Volts podcast: battery analyst Chloe Holzinger on the possible futures for lithium-ion

Welcome back, my Volts friends, to the Battery Week that never
ends. (Just kidding — this is the last of it.)


For several weeks now, I have had my head buried in batteries,
specifically, lithium-ion batteries: how they work, why they have
taken over so fast, what different varieties are competing for
which markets, and where innovation will take them in the future.


Even with as many PDFs as I’ve read, I'm still learning every day
just how much I don't know. I'm not going to lie: I still have
the Wikipedia page for lithium-ion batteries open in a tab.


So I thought it would be nice to round out battery week with
someone who actually knows what they're talking about. To that
end, I was happy to chat with Chloe Holzinger, a battery analyst
at IHS Markit. (At least, that’s what she was when I spoke with
her, and how I introduce her on the pod; since then, she’s become
an Investment Associate with The Engine, a venture capital firm
spun out of MIT.)


Chloe keeps up with lithium ion batteries for a living, so I was
eager to talk with her about the growing market, the raw
materials that make up batteries and their possible supply
problems, the coolest new innovations in batteries, from solid
state to liquid metal, and much more. She was generous with her
time and I learned a ton. Enjoy.


David Roberts   


Hello, everyone, this is Volts and I am your host, David Roberts.
For several weeks now, I have had my head buried in batteries,
specifically, lithium ion batteries: how they work, why they have
taken over so fast, what different varieties are competing for
which markets, and where innovation will take them in the future.
Even with as many PDFs as I have under my belt now, I'm still
learning every day just how much I don't know. I'm not going to
lie, listeners, I still have the Wikipedia page for lithium ion
batteries open in a tab. 


So I thought it would be nice to round out battery week with
someone who actually does know what they're talking about. To
that end, I am joined today by Chloe Holzinger, a battery analyst
with the clean energy technology and renewables team at IHS
Market, a research and analysis firm. Chloe keeps up with lithium
ion batteries for a living. So I was eager to talk with her about
the growing market, the raw materials that make up batteries and
their possible supply problems, the coolest new innovations in
batteries, from solid state to liquid metal and much more. She
was generous with our time and I learned a ton. So without
further ado, let's get to the conversation.


Welcome, Chloe. Thanks for coming on Volts.


Chloe Holzinger


Thanks, David. Thanks for having me.


David Roberts   


All right, let's start maybe just a little bit by telling us how
you ended up in the battery area studying batteries, analyzing
batteries in the battery market. It's a strange niche field;
how'd you end up there?


Chloe Holzinger  


Yeah, I sort of fell into it by accident, as so many people do. I
got my undergraduate degree in Marine Chemistry and my master's
degree in Mechanical Engineering, and happened to find the one
startup in the Boston area that was developing batteries for
underwater applications. So I joined them as employee number six,
got a patent, and worked for them until they got acquired by a
defense contractor. I then hopped over to the market intelligence
field, where I've been covering the broader next generation
battery technology area, and the various end applications for
batteries. And I've been here ever since.


David Roberts   


How long has that been? How long have you been immersed in
batteries? 


Chloe Holzinger  


Total, including the startup experience, is probably about five
years.


David Roberts   


It's been an active time in that field! Let's just briefly talk
about what lithium ion batteries are and where they came from. I
think everybody's heard of them. At this point, they've kind of
gotten a lot of hype, but maybe tell us when they entered the
market, their market development and why they're kind of reaching
this crescendo of hype right now. 


Chloe Holzinger  


Sure. So I can provide a very brief history here. Lithium ion
batteries were kind of invented separately at different stages by
different companies. If I remember correctly, Kodak did some
innovation on actual tape casting, which is the process that's
used to actually make lithium ion batteries. Some of the core
lithium ion battery technology itself was actually developed at
Exxon way back when; they just kind of sat on that. Then some
other different key breakthroughs were also developed at
different corporations; I think Sony was one of them as well. I
may apologize if I got any of that wrong. But they really were
initially commercialized for the consumer electronics
industry. 


Then smartphones and computing power got much better, laptops
became more commonplace, they were able to eventually make the
jump from consumer electronics and these small applications, to
electric vehicles, whether you're talking about a Tesla or Toyota
hybrid, lithium ion batteries have been pretty crucial. And now
we're seeing them used in all these different kinds of electric
mobility applications, as well as the grid storage space.


David Roberts   


What was the first time they showed up in an electric vehicle?
Because, just intuitively, the leap from a laptop to electric
vehicle seems like a pretty far leap. Who had that idea and made
that happen the first time? 


Chloe Holzinger  


You know, I don't actually know the exact history, but various
people have been trying to make electric vehicles for a really
long time. It's just before they were trying with lead acid
batteries. So there were a few electric vehicle prototypes in
Jimmy Carter's time, and they obviously didn't really go
anywhere. As much as people have lots of lots of opinions – and I
certainly do as well – about Elon Musk, you got to credit Tesla
for really making the electric vehicle really sexy and popular
again. 


David Roberts   


Is it fair to say that Tesla, back in the Roadster era, which I
guess was like 2008 or 2009, that that's kind of what kicked off
the current frenzy of development? Or do you think it was
inevitable?


Chloe Holzinger  


I think both. I think Tesla was really there. Right place, right
time, right idea, which is a pretty tough combination to come up
with. I think regardless, you're seeing electric vehicles really
rise in all different parts of the world and different companies
really leading the charge. And it's such an integral part of
decarbonizing transportation and industry. You know, if it wasn't
for Tesla, I'm sure it would have been some other company. But it
happens to be this particular American company that really got it
started here in the States at least.


David Roberts   


So, what's so great about lithium ion batteries? Let's just, just
briefly kind of look at the chemistry in the materials. We had
lead acid batteries, we had nickel metal hydride, nickel cadmium
batteries; batteries have been around. So, at the sort of the
chemistry level, what is it about lithium ion batteries, that's
so great, that has allowed them to colonize these markets?


Chloe Holzinger  


I could wax poetic about lithium ion batteries. A lot of what I
do in my various market roles is talk about all these other non
lithium chemistries that people are trying to develop. And there
really isn't a better alternative to lithium ion batteries for
electric vehicles. Lithium ion batteries are exactly the right
combination of energy density, it has good enough cycle life,
which means that it has a fairly good battery life, it has great
power density, it's able to charge in a reasonable amount of
time, you know, all of these different factors. There are
certainly some safety issues, but they're pretty safe. All of the
other different kinds of battery chemistries out there, they have
various strengths and weaknesses, but they're really unable to
compete on all of those fronts for a vehicle application. 


You have these various different grid alternatives like flow
batteries, some of which use vanadium or zinc. Those are really
big and heavy; they are not light enough, simply, for a vehicle
application. Lead acid batteries –  you replace your lead
acid battery every few years or so in your car. It doesn't have a
great cycle life; it certainly doesn't have a strong enough
energy density in order to fully electrify a car with a
reasonable all electric range. There's really just no competition
with lithium ion batteries for mobility applications.


David Roberts  


Does that have something to do with lithium itself, just as a
material? I mean, is lithium itself the secret sauce?


Chloe Holzinger  


In some ways, yeah. If you'd whip out your handy dandy periodic
table that I know everybody carries around with them, lithium is
towards the top [left] of the periodic table, which means that
it's one of the lightest elements.


David Roberts   


So it's top left, I'm checking here. It looks like it's the
[third] lightest material. 


Chloe Holzinger  


It is, and right below lithium should be sodium. I haven't
completely disappointed my chemistry teachers. Even if you go to
that one row below lithium, that's a much bigger atom, and that
bigger atom means that the energy density of that battery system
is going to be smaller: you're going to have less ion exchange
per kilogram of material. So the lightness of the lithium atom or
element or ion is definitely a part of what makes lithium ion
batteries superior to so many other different battery
technologies. 


There are a few other different arguments here–there are some
batteries that are multi-valence, in that they exchange a couple
electrons instead of one electron, but those are still extremely
early on in their development.


David Roberts   


Well, let's talk about the lithium ion battery market then. So
you said, they sort of grew and completely ate consumer
electronics, and then have jumped up and basically now
dominate  EV's, I think. So what's the sort of lay of the
land on lithium ion – where they're being used, what's driving
all of this development and innovation?


Chloe Holzinger  


It's really the electric mobility space. Lithium ion batteries
today are definitely good enough for an all electric vehicle, as
we're clearly seeing. There are a few different factors that are
driving further innovation in this area. So first is that
automakers really want to be able to rely on this lithium ion
battery value chain for the long term. There are a variety of
different questions; whether or not they're valid is another
point, but there are a lot of doubts about whether or not various
key metals are able to scale up their production to meet some of
these astronomical projections that automakers have around
electric vehicles. Some of the crucial ones are nickel, cobalt,
and lithium. There's a lot of innovation right now around
developing technologies that are more robust against some of
those fluctuations in key metals’ supply, demand, and pricing.


