the process of transforming raw materials into that electrode mother roll, which is fundamentally a different way to make basically the same product, replacing the front end of the cell manufacturing process.

The binders that are used to make wet coated electrodes don’t work for dry coating. There are different fundamental principles behind how you turn the powder into an electrode, and a different recipe for each different machine type. A set of rollers will shape the powder into a sheet, like making lasagna or your favourite sort of gluten-based layer.

Once you’ve made the film, you can then attach it to a foil, which normally has primer. The film formation step is like the extrusion of your slurry in a slot dye. Then coating, drying and calendaring in your wet coating process are replaced by a single lamination step where you attach your film to the current collector.

You make it sound straightforward, what’s the biggest challenge in doing this?

The fun bit is where we focus: in the preparation and design of the powder, which is as important as the preparation and design for the wet coating slurry process. With wet slurries, there are rules and ways of thinking that have been laid down over decades of work on designing these slurries, but with dry processing this is brand new technology. You just don’t have the shortcuts like a rheology trace for wet slurry, knowing exactly what it means. For dry coating, those relationships just don’t exist, so it’s much more interesting but more challenging to get it right.

How should we conceptualise dry coating? Everyone can relate to painting for wet coating, how do you explain this one?

Most of the really useful analogies actually come from cooking. We’ve got textbooks on industrial baking in this building. When you’re kneading bread, you’re stretching gluten and making a structure that holds stuff together. The PTFE is doing something really quite similar. Look at one of these machines that we use for processing the powder and it looks an awful lot like a pasta machine, squashing sticky powder together to make a sheet. It’s no coincidence really that an awful lot of the machinery that’s used in the front end of these processes is made by people who come from flour milling and those sorts of industries, for wet and dry actually.

Dry coating is one broad way to group a subset of coating processes, as removing the solvent gives several potential routes to achieving the ‘film’ of active material.

There are many different flavours of dry coating, different fundamental principles behind how you turn the powder into an electrode. There are different recipes for the powder, and different machine types to make that electrode shape from the powder.

The Maxwell-type route, which was developed by Maxwell Technologies and later acquired by Tesla, is the most popular and it is how dry battery electrodes gained momentum. This process involves dry mixing of active material, conductive additive and binder, followed by a fibrillation step by means of applying shear force, but more on this topic will come later in the article. Then, in a final step, a self-standing film is obtained by passing the mixture through rolls, which is later laminated onto a current collector.

A route that is getting more attention is the extrusion-type, where the differences occur inside the extruder. The steps of the Maxwell route also take place, but the material undergoes additional distributive and dispersive mixing, resulting in better particle and binder distribution. The main drawback of this route is the necessity of extra equipment, which makes the overall process more complex.

An alternative route is dry spray coating, in which a dry powder mixture is sprayed directly onto the collector. This route is different from the other two in the sense that the mixture is sprayed and it does not rely on a fibrillation step. However, this approach is more difficult to scale and some practical issues like good adhesion or high loading deposition remain challenging.

How do you differentiate your approach as the best when it’s a brand new product in a brand new market?

Like any process, you have a requirement for a certain set of properties in the product, in this case an electrode mother roll. It’s quite easy to have these conversations because you’ve got that defined factory intermediate at the end of the process and the properties that can be delivered from the process. Then it comes down to economics.

What’s the capital requirement, how much does it cost you to set the line up, how long does it take you to get the line running, what’s the throughput on the line, what’s the yield, how much good stuff are you making and how much are you throwing away? What’s the confidence on that? It’s easier to invest in something that has been done successfully 100 times than it is to invest in something that has never been done before, same as any manufacturing process.

There are different ways of making dry electrodes which will give you different properties in the finished product. There is a little bit of product design in it but most of it is about how manufacturable and how good the process is at making electrodes.

How different do you find selling a process rather than a material?

I don’t think it is that different because what we’re selling is a process for a product. The only difference is who runs the process.

If the customer is at any sort of scale, they’re going to want to validate the process. Car makers don’t say, ‘I’ve got 50 billion euros of revenue riding on something, but I’m not going to bother seeing how they make it.’ The product, usually an electrode specific to a cell design, needs to be developed, then the process needs to be validated. In the end it’s just a question of who runs the process.

PTFE and its behaviour

Among the different elements that make dry coating possible, the choice of binder is extremely important as it maintains good adhesion between the dry components. While binders have this role in both wet and dry electrodes, they are particularly important in dry processing, as no solvent is present during preparation to help the mix. However, both PVDF, the wet process binder, and PTFE, the dry process binder, are fluoropolymers, at a time when the EU is imposing sweeping bans on PFAs, with time-limited exemptions for battery components.

You need different binder systems and the most well-known and famous one is PTFE. When you make PTFE, you sometimes use fluoride disinfectants and those are really nasty molecules that can get out into the environment. The reputable suppliers that are making PTFE have good abatement and they control the release of these materials. If you don't have that abatement, then that is where some of its reputation has come from as quite a damaging material.

Then when it's in the battery there are some other really nasty materials that you also don't want to get out into the open. One thing to remember is that you're replacing another fluorinated polymer. If you're looking at cathodes, you're replacing PVDF with PTFE, not making something worse. Dry coating does potentially enable the use of non-fluorinated polymers in future formulations. That's at a quite an early stage, most people are still using fluorinated polymer.

There are several different types of the same named polymer depending on the different resin used, processing and any additives.

How do you choose the type of PTFE?

Like anyone else working with materials and batteries, you have to know your suppliers and work closely with them to select the right materials for different applications. Sometimes you might want the PTFE to be different because of the way you make the powder, or you need it to be different in the coating, or in the electrode. And in some extreme cases, you need it to be different from the electrochemical perspective. At the anode potentials, PTFE can react with lithium irreversibly and you want to avoid that sometimes. There are lots of reasons to change the binders, but luckily the binder suppliers are working really hard on helping to develop or select these materials.

Fibrillation

In its basic form, PTFE is found as agglomerates composed of long chains, which can be transformed into long fibrils through a process called fibrillation. This involves applying a high shear rate, which forces these agglomerates to turn into a network of elongated fibrils.

The ability to fibrillate is due to PTFE’s highly crystalline structure and high molecular weight composed of linear chains of –(CF₂–CF₂)– units. C-F bonds give chemical inertness and low surface energy, preventing the particles from flowing like other polymers, with viscoelasticity. The intermolecular bonds are weak, meaning the individual carbon chains can unfold and stretch into long fibres. Under shear, the agglomerates deform and the chains orient into elongated fibrils.

What is fibrillation and why is it such an important property for dry coating?

It's a really cool property of the PTFE that very few polymers have. At surprisingly low temperatures you can get it to extend by a massive factor, forming fibres of 10-20 microns long from particles which are 300 nanometres across. It's quite a dramatic extension that you can create within your electrode and that fundamentally is what allows PTFE to stick the components of the electrode together to form this film, strong enough to survive this process of making an electrode without any solvent. Where the PTFE is in your electrode dictates how it responds to your coating process, and how strong and how flexible your electrode is.

What makes PTFE-based systems difficult to work with and how is Anaphite solving these issues?

There are similar interactions between the binder and other components that you get with a wet process. If you have a very high surface area material like LFP or some NMC suddenly your binder or electrode starts to behave differently. You might need to add more binder or put the binder in a different place to maintain a good property and good active material content.

Some things about it are surprising. PTFE is really good at forming these fibres, but often you can't control it very easily. It'll do it too early or too late and that can affect your manufacturing. What we do as a business is basically control the distribution and the state of the fibralising binder so that it's processable into a high-performance electrode.

Do you have a breakthrough that Anaphite has achieved recently?

It can be very difficult to make an electrode that's flexible and strong if you have a very high surface material. One of the biggest headaches in dry coating at the moment is getting LFP to work because it has high press density and high-power performance. These are micron scale particles, not 10-30 micron scale materials that you'd use with NMC or graphite anodes.

We've put a lot of work into finding the right microstructure of LFP, carbon and PTFE and other components in such a way that you have a good enough electrical network for your electrochemistry, PTFE network and binder network for your mechanical properties, and keep the active content really high as well. It's possible to make an electrode quite easily if you have a lot of PTFE in there, but it's not a good electrode.

One of our most dramatic advances has been to pull down the inactive content by a long way. By selecting the right materials and getting the microstructure right we managed to achieve the combination of a flexible electrode with Gen 4 LFP which can reach really high press density and a really high active material content of 98%. Inside that 2% we squeeze enough conducting structure and binder to hold together the powder into a film shape, stick it to an electrode, and maintain the good properties. That's one of our most advanced products because it has been really difficult to engineer, but it's why our customers work with us. We have the expertise to design and make these materials and help them solve some key challenges in making batteries cheaper with dry coating, without sacrificing the performance that they expect.

A dry future awaits

Having answered the what and the how of dry processing, finally we needed to dig deep into the ‘why’ people are investing millions in this technology all over the world beyond just avoiding NMP.

It’s about energy cost and footprint, capital expenditure and the CO2 as there’s more regulation on the carbon intensity of battery and electric vehicle production. The primary driver for the shift to dry coating is energy cost and energy availability. People always forget to talk about it but if you need many hundreds of MVA for your facility there aren’t very many places you can go where that is available.

There are general improvements you can make increasing yield and reducing cost but with any process there is a window of what it can do and what outputs it can get. With wet coating it’s difficult to make very thick electrodes. It’s also difficult to use things like sulfide-based electrolytes which react with some solvents you might choose to use in wet coating.

We started to wonder about whether this technology could enable the manufacture of next generation electrodes, like solid state, which are notoriously difficult to process at scale.

Most of our work is on electrodes for current technology liquid electrolyte cells. But solid state is an important driver for the technology.

Anybody who wants to make a standard capacity NMC electrode has a workable wet process that has been optimised over 40 years. Then the dry coating is just an alternative. If you’re putting solid electrolyte in, that wet process won’t work because your electrolyte will react with your solvent. You need a process change, and your choice is either to use some quite weird solvents and completely new binder systems or go dry. A lot of the impetus on dry coating is coming from solid state.

To get dry coating to work, you need to put into your coating machine a well-structured homogeneous powder with the right active material contents (high 90s) to be competitive with wet coating. We’ve got a very special way of doing it and that’s our particular advantage with solid state. You’re adding a fourth major component into that system and one that behaves quite differently. It doesn’t really like being smashed about much. It becomes practically difficult if you’re using mechanical mixing to get this powder distributed. How do you distribute your PTFE without smashing up all of your electrolyte? It’s really quite a difficult challenge and it’s the design of those powders that we bring to the party primarily. We have to know how to apply them of course as well. It’s the tricks around making the powder that then enable the dry coating is our main aim as a business.

Final question, if you walked into a battery factory in 10 years, do you think anyone will still be using wet coating?

Probably yes. The lines that are being built at the moment are mostly wet coating and there is a slow change over. It depends on the risks and the costs and benefits. We’ve been around a number of facilities where they’ve kept a corner of the electrode production for their dry coating line so that they can switch stuff in later on. Some people don’t like changing processes without changing the product, and they’ll wait for another generation of cells to come along before they introduce the new process. But the changeover will come.

