Ep 22 EV battery chemistry with Cormac O'Laoire

[00:00:02] Hi everyone, I'm Ben.

[00:00:04] And I'm Yiou. Welcome to Sustainable Energy Asia Podcast.

[00:00:09] Today we are discussing battery chemistry with Cormac O'Lear,

[00:00:12] Managing Director at Electrios Energy and Head of Strategy at GreenLion.

[00:00:17] After an early career in academics, Cormac settled in Hong Kong for more than 10 years,

[00:00:23] following the development of the battery supply chain.

[00:00:26] In our conversation, we will cover subjects such as the main chemistry,

[00:00:30] NMC, NCA, LFP, the role play by China and Korea in the industry,

[00:00:36] and the latest development of LMFP, sodium iron and solid-state batteries.

[00:00:41] As always, grateful if you could take the time to read and comment on the show.

[00:00:46] It helps listeners to find us.

[00:00:48] Thanks and on with the show.

[00:00:50] Hi Cormac. Welcome to Sustainable Energy Asia Podcast.

[00:00:54] Can you introduce yourself and tell us what brought you to Hong Kong more than 10 years ago?

[00:01:00] Hi Yiou. Delighted to be on this podcast.

[00:01:02] My first Asian-dedicated podcast, I think it's about time.

[00:01:06] I'm Cormac O'Lear. I have Electrios Energy in Hong Kong.

[00:01:11] I've been there since 2012.

[00:01:13] I came to Hong Kong because I wanted to get involved in the battery business.

[00:01:17] It was a fledgling business back then.

[00:01:19] It was mostly, especially for the Western world, was dominated by the Japanese and Koreans.

[00:01:25] But as we all can see now, the Chinese were planning on running out of significant capacity.

[00:01:30] There was a lot of government policies enacted around that time, 2014 and 2012,

[00:01:35] that really spurred the EV battery industry.

[00:01:38] And it was a great place and a great time to be there.

[00:01:41] But originally I wasn't there for EV batteries.

[00:01:43] I was there for consumer batteries.

[00:01:45] There was a big push globally back then with cordless electronic devices,

[00:01:50] so like Hoovers, PowerDrills.

[00:01:53] And there was a certain bar being set by Dyson vacuum cleaners actually.

[00:01:57] They had very powerful cordless vacuum cleaners,

[00:02:00] and it put a lot of pressure on the rest of the industry to do something similar.

[00:02:04] And Dyson had a very high-end battery supplier that was neither Korean or Japanese or Chinese.

[00:02:11] So it was difficult for companies that wanted to acquire batteries

[00:02:15] to either get Japanese or Korean or the Dyson supplier.

[00:02:19] So my role there was I would take companies into China from Hong Kong,

[00:02:24] we'd stage in Hong Kong, and we'd visit a number of Chinese battery companies that no one ever heard of.

[00:02:29] But the major concern for brands back then was buying substandard batteries

[00:02:33] because we didn't want to see fires which would destroy brands.

[00:02:38] So companies are very cautious going into China,

[00:02:41] but we had a great time visiting many of these companies that we see today.

[00:02:46] They were mostly focused on consumer electronic batteries,

[00:02:48] but now they're big names in EVs.

[00:02:50] Great. And you're also the head of strategy at GreenLiang.

[00:02:54] This is a company focusing on battery recycling technology.

[00:02:58] Can you introduce the company and explain what is the problem that this company is trying to solve?

[00:03:06] GreenLiang is in Singapore where you guys are based,

[00:03:09] and I was fortunate to meet them a few years ago and come on board as a strategy advisor.

[00:03:15] And they're in this very complex part of the battery industry.

[00:03:20] For years it was just about building batteries.

[00:03:22] Let's build batteries as cheap as we can.

[00:03:24] And as we saw recently, governments are enacting policies in terms of recycled content.

[00:03:30] The price of battery metals is a big issue.