David Roberts   


I know they're expected to grow; every chart you see has the line
shooting up into the right. But in terms of scale, compared to
current nickel or cobalt demand for batteries, are we looking
down the road at 2x, 10x, or 100x? When people are daunted about
the scale of these metals, what do we mean by scale exactly? What
are these projections?


Chloe Holzinger  


I think right now, for scale, all electric vehicles are 2 to 3%
of annual new car sales. Automakers are saying that they're going
to go all electric by 2035 or something, and California wants to
ban ICE [internal combustion engine] vehicles by 2050.


David Roberts   


Washington actually just said no new ICE vehicles sold after
2030.


Chloe Holzinger 


Yeah, I mean, that's even more aggressive. And so to even meet
that kind of target, you're talking some pretty dramatic scale
ups of these upstream industries. In the lithium industry,
lithium ion batteries were something about 30% of the total
lithium market before electric vehicles took off, when it was
really just consumer electronics. Today, 65%-67% of all lithium
products go into lithium ion batteries, with the remainder being
like glass and pharmaceuticals and all of these other kinds of
niche applications. The lithium industry is really being driven
by the lithium ion battery market. The nickel and cobalt
industries are a bit different. But that's just [?????]


David Roberts   


Is this driving prices up? I mean, with all this new demand for
lithium, has price become a problem yet, just for the raw
material?


Chloe Holzinger  


No, not for any of the raw materials really. But right now,
cobalt is really both the most expensive battery raw material,
and the most well known to be sustainably problematic, whether
you're talking about the human rights issues or the mines
themselves. There's been a lot of coverage on the issues with
cobalt mining.


So there's been this effort over the past several years to move
away from cobalt, because of these primarily price and
sustainability reasons, but also because there are simply better
technologies out there than some of these high cobalt
chemistries. There are a ton of different battery chemistries and
a ton of different lithium ion battery chemistries. And there are
strong advantages to battery chemistries that don't use cobalt on
the energy density front, on the cycle life front for some
chemistries; there's just a wide diversity of chemistries out
there that really make it possible for automakers to pick and
choose what types of lithium ion batteries they really want to
use for which models.


David Roberts   


Let's get into some of those variations and I'm curious about the
sort of variations in chemistry and also sort of like what
performance sort of advantages and disadvantages come with us
with these different chemistries. 


So, the two sort of dominant chemistries, right now, or what have
been for a while are NMC and NCA. NMC has nickel, manganese, and
cobalt with its lithium, and NCA has got cobalt and aluminum.
Both those notably involve cobalt. I know there's been some
effort just within those categories to sort of change the
proportions and shrink cobalt. Who's doing that, and what does
that involve? What do you lose by losing cobalt, and what do you
need to compensate?


Chloe Holzinger  


Pretty much everybody's working to reduce the amount of cobalt in
these batteries. The NCA technology is really almost exclusive to
Panasonic and Tesla, and they're currently really the only NCA
mass producers. So NCA batteries are therefore used predominantly
by Tesla for its electric vehicles, and they're not used at all
in grid energy storage systems.


David Roberts   


And that's because they're extremely high energy density right?
Is it something to do with the aluminum?


Chloe Holzinger  


Yes, they are very high energy density, and the Tesla Giga
factories have been struggling to keep up with Tesla demand for a
few years now. So even if there was demand for NCA batteries and
energy storage systems, there just isn't supply for that. For
Tesla in the NCA chemistry, they've been able to reduce the
amount of cobalt in their batteries from 20% to 10% now. So
they've been able to significantly reduce the amount of cobalt in
those systems. 


For NMC, you know, this is the most commonly used cathode
formulation in lithium ion batteries today. And as you noted,
there are many, many different NMC formulations with varying
ratios of those key nickel, manganese and cobalt components. This
is where, to your question, it gets very interesting, in terms of
varying the amount of cobalt. The early versions of NMC had equal
amounts of nickel to manganese, cobalt, or NMC111. And the
technology has since progressed to now, where there's a lot of
talk and support for high nickel cathodes, which would be eight
parts nickel to one part manganese to one part cobalt. So that's,
again, if you're thinking about the ratios, dramatically reducing
the amount of cobalt there, and the benefit is that these high
nickel cathodes enable much greater energy densities. But the
converse, the trade off here, as you noted, is that these high
nickel cathodes are a bit less thermally stable than the lower
cobalt cathodes, and that can impact cycle life and safety. So
some of the reason why it's been a bit more difficult to
commercialize these high nickel cathodes for mass produced
electric vehicles, outside of China, is that some of these
batteries need extra safety features at the pack level in order
to counteract some of that increased thermal instability.


David Roberts   


Right. And when you add cooling systems and whatnot, you add
weight and thus, lose a little bit of your energy density
advantage.


Chloe Holzinger


Right, exactly. 


David Roberts


But the NMC 811 chemistry, that's the thing now, right? It was a
GM that just sort of debuted that fairly recently. I thought it's
all it's all the rage. 


Chloe Holzinger  


Yeah, it's definitely a thing. It's been used in various electric
vehicles in China for a year or two now, maybe a bit longer. And
as you noted, it's definitely made its way outside of China as
well. Even Volkswagen says that they are planning on using high
nickel cathodes in their luxury vehicles. 


But, at the same time, you've also seen the rise of this other
chemistry called LFP which is lithium iron phosphate, which has
the lowest energy density compared to NMC and NCA, but it doesn't
have cobalt and its core feedstocks, Iron and phosphate, are much
easier to procure and much less vulnerable to price spikes than
nickel, manganese or cobalt.


David Roberts


Right. And the loss of energy density for these LFP batteries–is
that mainly because of the loss of nickel, just because iron and
phosphate just won't hold as many ions as nickel? Is it that
simple?


Chloe Holzinger  


It's a little bit more complex than that. It has to do partially
with the cathode crystal formulations and really the cathode
structure, which I really don't think I could explain at an
intelligent level. You know, suffice it to say that LFP is
structured entirely differently from NMC and NCA, and that
different structure isn't able to hold as many lithium ions in a
small enough space as NMC and NCA. And, iron’s heavy. These are
not necessarily light batteries. 


But there have been innovations in pack design. With LFP, one of
its advantages is that it does have better cycle life and it does
have higher safety performance than NMC and NCA. We saw last June
that BYD released a new battery pack architecture that removed a
bunch of the safety features that were in there for NMC and NCA,
and this pack architecture is specifically for LFP batteries in
electric vehicles. At the pack level, these LFP batteries do
achieve very competitive energy densities such that Tesla can use
an LFP battery pack in its vehicles in China, and have those
vehicles really achieve very competitive ranges and energy
densities, compared to its NCA batteries back here.


David Roberts   


Right. I think in the Tesla battery day presentation, I believe
the way they put it was that LFP–just the chemistry–has 50% of
the energy density of their high nickel chemistry. But at the
pack level, you get 75% of the range, because of the lack of
safety and cooling, and everything. VW actually said something
similar with that–they're going to use LFP in their lower end,
sort of workaday cars where you don't need energy density. 


Let's just pause here and talk about energy density for a minute.
Energy density – tell us what energy density is, and why it's so
prized in these applications.


Chloe Holzinger  


Yeah, so energy density is basically, very simply, the amount of
energy you can cram into a particular kilogram or volume of
space. So there's gravimetric energy density and volumetric
energy density. You want more energy in that set unit, because
then that extends the vehicle’s range, if you're talking about a
vehicle application. So higher energy density batteries are able
to go further, drive further between charges. And range anxiety
is really one of the key things that particularly Americans cite
as one of the reasons why they're not interested in buying an
electric vehicle. They're concerned about not being able to
easily drive to visit family or friends, or their annual trip to
their favorite vacation spots, or go skiing. You know, there are
so many different things to do in this country, and some of them
are pretty far away. EV charging station networks are continuing
to be built out, but people are still citing range anxiety as one
of the key inhibitors for them to actually commit to an electric
vehicle.


David Roberts 


Right. So when we talk about energy density, we're mostly talking
about range. We're just talking about how much energy you can
cram into the battery in the same space. 


I had this in a separate section, but we're into it now. Let's
distinguish that quickly from power density, which is a slightly
different thing. Can you tell us what power density is?