The active material content can’t be pushed quite as high as a wet coating, although we’re working on that as well. Broadly speaking, people may not switch over all at once if dry coating is not yet delivering everything they want. But that’s what we’re working on: what electrode design are customers looking for?

The more interesting question is whether anybody will be building wet coating lines in 10 years’ time. I think I’d hope not. They work really well but it’s a mad way of doing it really. If you just look at the cost, the energy required and the solvents… The trouble permitting a large facility with NMP is almost a ban in some places. If you say ‘this new facility, I want to keep 200 tons of NMP on site,’ that’s enough to put off a lot of permitting authorities. We’re working to make sure that you’d be mad to build a wet line in 10 years’ time.

And with that, it was the end of our time chatting to Anaphite, and we hope you enjoyed reading this article.

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The lead up to 2020: Lithium Sulfur

Morrow Batteries was founded in 2020, but with roots originally registered back in January 2014. It was a 2020 joint venture between Agder Energy Ventures, and lithium sulfur battery company Graphene Batteries, which folded its assets, people and IP into Morrow.

The original idea of lithium sulfur was superseded by the realisation that pure Li-S was too immature to be commercially viable, as well as the reality that China was rapidly dominating in manufacturing for conventional lithium ion. Building factories, not just R&D, was the conversation within the European battery ecosystem: with Northvolt breaking ground in 2018, Tesla Berlin announced in 2019 and European OEMs keen to secure home grown European batteries for their EVs.

2020: making plans

The original factory plan was for a 32 GWh factory in four 8GWh modules, beginning with existing battery tech and eventually focusing on graphene enhanced Li-S from the IP they inherited from Graphene Batteries. This was to use sulfur from the Norwegian oil industry as a home grown supply chain.

In December 2020 the location for the gigafactory was chosen as Arendal, Norway due to the location having excellent clean energy, water and transport connections. The new plan was to build firstly a 1 GWh phase of current lithium ion tech, up and running by the end of 2024, followed by a 42 GWh factory, all of which would use clean energy from hydropower to enable low CO2 emissions.

Morrow chose their initial focus to be LFP to differentiate themselves from the crowd of high nickel chemistries promised to the European market at the time. Northvolt was focused on NMC811, as well as a lot of the other main projects announced at the time.

The next generation R&D was to focus on NMC as well as LMNO-C (LMNO with a graphite anode) for high voltage applications, as well as LMNO-X (LMNO with a niobium based anode) for heavy mobility applications. LMNO is a very high voltage cathode, which makes electrolyte decomposition a key issue, and stabilising cells a real challenge.

2021-2023: raising money, shipping samples and qualifying the process in South Korea

Jump forward to August 2021 and Morrow raised ~€21 million in a round led by the Danish pension fund PKA. The founding shareholders NOAH and Agder Energi Ventures also put in additional capital, with the municipal government in Arendal putting in significant capital, as well as a large €2 million grant from Innovation Norway.

Then in 2022, they raised €100 million in an equity investment round led by Siemens Financial Services and ABB, primarily to pay for equipment for the first factory. They also signed a supply deal with British company Echion Technologies for their XNO niobium based anode material as well as Haldor Topsoe for LMNO cathode, signalling confidence in the development of their own R&D in the LMNO-X technology.

The founding CEO, Terje Andersen, left in June 2022, citing a new phase for the company as they began building the factory. He was replaced in December by Lars Christian Bacher, who brought 30 years experience from Equinor as their CFO.

By March 2023, they had an operational Customer Qualification Line in South Korea training engineers and, importantly, shipping sample LFP prismatic cells. That June back in Norway, they opened their own R&D centre at the campus of the University of Agder.

In September they raised €70 million from their existing owners Å Energi, PKA, Siemens Financial Services, ABB and Nysnø, The customer qualification line was packed up in South Korea and shipped back to Norway, and started arriving from October.

The company positioned themselves within the ‘Battery Coast’ ecosystem, with graphite manufacturer Vianode, Glencore’s Nikkelverk and several other energy related companies as neighbours and collaborators. What they were trying to build was an ecosystem, not just a battery factory in the far flung north like Northvolt Ett in Skellefteå.

2024: things become unstuck

In April, the first major off-take agreement was signed for 5.5GWh over 7 years for Nordic Batteries, who would develop the cells into modules and packs.

The customer qualification line had arrived in containers, and all that was left to get the 1GWh facility up and running was installation and commissioning in Norway. In November, Morrow posted, interestingly in Norwegian only, about a problem they were having with the immigration authorities over their subcontractors coming from South Korea to install the line, which affected about 15 subcontractors. The beginning of production, which had been planned for the third quarter of 2024, was pushed back while they argued with the municipal immigration to get their subcontractors into the country.

Then, in December, Innovation Norway granted the company a ~€140 million loan (1.5 billion NOK) for the factory’s scale up, but importantly this loan came with staggered pricing, the first 500 million NOK at 5.73%, 400 million NOK at 11.23% and the final 600 million NOK at 5.73%. This money was expensive, and so at bankruptcy it seemed that only 300 million NOK had been spent of one part of this funding.

At some point in 2024 Morrow also pared down their ambitions to just LFP and next generation LMNO-X, wiping off NMC due to a lack of customers. From 2024 integrated annual report, ‘a strategic decision has been made to focus resources on the development of LFP and LNMO’ and as such ‘all development costs related to the NMC project have been written down to zero’ as well as ‘the goodwill from the acquisition of Graphene Batteries in 2020 has also been written down to zero.’

2025: lay offs amid the rest of the European battery dream crumbling

The immigration issue cost the company about 100 million NOK, or about ~€9 million, and 4 months of delay. This meant laying off ‘about 50-60 employees’ and closing the company labs in Kjeller, near Oslo.

In March 2025, Northvolt declared bankruptcy with over $8 billion in debt, putting immense pressure on the other European battery companies as finance became extremely wary of losing big chunks of money in the same way.

In April, the COO leaves and goes back to South Korea, in May there is a new Chair of the Board and the CTO leaves, and in November the VP of Sustainability departs to go back to academia. Then finally, in an already turbulent year, that December CEO Lars Christian Bacher left the company, framed as a ‘strategic direction’ change, replaced by the CSO and a cofounder Jon Fold von Bülow. We actually interviewed Lars Christian Bacher in September, just months before he left, when he was optimistic about the company’s direction.

2026: supply agreements start coming in, too little too late

In January with their new CEO, Morrow started looking for a commercial partner now they are manufacturing cells. A long term agreement until 2031 was signed for LFP cells for Proventia in Finland, to be used in off-highway and industrial applications. March saw an announcement at InterBattery Korea of a partnership via Memorandum of Understanding with Korean electrode foundry specialist JR Energy Solution, aiming to build a scalable European hub for high-performance electrode services. On the 17th April, they entered into an agreement with a German defence company following a 12 month validation process of their cells.

Just two and a half weeks later, on 6th May, Morrow Batteries filed for bankruptcy. Their integrated annual report from 2024 admits that ‘at the current rate of cash consumption, securing additional funding will be critical to sustain operations. Based on current assumptions, the Company is forecasted to have sufficient liquidity until the first half of 2026,’ which, it turns out, was a pretty good forecast.

As Miguel Pereira, Director of Process Engineering, wrote, ‘it takes many factors to succeed, but a single one is often enough to fail,’ citing the main reason of failure as the lack of patient investors in this capital intensive business. For Morrow to have worked, there needed to be an acceptance of the first few years being unprofitable, a reality across European battery ventures, with the profit motive presenting a huge challenge to the long term ramp up required.

As we see it, the main issues Morrow faced came down to three key things:

• they were not profitable making LFP: they allegedly had enough customers to offtake the 1GWh they were capable of producing, but it would have taken several years for this offtake to start making any money, as discussed by Miguel Pereira. Equally, these customers had to be happy paying a premium for a European LFP cell when they could probably buy a better product from China, massively narrowing the potential customer base.

• their next generation chemistry wasn’t working: Morrow’s main bet was on making LMNO cells work, which would have defined them in the European market and made them money. Unfortunately, this is a notoriously difficult chemistry, and despite whispers of breakthroughs from the team it wasn’t ready for commercial production yet.

• they had no ownership of the supply chain: they bought all of their materials from China. Cathode, anode, electrolyte; it was all from China with no short term plans to make LFP in Norway that we can see. Until they made LMNO work, they were entirely reliant on Asian know-how and materials.

These factors are also common to pretty much any European venture.

Morrow did a lot of things right: they learnt from South Korea, extensively qualified the line before bringing it over, worked with the state and private investors and focused on just one technology with a next generation project in the wings. What they achieved on a team of less than 200 workers was a true feat of persistence. We wish each and every one of them the best.

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This content is for interest and informational purposes only and should not be considered investment advice. Through this website, Intercalation Collective does not provide any investment, legal, accounting, or tax advice.

One of the corner stones of the battery industry that we devote less words to in this newsletter is finance. It is the make or break of battery companies as frequently as the actual technology. The dominance of Chinese battery companies is often attributed in part to near-zero interest loans from local government, which allowed companies to build out capabilities while profits remained extremely low.

In the USA and Europe, companies raise money largely from venture capital, debt financing (like a mortgage on a house) and from governments via grants, subsidies and loans. Venture capital funds normally operate on 10 year cycles, returning the capital back to investors within that period. That’s simply not possible if it’s locked into a battery factory somewhere, while the profit very slowly accumulates on a production line.

The fundamental mismatch between venture capital and clean tech like batteries was well summed up in this recent talk by Kara Rodby at the Volta Foundation. Batteries are a low margin industry, where low interest, patient financing options are crucial. Capital expecting a return in less than 10 years simply won’t be satisfied.

There’s one form of ‘long term, patient capital’ which is seen less regularly in the battery space. This is ‘crowdfunding’ or ‘retail investors’, individuals who invest their own savings in ventures they believe in or belive will have a high return. A few companies have raised from crowdfunding sources over the last few years, and there are two different types where you can either essentially ‘preorder’ a product, confirming market before launch, or a more traditional model where you get to hold equity of the company, like a stock.

Examples of equity crowdfunding in the battery space include:

• Soteria raised $433,486 (USD) from 333 investors in 2023.

• Minviro, who raised £807,726 from 188 investors in 2025 to scale their LCA platform XYCLE.

• Recyclus raised £63,592 from 191 investors in 2026, for additional processing equipment designed to further optimise recycled material outputs.

• Cornish Lithium have raised several multi million pound rounds from 2019 to 2025.

Crowdfunding seems to offer several advantages, notably that the investment pool is much wider than just traditional venture capital and may include expertise or networks. It also allows companies to build strong presence in communities where they operate, which is particualrly important in companies that need planning permission and good local relationships, like mining or heavy industry. It could however also signal that companies were unable to raise from traditional investors, or that they need an instant available injection of cash without revaluing the company by doing a full funding round.

There was only one way to get more insights into this model, and that was to get on the phone to someone who has done it. In the UK one battery recycling company is crowdfunding again, following a £6,608,804 round with 762 investors, so naturally that was exactly who we called. We last spoke to Altilium at the end of 2024, so it was fantastic to catch up with Dr Christian Marston on all things crowdfunding.