[00:03:32] And we're digging these batteries out of the raw materials out of the ground,

[00:03:36] and we're determined for them not to end up back in the ground, which was historically the case.

[00:03:41] There was very little money to be made in recycling lithium ion batteries.

[00:03:46] Lithium prices were quite low historically actually that it didn't even make much sense.

[00:03:52] We were just recycling the batteries for cobalt.

[00:03:54] But GreenLiang have a very innovative technology.

[00:03:57] They can recycle all the metals at a very high recovery rate and very high purity.

[00:04:02] And I found their tech quite interesting.

[00:04:05] And coming out of Singapore, which is pretty close to Hong Kong,

[00:04:08] and I really liked it and I was delighted to be part of that business.

[00:04:12] Today we'll talk about battery chemistry.

[00:04:15] Maybe as an introduction, it would be great if you could give us a broad presentation

[00:04:20] about the dominating battery chemistries, like the two broad categories, NMCs and LFP,

[00:04:27] and how they compare.

[00:04:29] Right now we have basically two types of cathode materials.

[00:04:32] We have nickel-based. I call them nickel-based now.

[00:04:35] So that's NMC or NCA.

[00:04:37] And we have the lithium ion phosphate.

[00:04:40] Historically, NMC was the battery of choice.

[00:04:44] I used to work for the Department of Energy back in the US.

[00:04:47] At the time, we were not focused on making the cheapest battery possible.

[00:04:51] We were focused on making the most energy-dense battery at all costs.

[00:04:56] So it was a competition between all researchers every year.

[00:05:00] In papers, the competition was like who could provide the most innovative material

[00:05:05] with the highest energy density.

[00:05:07] Historically, it's nickel-based chemistries.

[00:05:10] And you started off with NMC 333 one year,

[00:05:13] and then another group comes in with 523, the most innovative.

[00:05:17] And then it grew to 721 and 811.

[00:05:20] So it was historically just competition about energy density.

[00:05:23] LFP was around at the time,

[00:05:25] and there was very little interest in it in the Department of Energy.

[00:05:29] So that is 2004 to about 2013, actually, a long time.

[00:05:34] Mostly NMC, and we still see that today in Europe and US.

[00:05:37] NMC dominates in terms of deployment.

[00:05:41] Big appetite for high-energy density batteries.

[00:05:44] The European buyers and the US buyers don't want to give up their 800,000 kilometer range

[00:05:50] they get with the current ICE using diesel or gasoline.

[00:05:55] But we're seeing a real competition between NMC and LFP.

[00:06:00] All the LFP capacity is basically 100% coming out of China.

[00:06:05] So everyone thinks that making LFP, you can get phosphates and iron,

[00:06:09] which is a big part of it.

[00:06:10] But high-purity iron is basically also made in China.

[00:06:13] So the raw materials for LFP are quite difficult to source in both Europe and US.

[00:06:19] And we're more familiar with the NMC process there.

[00:06:23] And there's more established industries, right?

[00:06:26] Other than iron, there's markets already available, LME, the CME,

[00:06:32] pricing for nickel and cobalt, the primary materials.

[00:06:36] The car industry can understand that a little bit, and the battery makers.

[00:06:40] So I think that was one of the reasons why NMC dominated.

[00:06:43] And there was another way.

[00:06:44] That was even the case in China actually,

[00:06:46] because China used to give subsidies based on the energy density of the battery

[00:06:50] to the battery companies and the OEMs.

[00:06:52] So if you made cars with LFP, you would get very little subsidies or none at all, depending.

[00:06:58] And if you made high-energy density batteries, you get subsidies.

[00:07:02] And China scrapped that in 2014.

[00:07:04] And then there was a big flood of LFP, because now there was no need for the EV makers to use expensive NMC.

[00:07:11] They could readily source the LFP batteries.

[00:07:14] And they went.

[00:07:15] And then we saw the innovation of LFP EVs and LFP battery packs.