Chloe Holzinger  


Yes. Energy and power are like two sides of the same coin. So,
energy is basically the total amount of, let's say, electrons in
a given volume in a battery, for example. So your battery pack
will have a very specific energy capacity. Power is the rate at
which those electrons leave that battery to go do other things.
So power density really refers to how quickly can you get that
energy out of the battery, how fast those electrons leave.


David Roberts   


Oomph Is the word I use. 


Chloe Holzinger  


Yes, exactly. With lithium ion batteries, they do have their own
particular variations in power density. But a lot of that ends up
being irrelevant when you put it into a pack. You're seeing a lot
of different pack architectures; there's some high voltage pack
architectures that are more efficient now. And so, the power
density isn't really something that folks are optimizing for at
the moment.


David Roberts   


Isn't that, though, what gives you your zero to 60 in two
seconds, or whatever it is they're saying now? 


Chloe Holzinger  


That really doesn't really have to do with the battery chemistry
so much. Just like you can fast charge your car, you can
definitely discharge your battery pretty quickly if you want to.
It's just whether or not that harms your battery system. So there
has been some research on better enabling fast charging for
electric vehicles.


David Roberts   


Right. So fast charging, it's just for the flip side of power
density, right? It's like how quickly you can release the energy
and how quickly you can accept it. Is that sort of together?
Those are kind of the same thing?


Chloe Holzinger  


Yeah, yeah. The flip side is that if you discharge your batteries
super quickly, you can, A) harm the lifetime of your battery, and
B) then that impacts your range, because there's fewer electrons
in your battery then. So that's why your hybrid, or I guess my
little Honda Insight, has an Eco Mode, where it controls how fast
you can accelerate and things like that.


David Roberts   


Oh, interesting. And how is that Eco? Is it just Eco because it
makes the battery last longer?


Chloe Holzinger  


Sure, I’m pretty sure that's the only thing it does. It does seem
to impact my air conditioning, too. But I'm not entirely sure
what good Eco Mode does, except I get five stars if I do well.


David Roberts   


So, obviously, energy density is dominating in the EV space,
since most of what people want out of an EV these days is greater
range, and that's kind of what people are pushing toward. So I'm
sort of curious, EVs are by far the biggest market for these
batteries, so my sort of assumption is that whatever the EV
market wants, that's what's going to drive innovation. And sort
of whatever the EV market ends up choosing is just going to scale
up so big and get so cheap that it's going to be cheaper for
other applications too. 


So I guess what I'm asking is, outside the EV space, what are the
other applications for lithium ion batteries, maybe where energy
density is not the prime consideration? Are there other factors
that developers and researchers will be chasing, sort of other
performance characteristics other than energy density?


Chloe Holzinger  


Yeah. So I think what's important to clarify is that, range and
energy density, those are what consumers want. But what
automakers want is a reduction in costs. And really, that's what
every sector wants. They don't want to pay too much for the
battery. So some of these high energy density technologies that
are really cutting edge and technologically incredible, some of
them are really expensive, and it's hard to see how those costs
can come down. And so there will likely always be some kind of
market for those extremely high energy density technologies, but
it's still a huge open question on whether or not those
technologies will even be used in electric vehicles beyond the
luxury vehicle segment. You even really see those different
chemistries in an economy car. And I think from the past couple
battery power day announcements by Tesla and Volkswagen, they're
not planning on those high energy density batteries being used in
most of their vehicles. They're looking at tailoring their
vehicle battery strategy to some of these cheaper chemistries
that are more robust to price bikes. 


And, to answer the other half of your question, when you're
thinking about the impact of these automotive trends on other end
uses for batteries, whether that's consumer electronics or energy
storage, you see a couple different things. So for consumer
electronics, that's a market that pretty much at this point
scales with population growth. Everybody has a laptop, cell
phone, some people have multiple, and the battery technologies
for those systems are pretty stable. Those are not really where a
lot of the cutting edge innovation really is at this point in the
battery world. 


For the energy storage market, the energy storage market has
fluctuated in what battery technologies it will use, depending on
what's available, and how much they cost. And so this recent
increase in LFP demand in the automotive industry, for example,
has actually caused a shortage of LFP battery availability in the
stationary storage sector. And this is definitely temporary. I
don't really want to scare anybody –


David Roberts   


It's just manufacturing capacity, right?


Chloe Holzinger  


Right. I mean, if you think about it, electric vehicles are like
90% of the battery market. So if you are a battery manufacturer,
and an automaker comes up to you and says I want you know, this
huge amount of LFP batteries, are you going to go fulfill that
order? Or are you going to go, “No, I'm committed to these other
orders that are much smaller for these other particular
applications.” Sometimes they'll commit to the energy storage
contracts that they have, and sometimes they'll say, “Well,
actually, this is really tempting, I'm just going to go with this
much, much bigger order.” 


And there are a lot of efforts to increase manufacturing capacity
for LFP batteries at the moment. But for the short term, first
half 2021, it's been basically impossible for stationary energy
storage companies in the US to order new LFP batteries for
systems this year.


David Roberts


Interesting. Let's talk about storage briefly. In EVs, obviously,
energy density is a big thing, because you want to go a long way.
What are the sort of performance characteristics that you're
selecting for, in say, a home storage battery–a Powerwall or some
variant? What do you want out of that battery?


Chloe Holzinger  


The fascinating thing with the grid storage sector is that,
unlike electric vehicles, every application is really different.
Comparing an economy car to a luxury car, you might say, one
person does city driving, and the other person likes to do long
treks or whatever. But comparing a home energy storage system to
a utility-scale solar plus storage system that's a gigawatt in
scale, those are completely different systems, with completely
different demands and needs. That utility scale system is
probably going to want to cycle once a day, twice a day, maybe.
And that's a lot more often than you would charge your car;
that's a pretty heavy use case. And, in the US, we have a lot of
land here, so footprint isn't really a huge issue. 


Whereas, in your home, you really want a small system that’s very
safe because it's in your house, and you want to make sure,
ideally, it's paired with a solar roof. I think Tesla right now
has just said that they aren't selling any home batteries without
solar. But that's probably not going to charge and discharge as
deeply as a commercial, industrial, or utility scale battery.


David Roberts   


So for a big grid battery, then, maybe you don't care so much
about energy density, because space is not as prized like volume
is. It's okay to be a little bigger, and it's okay to be a little
heavier as long as you're very resilient, or have a high cycle
life, right? So, if I'm going shopping for a battery purely on
cycle life, where do I look? Who's the leader there?


Chloe Holzinger


Yeah! Some of it's also just discharge rates. Really the only two
battery chemistries right now that are really used in stationary
storage applications are LFP chemistries and NMC chemistries, and
not necessarily high nickel NMC like 811 formulations – it's like
NMC 532 or 111. They're not the ultra high density, lower cycle
life chemistries. 


Among those three chemistries, if you're talking the two
different NMC formulations and the LFP, that pretty much covers
the vast majority of stationary storage systems. There's much
less diversity in chemistries in the stationary energy storage
market, in part, because there's different needs than the
mobility market, and a lot of the efforts to make new
technologies for lithium ion batteries are focused on the needs
of the mobility sector and not necessarily the needs of the
stationary energy storage sector. 


And so you see that these non-lithium alternative batteries are
almost exclusively targeting the stationary energy storage sector
because there are so many discrete niche applications that maybe
lithium ion isn’t best suited for. In an ideal world, one of
these non lithium alternatives, would be able to find a place in
it. So an example is some of this long duration seasonal storage
that people are talking a lot about now. California, in
particular, has been supporting these through grants, and various
Community Choice Aggregators are supporting these through RFPs.
Those types of seasonal duration, really, really low discharge
systems, enormous systems for meeting those various occasional
needs, [lithium batteries] are not appropriate.


David Roberts   


Enormous systems, that may only charge and discharge like, once a
season - once every couple of months.


Chloe Holzinger  


Yeah. And so for those systems, lithium ion batteries are way too
expensive. You could hypothetically, still do it with a lithium
ion battery; it's technically feasible. But you would never want
to – it would be extraordinarily expensive. And so you are seeing
a bunch of different technology developers developing entirely
different systems for long duration storage specifically, that
are using various different kinds of low cost feedstocks. And
they're claiming we'll be able to meet those types of needs at
reasonable capital expenditures.


David Roberts   


Right, let's return to EVs real quick and look at a few of the
sort of more hyped, cutting-edge technologies that are coming
along, see if we can figure out if any of them are really going
to change the game, as they say. 