Altilium is currently planning to get spades in the ground for their scale up ACT3 facility in the south west of the UK this summer. Once complete, ACT3 will process 24,000 EV batteries per year into nickel mixed hydroxide precipitate, lithium sulphate and graphite, a pretty big step up from their pilot line ACT2 facility. ACT3 will be proof of concept for a much bigger plant that would process 150,000 EV batteries a year in Teesside.

What is Altilium’s experience of the funding landscape?

We’re very proud of SQM, Mizuho and Marubeni. They think strategically as patient long term capital. It’s not that we have a traditional VC like the generic decarbonization fund VCs. We actually really struggled with traditional VCs in the early days. They would say we really liked the tech and then when we say, look, we’ve got to build facilities and get spades in the ground and they lost interest. So we’ve been fortunate with strategic investors from the industry that understand this industry.

So… crowdfunding. How does it work?

The first point is that you have to engage with the platform like Republic. One advantage of crowdfunding in the early days is it gives you credibility because retail is FSA regulated and there’s a lot of due diligence and compliance checks. You’ve got to convince the crowdfunding platform that you’re a credible business. You sit on their platform and they can send out emails to their investors, increasing your profile.

For a couple of weeks you’re engaging with companies which are registered or have an interest, and then there’s a priority period for normally a week, and then it’s open for a month. Through that month, you can engage with the people who haven’t invested on your list. When you’ve done it two or three times you have your existing investors already. We have a over 1,000 retail investors, who own 0.5% via one special purpose vehicle.

Altilium also just secured an £18.5 million UK grant for their ACT3 plant in Plymouth, from the UK Government’s Drive35 Scale Up programme to support zero-emission vehicle technologies. The conditions of this grant (minimum 2:1 private investment:grant ratio) imply that Altlilium needs both £37+ million of commited private investment and some cash headroom.

How does the crowdfunding interact with the rest of your grants and investments?

We have SQM as a shareholder in our Series A, the world’s largest lithium supplier, and then in 2024 we had Marubeni and Mizuho bank, large Japanese corporates. So I think importantly, they’re patient long term capital. Our pilots are running and we’re producing materials, which we’re qualifying for the ACT3 facility. We’ve started planning and permitting, and we have the 18.5 million pound grant to scale up.

The reason we crowdfunded was firstly to build on that momentum. As a concept the reason to crowdfund is the community aspect. We really want to engage with the community where we’re investing, because we have public consultations on planning and environment permitting on our facility.

Having institutional and retail investors allows us to understand how we present this business. The questions we get asked are quite interesting. It really allows us to sharpen how we built this company and present this opportunity. It could be that one day Altilium does an IPO and having some early engagement with retail investors means we have some governance. The Republic platform is not like being listed, but we do have to give quarterly reports and we answer questions.

One of the challenges of getting to Net Zero is you’ve got to build infrastructure and with plants and giga factories, the capexes are high. You can’t build a plant with crowd funding money. So it’s less about the the money. The energy transition requires kind of an enormous amount of capital and and bringing the public into that journey gives some momentum and support to recovering critical minerals from old EVs. As we move forward and we do a series C and a series D, we will continue to engage with our early investors who put money in from day one and it allows them an opportunity to continue to invest and to think about Net Zero.

What are the main motivations for crowdfunding?

Battery recycling is still invisible to the public generally, and it’s really critical to the EV transition. For the public awareness of EV batteries in the energy transition and the myth that they can’t be recycled, we think crowdfunding is one way to increase the profile of battery recycling.

Having a long term supporter base around the company is good as well. Investors have become advocates, they follow the technology, share the story, amplify awareness around battery recycling and circular economy. These are local people and more broadly within the UK. People invested from the battery industry and we were very proud that they invested, and we’ve even been able to engage with them, and they’ve helped us with advice.

Anyone who talks about Net Zero and doesn’t have fluency of Lithium supply chains or around critical minerals, probably doesn’t know how you’re gonna get to Net Zero. It’s hard if you’re an individual, how do you support getting to Net Zero? You recycle your rubbish, you think you’re doing a good thing and you are, but it could be a distraction. There’s not much you can do as an individual to get to net zero. You can eat less with meat, fly less, drive an EV and maybe start a clean tech company. This is one way we can let people make an impact, you can hold two stocks in Altilium. If you’re interested in Net Zero or industrial resilience it is a platform to to support getting there, and we want to give people that opportunity.

The night train service European Sleeper aimed to raise €2.3 million to finance an expansion of services, including the cancelled Paris-Berlin connection. If you believe the internet forums, many of the investors in that particular venture were believers in the project of providing better European night train infrastructure, rather than people trying to explicitly make a profitable return. Critical minerals are also critical infrastructure and structural necessity to the economy, something Ed Conway has been talking about a lot recently as factories shut down in the UK due to high energy costs, leaving the country reliant on imports for crucial building block chemicals.

Do you think the retail investors in Altilium are hoping to make money or do they see this as important critical infrastructure where they can contribute?

I think it’s dual. They want to make money, and I think they’re generally interested in net zero and clean tech. We are asked questions “How are you going to make money, what’s the exit? Are you going to do an IPO? Is it going to be a trade sale?” So I don’t think it’s purely altruistic, I think they are expecting a return and as a commercial company we expect a return to our investors.

In terms of making money as a company, we were set up to support Net Zero and industrial resilience and recovering critical minerals from existing waste streams such as EV batteries, onshorering supply chains here. We just keep building and hitting milestones. I think if we do this right, we make money. But the purpose of doing this isn’t just to make money.

How does the recycling market feel in general at the moment?

There’s a bit of fatigue around Net Zero, and there’s an opportunity for this industry to reduce dependence on oil and overseas raw material, that sovereign piece is important. The market might get tight for secondary raw materials, as you move later this decade because of the regulatory requirement for recycled material.

The geopolitics as well since President Trump made critical minerals more high profile, the politics of localised supply chains and not being reliant on others. We see that what's happening in the Middle East as well. I think it supports the narrative of a number of UK companies in critical minerals and batteries.

What’s on your mind, looking forward to your next round of crowdfunding?

I think sometimes people see crowdfunding as something a company does really early on and then you don’t need to do it again. That is probably applicable to some industries, but we’re building strategic industry for the UK. I think you will see companies in critical minerals as we move forward will use some retail investment for community and increasing profile.

Thanks again to Altilium for talking to us!

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CATL’s next wave

CATL hosted a Super Technology Day on 21st April in Beijing, unveiling several next generation batteries. The 3rd gen of the Shenxing battery claims to charge from 10% to 80% in 3 minutes 44 seconds, much faster than the BYD Blade 2, enabled by ultra low internal resistance.

The most exciting news from this week is that CATL has also agreed a major offtake agreement with ESS manufacturer Beijing HyperStrong Technology. It’s for 60 GWh of sodium batteries delivered over 3 years. This implies a sodium ion gigafactory running at output of 20GWh a year, which is a significant scale not yet really seen for sodium ion. LFP is currently selling at $40-60/kWh whereas sodium ion is more like $70-100/kWh, but this represents an investment in scale for the future as well as a bet on diversifying chemistries for mineral supply reasons.

All the happenings in America

A small team in California have launched the Electrochemistry Foundry (ECF), a non-profit shared-use battery pilot manufacturing facility. Similar to the model of UKBIC in the UK, the aim is to address the ‘pilot-to-scale gap in hard tech’ without requiring significant capital up front. The facility will be ready late 2026, funded by a competitive $28 million award from the Californian Energy Commission. The team running this enterprise comes with experience from Cuberg, Northvolt, US DoE, Activate who have seen and lived the challenges the ECF aims to address.

A class action lawsuit

A class action lawsuit has been filed against SES AI alleging that it exaggerated the capabilites of its Molecular Universe platform. Investors are attempting to recoup some losses following a plunging stock price. Molecular Universe was marketed as an AI based tool capable of accelerating battery material discovery which allegedly was an AI wrapper rather than a real product. Several examples of misconduct are alleged, you can read the full details here.

🍬 Tidbits

🇨🇦 Novonix has divested all non-critical Battery Technology Solutions in a sale to its former CEO in order to focus on the development of synthetic graphite supply chain in North America.

🔋 London based asset management firm Gresham House is planning to raise a fund of roughly €1 billion to focus on BESS systems in Europe.

🍩 A criminal complaint has been filed against Donut Labs for misrepresenting the capabilities of their technology. The complaint was filed by a worker in a partner company, and it will not be a surprise to anyone who has been watching the claims that they have made a solid state battery that can meet incredible cycle life and energy density AND is ready for mass production.

♻️ UK recycling company Altilium is crowdfunding again, following a £18.5 million grant from the UK government. The two investments will be used to build their ACT3 plant in Plymouth and also a larger plant in Teesside.

🇬🇧 A gigafactory in Coventry, UK, has had planning permission granted and is readying to start construction from June 2026, with no planned occupant (yet). One to watch…

💻 New PyBaMM update for EIS released for users.

🇨🇳 A neat map showing the lines between the different Chinese auto makers.

📰 What else we covered at Intercalation

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Back on 20th April 2020, Intercalation Station posted its first introduction. The first longer post a week later highlighted jobs at OXIS Energy, Johnson Matthey, Cuberg and 24M, none of which are in the battery game any more. We very much still are, thanks to you dear readers.

You love data as much as us, so we did a little number crunching on our end to bring you some pretty graphs:

Our 5 Most Read Pieces of All Time

1. A Battery Taxonomy

At some point we decided to make the Cube Rule of food apply to batteries and it was unsurprisingly our biggest hitter ever… so far.

2. Battery production is genuinely difficult

The Northvolt diaspora is now found across the world with their expertise and stories of the Swedish Arctic winters. Now held as a failed attempt to reindustrialise Europe and around £500 million invested by Swedish pension funds written off, we looked a at the technical reasons Northvolt failed, which may well explain why governments are now attracting Chinese subsiduaries to produce batteries in Europe especially with a copy paste manufacturing plan that’s already worked.

3. Gigaprofits: “batteries not included”

Do battery factories actually make any money? Back in 2023, it looked like manufacturers had a net profit margin in the 2-3% range, while CATL, EVE, and Samsung SDI were a bit higher at 8-10%. It might be time to run these numbers again…

4. A tale of three press releases part 3 : Porsche and the AC battery

The technical innovation coming out of the luxury end of the car market is saving space, efficiency and getting freaky with AC-DC current inversion. Expect these developments to trickle down towards the mass market, hopefully space, cost and materials.

5. Na-Ion: A battery worth its salt?

Battery manufacturers have been flirting with sodium ion for a longgg time. Back in 2023, we wrote about sodium ion packs going into cars and their advantages even in a cheap lithium market. The main reflection was that their development was had been largely ignored outside of China, and considerably less invested in relative to technologies still not in production like solid state.

It’s been a few years since we asked… who are our readers?

Thanks for reading Intercalation Station. It’s such a pleasure and a privelige to write about batteries for the world to read, supported by our amazing subscribers 🔋🩷

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The battery industry has found itself at a critical juncture. Against a backdrop of shifting financial incentives, changing global politics, and rapid deterioration of international law, more and more actors in the sector are straying from the vision of building a clean energy future, lured into the orbit of something far darker: warfare. This essay is an attempt to call attention, and hopefully start to build opposition, to the ongoing militarization of the battery industry.