[00:07:23] LFP has a certain energy density that's very hard to get above what we already have today.

[00:07:27] So how can we get it at the same level as NMC?

[00:07:31] And we did this by using cell-to-packs or removing modules or cell-to-battery,

[00:07:36] which you see with BYD, or removing the cell formats itself.

[00:07:41] So making the batteries as light as possible.

[00:07:43] And so we saw these innovations LFP that we didn't see before.

[00:07:48] And they were purely driven by market forces rather than academic,

[00:07:52] which historically led the battery industry.

[00:07:54] Yeah, that was really the core component that allowed the LFP to gain market share.

[00:07:58] In the EV battery supply chain, since 2023, the mood has been quite low in these markets.

[00:08:04] It's a bit better now actually, but the price of raw material, lithium, nickel, cobalt was really low for a long time.

[00:08:13] And maybe it would be interesting if you can just expand a bit on the drivers of these critical minerals

[00:08:20] and explain why prices behave as they did and why maybe they have recovered a bit nowadays.

[00:08:26] Slight recovery. Yeah, it's looking a little bit better at the moment.

[00:08:29] Battery metals. So you guys remember 2021, early 2022, lithium was skyrocketing.

[00:08:35] I'd calls every day from companies looking to source lithium carbonate.

[00:08:40] They would pay any price.

[00:08:42] There was a real sentiment in the market that we're just not going to have enough lithium available for the next few years,

[00:08:49] right up to the end of 2024, 2025.

[00:08:53] And that was due to this is a new market and it was due to misunderstandings of the market.

[00:08:59] A lot of panic buying is what drove the price up.

[00:09:01] And a lot of analysts got it wrong in terms of how quickly we could increase the capacity of lithium, lithium carbonate.

[00:09:10] And primarily again, China increased their capacity at a phenomenal rate to address the shortcomings in the market much more than anybody envisaged.

[00:09:21] And that led to what we might say is the bust of the lithium price.

[00:09:25] It's not much of a bust because it used to be a lot lower than it is today.

[00:09:28] So it's about 100,000 RMB per ton to 115, I think it is today.

[00:09:33] But around that price and that's still a pretty good price historically for lithium carbonate actually.

[00:09:39] But it dampened the industry a little bit because there was a lot of lithium mines planned in North America, Europe, South America,

[00:09:49] all geared at a much higher price lithium for the actual business and finance of the company.

[00:09:55] So now we've seen lithium hover at low prices for over 12 months,

[00:09:59] and it's called into question the viability of producing lithium outside China at the moment.

[00:10:06] So right now we're relying on subsidies and the IRA.

[00:10:10] But I was talking to an investor recently and when he looks at mining investors,

[00:10:15] when they look at mines, your mines are long term investments, right?

[00:10:18] 25, 30, 40 years.

[00:10:20] They look to see how this looks without subsidies in terms of because we know they're all going to be pulled away eventually, right?

[00:10:26] And it would be interesting to understand also what has been the impact of those low prices

[00:10:32] in the dynamics that you can see between the main chemistries like the nickel intensive one and the LFP.

[00:10:39] Just to understand how the price of the commodities has impacted the evolution of the chemistries.

[00:10:44] We have come back to the EV market, right?

[00:10:46] So historically, EVs were bought by the premium side of the market.

[00:10:52] So high paid all started basically in California was bought by techies, basically high paid Silicon Valley tech buyers.

[00:11:00] And to a certain extent, it's almost still the same way in the US and in Europe.

[00:11:05] But now we see if we want a complete energy transition, we're going to need multiple chemistries.

[00:11:11] And what has not been cracked yet and has been cracked in China is the mass market.

[00:11:16] So there's two things.

[00:11:17] Metal prices could be low, but are they low enough for the mass market?

[00:11:22] So most likely, there's never going to be one chemistry solves all.