Let's talk about one that I think everybody's heard about at this
point, which is solid state batteries. Maybe just tell us, what
is a solid state battery and why would you want to make one? And
is it in fact going to [make a huge difference?] I mean, I've
been immersed in batteries for weeks here and I have read an
enormous array of very strong opinions about the future of solid
state batteries, all of which are mutually contradictory. So
maybe you can just give us your sense of sort of, what is solid
state, why is it so hyped, and will it revolutionize batteries
all over again?


Chloe Holzinger  


Yeah, yeah, definitely, there's definitely a variety of opinions
here. And really what solid state refers to really just means
that the electrolyte and separator in an all solid state battery
are replaced with one solid material that you know, is non
flammable, that doesn't use the same materials as today's
incumbent electrolytes and separators do.


David Roberts   


We should just pause and note that most of the incumbent
electrolytes are liquid, some form of goop– 


Chloe Holzinger


Liquid or gel.


David Roberts


–which tend to be flammable, among other things, which is part of
the problem.


Chloe Holzinger  


Yes. That’s really where the safety concerns around lithium ion
batteries come from. It's because of these flammable
electrolytes.


David Roberts   


So you replace the electrolyte with a solid material that
obviously gets you safety, since the solid material won't catch
fire. But what else? What else does it do? 


Chloe Holzinger  


That's really it. That's the definition of a solid state
battery. 


David Roberts   


But don't they also improve energy density, though?


Chloe Holzinger  


So this is where it gets tricky. Because for a long time, people
thought that in order to use a lithium metal anode, which is
really a much higher energy density than today's incumbent,
graphite anodes, you really need a solid electrolyte, because
when lithium metal anodes charge and discharge, lithium plates
back onto the anode. And so there's a risk of the lithium plating
unevenly on that anode.


David Roberts


Dendrites!


Chloe Holzinger


Yep. And these branch-like dendrites can short the system and
cause the battery fires; you really don't want dendrites. 


David Roberts   


This was an interesting fact, I just learned in my research,
which I'll insert here, is that using solid lithium metal as an
anode actually preceded lithium ion batteries. And it was these
problems, namely, the formation of dendrites and such, that
actually led researchers to say, well, let's put graphite on top
of the lithium. And that way the ions can nestle in the graphite
or intercalate in the graphite. They won't be able to hold as
many, but they'll be stable, and it won't have these problems of
dendrites and etc. So it's sort of interesting that the solid
metal anodes are coming back. Like, they were around in the
1970s, and they're coming back; it seems like everything comes
back eventually in the battery world. 


Chloe Holzinger  


Yes. And lithium metal anodes are really the key to maximizing
energy density in lithium ion batteries. And for a long time, a
lot of people thought that you could only use them with a solid
electrolyte. What we're finding now is that that's not
necessarily true. You're starting to see a lot of other startups
that are using lithium metal anodes with liquid electrolytes –
Scion power has been doing it for a long time. And Cuberg, which
was just acquired by Northvolt. These battery developers aren't
using a solid electrolyte and are still achieving the same types
of cell level energy density that the solid state battery
developers using lithium metal anodes are also achieving.


David Roberts   


Well, why wouldn't you want to use a solid electrolyte though?
Are there considerations governing why you choose one electrolyte
or the other? 


Chloe Holzinger  


So the solid electrolyte benefit is that added safety, right?
You're not going to get that added safety with any kind of liquid
electrolyte.


David Roberts   


Right. I guess I'm just wondering, why isn't everybody sort of
herding to solid electrolytes if they're safer? Is there is there
a drawback of some kind?


Chloe Holzinger 


Yes, there are a few. The first electrolytes were made of this
polymer called polyethylene oxides, I think PEO electrolytes, and
these are solid. They're actually in use in vehicles today and
have been for a while, in a few ride sharing vehicles, I think in
Paris. But they need to be heated up in order to actually achieve
the kinds of ionic conductivities, in order to basically allow
the battery to charge and discharge efficiently. And that
external heater impacts the total battery efficiency. If you have
to use part of the battery output to heat itself, you're having
less battery to drive the vehicle. That's one main issue with
electrolytes is that room temperature ionic conductivity is
difficult to achieve. It's difficult to make a solid state
battery that can charge and discharge at reasonable rates at room
temperature without an external heater.


David Roberts


Interesting. Is there such a thing in the world yet? I assume
some researchers are on that.


Chloe Holzinger  


Yes. So that's really one of the first things that a lot of these
solid state battery developers that you're seeing today have been
focused on and working on, since they were founded. That was
really their first starting goal. And so companies like Solid
Power and Ionic Materials, they both claim to be able to have
very competitive charge-discharge rates at room temperature. The
other factor is, with any new battery technology, it's going to
have a lower cycle life than one of these incumbents. And this is
a case for solid state batteries, for lithium metal anodes, for
some of these high manganese cathode chemistries that you're
hearing about now. These are all new materials that are still in
their development stages. And so because of that, they're not
100% optimized for full functionality yet.


David Roberts   


And that's just a matter of learning by doing right–just making a
bunch of them and figuring out incremental improvements.


Chloe Holzinger  


Exactly. Science is a slow process. And, some of these batteries
are only able to achieve 500 cycles, for example, which is much
less than, you know, the 1000 cycles plus that you would really
need to be qualified for use in an Electric Vehicle. All these
companies have been getting much better over time, Bbt that's
still a weak area for solid state batteries.


David Roberts   


So it sounds like a lot of the hype around solid state is less
about the solid electrolyte in particular, and more about the
combination of a solid electrolyte with lithium metal as an
anode. 


Chloe Holzinger


Exactly.


David Roberts


That's what people think is going to be the next revolution, or
whatever.


Chloe Holzinger  


Right. So if you take a look at QuantumScape, for example,
QuantumScape uses this lithium metal anode. And it claims that it
has spent these past many years of its development really
optimizing and solving the dendrite issue. But QuantumScape uses
a solid ceramic separator, yet also uses some liquid electrolyte
at the cathode. So it's not what I would call an all-solid state
battery. It is a lithium metal anode battery, but not all solid
state. And it's because it uses a solid ceramic separator, it can
be lumped into some of the semi-solid batteries. These different
terms kind of get conflated. 


David Roberts


Semi-solid state.


Chloe Holzinger


Yeah, yeah, I mean, really. So, the lithium metal anode, that is
the part that enables this huge energy density increase that
QuantumScape has been able to show through its data that it’s
shared.


David Roberts   


It's a little weird to me, then that solid state gets all the
hype, since it's really the lithium metal, it's the metal anode
that's really giving you the sexy kind of performance boosts that
you want in the solid state. The electrolyte is a little bit of a
footnote to that. Why did things work out that way? Is it just
people not being careful with their terminology?


Chloe Holzinger  


Yeah, it's a little bit of an artifact from when people thought
that you needed an all-solid electrolyte for a lithium metal
anode. And so “solid state battery” really referred to the
combination “lithium metal anode” and “solid electrolyte”. But
you're seeing companies now that are developing lithium metal
anode batteries without solid electrolytes, and you're seeing
solid electrolyte developers developing batteries with a graphite
anode. So it's not really the uniform term that people assumed it
would be when it started becoming part of the lexicon two to
three years ago, 


David Roberts   


I'm just gonna clarify this for readers who are confused. You
have a lithium metal anodes, which can be coupled with either
solid or liquid electrolytes. And then you have solid
electrolytes, which can be coupled with either lithium metal
anodes or traditional graphite. And so they're sort of separate
in that you got a matrix of possibilities. But the solid state
that everybody's excited about, the one that's supposedly setting
off this whole new round of innovation and everything, that's
mostly about the lithium metal metal anode involved. 


Chloe Holzinger


Yes, yes. 


David Roberts


And so the lithium metal anode holds more lithium ions. And if
you can overcome the dendrite formation problem, you just get a
ton more – they're saying double the energy density, which would
mean theoretically, double the range for an electric vehicle. And
there's a bunch of these that are supposedly, just over the
horizon, right, like mid 2020s? Is all the really sexy hype stuff
still out a few years? Are any of these in use yet?


Chloe Holzinger  


Yeah. A lot of these different battery technologies are still
pretty far away from commercialization. So, probably the most
aggressive companies are saying that they'll be able to use solid
state batteries in an electric vehicle by 2025. And that's pretty
aggressive when you're thinking about how long it takes to get a
battery qualified for use in a vehicle by an automaker. And also,
when you're thinking about the scale in production, if you're
going from a pilot plant to a mass produced vehicle, that's a
huge jump in production capacity. And that's a whole different
hard part of this whole equation. You can make the best battery
in the world at lab scale, but that doesn't really mean anything
if you can't make it in a cell that can integrate into a pack for
an electric vehicle, and then produce the same high quality
battery over and over and over again for many vehicles. That's a
huge stretch.