Over the past decade, batteries have become widely recognized to be important tools for supporting planetary wellbeing. We often spotlight the many positive impacts battery technologies have both environmentally and socially. Impacts that I feel clearly in my day-to-day life, when I hop on one of London’s many battery electric double-decker buses. These buses are a force for public good on many fronts - not only as a low carbon transportation option, but as an affordable and accessible service for the city’s many residents. Impacts that we’re also seeing take shape around the world, in countries like Pakistan. After making headlines last year for adopting solar power at a scale far beyond what anyone expected, Pakistan is now also importing batteries at speed. This could allow many of its population to have clean, cheap, and reliable electricity for the first time.

At the same time, we are also facing a surge of batteries being developed for more troubling purposes. Technologies that could be the building blocks for a more sustainable and equitable world are instead being designed to power machines of violence and surveillance. Rather than catalysts for global peace, cells of the future risk becoming abettors of destructive wars. Increasing mineral extraction to feed these batteries could further threaten our planet’s precious ecosystems and leave historically marginalized communities to once again pick up the pieces, all while the original goal of preventing climate collapse remains deferred.

Electric vehicles (EVs), stationary energy storage, and consumer electronics are overwhelmingly the bread and butter destinations for most battery technologies. They accounted for around 93% of the world’s lithium-ion battery capacity in 2024. However, alongside these three applications, there is an entity that heavily consumes batteries but tends to fly under the radar: the military-industrial complex. From everything from submarines to night vision goggles, battery manufacturers have long produced a variety of customized packs for military use. Yet, to date, most battery companies have regarded this as a niche, non-essential focus area for their products. That is no longer the case.

Citing slowing EV sales in the US and Europe alongside rising military interest in energy storage, many Western battery manufacturers are refashioning their tech, once destined for clean energy purposes, under the brandings of “defense” and “national security”. Geopolitics and economic forces are significant drivers of this change in priorities. With China firmly established as the global leader in battery production and having strategic control over most of the battery supply chain, cell manufacturing in other markets is not cost-competitive in many cases. For military applications, however, cost is not an issue in the eyes of Western governments, who have expressed a willingness to pay a premium for domestically produced batteries that don’t rely on imports from a perceived adversary.

Combat drones in particular, also called “unmanned aerial vehicles” or UAVs, are becoming one of the most sought-after military end uses for batteries. Militaries primarily use combat drones to conduct surveillance and carry out "targeted" attacks while soldiers control them from afar. At present, many of these drones are powered by combustion-based propulsion, not batteries. This is because they often have sizes too large and ranges too long for existing battery technologies to support. However, numerous battery companies, particularly those developing next-gen chemistries, are trying to leverage the lightweight, energy-dense nature of their cells for building advanced, electrified military drones.

Lithium-sulfur manufacturer Lyten, for example, have announced their intention to build high-endurance, “combat-proven” drones and launched a “drone propulsion unit” dedicated to serving the U.S. military’s interests. Last year, NEO Battery Materials unveiled an ultra-high energy silicon anode cell primed for “one-time use” combat drones (also called “kamikaze” or “suicide” drones) and recently acquired a massive site specifically to build drone batteries. And just last month, Sion Power announced they would be transforming their lithium-metal batteries, initially developed for EVs, into ones for advanced suicide drones and other UAVs. With combat drone manufacturing becoming an increasingly profitable endeavor, how many others might decide that they too want to cash in?

Proponents of combat drones argue that their “high-precision” allows them to conduct strikes on combatants with minimal risk of civilian deaths or injuries. However, this characterization of drone warfare as somehow safe or humane is heavily disputed, with substantial evidence to the contrary. The US’s barrage of drone strikes throughout the 2010s, which took the lives of hundreds of civilians across Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen, and Somalia, might be the most well-documented example. And, more recently of course, the ongoing US-Israel war on Iran, in which thousands of people have been killed. Drones have been used so ubiquitously in this war that technologies like the US’s LUCAS and Iran’s Shahed have become household names.

With battery electric UAVs still in their relative infancy and often spoken of as “technologies of the future”, it would be easy to dismiss concerns about their potential danger as premature or alarmist, especially when comparing them to long-established, conventional UAVs. However, battery-powered combat drones are not just an idea on a corporate R&D lab’s whiteboard. They already exist and are increasingly being engineered to inflict harm on innocent people. One technology in particular has made frequent appearances in recent war zones: the quadcopter.

Quadcopters, as the name suggests, are small drones (often weighing only a few kg) with four rotors that can be remotely controlled by a person meters or miles away, typically using what’s called a “first person view” (i.e. virtual reality) camera. Most current quadcopters are equipped with lightweight, lithium-polymer batteries and many models are available for commercial use. They are often marketed for innocuous purposes like aerial photography, agriculture, and postal delivery. However, despite their unimposing appearance, more and more quadcopters are being manipulated into agents of mass killing.

These buzzing bots have particularly made a name for themselves in Ukraine, where the invading Russian forces have relentlessly attacked civilians with swarms of quadcopters over the past several years. Often rigging them to drop hand grenades or dive directly at people, Russia have employed quadcopters at dramatic scale as part of an “intentional and coordinated” effort to intimidate residents and force them to flee from their homes. Russia’s use of short-range drones on Ukrainians is so prevalent that, in addition to being given a frightening descriptor by locals - the “human safari” - it is actually the leading cause of frontline civilian deaths in the war (over 80%).

Ukraine is not the only place where quadcopters have been wielded to perpetrate war crimes. The Israeli military have also widely employed quadcopters armed with lethal weaponry to commit appalling atrocities against Palestinians, as part of its ongoing genocide in Gaza. From everything ranging from psychological torture to systematic killings, Israeli forces have found a horrifying array of ways to use this technology on innocent civilians (watch: detailed analysis of Israel’s quadcopter use in Gaza). One of the most disturbing trends doctors in Gaza have reported is patients, often children, being shot by quadcopters that have been fitted with sniper guns – many times directly in the head. In some even more abhorrent instances, Israeli quadcopters have been seen hovering over recently bombed areas and shooting children lying injured on the ground.

The cases I’ve described above are obviously deeply disturbing in both their brutality and brazenness. What I find almost equally alarming is that there are indications that Russia and Israel have been able to commit these acts of cruelty using, at least to some degree, modified “off the shelf” quadcopters, not necessarily ones originally designed to be used as weapons. With battery companies now getting actively involved in combat drone engineering, what new horrors might be unleashed if the batteries of tomorrow are deliberately tailored for technologies more deadly and sophisticated than makeshift quadcopters? Will Gaza and Ukraine only be the beginning?

More batteries for weapons also means more batteries being diverted away from positive aims. As the battery industry becomes further embedded into the military-industrial complex, the goals the battery boom was supposed to achieve – reducing emissions, fighting the climate crisis, and promoting energy justice – risk being pushed to the periphery. This also means more mining of so-called “critical minerals” like lithium, nickel, cobalt, and many others to feed weapons production. The widespread extraction of these minerals as a result of the ongoing EV surge is already having a host of negative impacts on local communities and biodiversity, which you can read about in my previous article. These damaging mineral mines would also become the birthplace of technologies that could be used to further exacerbate human suffering and inequality. If the environmental toll of mining to support passenger EV production, widely framed as a “necessary” tradeoff for climate action, is itself raising serious ethical questions, how can we begin to justify it in the name of war?

I don’t have an easy answer for how we’re supposed to prevent batteries from being used to enable instruments of violence. Military influence is pervasive throughout the battery ecosystem, from university research labs to big-name companies. This means funding incentives for battery researchers and manufacturers can be heavily biased towards applications that militaries want, combat drones being just one. The profit-hungry structures within which we exist also encourage the production of technologies that will most quickly fill the pockets of shareholders, no matter if to the detriment of human and environmental wellbeing. That means if batteries don’t make enough money to satisfy investors as “climate tech”, they will seek out alternative ventures to pivot towards and protect their bottom line. With batteries showing demonstrable capabilities in weapons systems and offering energy security advantages, warfare is the gold rush of the moment that investors are seeking to capitalize on. Given the amount of money and power backing the decisions being made, we must persistently advocate at every level, from the individual to the system as a whole, if we hope to push the battery industry to change course.

Regulations and treaties can be powerful, although certainly imperfect, mechanisms for controlling how technologies are used. The nuclear non-profileration treaty and the banning of chemical weapons are two relevant examples of ongoing international efforts to rein in dangerous technologies. Perhaps something similar in spirit needs to be devised to restrict what batteries can be built for.

We also have considerable agency as workers to collectively speak up and pressure our employers to stop activities that conflict with our values. Take, for instance, the well-documented activism of Google employees. After successfully pressuring their company to cancel a contract with the US military a few years ago, Google employees also recently organized en masse to demand it stop helping ICE. Or, an even bolder example: the Mediterranean dockworkers who have courageously been refusing to load weapons onto ships, walking out of their jobs and demanding that ports be made “arms-free zones”.

Ultimately, we have a lot of work ahead of us and there probably won’t be a single, silver bullet antidote to the forces we’re up against. Regardless, I think questioning why we started in this industry in the first place, and defending the vision of the future that I’m sure many in the battery sector still share, one of a cleaner, healthier, and more just world, sounds like a good place to start.

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⛏️ Historical records & ownership rows in the DR Congo

Back in July 2025, Bill Gates-backed mining company KoBold Metals signed a deal for mineral exploitation in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, including the rights to mine the Manono Lithium deposit. This deposit is one of the world’s largest untapped hard rock deposits, and which has disputed ownership. KoBold plans to fund digital geological mapping, hire local staff and support infrastructure investments in host communities, and the deal makes up part of broader US aims to reduced Chinese dominance over mineral supply chains.

However because of its colonial past, the owners of the historical records which are key to KoBold’s digitisation campaign and preventing the need for too much dangerous and expensive exploration, are not in the DRC. They’re in the Africa Museum in Tervuren, just outside Brussels in Belgium, a relic of their ~75 year brutal control of the DRC. The Belgian state has argued that it cannot hand over federal public archives to a foreign private company without a formal contract with the Belgian state, and that there is an alternative EU-funded digitisation project underway expected to finish by 2031. These digital copies are gradually being sent to Congolese authorities, who can exercise sovereign control over their use. A case of lingering colonial power still impacting exploitation of minerals and the DRC’s sovreignity to this day.

💰 Big Raisers Crash Out

Veteran startup 24M is instigating mass lay offs and shutting down. They raised a total of $500 million over 13 founding and grant rounds since their founding in 2010 and at one point were valued at over $1 billion with links in companies all over the world, most famously the Norwegian former battery giant Freyr in commercial development of their thick electrode technology. Battery Burn Book published an interesting ‘failure mode analysis’ on the problems faced at the company, citing chasing the wrong market and reactive, not proactive, R&D as key problems.

Ascend Elements has also filed for bankruptcy. They raised $900 million in total, but the decision seems to have stemmed from a government decision to cancel $316 million grant for the Kentucky facility under construction.

This means that of the 3 massive US recycling companies we mapped back in 2024, only 1 is now still going in the same form, with Li-Cycle acquired by Glencore and only Redwood still in existence as it was then. We will probably see more of this consolidation of the recycling industry over the next few years.