[00:11:27] But in terms of nickel pricing being attractive for high nickel cathodes,

[00:11:32] I've not seen that as the particular reason for a company which primarily would be Korean handmakers

[00:11:39] as the particular reason why they're going towards high nickel.

[00:11:42] Primary reason for them still is they want to make a superior product with the safest,

[00:11:48] with the highest energy density, with the longest cycle life.

[00:11:51] And the other thing about difference between NMC and LFP is the ceiling and energy density has been reached with LFP.

[00:11:58] It's not going to go much higher where there's a long way to go to reach the ceiling of NMC.

[00:12:03] And what we're seeing there, of course, is why it's getting higher nickels because they're removing the cobalt,

[00:12:09] as much cobalt as they can out of it.

[00:12:11] Historically, there's another cathode called LNO, lithium nickel oxide.

[00:12:16] And that's got the highest energy density, but it's highly unstable.

[00:12:20] And that's why cobalt and aluminum and manganese were added to that to make it more stable.

[00:12:25] But as we're removing these other elements, we're going back towards the original product, which is LNO.

[00:12:31] But I do not see the low nickel prices as the driver, as opposed to LFP.

[00:12:36] The low prices of those raw materials are the driver.

[00:12:40] But the big problem for LFP is that the lithium price, if lithium skyrocketed again, that was a big problem for LFP.

[00:12:47] And all of a sudden LFP is just as expensive as NMC.

[00:12:51] And now we've got this new market of nickel coming from Indonesia.

[00:12:55] So back in the early 2010s, I was involved in some nickel projects in Indonesia.

[00:13:01] And there wasn't a mention of batteries or EVs back then.

[00:13:05] It was all for the stainless steel market.

[00:13:07] There was no interest at all in nickel from Indonesia for the EV market.

[00:13:12] And that's changed a lot since then.

[00:13:14] But yeah, this nickel coming out of Indonesia is going to keep nickel prices depressed for some time to come,

[00:13:19] which is good news for EVs.

[00:13:22] So we still have to get the price of EVs down to be comparable with ICEs.

[00:13:27] It's still not quite there yet.

[00:13:29] There's artificial reasons why we're there right now in terms of what we're seeing in China.

[00:13:34] There's EV price wars, there's overcapacity of batteries,

[00:13:38] there's battery price wars between CHL and all the other players where basically we might see the battery market conciliate

[00:13:47] where we have four or five big majors in oil and gas production.

[00:13:51] We might have the same globally for batteries as well.

[00:13:54] So there's a lot of companies that won't be able to survive this price war.

[00:13:58] And that's unrelated to the pricing of the base metals.

[00:14:01] And also China and South Korea have been leaders in the global battery production industry.

[00:14:08] So what are the trends that you've observed in battery chemistry in these two countries?

[00:14:15] So the Koreans now are talking about building LFP plants.

[00:14:20] They historically have no experience in making LFP batteries.

[00:14:24] How China got where they are today is they used to hire Korean and Japanese battery engineers in the early 2010s.

[00:14:31] So you go to visit any Chinese battery company, even today them at a certain extent, and their suppliers.

[00:14:36] There's a Korean or Japanese person on the senior staff.

[00:14:40] I think that's changed now.

[00:14:42] We're going to see it go in the opposite way.

[00:14:44] So it's academic drain, going from China to teach the Koreans and the Japanese how to build LFP batteries.

[00:14:49] But talking to the Korean cam makers, they are all in nickel batteries, of course, and nickel cathode materials.

[00:14:57] So now we're going to see 811 as just the standard nickel chemistry.

[00:15:01] 533s are being pushed out.

[00:15:03] 622 will be going up as the majority as nickel cathode material.

[00:15:09] China, as you know, BYD used to do to a certain extent, NMC cells.

[00:15:13] They're all in an LFP now.

[00:15:15] CATL still build NMC cells, but primarily the business is LFP.

[00:15:21] So when people talk about CATL versus LG, I always say LG is the biggest NMC battery maker, a nickel battery maker, and CATL is the biggest LFP battery maker.