David Roberts   


Yeah. One of the sorts of considerations I keep stumbling into
is, you've got, at this point, a pretty enormous manufacturing
capacity built up for conventional lithium ion batteries, which
means just a lot of learning by doing a lot of scale, and just a
lot of built infrastructure. And so one of the things I see a lot
is, if you're going to get a competitor to conventional lithium
ion batteries, it's probably going to have to be able to make use
of existing manufacturing capacity. In other words, like, you
can't just require a whole new set of factories, whole new kinds
of factories. So I'm wondering, of these kinds of solid state
batteries, are any of them going to require new factories? Or are
they going to be able to make use of existing manufacturing
techniques?


Chloe Holzinger  


The startups are really pursuing mostly one of two different
strategies. So the first strategy is really becoming a material
supplier for incumbent cell manufacturers and producing their
solid state batteries on today's manufacturing lines. And as you
said, that really is able to leverage existing infrastructure,
which is phenomenal; you can really access that very quickly if
you can integrate yourself into or integrate your technology into
these manufacturing lines. That's a great way to be able to make
a lot of your batteries quickly. Also, some of these
manufacturing lines – these costs quite a lot of money to build.
So many factories and automakers aren't going to want to pay for
new factories that require new facilities. When you have
governments really throwing billions of dollars at a single
factory, if you consider all the amounts of money that the
European Union and various European countries have given to sell
manufacturers to build factories within Europe, it's incredible.
So that's one strategy. 


The other strategy is, if the battery company is unable to
integrate its technology with today's manufacturing lines,
there's really no other option except for that company to become
a cell manufacturer themselves, and build the relevant
manufacturing lines using whatever specialized equipment that
they need. They're going to have to do that themselves.


David Roberts   


And that, to me, just sounds daunting. I mean, to me, it almost
sounds more challenging than the sort of scientific work of
developing a new chemistry, just the nuts and bolts work of
becoming a large scale manufacturer. This other manufacturing
process has been around for decades, and it's been coming down at
cost for decades. I mean do you see any of those possibly getting
anywhere or succeeding?


Chloe Holzinger  


Yeah, I mean, I don't want to pick favorites, or say that
anybody's absolutely not going to succeed, because I could
absolutely be wrong, and I don't want to insult anybody. But I
think one of the factors that is supporting groups in the second
category that want to make batteries themselves – because you're
right, this is in a lot of ways even more difficult than the
actual battery development in the first place. But there are huge
amounts of money out there looking to support solid state battery
development, whether you're talking about automakers, or cell
manufacturers, or chemicals suppliers, or now, financial
institutions. SPACs are here for at least the near term, and the
amount of money available to companies looking to go public by
merging with a special purpose acquisition company, or SPAC is
just phenomenal. You have a valuation of a billion dollars, which
used to be a lot of money for a startup. And suddenly, overnight,
go to a $10 billion valuation.


David Roberts   


Yeah, it's got a bit of a bubble feeling, as I read around solid
state. Do you think that's right? Do you think there's gonna be
some high profile crash and burns happening at some point?


Chloe Holzinger  


I mean, I think it really depends on the company. Not all the
SPACs, the companies in the electric mobility space that have
chosen to go public this way, they're not all equal. There are
some companies that are already making revenue, and that haven’t
really changed their business plan at all since going public.
They're just continuing ahead and saw an opportunity to make a
lot of money really quickly, and who am I to blame them for that?
I actually support some of that strategy in part because there
has been a lot of government support for electric mobility
technologies in a lot of countries but not really in the United
States over the past four years, since 2016. So a lot of these
developers and these companies that are operating in this space,
if they're targeting a market that they're expecting will grow
with these kinds of exponential rates that automakers are
expecting, they want to grow quickly in order to meet that
demand. And going public via SPAC is a quick way to make that
money to scale your process and go get that market. And you don't
want to miss that opportunity.


David Roberts   


There's a lot of money floating out there. 


Chloe Holzinger


Yeah.


David Roberts


Let's talk about one or two more of the areas of innovation. We
hit solid lithium metal anodes, which gets you a bunch more
energy density. We talked about solid electrolytes, which gets
you safety – no more fires. One of the other ones I see come up a
lot that Tesla is leaning heavily on, and that I know some people
are very excited about, is using silicon as an anode. Can you
tell us a little bit about about who's doing that and why?


Chloe Holzinger  


Yeah! So Silicon is a little bit different from these other
different technologies, in that it is much closer to
commercialization than either solid electrolytes or lithium metal
anodes.


David Roberts   


You mean silicon anodes specifically? 


Chloe Holzinger  


Yes. And really when I say silicon anodes, for the most part, I’m
meaning silicon graphite composites. These won't really be pure
silicon anodes. I’ve really yet to see a pure silicon anode
battery that is cost competitive with lithium ion
batteries. 


David Roberts   


Why is the graphite still in there? What goes wrong when you add
more and more silicon? Like, why is it difficult? 


Chloe Holzinger  


It’s not necessarily that it's more difficult, because all
silicon batteries have existed for a while; it's just that
graphite’s way cheaper. If you can use some percent silicon to
increase the energy capacity of your anode, and, the more silicon
you put in your anode the faster you are able to charge your
battery, if you're able to use a relatively high percentage of
silicon in your anode, but still have some graphite in there, you
can get some of the benefits of using a silicon anode without
necessarily the extremely high costs.


David Roberts   


And silicon as an anode – does it work the same way lithium metal
as an anode does, in the sense that the ions plate onto it, or is
it intercalation?


Chloe Holzinger  


No, it's intercalation for these silicon anodes. And I kind of
skipped over it, but there are some technical difficulties with
silicon. With that intercalation, the silicon anodes do tend to
swell, and that swelling can crack certain parts of the battery.
It can impede and change different coatings that you might have
on the silicon anode particles, and swelling isn't good. These
silicon developers for batteries, all of them claim to have
addressed the swelling in some regard, whether they're doing all
silicon, pure silicon anodes, or silicon-graphite composites,
they're all looking to address that main issue. But really, all
of these developers have their own particular kind of material.
There isn't really one dominant silicon-graphite material that's
in use out there. There are a wide variety of companies using
silicon metal, and some using silicon oxide, and others using
silicon nanoparticles. It's just a very diverse field of a lot of
different technologies.


David Roberts   


And didn’t Tesla just announce something kind of new and fancy in
its 2020 battery day? It's going to use just unprocessed
metallurgical silicon, right? So you cut out the processing step,
just use raw silicon and instead of trying to mix all these
chemicals in to prevent swelling, it’s just going to design the
cell – of course, you know, I have this 101 level understanding
of all this so I could be getting all this wrong – but it's
basically going to design the cell to accommodate swelling,
instead of trying to prevent swelling. It's just going to design
around it and allow it, and even in some ways get benefits out of
swelling. I don't know if you know any of the details of what
they're doing. That could be a horrendous summary.


Chloe Holzinger  


I mean, I don't think really anybody outside of Tesla knows
exactly what Tesla's working on. Tesla has a knack for making
these large announcements with very sparse technical details. And
so I also am looking forward to seeing what they are talking
about. I would assume that the combination of all of the
different technologies that Tesla discussed at its battery day –
I think Elon Musk said something along the lines of he's
expecting this to be a three year plan until these technologies
are in use. That seems unnecessarily aggressive. I mean, I
wouldn't consider it a failure of Tesla, that Tesla was
disappointing me in some way if they took a few extra years to do
these things. And I think that we'll probably end up seeing that
on a more of a 2025 or 2026 timeframe. 


David Roberts   


Right. So just to summarize, then on the silicon, you get more
silicon on your anode, you get higher energy density because
you’re housing more ions basically, but silicon’s expensive, and
graphite is cheap. So the effort here is to figure out a way to
use more silicon, thus increasing energy density, without unduly
increasing costs. Is that a fair summary? 


Chloe Holzinger


Yeah, yeah I think I can agree with that. 


David Roberts


These are, to my mind, the big ones within the lithium ion family
that we've hit here: the sort of lithium metal anode, solid state
electrolytes silicon anode, high nickel cathodes, LFP with iron
rather than the manganese and the cobalt. Those are, to my mind,
the big sort of competitive or maybe competitive ones within the
lithium family, but there are, as you say, these other
chemistries that if you talk to people working on them, they say
have advantages. 


One of them is zinc, sort of just using zinc. As I understand it,
just substituting zinc for lithium, and using zinc ions rather
than lithium ions. Do you have any thoughts about zinc batteries,
whether they're going anywhere, zinc ions specifically?


