Mid-April News Roundup
A battery that can last 100 years, Canada's shiny new EV investments, and solid-state criticisms from industry
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🛠 Industry News
Batteries in the Whitehouse
Biden has used emergency authority to invoke the Defence Production Act (DPA) to secure US domestic battery material production and supply. This policy was aimed at accelerating the clean energy reliance following skyrocketing fossil fuel prices and “Russian geopolitics”. Companies dealing with lithium, cobalt, and copper will soon have more access to funding support, an opportunity that boosted financial markets with the late-March announcement.
Elon has also clearly been feeling the mineral supply squeeze after hinting that Tesla may move upstream in mining and refining. The DPA could also help establish high-purity metallic lithium production, an industry that needs to dramatically scale to meet needs in solid-state and other next-generation battery technologies (just don’t call them the holy grail please).
The pandemic response has been a prime example of the powers of the DPA: accelerating ventilator, mask and other PPE, and vaccine manufacturing.
Ford puts solid-state on blast
EV OEMs like Ford have been keeping a close eye on emerging solid-state battery offerings. So far, things seem underwhelming. Check out these great plots presented at the 39th International Battery Seminar earlier this month.
Shashank Sripad put it best:
9 solid-state battery suppliers, 3 are >5Ah, and 2 reported safety. None are superior to Li-ion!
Can you guess which companies represent the 9 evaluated above?
Ford isn’t alone in pointing out unsavoury aspects of solid-state. Nissan VP Kazuhiro Doi, who’s leading the company’s own solid-state research efforts, made the following bizarre (but welcome) admission about the tech:
“Energy density is double, so you have a potential bomb that’s more dangerous”
We’ve seen before how “safe” battery chemistries such as solid-state or LFP can still lead to deadly, destructive fires, but it’s nice to hear this fact acknowledged by someone so high up at a major company. After all, as long as you’re storing a bunch of energy in a tiny place, the potential for danger still exists.
In other solid-state news, Taiwan-based solid-state battery manufacturer Prologium also recently unveiled prototype swappable packs for Gogoro E-scooters.
O(EM), Canada!
Canada is something of a secret battery research powerhouse. The country (where 2/5ths of Intercalation’s staff hail from) is home to pioneering teams such the Jeff Dahn Research Group, Hydro-Québec, and Moli — the company which technically developed the world’s first commercialized rechargeable lithium battery (take that, Sony).
Despite these illustrious institutions — as well as enormous reserves of crucial battery natural resources — Canada has a surprising lack of EV production facilities, battery manufacturing OEMs, and other battery supply chain companies.
That’s all set to change. A whirlwind of new projects have been announced in recent weeks, and we’ve summarized some of the biggest ones here:
Québec is getting not one, but TWO cathode active material (CAM) manufacturing facilities. In announcements made just three days apart, BASF and GM+Posco have separately confirmed that they will each build large-scale CAM facilities in Bécancour, Québec. The location will allow the companies to strategically take advantage of Quebec’s abundant and cheap hydroelectricity as well as rail and river transport to mines and battery production facilities located elsewhere on the continent. Both plants are planned to be operational by 2025
Speaking of GM, the federal government and the province of Ontario recently announced a contribution of $518 million CAD ($410 million USD) to help fund the company’s transition from ICE to EV production in Canada. Some of the money will go towards the upgrading of a plant in Ingersoll, Ontario to become Canada’s “first full-scale EV manufacturing plant” which will produce BrightDrop-branded commercial vans (although it looks like another portion of the government’s money will go towards the regular ICE side of GM’s business, including ramping up production of Chevrolet Silverado pickup trucks in Oshawa, Ontario)
Windsor, Ontario — a major vehicle manufacturing hub directly across the border from Detroit, Michigan — is getting a $5 billion CAD ($4 billion USD) investment for a 45 GWh battery manufacturing plant (also a first for Canada!). The plant will be built by a joint venture between Setllantis and LG Energy Solution. It’s unclear exactly how much money the relevant municipal, provincial, and federal governments shovelled into this project, but the amount is somewhere in the “hundreds of millions of dollars”
Honda is also getting in on the Ontario x Canada spending frenzy. They’ll be getting $263.2 million CAD ($208.4 million USD) to be exact. This money, along with another $1 billion CAD from Honda itself, will be spent upgrading the carmaker’s Alliston, Ontario plant to produce PHEVs
These developments represent a huge boost for the EV industry in North America, which desperately needs new battery and EV manufacturing facilities to compete with Europe and Asia. If all this seems like a lot of news very quickly, it may have something to do with Canada’s 2022-2023 federal budget being due last week — maybe the feds wanted to have something to show for their plan to invest $2 billion CAD in EV development?
What are early-stage battery startups working on?