[00:15:31] So you could say they're almost unrelated in a competitive sphere.

[00:15:35] Yeah, but the CATL still see the value in NMC and I see them still developing it.

[00:15:41] And the whole recycling industry is based around NMC batteries.

[00:15:46] So to grow further and be sustainable and have full circularity here towards 2050, it makes sense to go keep what NMC,

[00:15:55] because once we had all the materials out of the ground, the battery ecosystem could be almost self-sufficient in terms of recycling to gigafactories.

[00:16:03] So I think there's also a new variant, the LMFP chemistry.

[00:16:08] What I understand is not really at the commercialization stage, but has demonstrated very good potential.

[00:16:13] It would be really interesting if you can illustrate the differences between the LFP and the LFP, and what are the key advantages of the LMFP over the LFP?

[00:16:23] Sure. Lithium iron manganese phosphate. It comes in two versions.

[00:16:26] You can have lithium iron manganese phosphate or you can have lithium manganese iron phosphate.

[00:16:31] That's depending on how much you dope of each of those elements, those metals.

[00:16:35] And so depending how you dope it, you get different performances.

[00:16:38] So if you want to like 60% manganese, 40% iron or you want 60% iron, 40% manganese in terms of properties.

[00:16:46] LFMP is an interesting one. You know, I don't see it at a commercial scale in China yet.

[00:16:51] A lot of talk about it.

[00:16:53] I did speak to two large Chinese battery manufacturers recently, and they don't envisage it having a big share of the market towards the end of the decade.

[00:17:04] There's some problems with LFMP on a technical note.

[00:17:08] One is the one which is one of the problems for LFP historically, which is LFP is not conductive, so it doesn't conduct electrons in and out of the cathode,

[00:17:17] which is difficult when you're running a battery based on electrons.

[00:17:21] So LFP had to be coated and carbon, which is conductive.

[00:17:25] And LFP has to be made in small particle size also for the conductivity.

[00:17:29] LFMP has even worse conductivity than LFP.

[00:17:33] So that has to be addressed. It has worse cycle life still.

[00:17:38] So they're still figuring out how to make it at a mass commercial level actually.

[00:17:41] There's there's like three or four different ways of doing it.

[00:17:44] There's no standard. So in the NMC sector, there's just a standard way of making NMC called co-precipitation method.

[00:17:51] That's it. And everyone does some very never.

[00:17:54] But they see that even LFP, there's a number of different ways of making LFP in terms of feedstock and raw materials.

[00:18:01] And they do differ between the top Chinese LFP producers, cathode producers.

[00:18:07] And they actually vary quite widely depending on which acids you want to use and ease a feedstock.

[00:18:13] And LFP, there's no...

[00:18:17] So in the battery industry, it's better if everything is standardized.

[00:18:21] Basically we have standardized electrolyte. Everyone uses the same electrolyte.

[00:18:25] LFMP, there's no standard of which grade.

[00:18:28] As I said, do we want lithium iron manganese phosphate or do we want lithium manganese iron phosphate?

[00:18:32] There's no standard material yet.

[00:18:35] I don't think we'll see a LFMP battery 100 percent.

[00:18:39] But I do believe that it's certainly V models in China.

[00:18:43] It's been doped in already for some other performances.

[00:18:46] So LFMP has higher energy density in LFP and it has a higher voltage.

[00:18:52] The voltage is 4.1 volts. LFP is about 3.8 volts.

[00:18:57] So at the higher voltage, LFMP can be worked alongside and together with the nickel based chemistry.

[00:19:04] So LFMP can be used with 523 together in the same battery pack or even in the same cell.

[00:19:09] And this will improve the performance of the 523, NMC523 in terms of cold weather.

[00:19:15] So it's easier to get the battery pack to start the car and have the battery pack operating at a higher state of charge.