Chloe Holzinger  


Yeah, so zinc batteries. From my understanding, there are a lot
of zinc battery companies out there. So it's possible that you
know, I might not be speaking exactly to the same type of market
that your contact is. But, you know, most zinc batteries are
being developed for stationary energy storage applications. And
similar to what I said about silicon anodes, every zinc battery
company has their own particular technology. There isn't one zinc
technology that's outstripping all of the others. Eos – another
company that went public via SPAC – they're developing a zinc
battery for stationary storage applications. I think they're
using some kind of air cathode? I could be getting that
wrong. 


And then there are others in battery companies that are using a
flow battery architecture, which is usually more common for
vanadium batteries. There are just so many different zinc
chemistries out there. I would be interested to see how these
different systems perform in the field. A lot of these different
technologies are still lab scale, and Eos obviously isn't. But,
how these perform in the field – if they're able to increase
manufacturing scale, and compete on costs with lithium ion
batteries. That’s another area – a lot of these zinc batteries do
use much cheaper chemical feedstocks than lithium ion batteries,
but because they don't have the same kinds of manufacturing
economy of scale as lithium ion batteries, it's still more
expensive as a system to deploy right now.


David Roberts   


One of the zinc guys I talked to, his company’s big scheme is, he
says, he can slipstream into a lead acid manufacturing plant and
just use the same machinery as a lead acid manufacturing plant.
And he wants to go after lead acid batteries, which are still a
$45 billion global market; they're not gone by any stretch of the
imagination. He wants to scale up that way: first, eat up the
rest of the lead acid batteries and then start competing against
lithium ion after that. So yeah, there's just a huge variety of
ways you could go about that. And also sodium. I don't know if
this is even worth saying anything about but I've also read that
you can substitute sodium, which is basically salt, substitute
those for lithium compounds and make sodium ion batteries. Have
any of those poked up onto the actual market yet?


Chloe Holzinger  


Yeah, you know, I think there's really one leading sodium battery
startup for electric mobility applications called Faradion, based
out of the UK. They're targeting both grid storage applications –
a lot of that lead acid replacements – as well as low cost
e-mobility applications, like two wheelers, for example. And,
again, I think that this is a really interesting and compelling
kind of technology. But going back, even to the QuantumScape
example, the hard part is really the commercialization in some
regards. It's not really the hard part, but it's a different
problem and it's a different way of thinking about the same
technology. And sometimes, it takes one group of people to
develop the technology, and another group of people to
commercialize it. There are two very different problems that are
both incredibly difficult. 


David Roberts   


Well this brings me to a sort of an overarching question. In some
sense, this was sort of the question that ended up motivating my
whole dive into batteries in the first place. Which is, you can
find a lot of people in this space, who will say, yes, there's
all these interesting new technologies out there innovating out
there on the cutting edge, finding little tiny niches. And there
are plenty of batteries that can outperform lithium ion on a
particular metric, this metric or that metric, or that can have
some performance advantages. 


But it's that second part, it's commercializing and scaling up,
and conventional lithium ion batteries with conventional lithium
ion manufacturing capacity, have just gotten such a head of
steam, have gotten so big, scaled up so much and are falling in
cost, all the time, as manufacturing capacity, doubles and
doubles again, that it's that lead – not sort of the scientific
lead – but the commercialization head start, this just
unbridgeable.Like, there's no new battery technology that's going
to perform so much better, that it can just sort of magically do
that scale, especially when you're chasing a receding target,
right? Because the lithium ion batteries are forever getting
cheaper and cheaper. 


And as I say in my posts, this is somewhat of a parallel to the
PV in solar. There's all these other solar technologies that can
outperform conventional solar PV on this or that metric. But just
the amount of scale and manufacturing scale that PV has at its
back is just giving it an unbridgeable head start. On that big
question like, and I guess it just comes down to how much you
rate the difficulty of this commercialization, so any of these
sort of innovations we've talked about – your solid state, your
different kinds of anodes – what's your sense of whether they
have a chance? Or do you think that your sort of standard lithium
ion batteries would just have that scale advantage that's
unbeatable at this point?


Chloe Holzinger


No, I definitely think that there is absolutely room for
improvement. The technologies that are likely to succeed and be
implemented on those commercial scales and compete at those costs
will be the technologies that enable cost reductions in other
ways. Whether it's because they're using cheaper feedstocks, or
able to integrate into incumbent manufacturing lines, whether
that's lead acid or lithium ion, leveraging the existing
infrastructure is huge. And, reducing the cost of batteries is
going to be critical for enabling some of these EV adoption rates
that these automakers are expecting. The battery makes up, I
think, 50%, roughly, of total costs for an electric vehicle.


David Roberts


Oh wow, that’s crazy.


Chloe Holzinger


And so in order to really make electric vehicles affordable for
everybody, and not just people who want to go buy Tesla's, you
really need to bring those costs down. You also need to be able
to scale the supply chains for lithium too. Lithium batteries
have these current great economies of scale, but those are going
to need to increase even further. And are our current processes
really robust enough to accommodate some of that demand that
we're forecasting for 2030, 2040, 2050? There are definitely open
questions out here that some of these non-lithium battery
alternatives could be able to take advantage of.


David Roberts   


So there's at least the possibility then, there's at least an
open possibility, that some of these supply mccammon materials,
supply constraints could inhibit lithium ion growth enough to
open a market – a possibility in the market – for these other
chemistries.


Chloe Holzinger  


Sure. I do think that whatever slowdown in the lithium ion supply
chain, if there is one, would only be temporary. Lithium ion
batteries are just so good at what they do, and there's already
so much money in here that it makes sense to simply fix the
problem rather than pivot to an entirely different technology.
But I mean, for alternative technology developers, it's really
critical to make sure that you're competing with the lithium ion
battery technology that you plan to compete within 2025 or 2030,
or whatever you plan to enter the market, and not today's lithium
ion battery technologies or yesterday's lithium ion battery
technologies. 


As these alternatives keep developing, lithium ion batteries are
gonna keep getting better. We're seeing new pack architectures,
new cell architectures, new battery management systems that are
able to increase the usable battery capacity of an incumbent
lithium ion battery without really any changes to chemistry, you
just make the–


David Roberts   


Oh, just a software that’s new and better–Interesting. 


Chloe Holzinger  


So there are just all of these other technologies that are
surrounding the lithium ion battery industry that, you know, are
making lithium ion batteries even more competitive and even more
cost effective, and lowering, you know, pack costs and sell costs
to levels that are useful for economy cars. We're just seeing
improvements really all around.


David Roberts


I was gonna ask this later, but this is a good segue into this. I
read one of these reports, and the first thing I would say is,
I've never looked into a market that is so – I don't know what
the word is – dynamic, uncertain? Like, if you're trying to
compete against the lithium ion batteries of 2025, who in God's
name knows what’s that’s going to be? Who knows what you're
competing with? It's just such an incredible state, there's so
much flailing around in the dark here. There's so little
consensus about what's going to happen. It's a little
crazy. 


But, in terms of lithium supply, I wanted to hit on that again
before we go. We mentioned that cobalt needs to go. I think
everybody agrees that the battery makers agree that over time,
cobalt needs to be shrunk and eliminated. But what about the
lithium supply itself? My sort of vague sense from what reading
around is, there's plenty of lithium in the world. Absolute
supply is not the constraint, but digging it up is pretty gross,
the way we currently do it, and pretty limited. So what's
underway to sort of address those possible supply constraints?


Chloe Holzinger  


So you're right. There's tons of lithium in the world, we're not
really at risk of a lithium shortage by any means. In terms of
pure natural resources, it's really about being able to get that
lithium out of those natural resources in a cost competitive way,
and in a way that you're producing a battery quality lithium
product. Lithium ion batteries require an insanely high quality
kind of lithium. There have been a lot of junior lithium
companies looking to try to tap into the growing lithium ion
battery market, who have struggled in one way or another to
produce a product that is acceptable to the lithium ion battery
industry. Whether or not it's low purity, or it has certain
impurities that are really toxic to lithium ion batteries, it's
hard to produce a high quality lithium product for lithium ion
batteries. There are really only a handful of companies out there
that do it. 


Making sure that those companies are able to scale their
production in a manner that they can address some of these
lithium ion battery demands of 2025, that's definitely a huge
concern, especially since lithium prices were so low for so long,
really, for the past year or two. 


David Roberts


Are they rising now? 


Chloe Holzinger


Yes, they are coming back now. Which is great because it was
really getting impossible to imagine how they could go lower. But
they are coming back and that added capital for the lithium
companies will be really crucial for funding these capacity
expansions. A lot of these expansions take a long time to build,
and even once they're built, they can take a really long time to
actually have the lithium go through the whole process. These
brine ponds in South America – the way that these ponds work, is
that you, very simply, slowly evaporate the water off of the
brine.