🍬 Tidbits

🕰️ Time has announced their ‘America’s Top GreenTech Companies of 2026’ list with many recognisable names.

🌲 Neat interactive webpage on the overlap between biodiverse areas and critical minerals.

⏳ Amprius Technologies has secured a $21 million purchase order for its silicon anode cylindrical cells for light electric vehicles in a Chinese supplier.

🚗 Renault has recalled some models of the R4 and R5 due to a production anomaly at their suppliers plant.

♻️ Metals refiner Nth Cycle has landed a $1.1 billion purchase agrement with Trafigura for nickel and lithium materials, all minerals that will be processed in the US.

🇬🇧 The UK government have invested £18.5 million in UK recycling company Altilium in a grants funding round.

🔋 We came across this open source BESS equipment data base for comparing specs.

💨 Following their announcement with Google in February, Form Energy will deploy the first Iron-Air battery in Ireland to come online in 2029.

🇰🇷 SK Battery America Inc has laid off almost 1000 workers in the Georgia state of the USA, about 37% of its workforce amid cooling EV demand. This plant supplied the Ford F-150 Lightning electric pickup truck, which Ford cancelled in December.

🧂 Energy price surges are threatening chemical plants in European countries, including the UK. Deindustrialisation of key capabilities like making analine and NaCl may threaten other industries and make places like the UK even more reliant on global supply chains at a political moment where independence is invaluable. This is something Ed Conway has been highlighting for the UK for a while…

🎧 What else we’re reading and listening to

• From lab to exit: the Cuberg story with Richard Wang. Deep Tech Catalyst Podcast.

• Secondary Energy Commodities. Power Plays podcast, discussing the knock on impacts from the Middle East conflict beyond oil and gas.

• The Green Transition needs so much mining - Tech Won’t Save Us podcast.

• Solar + Storage: The Economic Core of the Future Grid. Redefining Energy podcast.

📰 What else we covered at Intercalation

• The final installment on Deep Sea Mining by Claire.

• ‘Where are we at with lithium metal’ parts 1 and 2 by Roman.

• The Holy Acquisition where we interview the Swedish CEO of Holyvolt, who just purchased Wildcat Technologies.

• One for the paid subscribers:

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Battery material prices had been falling for two years. A sharp lithium rally in Q1 2026 may signal that the floor is in.

Battery Component Price Report: Q1 2026

Q1 2026 was the quarter lithium woke up. Li2CO3 and LiOH rallied close to 38%, fueled by Jiangxi mining crackdowns and a rush to buy ahead of China's April export rebate cut. That surge pulled cathode materials up 20–35% and nudged cell prices higher for the first time since they bottomed in 2025, though overcapacity kept both LFP and NMC well below $100/kWh. Meanwhile, LiPF6 went the other direction entirely, correcting 35% from its late-2025 spike and dragging electrolyte costs down with it. Anode and inactive materials stayed flat throughout.1

We’re back this quarter with our new-&-improved BCPR (with interactive charts) which first launched with our 2025 annual summary - check it out here.

Read more

At the beginning of March, news caught our eye that veteran machine learning company Wildcat Discovery Technologies had been acquired by Swedish start up Holyvolt for $73 million. Holyvolt has around 30 employees, and uses a screen printing process to make electrodes more sustainably. Wildcat has been around since 2006, using large machine learning and ‘AI’ models long before we were discussing the AI hype in batteries.

This is a very interesting acquisition, particularly in light of the fact that Wildcat raised $90 million in Series D funding back in July 2022, signficantly less than what they were then purchased for. Naturally, we had to get the low-down, and Holyvolt’s CEO & Founder Mathias Ingvarsson was kind enough to sit down with us.

Could you tell us about the name Holyvolt and where the initial company idea came from?

For us, the idea behind Holyvolt has always been quite simple: we want to power the planet with positive energy. From day one, we’ve been focused on rethinking how batteries are made, making them cleaner, more affordable and less dependent on complex global supply chains.

We saw a real opportunity to develop new production processes that could deliver high-performance batteries in a more sustainable and scalable way, particularly with supply chains anchored in Europe and North America.

We founded the company in 2022, but the underlying technology had been in development for over 15 years.

How does the company structure work?

We’re headquartered in Sweden, with R&D in Munich. This gives us a foothold in the heart of European battery activity. And now, with the Wildcat acquisition, we’ve added a strong presence in San Diego, so we can operate as a transatlantic organisation.

Wildcat is a wholly owned subsidiary, but very much integrated into the broader group. What’s important for us is that we’re bringing together deep in-house expertise across both companies, combining process engineering, chemistry, and materials science in a very cohesive way.

Can you tell us about the screen printing you have developed? Is it scalable for gigafactories or targeted at R&D high throughput testing?

Our process is based on screen printing of solvent-free chemistries, which is a significant departure from conventional battery manufacturing. By avoiding the solvent-based slurries conventional electrode manufacturing relies on, we can open up a much more energy efficient and modular production model.

In terms of scale, we’re absolutely thinking beyond the lab. The technology is built for industrial scale, from pilot production through to full manufacturing deployment. From a commercial perspective, we see ourselves as a technology partner across the battery value chain. That means we’re flexible, and we can work through licensing models, partnerships or other tailored approaches depending on what our customers need, rather than focusing on a single route like in-house cell production.

Wildcat Discovery Technologies has been around for 2 decades, what are the main learnings from this company that you’ll be using more widely across Holyvolt?

What Wildcat has built over nearly 20 years is incredibly valuable. The company was built on the idea that if you can run thousands of experiments simultaneously rather than sequentially, you compress years of development into months. That sounds obvious when you say it, and it already is obvious to the pharmaceutical industry. We now see organisations across the battery industry applying these technologies with tangible results.

The High Throughput Platform is up to ten times faster than conventional R&D methods, and it generates the kind of structured, high-quality datasets needed to accelerate development while reducing risk and cost. What we’ll be applying more broadly is that culture of data-first development for materials, plus for how we think about process optimisation too.

Are there any successful examples of the Wildcat discovery tool, particularly that would be relevant to the Holyvolt processes?

I have to be a bit careful here because so much of Wildcat’s work is confidential, that’s the nature of doing deep R&D for OEMs and Tier 1s who aren’t exactly keen to advertise what they’re working on. What I can say is that Wildcat holds more battery patents than any other company in the US, which gives you a sense of the output. And the cobalt- and nickel-free cathode materials are something I’m particularly excited about in the context of Holyvolt’s processes. They align directly with our goals around cleaner chemistry and supply chain independence.

Relatedly, has Wildcat made cathode materials at scale for partners? Are you acquiring cathode synthesis expertise here?

Yes. And this was one of the things that made the acquisition feel so right. Materials synthesis at scale is a real and active capability at Wildcat. They operate a pilot manufacturing line capable of producing cathode powders at the 100 kg level and build cells up to 20 Ah. So, we’re not only gaining discovery capabilities, but also very practical expertise in materials synthesis and early-stage production. This is a critical part of what makes this acquisition so compelling for Holyvolt.

Our screen-printing and water-based process technology is designed to be scalable; being able to pair it with a partner that has proven cathode synthesis capability means we can move from molecular discovery all the way through to pilot-scale production within a single integrated group.

That eliminates a bottleneck that has historically slowed the battery industry down enormously.

Is the aim to test a broader variety of materials or streamline better testing with machine learning?

It’s really both, and the two are interconnected. You run thousands of experiments in parallel, which gives you breadth. But Wildcat’s platform is designed to produce terabyte-scale, structured datasets, which is what makes the machine learning actually useful. Each cycle of experiments informs the next one more intelligently. So, it is not a choice between breadth and speed. The platform delivers both, allowing us to expand the scope of what we test, while also accelerating how quickly we learn and optimise.

Will the Wildcat tool allow study of processes as well as materials?

That’s one of the things I’m most excited about, actually. Historically, materials development and process development have been done in separate silos, and the gap between the two is often where promising technologies fall apart.

By bringing Wildcat’s discovery platform together with our process technology, we can start to study how materials behave within our specific manufacturing environment, not just in isolation. That’s a fundamentally different way of working. A material that looks great in a coin cell might behave very differently when you’re running it through a screen-printing process, so being able to close that loop quickly and iteratively is genuinely valuable.

How is Holyvolt funding this acquisition?

It was a $73 million deal, structured as a mix of cash, stock and deferred milestone-based payments. We had just closed a €20 million funding round, which gave us the foundation to move on this. One thing worth mentioning is that several of Wildcat’s existing investors chose to roll their proceeds back into Holyvolt. I think that says something, these are people who know Wildcat inside out, and they decided they’d rather be shareholders in what we’re building together. That kind of conviction from people with full information is always a good sign.

It sounds like a pretty great deal for the team at Holyvolt, and hopefully we will see some great output from this neat discovery-testing-process-material synergy from God’s own energy company.

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Why don’t we have commercially available cells with lithium metal anodes yet?

As we saw in Part 1, the production of lithium metal is a long and complex route, and crucially air sensitive and difficult to transport. To use commercially in batteries, further material processing and engineering are needed to meet industrial demands and to overcome the practical challenges.

Practical challenges

Lithium metal anodes present several fundamental challenges that appear at lab scale. Finding solutions to these issues requires fundamental understanding of their mechanisms.

1. Dendrite formation. These tend to occur due to uneven lithium plating/stripping arising from local current density inhomogeneity and electrode-electrolyte interface instability.

2. Loss of active lithium. An initial loss of lithium is unavoidable due to SEI formation, which is why cells are typically designed with a slightly higher N/P ratio. Other lithium inventory losses can occur through non-uniform plating/stripping, which leads to electronically isolated “dead lithium,” as well as through unstable electrode–electrolyte interfaces or lithium consumption at the cathode side.

3. Stable SEI. It is a key element in any cell key to enabling long cycling and preventing lithium inventory loss and something we explored in more depth in a previous article.

4. Mechanical degradation and void formation. During plating/stripping, voids can be created, which increase interface resistance and lead to dead lithium. Void formation is particularly harmful in solid-state batteries because gaps cannot be refilled by the electrolyte.

Industrial needs

Lithium metal anodes have to meet several criteria to be competitive against graphite anodes in performance, safety and cost.

1. Thickness and uniformity. Commercial cathodes typically deliver areal capacities in the range of 3–4 mAh/cm², which is why conventional graphite anodes require thicknesses of 70–100 µm. If lithium metal is to be paired with such cathodes, the active anode thickness must be reduced to roughly 15–25 µm (that is 1/4 the width of a human hair) to avoid excessive inactive mass. Although this would significantly boost both gravimetric and volumetric energy density, manufacturing lithium at scale at these thicknesses is a big engineering challenge. In addition, thickness uniformity of the lithium foil must be controlled, as local thickness variations can lead to non-uniform current distribution and promote dendrite formation.

2. N/P ratio. Graphite-containing cells typically use N/P ratios (negative to positive) above 1 (i.e 1.05 - 1.15) to compensate for irreversible losses. However, for lithium metal anodes, the aim is to go as close as possible to near-zero excess or bet for anode-free configurations.