The Energy Tech Challengers competition run by Contrarian Ventures has just announced its top 10 battery track finalists working on an array of solutions from software battery management, to upcycling EV packs, to material components:
Addionics: 3D current collector architectures
Allegro Energy: water-based electrolytes for supercapacitors and flow batteries
Betteries: upcycling 2nd-life EV cel
Brill Power: hardware and software solutions for intelligent battery management
Broadbit: advanced lithium and sodium electrolyte formulations
Clean Energy Global: connected and swappable battery modules
Geyser Batteries: supercapacitor developers
Nanom: engineered carbon and silicon electrode materials
Stabl: modular power storage inverters
Watch last year’s finalist pitches here and stay tuned as the 2022 Ultimate Challenger will be announced on April 28th!
Battery startups really are centre stage for investors right now…
🔬 Research News
A 100-year battery
Remember when Jeff Dahn projected that cells cycling in his lab could reach 1 million miles with a lifetime of 20 years? Well, it turns out those cells are still going!
The cells in question are 200 mAh (i.e. small, but not tiny to the point of irrelevance) pouch cells composed of a single crystal NMC532 cathode and an artificial graphite anode. They’ve been cycled over 15,000 times at moderate charge/discharge currents (1C/1C) between the voltage limits of 3.0V and 4.2V — the equivalent of 4,000,000 miles in an EV, and with only ~5% degradation! (It’s crucial to note though that these cells are being tested in somewhat favourable lab conditions and not under real-world EV duty cycles.)
What’s really interesting is if you take these cells and cycle them at even less punishing conditions — 3.8V for the upper cutoff voltage, or about half the capacity of a standard NMC532 cell — you get a cell that can last 100 years, at least according to predictions based on current data.
Even though these cells use cobalt, an element that many companies are trying to eliminate from their supply chains, this data is a testament to the durability and longevity of single-crystal NMC532 cathodes. Longevity that could result in less cobalt being used overall compared to shorter-lived NMC811 cathode batteries.
These projections continue to push our expectations for battery lifetime and second-life applications of EV batteries. In fact, these “century” batteries would almost certainly outlast all the other components in an EV driven to such extremes, meaning you couldn’t drive your EV this long if you wanted to. Jeff Dahn himself is pushing for more vehicle-to-grid (V2G) utilization of long-lasting EV battery packs as a way to take advantage of their incredible cyclability.
Sodium-ion batteries charge fast
RS2E @EnergyRS2E
➡️If you are interested in #SodiumIon #batteries, then check out our last article about methyl acetate as a co-solvent for fast charging Na-ion #battery #electrolytes. @CSElab_Paris @Sorbonne_Univ_ @cdf1530 @TiamatEnergy https://t.co/CHS0C3w81u https://t.co/s9usdLaqPOFrench researchers have published work showing a 10-minute fast-charge for commercial sodium-ion batteries in an 18650 cell format. The trick was tuning the conductivity of the electrolyte by adding a methyl acetate ester that lowers the viscosity so that ions can move through it faster.
Sustainable development of beyond-Li
Au and coworkers have provided some commentary on how stakeholders can work to improve beyond-Li batteries in terms of performance, materials, and sustainability.
If you’re in the battery space, perhaps you can see how your work aligns with these key strategies: high-throughput centralized testing, advanced multifunctionality; design for end of life; target abundant materials and enforce stricter mining and refining practices; resilient local supply and manufacturing; reducing energy demands of manufacturing; clearer labelling and accountability; concerted cooperation policy and legislation with financial incentives.
🚀 Startup Tracker
ONE (Michigan, USA) raises an additional $65m from their $25m Series A to expand R&D and US battery factory.
Coreshell Technologies (California, USA) raises $12m Series A to continue developing battery coating technology.
Altris (Sweden) raises €9.6m (100 MSEK) Series A to scale Na-ion battery cathode material, Fennac, to 2,000 tonnes.
Swobbee (Germany) raises a $6.5m Series A to commercialize battery swapping for micromobility vehicles.
Bonnet (London, UK) raises $5.5m (£4m) for EV charging in UK/Europe.
Ligna Energy (Sweden) raises €1.3m Series A to develop batteries made from forest/wood-based materials commercialized from Linköping University.
Zoolnasm (China) raises new funding for sodium-ion batteries R&D (Zoolnasm uses a Na2Fe2(SO4)3/C composite high voltage platform).
Blue Current (California, USA) emerges from stealth mode with new solid-state battery.
Liminal (California, USA) raises an $8m series A and rebranded from Feasible to commercialize ultrasound battery diagnostics.
🎧 On our reading/listening list
Catalyst Podcast: When will batteries take over the world?
Sarah Constantin: Predicting growth in the battery industry
Kent Griffith: Solid-state and Li-metal industry highlights
Helmholtz Institute Ulm: Prof. Dr. Maximilian Fichtner - Batteries for Electric Vehicles
CBC News: Which dollar-store batteries stand up to big-name brands, and which should you avoid?
Intercalation Station: Gaël Mourouga text mined Reddit for some insights on energy storage
Intercalation Station: A Battery Taxonomy — our take on various battery chemistries and the way they’re categorized
The Deep End: LowerCarbon Capital’s Clea Kolster talks about trends in climate tech
Nanoramic: Electrode Manufacturing: Comparative Analysis of Wet & Dry Production Technologies
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