David Roberts   


Yeah, really slowly! That's a crazy industrial process where
there's just weeks of stuff sitting there.


Chloe Holzinger  


Yeah, yeah, and it's really sensitive, it's really hard to get
that right! Those evaporation ponds are extremely, you know, they
sound really basic and really simple – you just evaporate the
water. But, it's not so simple. It's a very delicate balance. And
it's just incredible that you know, your smartphone or your fancy
electric vehicle, whatever. The lithium in there, there's a high
probability that came from 18 months of evaporating in South
America.


David Roberts


It's hard to adjust the supply, remotely, on a timely basis if 18
months of evaporation!


Chloe Holzinger  


Yeah! So then the other side of this is that, in Australia is
where a lot of the other lithium comes from, that comes from hard
rock mining. That doesn't rely on evaporation at all, but it does
have significantly higher carbon dioxide emissions than the brine
process. So there is a trade off: you can go faster, but that
requires a lot more energy much faster, you can't just use solar
power. So it’s a lot of carbon emissions.


David Roberts   


It just seems like, I mean, this is my liberal arts major’s,
untutored, gut response to all this, but this just seems like an
area that like surely science can do better than that. At least,
it just seems like something that we haven't put a lot of a ton
of research into yet. And surely, we're going to come up with
something better in the long term. If we need this, like, 10x,
50x of lithium supply, surely we're gonna figure out something
better than 18 months of evaporating? 


Chloe Holzinger


Absolutely. 


David Roberts


Is there anything on the horizon that's more sophisticated?


Chloe Holzinger  


Totally. And, I think the reason why we haven't seen a lot of
those technologies being used commercially yet, is because there
wasn't really a need until, like five years ago. So, again,
science takes a long time, and it takes a while to develop an
entirely new technology. But there are quite a few different
options out there right now – these technology developers that
are targeting the lithium industry, and looking to really extract
lithium from these natural resources at a lower energy capacity
and reduced water consumption, and in a shorter timeframe, with
low CO2 emissions. Those are all crucial factors for these next
generation lithium extraction technologies. But there are quite a
few out there.


David Roberts   


And just quickly on Nickel–what's the story on nickel? Is it
roughly the same, like there's enough in the world, it's just
capacity could be higher?


Chloe Holzinger  


Nickel is a bit of a different story, because the nickel industry
is much, much larger than the lithium industry, and lithium ion
batteries make up a very small part of that nickel demand.
Nickel’s used in a lot of alloys. I think it's used in steel
manufacturing, for example. Making sure that there's enough
nickel also for the lithium ion batteries, it's a tough situation
to really think about. 


David Roberts   


Because it sounds like Elon Musk is borderline desperate to find
Nickel. He's out there saying on calls, like, please start a
nickel company. I will give you a guaranteed 30 year contract;
someone please give me nickel.


Chloe Holzinger  


Yeah. And I honestly don't entirely know what he's talking about
there. It may be that he wants somebody to mine nickel
specifically for him, and that's really where he's coming from,
rather than necessarily for the steel industry, which is much
bigger than the lithium ion battery industry.


David Roberts   


Maybe it will just – with Tesla's march towards vertical
integration – maybe it will just open a nickel mine.


Chloe Holzinger  


Yeah. So I think, with regards to really all of these different
technologies, one of the ways that companies like Tesla are
looking to address some of these long term needs is through
battery recycling, because you can recover a lot of these metals
through those processes.


David Roberts   


What a great segue, this was my next question! This is something
I feel guilty about, that I'm not actually writing much about in
my series. And this is, environmentally, a huge part of the
story. So let's, let's talk about recycling, then. Right now, the
sort of amount of lithium ion batteries that need to be recycled
right now, is relatively low, because a lot of the ones that were
in the first EVs are still going. So the problem we're facing now
for lithium ion battery disposal is just a fraction of what's
going to happen once EV's are 50% or 100% of cars, rather than
2%. So what is the current state of lithium ion battery
recycling? Is it done, and what can and can't be recovered from
them? And like how environmentally gross is all of this, I guess
I'm asking.


Chloe Holzinger


Yeah. There are some battery recycling facilities that are
operational today for lithium ion batteries. But what most of
them are doing right now are basically making some of the scrap
materials for manufacturing back into a usable feedstock for
lithium ion batteries. So that scrap recycling is where a lot of
battery recycling is today. And that's great, but it's very
different from the processes required for breaking down a fully
realized lithium ion battery into its constituent components.
Exactly what you said – there really aren't too many lithium ion
batteries that have reached their end of life right now. So we
haven't really seen any of these major lithium ion battery
recycling facilities really be profitable yet because of that
very small total volume of end of life batteries. But, if you can
extract nickel, manganese, cobalt, lithium from these batteries
today, and recycle them into the value chain, that would be an
incredible feedstock for lithium ion batteries. And some have
argued that that could even be a higher quality feedstock than
virgin materials, because you know exactly all of the inputs
going into that system, as opposed to a rock you dug up from the
ground.


David Roberts   


But my sense is that one of the difficulties is that these are
compounds, right? These are not sort of discrete metals on
different parts of the battery, they're compounds. So there's
some chemistry involved in pulling that apart. 


Chloe Holzinger  


There is. I think the leading process that I am not technical
enough to go into too much detail about is called
hydrometallurgical. That's very energy intensive, and does
require quite a bit of sulfuric acid to break down those
components. But I think the two areas, to my mind, that are most
pressing right now about better recycling processes, is that half
the cost of battery recycling comes from the logistics of getting
the battery out of the car and to the recycling facility and then
getting the recycled material to the cathode producer or to
whoever the customer is. Those logistics costs are hugely
expensive, and definitely going to come down.


David Roberts   


That's the kind of problem we know how to solve, right? I mean,
those are solvable.


Chloe Holzinger  


They are solvable problems. They require cooperation. *Laughs*


David Roberts   


*Laughs*. Uh oh, maybe we don't know how to do that. 


Chloe Holzinger  


Say, for example, some European countries qualify used lithium
ion batteries as hazardous waste, versus some other kind of
category, and that creates paperwork. And I had no idea paperwork
could be so expensive, but apparently it is. And, I guess, aside
from logistics, the other part is that lithium ion batteries
today are not designed for recycling. They're not designed yet to
be taken out of a car very easily – it's really difficult to get
it out of a car.


David Roberts   


Right? So yeah, I was gonna ask whether the recycling concerns
are sufficiently large or pressing enough to actually be feeding
back into the kind of innovation and design of batteries. Is
anyone trying to make these batteries more recyclable? Is that a
real effort yet?


Chloe Holzinger  


Not that I have particularly heard of. Although, I think, from a
theoretical perspective, I would assume that swappable batteries,
like those that NIO is working on, would be easier to recycle
simply because you can get it out of the car very easily. But,
with regards to – glue is really hard for a recycler to get
around. I haven't really heard of any cell maker or automaker
talking about using less glue in a battery.


David Roberts 


The zinc guys are quick to say they don't use these compounds.
Lead acid batteries are pretty easy to recycle – you just strip
them apart – and they say zinc batteries are the same, you can
just strip them apart and get almost 100% of your materials back.
That's one of the advantages of the zinc people boast. I just
don't have a sense of whether the market cares about it yet or
whether the market will care about it. 


This is, I guess, a vague question, but just do you worry about
the environmental impact? Every time I bring up batteries on the
internet, without fail, there's a person who comes along and
says, “Oh, yes, but we're mining horrible things and polluting
horrible things. And the whole thing's an environmental disaster
that everybody's ignoring and glossing over because everyone
loves EVs.” I would love for that to be wrong, but I'm not super
confident that it's wrong. What's your general sense of the
environmental impact of this? Is that a big top of mind concern
for you or for the industry?


Chloe Holzinger  


So it's definitely a huge growing interest for the industry,
especially the upstream mining sector, because that's really
where a lot of these concerns really come from. Cathode
production can be electrified, which means that if you use solar
or wind power, you don't have carbon emissions. The cell
production facilities, those also require quite a bit of energy,
but you can use clean energy resources for that as well. 


David Roberts   


It’s really less about energy than the materials really, that I'm
talking about. Just this mining and disposal of materials.


Chloe Holzinger  


So the recycling bit, and the upstream mining bit – those are the
two parts that when somebody is talking about sustainability in
the lithium ion battery value chain, those are the parts that I
would think that they're talking about. Recycling, we're seeing a
lot of government support for this, as well as automaker support,
because if you can get higher quality material through a process
that maybe you own –


David Roberts   


Right, so you're mining your own waste, basically.