3. Coulombic efficiency (CE). It is a critical metric for lithium metal anodes. The absence of a host structure makes lithium losses irreversible, meaning that even small inefficiencies can accumulate and lead to severe capacity fading. To achieve long cycle life, lithium metal batteries must operate at CE values of at least 99.9%, preferably 99.95%.

4. Current density. Considering the specs mentioned before, current densities should be above or equal to 3 mA/cm² to allow fast charging and overpotentials should remain low to reduce inefficiencies.

5. Stack pressure. This requirement is mainly related to solid-state batteries. In these systems, external pressure is often necessary to maintain intimate contact at cathode and anode interface. To successfully implement them, low stack pressure cycling should be possible, to reduce technical challenges in pack design as well as improve safety. Typical values should be below 5 MPa and 2 MPa for EVs.

Who is solving which problem?

Although many companies are working on integrating Li-metal anodes in cells, only a few are focusing on the metal itself and how to process it in order to meet the criteria mentioned. Hence, companies that source the metal from external providers will not be included.

To prepare Li metal foils, the main used routes are:

Extrusion + roll-to-roll, the most mature of all and comprises extruding lithium followed by thinning of the foil through rolling.

Molten lithium casting which involves heating lithium above its melting point and casting it onto a current collector.

Vapor deposition techniques include evaporating lithium in vacuum and condensing onto a substrate, ensuring very thin and uniform films.

Electrochemical deposition, where lithium is plated directly onto a current collector from an electrolyte containing lithium ions.

Blue Solutions

With over a decade of research in Li-metal polymer (LMP) batteries, it was founded in 2001 through its parent company Bolloré. Their bet on LMPs was based on the belief that this configuration offers increased safety and performance compared to other Li-ion configurations. Such a strong research background enabled mass production of LMPs in 2011 and to date they have powered over 600 million vehicle kilometers.

One of the differentiating aspects of Blue Solutions is that they manufacture Li-metal anodes and polymer electrolyte films as well as assemble batteries. Their Li-metal, produced via a proprietary roll-to-roll process advances are very promising as they moved from 60 micron Li foils for their Gen 3 batteries to below 20 microns for their Gen 4 batteries.

Pure Lithium

Based in Chicago, Emilie Bodoin and Prof. Donald Sadoway founded Pure Lithium in 2020 with the objective of vertically integrating the supply chain of Li-metal anodes, hence the name of their technology Brine-to-Battery.

Their core technology aims to obtain Li metal by electrochemical deposition while bypassing the use of Li-containing salts. The process begins with lithium brines, where Li⁺ are selectively isolated from other ions and water using a membrane. Once done, Li⁺ can be electrodeposited safely onto a substrate. It is essential to remove water before electrodeposition, because were it to be present, hydrogen gas would be generated first instead of lithium metal.

Performance has been demonstrated with Gen 1 and 2. The second, paired with a vanadium-containing cathode, achieved an energy density of 425 Wh/kg over 1,000 cycles at a 1C rate.

Skellium

Founded last year, this start-up is a spin-off from RWTH Aachen PEM Institute. They aim for scaling ultra-thin Li-metal production by using a coating process that was developed during the “LIMA” project.

Contrary to the other companies, they use a molten lithium process to coat Li-metal onto a copper current collector. This removes the need of vacuum, but requires higher temperatures to melt lithium. More notably, they state that a 3D skeleton aids in dendrite prevention hinting at a porous copper scaffold.

Elevated Materials

A spin-out from the semiconductor company Applied Materials, it was founded to commercialize and scale the production of ultra-thin Li metal foils produced through vapor deposition. Submicron thicknesses up to 20 microns are available with the lowest intended to be used for pre-lithiation.

I had the pleasure to interview Dean Frankel, Vice President of Product Marketing:

1. What are the major engineering challenges when producing ultra-thin Li metal at scale?

Historically, lithium metal has been produced through rolling processes. While this works for thicker foils, it becomes increasingly difficult to maintain tight thickness control and smooth surfaces as the material gets thinner. With rolled lithium metal foils, it is possible to produce relatively narrow (~150 mm) and relatively thin (~20 micron) material, but costs rise significantly as thickness decreases. The mechanical nature of rolling can also introduce defects, thickness variation, and handling challenges that ultimately affect electrochemical performance and manufacturing yield.

Lithium is also highly reactive with oxygen, moisture, and contaminants, so surface quality and contamination control are essential. Small surface defects or parasitic reactions can have a disproportionate impact on battery performance, particularly at very low lithium loadings.

Advanced manufacturing approaches such as roll-to-roll vapor deposition offer a different path forward. By depositing lithium as a thin film, it becomes possible to produce very uniform, smooth layers with precise thickness control across large areas. These methods are also not constrained by the same mechanical limitations as rolled foils, which creates the opportunity to produce ultra-wide lithium films. Today, we produce films approximately 700 mm wide, which is important for achieving the throughput and cost structure needed at gigawatt-hour scale.

Another benefit is material efficiency. Ultra-thin deposited films reduce the total amount of lithium required while still delivering the performance advantages associated with lithium metal anodes.

2. What are the main difficulties shipping Li metal from both product stability and regulatory perspectives?

Lithium metal is regulated as UN 1415 – Lithium, Hazard Class 4.3, meaning it is classified as a water-reactive material for transport. From a practical standpoint, this means lithium metal requires appropriate dangerous goods packaging, documentation, and handling. When shipped by air, it is generally restricted to cargo aircraft under applicable transport rules.

That said, we do not view shipping as an insurmountable barrier. When sealed properly, lithium metal films can have a shelf life of more than six months, and in some cases customers have used material beyond the recommended shelf life without adverse results. With the right packaging design and modest shipping volumes, the impact on cost and safety can be managed effectively.

3. Do you see Li metal anodes being produced centrally and shipped to customers, or manufactured onsite with cell production?

Today Elevated Materials supports more than 35 customers a year out of our facilities in Alzenau, Germany and Sunnyvale, California. This model makes sense as customers are doing both R&D and piloting lithium metal films for various applications (lithium metal batteries as well as prelithiation). We see localized production as an important step toward lowering cost and delivering GWh-scale films to a single customer. Elevated Materials has plans to produce up to 3 GWh per year at our facility in Alzenau, Germany. However, once a single customer begins consuming more than roughly 1–3 GWh per year, it becomes logical to consider localized production, typically adjacent to that customer’s gigafactory.

Elevated Materials shipped more than 100 km of material to a single customer last year. While that is not yet gigawatt-hour-scale volume, it represents a meaningful qualification volume and an important step toward full product qualification and in turn, Gigascale production.

Sigma Lithium Ltd

This UK company based in Oxford was founded in 2015 by a team of professionals with 25+ years of experience in Li battery development. Their objective is to expand their proprietary technology 3D-Li produced via low vacuum deposition by licensing it to other OEMs, enabling a broader industry use.

I had the pleasure to speak to the founder, Dr. Gleb Ivanov to get more insights into their product and these are some of the topics we discussed.

1. What is 3D-Li and how is it processed?

3D-Li is a Li-metal anode that uses a non-woven carbon scaffold where lithium is deposited through a dry and low-vacuum process. Gleb stressed: “using low vacuum is very important as it requires reduced pumping times, however, low vacuum makes it more challenging to fully remove moisture or oxygen”.

2. What are the key benefits of 3D-Li?

Owing to the 10-fold increase in surface area, it reduces current density and enables fast charging without dendrite formation. Also, having a metallised scaffold removes the need of a current collector, hence reducing the overall weight of the cell. Although these are great pros, Gleb emphasized one above others: “owing to the high aspect ratio of the carbon fibers, volume change is drastically reduced to around 2%”.

3. What are some of the recent milestones and which are the plans for the coming years?

The anode is being validated by several OEMs and labs in different European countries and so far it has been successfully tested with NMC, LFP, high voltage cathodes and electrolytes. Recently they had set a target of achieving 50 cycles with high power and energy, which was exceeded and reached 250 cycles.

The upcoming milestones include upgrading the current Gen 3 technology to Gen 3+, and ultimately reaching Gen 4. These final development stages are being carried out in collaboration with companies in the UK and Belgium. It should be noted that Gen 4 will represent the final upgrade and will serve as the platform for future licensing.

Final thoughts

Ashley Cooke once posted: “I once tried to bring lithium-sulfur batteries to the world, and didn’t succeed. Here’s how I’d approach it now, starting by turning the problem upside down”, meaning starting with solving Li-metal rather than the cathode. Having such a diverse landscape of companies aiming to solve the fundamental challenges of Li-metal at scale brings hope that soon technologies like solid-state, Li-sulfur or batteries of higher volumetric and energy densities will be a reality.

Having material suppliers already demonstrating shipment of ultra-thin foils or cell developers integrating them into cells proves that Li-metal batteries are no longer a concept. More importantly, the ambitions of companies to vertically integrate Li-metal production and cell development within the same umbrella ensures a future with less geopolitical strain.

Overall, there is still a long way to go and the main obstacle is scaling the production and shipment of ultra-thin Li-metal while ensuring high-volume cell manufacturing. With the interest of expanding battery performance limits, the demand on Li-metal anodes keeps increasing, making the future of Li-metal batteries appear promising.

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Lithium, an element that played a key role in medicine during the 19th and 20th centuries, was first used to treat gout and later became important in psychiatric care. It was even included in early formulations of 7Up, where it was marketed as a health-boosting beverage. Today, lithium has taken the throne in another field: the battery industry. It is a critical component in enabling rechargeable batteries, which are found everywhere in our lives.

Back in the 1980s, Molicel released the first Li-metal battery but safety issues, which I will touch on later, forced the company to reclaim them. After that, Sony released the first rechargeable Li-ion cell containing a carbon-based anode instead of lithium metal. Since then, most Li-based rechargeable batteries have used carbon-based anodes (typically graphite). With the interest of reaching higher energy densities and the rise of all solid-state batteries, lithium metal is seen as one of the routes to next-generation batteries.

Graphite anodes are considered safer because lithium ions intercalate between their layered structure rather than depositing as metallic lithium. This suppresses the formation of dendrites: needle-like structures that can penetrate the separator and cause internal short circuits. However, this enhanced safety comes with notable trade-offs:a limited theoretical gravimetric capacity of about 372 mAh/g, reduced volumetric energy density and lower cell voltages.

Lithium metal anodes rely on lithium plating and stripping, processes that are more prone to dendrite formation. If these issues can be effectively mitigated, they offer high theoretical gravimetric capacity of 3,860 mAh/g.

Next-generation batteries (i.e solid-state and liquid Li-metal, Li-sulfur, Li-air) are key to enabling higher gravimetric and volumetric energy densities, which would expand batteries’ capabilities beyond portable electronics and EVs.

How do we go from natural resources to Li metal?

An entire article could be devoted to the lithium supply chain, however; the purpose of this discussion is to focus on lithium metal. This section will briefly run through all the steps and pinpoint the most important.

Lithium does not occur in nature in its metallic form. Hard-rock resources include minerals such as spodumene, lepidolite, and petalite, with spodumene being the most widely used due to its abundance. Brines, which might be more familiar to the general public as they are found in tins, are water bodies such as underground aquifers where lithium is present in solution as dissolved lithium salts.