Chloe Holzinger  


– that's super attractive. And, from the upstream part, we were
talking about some of these lithium extraction technologies,
there are a lot of efforts there to make that a lot more
transparent and a lot more sustainable as well. So I wouldn't
necessarily throw out some of these concerns offhand, but I don't
really think that they're super relevant to the conversation.
Since there's the idea of sustainability and lifecycle analysis
and carbon emissions in the lithium ion battery value chain, ESG
concerns, these are all things that the lithium ion battery
industry is taking, actually very seriously.


David Roberts   


And you think they're solvable on some on some timescale? There's
no problem for you?


Chloe Holzinger  


Yeah, I mean, it's hard to talk your way around Cobalt. So, the
solution there is just to get rid of the cobalt, or wait for
recycling. But aside from that, there's no part of the lithium
ion battery supply chain that is going to lead to the kind of
disaster like the BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico or the Exxon
Valdez, or any one of these major oil spills that have had all
these kinds of ecological long term consequences.


David Roberts


Yeah, I guess when you're calculating the environmental impact,
you do have to sort of “minus” all the oil and gas impacts that
you are avoiding, right, which is huge?


Chloe Holzinger  


I wouldn't necessarily say minus? I don't want to say that the
lithium ion battery industry is perfect, and that they don't
really have to do anything in order to satisfy that criteria. I
think there are changes that need to be addressed. But I think
that the conversation around “lithium ion batteries and electric
vehicles are just as bad as ICEs (Internal combustion engine
vehicles)”, I think that's kind of a disingenuous argument.


David Roberts   


Okay, I don't want to keep you all day. So just as a final topic,
then, this relates to the supply chain too. Sort of notoriously,
even though more or less everyone agrees at this point that we
are on the front end of a giant explosion of EVs and the EV
industry, the US notoriously has virtually no domestic EV supply
chain. We have virtually no EVs manufactured here; the metals are
imported, almost all the parts are imported, almost the whole
supply chain is imported at this point. And this is something
that lots of people are concerned about. They think in terms of
the whole competing with China, and jobs and a new growing
industry, all that kind of stuff. So part of what Joe Biden's
infrastructure proposal is about, is trying to goose the creation
of a US EV supply chain, both for kind of materials and parts and
for the EVs themselves. What's your take on that? Is that a
doable thing? Is that something that we could stand up really
quick? Or are there structural reasons why it's particularly
difficult or why it hasn't happened?


Chloe Holzinger  


I don't think there are really any structural reasons. I think
it's really about – oh, maybe this is a structural reason, but, I
think it's more about making sure that our policies around clean
energy technologies and electrification are well aligned at the
local, state, and federal levels, and that  those aren't
going to change anytime soon. Part of the reason why we haven't
seen some of these is that industry players fled the US market.
While they do have all of these facilities under construction in
Europe, it’s because the US has gone back and forth a few times
on its EV policies. President Trump did have a lot of support,
actually, for the upstream minerals supply chains, and did sign
some executive orders, looking at the battery minerals supply
chains, and the possibility of bringing some of those here.


David Roberts   


Because there is lithium and nickel here, right?


Chloe Holzinger  


Yep. But some of those efforts were pretty undercut by his
administration's attitude against electric vehicles. And so that
leads to some confusing signals for the industry. And I think
having a well aligned cohesive electric vehicle and clean energy
industry policy would definitely increase the confidence of both
investors as well as industry players that the US market can be
relied upon. So that's one main aspect. 


The other main aspect is that if you take a look at where these
battery industries are, and wherever the minerals operations are,
those companies have all received huge amounts of government
support. I don't necessarily know if the US is really ready to
commit that kind of government funding to battery manufacturing.
I guess we'll see what the Loan Programs Office does at the
Department of Energy (DOE) now. But, in the latter Obama years
and in the Trump times, there was a lot of fear around being
guilty of the next Solyndra. 


David Roberts


Really...


Chloe Holzinger


You're not gonna ever get anywhere if you're always going to be
afraid of that kind of pretty minor failure. And, in some ways
expected, you're gonna have some failures, it's not all going to
be winners.


David Roberts   


I know, the point of the program was to take risks as a whole.
And that's how it was designed and sold. That was the whole
point...


Chloe Holzinger


Yeah, yeah!


David Roberts


Oh, don’t get me started on that... There's definitely going to
be a new Solyndra. I mean, there's definitely going to be a bunch
of failed EV companies and failed battery companies and the like.


Chloe Holzinger  


Oh absolutely. And that's not necessarily a bad thing. This is
kind of what the US is supposed to be very good at – wildly
committing to insane ideas, and some of them panning out. But not
all of them. And that's, you know, there's a reason why we have
such a healthy startup culture in the US, and why a lot of these
US battery startups are being acquired and attracting attention
internationally from Europe and Asia. There's a lot of
intellectual capital here. It's really just about making sure
that there's a reliable steady market.


David Roberts   


Right. And that requires industrial policy of a size and scale
that this country hasn't really has been kind of trending away
from ever since Reagan. That's kind of one of the more
interesting, broader political stories going on right now: is
Biden trying to revive industrial policy, old school industrial
policy of the kind that like China and Germany used to dominate
solar PV? It will be interesting to see whether we're willing to
do that. 


Well, thank you so much for this. There was one final question I
had. And you may not have anything to say to it, but it's on my
mind, because I like to speculate about future utopias. Some of
the reports I've read about lithium ion batteries, about the
innovations possible once you get your solid state, your lithium
metal and your various other advances people are talking about,
like right now, prices are approaching $100 per kilowatt hour.
People are saying we're going to hit that by 2023 or whatever,
which used to be, as I understand it, considered basically
impossible. And now it's on the way, and I'm seeing reports
talking about those numbers, eventually getting down to like $50
per kilowatt hour or 40, or even 30, which is mind boggling to
me. And one of the things that makes me think about it is, mostly
we think about existing applications and sort of like, how do we
make batteries for those, but I'm just wondering if you have a
battery that is $30 a kilowatt hour, what could you do with that,
that we're not even doing with batteries yet? In other words,
like, what are other applications for energy storage that might
open up if we end up with super, super cheap storage?


Chloe Holzinger  


Sure. Yes. First, I'd be very curious to see what kinds of
assumptions are made on those $30 per kilowatt hour batteries.


David Roberts   


I can tell you, it has to do with fluorides, and conversion
rather than intercalation, and a bunch of other speculative
stuff. That is, I doubt it will hit 40 or 30. But even 50, or
even like 70, even 100 is crazy, but like, once you're getting
lower than that, I'm just wondering, what other worlds of energy
storage maybe just haven't occurred to us yet because we haven't
had batteries cheaply? 


Chloe Holzinger  


Yeah, yeah. I mean, I think one application that we're seeing
quite a lot of momentum for is marine vessels, and electrifying
the propulsion systems for marine vessels; particularly, ferries
are good. In the same way that electric buses make a lot of sense
pretty much everywhere: you can predict where the vessel is going
to go, you know exactly what it's going to get there, and you can
charge it at reliable times. So that's one area. 


I think, another area for some of these next generation
batteries, maybe solid state lithium metal anode isn't
appropriate for an economy car – I don't know – but it would
definitely be appropriate for electric aviation and those types
of applications where weight and energy density mean even more
than the mobility sector, or the automotive sector.


David Roberts   


Talk about energy density being prized up in the air - that's
when you need it most.


Chloe Holzinger  


Yes, exactly. Some of these electric aircraft could definitely
benefit from solid state batteries, both from a safety benefit,
because you super do not want that battery to catch fire – you
want to make sure triple share that that battery is very safe
– 


David Roberts   


Thermal runaway has a whole different valence when you're
thousands of feet up.


Chloe Holzinger  


Safety matters a lot more to the aviation sector than then even
to the automotive sector – and energy density as well, as we both
talked about. 


So those are really some of the key markets that I would be most
interested in for lithium ion batteries moving forward. There is
a lot of talk about medical devices and going the other way and,
and looking at smaller and smaller –


David Roberts


Yeah, right, right. 


Chloe Holzinger


Those applications are not really a cohesive group. They all have
different requirements. And that could be a way for some of these
non-lithium, potentially zinc batteries. There are a lot of
different battery options for those different kinds of
devices. 


David Roberts   


Well, so interesting. I've kept you, sorry, longer than I said I
would! I feel like we've only scratched the surface. Thank you so
much for taking all this time and for talking to me. 


Chloe Holzinger  


Yeah no problem! It was a pleasure. 


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