The hard rock route requires freeing the lithium salt from the crystal lattice. The first step involves mining. Taking spodumene as an example, it is found in pegmatite deposits, which are highly abundant in Australia, making up over 70% of the world’s spodumene supply. Once mined, the ores are crushed and ground to make separation of spodumene and other mineral rocks easier. Then, a heating step is required to convert the naturally found α-phase to β-phase. Such a step is critical, as the β-phase is less dense, and has a more open crystal lattice making lithium more accessible.

Lithium leaching is typically performed with sulfuric acid (H₂SO₄) which has a strong affinity to lithium and high conversion efficiency. The result of this step is a lithium sulfate (Li₂SO₄) rich solution that also contains impurities. After the purification step, lithium carbonate (Li₂CO₃) can be precipitated and recovered. Lithium hydroxide (LiOH) can also be obtained, but not directly through precipitation. Some companies like Tesla have opted for an acid-free route that involves using NaCl followed by high-energy milling. By using NaCl as a cationic source, lithium can be easily displaced and LiCl is obtained and then converted to LiOH. This process, however, is used to obtain precursors for cathode synthesis rather than for Li-metal synthesis.

The brine route generally involves less steps but requires longer times. To start, the lithium-containing brine has to be pumped from underground reserves, which also carries other dissolved salts. These brines are then left to evaporate over long periods of time in ponds/lakes. This concentrates the brine, and non-lithium salts precipitate. Once the brine has reached a desired concentration, a chemical treatment is carried out to remove additional impurities. Lastly, like the mineral route, once the solution is purified, lithium is recovered through precipitation of lithium carbonate.

It must be noted that processing techniques like direct lithium extraction are gaining momentum as they aim to bypass the evaporation step by selectively trapping lithium ions from the brine.

Alternative routes, like lithium clay, have been gaining popularity in the US as hard-rock or brines are not widely available and countries look for mineral sovereignty. The steps followed are very similar to the hard-rock route, with the exception that no phase transition is needed, so leaching can be done directly after mining. Although finer particles make lithium extraction easier due to shorter diffusion paths, larger surface areas increase leaching solution consumption and make separation of solid-liquid more challenging.

Once lithium carbonate or lithium hydroxide are obtained, they are converted into anhydrous lithium chloride (LiCl) and mixed with potassium chloride (KCl) to lower the melting point of the salt mixture. This molten LiCl–KCl system is then used as the electrolyte for molten-salt electrolysis. At the positive electrode, chloride ions are oxidized to form chlorine gas, while at the negative electrode, liquid lithium metal is produced. Due to its low density, the molten lithium floats to the surface, allowing for easier collection. Companies that carry out this electrolysis step typically also manage the metal-forming operations, as they have necessary equipment to prevent air or moisture exposure, which would affect the final product due to the high reactivity of lithium. In this final stage, lithium metal is cast into ingots, and in some cases rolled into sheets or foils.

After this complex and multi-step processing route, lithium metal is shipped to companies aiming to integrate it into next-generation battery technologies. In the next part, I will discuss the industrial requirements and performance challenges, as well as highlight companies that are making significant progress toward enabling lithium metal batteries at scale.

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Running the Numbers

Beyond environmental considerations, it is easy to wonder if deep sea mining is truly worth all the hassle and expense. Building new types of robots and equipment, shipping nodules across vast swaths of ocean, developing new processing flowsheets, all these things are expensive and add risk compared to existing methods.

To reassure investors and others, companies in this space have published technoeconomic analyses (TEAs) of their proposed approaches. The high level of detail illustrates just how many factors there are to optimize, yet also makes it clear that a successful team could bring in substantial revenues. Studies by the International Seabed Authority indicate that the Clarion-Clipperton Zone (CCZ) in the Pacific Ocean contains 21 billion tonnes of polymetallic nodules at an estimated value of 320 to 1,100 USD/tonne, indicating a value of anywhere between 7 and 20 trillion USD.

It is also notable that much of the cost and risk has nothing to do with the fact that the nodules are harvested from the deep sea. Significant costs come from the processing stage, and one of the most uncertain factors in determining whether the project will be financially successful is the fluctuating market price of metals. These costs and risks also exist for land-based projects, and the presence of multiple metals in nodules could soften the blow of price drops of a specific metal.

Speed

Although metal price and demand projections vary in the long term, many people have expressed particular concern about our ability to extract critical minerals in the short to medium term due to society’s rapid electrification. Building a new land-based mine takes an average of 16 to 18 years, so new discoveries will not ameliorate this concern.

Because nodules must be transported to land regardless, deep-sea mining companies often propose processing their initial loads of nodules at existing facilities. If this plan proves viable at scale, metals harvested from the ocean could be a reality sooner than many expect. The Metals Company and PAMCO in Japan recently tested this setup with a 2,000-tonne pilot run, which was intended to demonstrate the technical compatibility of existing kilns, paving the way for a targeted commercial throughput of 1.3 million tonnes of wet nodules annually.

However, ‘technical compatibility’ does not equal ‘immediate production.’ Years-long delays in reaching optimal recovery are common even for land-based mines with familiar ores; new processing plants take 2.5 years to reach intended throughput even after production begins. Although pilot studies have been informative, uncertainties still remain about how polymetallic nodules will behave at true industrial scale. Experts believe that a ramp-up period will be unavoidable as companies move from short-duration tests to continuous, year-round operations.

Furthermore, deep sea mining is not the only creative response to potential metal shortages, and high prices have a tendency to motivate people to find new solutions. Existing land-based facilities, particularly nickel operations in Indonesia, have successfully ramped up production to meet, and in some cases exceed, rising global demand. As shown in the image below, this surge in supply has led to notable price drops in battery metals.

Politics

Although deep sea mining supporters still speak about how this will be a greener approach to metal sourcing, like with many other technologies, the conversation has shifted towards national security and defense. In particular, China’s domination of existing supply chains and their moves to restrict access to key metals have politicians worried about dependence on China for essential materials for both modern tech and defense.

With the increasing focus on onshoring and “friend shoring” of essential materials, critical minerals have gone from a niche field to a hot topic, with deep sea mining being put forward as a potential solution by some, including the United States government.

However, just as with the environmental impact and financial risks, the importance of processing should also not be ignored here. Even if we can efficiently harvest nodules from the deep sea, China also possesses both the vast majority of the know-how and facilities for metal processing, including ownership of Indonesian Ni refining facilities. Some countries, including the USA, actually have substantial metal reserves, but decided years ago to buy from abroad instead of processing at home, in no small part due to the dirty, environmentally harmful processes used to transform ore into metal. For deep sea mining to actually reduce reliance on China, other parts of the supply chain will also need to be addressed.

Further complicating the picture for deep sea mining companies and other new facilities, China has also shown a willingness to drop prices to undercut competitors abroad and maintain their strong position. Although governments are looking for ways to counteract such challenges, such as the newly announced Project Vault, this risk still adds geopolitical uncertainty to financial projections.

Starting in 2026?

In an ideal world, we would have enough time to carefully observe deep sea ecosystems for decades before deciding to move forward. But the real word rarely waits for complete information. Regulators are unlikely to escape making a difficult judgement call with imperfect information, particularly with the changing political landscape.

In fact, there are already signs that not all players are willing to wait for the International Seabed Authority (ISA), who are charged by the UN with regulating mining of the seabed in international waters. The ISA has been developing guidelines to ensure that marine life is protected and that royalties from mining profits are distributed equitably, but have missed several deadlines and are coming under intense pressure as the technologies needed have matured.

In April 2025, the Trump administration issued an executive order to fast-track deep sea mining at scale. Although countries have the right to mine in the exclusive economic area near their coasts, this executive order included language indicating that these processes would also apply beyond US jurisdiction, raising concerns that the US would permit companies to proceed unilaterally instead of waiting for international regulations to be ready.

Around the same time, the US subsidiary of The Metals Company officially began the process with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) to pursue exploration licenses and commercial recovery permits in the CCZ based on the Deep Seabed Hard Mineral Resources Act of 1980. Further streamlining of the application process in January 2026 has led some to speculate that the company could begin mining in earnest as early as the end of 2026, though 2027 or 2028 is more likely.

Conclusions

It is essential that we learn to be mindful of our metal consumption and reduce our usage of these powerful, yet environmentally challenging, materials where we can. Yet without a gigantic societal shift, we will still need to source substantial quantities of new minerals for the foreseeable future.

The high concentrations of key metals such as copper, which are essential for many central technologies of the green energy transition, could make deep sea nodules a more climate-friendly source than land-based ores if choices are made carefully. But whether you are interested in the environmental impact, the financial risk, or geopolitical factors, how minerals are processed deserves far more attention than it usually receives, no matter whether the source is on land or under the sea.

With all the talk of re-shoring this essential piece of the supply chain, it is worth asking ourselves if we are truly willing to rebuild facilities that were pushed abroad years ago because of their dirty nature. If we are to build new supply chains to support polymetallic nodules or other “friendlier” sources of metals, we must seize this opportunity to build cleaner, more sustainable facilities, instead of replicating the problems of the past.

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🔧 Iron-air taking the world by a rusty storm

Google has paid Form Energy $1 billion for the 100-hour system that will make up part of the mix powering its new data centre in Minnesota. Form Energy has been around for several years, with rounds raising up to $1.4 billion to date. The idea for Google is to be able to power its data centres renewably without raising local power bills, and support the push to expand AI and cloud infrastructure ‘responsibly.’

Ion-air batteries work by reversibly rusting - oyxygen pumped into the cells rusts iron, releasing electrons: demonstrated by the below diagram:

Lithium ion batteries are usually 4-12 hour systems, but iron air can discharge for multiple days due to its reversible rusting process. For this reason, they are often used in complement to wind energy, where there are days in a row of maximum production needed to be stored. Lithium ion in contrast is best paired with solar generation.

Since the Form Energy system is rated at 300 MW with a 100-hour duraction, this totals 30 GWh, and with an investment of $1 billion, making the capital cost $33.33 per kWh, significantly lower than utility scale LFP cell projects which price at $80 - $140 per kWh. There is a smaller company, Ore Energy, doing this in Europe, with some small batteries already hooked up to Dutch grid.

🔑 New owners

The purchase deal for Northvolt’s assets by Lyten is now complete, and battery production will be restarting in Skellefteå, Sweden. The site will also include a data centre as a tenant in an area previoulsy marked for gigafactory expansion. There are union concerns raised over the American style contracts in Sweden, which may present some difficulties for Lyten, but we wish them and the people of Skellefteå the best in getting this back off the ground.

🎂 Something we haven’t mentioned?

Everyone is talking about one particular battery, but we’re saving our take for when there’s more data than marketing exercises.

🍬 Tidbits

📦 EVE Energy has announced that the world’s first 100 MWh-class energy storage facility is now operating, with 628 Ah cells. It features 80 Mr Giant energy systems.

🚙 Lucid Motors has laid off 12% of its workforce reportedly to “improve operational effectiveness and optimize our resources as we continue on our path toward profitability”.

🇷🇸 ElevenEs has closed a Series B investment round backed by Caterpillar VC, which will fund a 1GWh factory in Serbia that makes LFP blade cells. The value was not announced by the intention is that the funds will go to infrastructure and equipment.

🏔️ NREL, now National Lab of the Rockies, has laid off 134 employees to ‘adjust to existing and projected funding levels and alignment with DOE priorities.’

💧 Aqua Metals, Nevada-based recycler & refiner, has entered into a term sheet to acquire Lion Energy, uniting battery energy systems business with recycling and metals technology. Aqua Metals will get around $25 million in equity.

🎧 What else we’re reading and listening to

• Upcoming webinar series on polymer electrolytes:

  

• Podcast on Battery Energy Storage Systems with Noah Ryder

• A policy report from the Nordic Africa Institute on mineral value chains in the Copperbelt in DR Congo and Zambia.

• Opinion piece from Shmuel de Leon on the state of European and Northern American battery manufacturing. Not the cheeriest read!

• Ethiopia’s EV Boom: read by Bloomberg.

• Why Are Chinese EVs So Cheap? report by Rhodium Group.

📰 What else we covered at Intercalation

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Military strikes on Iran’s nuclear program, the capture of Venezuelan president Nicolas Maduro, the seizing of oil tankers, the list goes on. America’s actions are not just targeted with traditional security interests in mind; however, there is a renewed focus on resource security and ensuring America has access to the natural resources it needs for energy security and defense. It’s not just oil though, critical minerals and rare earth elements are in sharp focus for the US, as they form the foundation of modern electronics and energy and defense technology.

Batteries need several key critical minerals and so the story of battery manufacturing and supply chain is intimately tied to the story of critical minerals and rare earths. Modern defense and energy technologies rely more and more heavily on sophisticated electronics, batteries and motorized systems, and so access to critical minerals is key. Critical minerals are those designated as essential to the economic or national security of the U.S.; have a supply chain that is vulnerable to disruption; and serve an essential function in the manufacturing of a product, the absence of which would have significant consequences for the economic or national security of the U.S.

International Energy Agency data shows that the typical electric car requires six times the mineral input than a conventional car. Lithium ion batteries, whether they are used for EVs, stationary storage or consumer electronics, rely on Lithium, Nickel, Cobalt, Manganese, Graphite, Copper and Phosphate among others (depending on battery chemistry). Rare earth elements also play a major part in magnets vital to electric motors and wind turbines.

There is a problem though. China holds a near monopoly on critical minerals and rare earths. It is the leading producer of 25 critical minerals and around 90% of the world’s rare earths are processed in China, along with 80% of the world’s Lithium. In sharp contrast, 80% of the US’s critical minerals come from foreign sources and there is no domestic production for 14 critical minerals.

Driven by battery demand, the demand for lithium in 2040 could be 40 times that in 2020, with other battery minerals trending in the same direction.

With the surge in expected demand, and the increased use of batteries in defense applications, it’s no surprise that in the US Geological Survey’s 2025 list of critical minerals, Lithium, Nickel, Cobalt, Manganese, Graphite, Copper and Phosphate are all listed.

So in the absence of a domestic supply chain, the US has been looking outside of its borders.

President Trump has repeatedly stated his desire to acquire Greenland, and in Davos he said a ‘framework of a future deal’ was agreed. In part this is driven by access to future shipping lanes and its location for missile defense, however Greenland’s natural resources are also playing a part. The Geological Survey of Greenland and Denmark states that 24 of the 34 critical raw materials on the list of critical raw materials for the EU are present in Greenland, including Copper, Graphite, Cobalt, Iron, Nickel and Lithium, all critical for battery production.

It’s not as simple as just going to Greenland and getting the minerals though, most of Greenland’s resources are locked under thick ice sheets, often three kilometres thick, and vast areas of the territory lack road, railways or the electricity infrastructure to support large mining operations. Mining operations can take decades to reach full production, and technologies change in time. As such, companies have been averse to spending large amounts of money in exploring mining in Greenland with the challenges it presents. Other challenges include the type of silicates which contain the rare earths, the public hearing process, and even radioactivity.

So even if America acquired Greenland, it’s doubtful that anyone could extract the minerals there profitably. Not to mention that Denmark and the rest of the western world has been extremely resistant to US expansion in Greenland.

So maybe America makes a deal with a country where it has more leverage? In April 2025, the US signed a deal to establish a joint investment fund for the reconstruction of Ukraine. As part of the deal, Ukraine maintains ownership over natural resources and will contribute 50% of revenues from the exploitation of new minerals, oil, and gas projects. The US will also supply capital contribution and receive provisions for the U.S offtake of future mineral resources on competitive terms. Ukraine is estimated to have 19 million tons of Graphite, ⅓ of Europe’s Lithium deposits and significant Copper, Nickel, Cobalt and Manganese reserves and the US wants first access to it in exchange for financial and military support.

Similarly, in December 2025, the US signed a strategic agreement with the Democratic Republic of Congo aimed at increasing US investment in the country’s mineral industry. Congolese officials presented a list of high value mineral assets to Washington, with projects spanning manganese, copper, cobalt, gold, lithium, and other critical minerals. Congo is vastly rich in mineral resources, holding 10% of the world’s copper reserves and 35% of the world’s Cobalt reserves. Critically, Congo already has large mining infrastructure in place and is open to US investment, making it an attractive place to do business. The US has also struck a rare earths deal with Australia.

Domestically the US is making moves to try and increase production and invest in US mining and processing companies. The Trump administration just invested $1.6B in USA Rare Earth, an American mining company specializing in rare earths, $1.4B in Vulcan Elements, a manufacturer of rare earth magnets, and became a majority shareholder in MP Materials, which owns the US’s only operational rare earth mine.

The US is becoming more and more focussed on striking deals to increase its supply of critical minerals and rare earths, domestically and overseas. We could see the buildup of US strategic reserves as a buffer against export controls from China. In time this could translate into a more stable supply of battery raw materials into the US. However, access to raw materials is not sufficient for a strong battery supply chain, the true value is in being able to refine and process the raw materials into battery grade components.

This fantastic graphic from Atlantic Council shows how concentrated the global refining capacity of Lithium is. China and Chile dominate in refining capacity and refined exports.

Without significant investment in refining capability, the US will continue to rely on foreign sources for critical minerals, no matter how much raw material it can get its hands on. And if you are still reliant on China for processing, then your supply chain vulnerability still exists.

This looks to be an oversight in US investment and strategic planning. Building refining capability is extremely capital intensive and fluctuations in price can deter US companies from making that investment. China’s long standing infrastructure, government support and ability to endure low prices to keep a grip on the supply chain will make it extremely difficult for the US to pry even a small share of processing capability away from China, and make a profit doing so. Without the refining piece of the puzzle, the international deals and investment in domestic mining could prove to be ineffective in reducing reliance on China.

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🇨🇦 Canada

In the middle of January, Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney visited China, the first visit of this kind since 2017. The result of this trip is a trade deal that will slash tariffs on Chinese EVs down from 100% to 6.1% on the first 49,000 vehicles per year, with the quota increasing to 70,000 in 5 years. China will also lower tariffs on Canadian canola seed from 84% to 15%, and committed to visa-free access for Canadians travelling to China. This is a reflection on the tumultuous relationships Canada has had with Donald Trump’s America, with Carney seeing China as a ‘more predictable’ trade partner, something that Chinese leader Xi Jinping has been trying to achieve.

The early winner in this new import situation is likely to be Tesla, with its Shanghai factory already able to make a Canada-specific version of the Model Y and very established Canadian sales network. Half of the quota will be reserved for vehicles under 35,000 CAD (around 25,000 USD), which is lower than any Tesla vehicles, which will give some market room for Chinese manufacturers with a more market level range.

A senior Canadian official also expressed a desire for Canada to look at joint ventures with Chinese companies to build domestic vehicles with Chinese knowledge. This is a similar route to approach increasingly adopted in Europe, welcoming factories into create jobs and attempt to transfer knowledge, which is a more pragmatic approach than out right expensive competition.

Tesla

Back in 2020, Tesla promised tab-less cells with 6x the power output of the current model at the time, that would be made in house. The cells were promised as large 4680 cylindrical cells (46mm diameter 80mm height), with multiple improvements in the process including tab-less design, steel casing and dry electrodes.

Dry electrode coating is no easy task, shown by the 5 year learning timeline at Tesla, and on the 1st February Musk posted on X that his team had made the dry electrode process work at scale. EVLithium did a neat deep dive on the whole 4680 and dry electrode process.

Relatedly, Tesla reduced a $2.9 billion order to just $7,000 for high nickel cathode materials from Korean manufacturer L&F. This has been blamed on weak Cybertruck sales, since the CAM was used for 4680s currently only used in that model.

🍬 Tidbits

🇮🇳 Ember Energy analysis reveals that India is electrifying faster at equivalent levels of GDP than China did, with much lower coal use, rapid solar deployment, growth EVs and much lower oil demand for transport. The result of this is much greater energy sovereignty.

📷 Polaron has raised $8 million in seed funding for their AI assisted microscopy platform.

💸 Sparkz raises $20.2 million in a Series A to scale integrated LFP battery production in the US.

💰 UK based battery intelligence company Elysia has expanded its reach beyond EVs and heavy industry into the BESS market via acquisition of US company Zitara.

🧂 Material deindustrialisation is occurring in Europe at a worryingly fast yet silent pace, Ed Conway has written another brilliant piece about salt in the UK.

🏖️ Silicon in the Washington State area, where both Sila and Group14’s US activities are based, is facing challenges competing for power with data centres. Group14 has shifted its main focus to a South Korean facility. Relatedly, Amprius is expanding its US production through a partnership with Nanotech Energy.

🤝 CATL has signed a massive LFP order from Ronbay New Energy Technology to supply 3.05 million tons of LFP between 2026 and 2031, work $17.2 billion, the largest order to date in battery materials. CATL are also acquiring 5% of Fulin, another LFP supplier, to allow them to increase their capacity to 500,000 tons annually.

❌ Volvo Cars is officially cancelling its operations on Novo Energy after failing to find a technology partner, meaning that 75 jobs are being cut in Gothenburg.

🇺🇸 The US Department of Energy has announced $30 million for funding across energy technologies. The funding focus targets the 1,000 Wh/kg threshold for eVTOL, drones and robots.

🎧 What else we’re reading and listening to

• Video Review of Xiaomi’s SU7 EV

• What a Tour of China’s Factory Floor Reveals About the Future of Clean Energy by MCJ on Linkedin

• Kara Rodby gave a slightly different type of talk this month at the Volta Foundation’s online battery networking session on ‘Revisiting the Plot in Clean Energy’ about whether the "free market" approach driving the West's climate change abating efforts is working or whether it is set up to fail, and what we should be doing instead. It’s very though provoking and we highly recommend a watch!

• What happens when a Chinese Battery Factory comes to town, by Wired, complemented nicely here by some graphics by Zeyi Yang.

• Some neat graphs on long duration energy storage by Oliver Schmidt, reflecting LIB and relative price comparisons year on year.

📰 What else we covered at Intercalation

• The Stories Intercalation Is Watching For 2026

• Who’s Who Guide to Battery Modelling Software in 2026 part 1 and part 2 - two authors of this year’s Volta Foundation Battery Report give an accessible crash course intro to battery modelling software.

• Charged Careers - an overview of all the places battery experience can take you.

• The IBA Conference - Jess recaps research highlights from November.

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