[00:19:24] So that is the projected view that LFMP will play, which is a substituent to NMC523 and where it lacks in terms of cold weather performance or cycle life.

[00:19:36] That's the thought. But I think LFMP is a little bit away.

[00:19:40] And we're seeing more moves than LFMP in the Western LFP startups.

[00:19:45] That's interesting. I wanted to ask, do you have any views on how this chemistry might take shape in the future and how it will evolve?

[00:19:53] When you develop a product for the battery industry, primarily it's about the supply chain.

[00:20:00] Can you build it and how much is going to cost?

[00:20:03] There's no LFMP supply chain. So no one really knows how much it's going to cost to build that supply chain.

[00:20:09] And then is it worth scrapping the whole LFP supply chain?

[00:20:14] So apparently there's like five million tons capacity of LFP production coming online in the very, very near future.

[00:20:22] So is it worth scrapping all that, which is a lot of it's way more than we need, first of all.

[00:20:27] So is it making economic sense to scrap that for an extra 10 watt hours per kilogram for LFMP?

[00:20:34] You know, that's for economists to calculate. But I can come down to the cost of supply chains.

[00:20:39] And it's quite similar what we're seeing with sodium mine as well.

[00:20:42] There's no sodium mine supply chain.

[00:20:45] And how much will it cost to set that up? And is it worth disrupting all the investments we made in the lithium supply chain?

[00:20:51] So in 2023, we've seen a rise in ultra high nickel batteries.

[00:20:56] Batteries contain over 90 percent of nickel.

[00:20:59] So could you elaborate on the key factors driving this development and the main industry play and then as well as technological advancements that make this possible?

[00:21:09] There's been a lot of developments on the cell level for high nickel.

[00:21:13] Like nickel also means higher voltage. And for higher voltage, we need electrolytes that can be stable at higher voltages.

[00:21:22] So we've been developing additives primarily to go into traditional lithium ion electrolytes that can handle the high voltages and conditions that we see in high nickel.

[00:21:31] This has been driven by the Korean cam makers. So EcoPro, LNF, a few others.

[00:21:38] They've been driving the high nickel. And this is coming again from consumer demand where they want higher energy density cells.

[00:21:46] And this is when you get into the EV markets in US, you like they have bigger cars, right?

[00:21:53] And SUVs. And if you were to equip those cars with LFP, you would have very heavy battery packs.

[00:22:02] It's the same as we want to electrofly airplanes as well.

[00:22:06] Right. So in order to do that, we need higher energy density cells that weigh less.

[00:22:11] So you can never do it LFP, for example.

[00:22:13] So for like really high end premium markets with big SUVs or trucks, it makes more sense to use high nickel NMC cells.

[00:22:23] And this was very difficult to do a few years ago.

[00:22:26] So we've come a long way and this is all against pressure from the market.

[00:22:29] We had to develop new electrolytes. We had to develop new coatings for nickel so that nickel didn't oxidize during production.

[00:22:36] High nickel cam materials. So the very sensitive materials when you have that much nickel in the cathode.

[00:22:42] And so there was other strategies that we used throughout the cell rather than just focusing on making the cathode material.

[00:22:49] But the big one again was the electrolyte.

[00:22:52] You mentioned also previously the sodium ion batteries at N23 that reemerged.

[00:22:59] Can you explain what are the key drivers of this trend around sodium ion batteries and the potential of this chemistry?

[00:23:06] Sodium ion is around as long as lithium ion, but it didn't have the energy density, which was required.

[00:23:14] Lithium ion was used primarily in the early days, especially in the US, in military applications and space applications where you needed high energy.

[00:23:25] One of the projects we were working on was Future Warrior, I believe, which was a soldier who would carry a lot of batteries on him basically and had to be most energy dense and lightest as possible.

[00:23:39] So in that case, sodium wouldn't work. So there wasn't much use for sodium in the early days.

[00:23:44] But what really turned the flip the switch was when lithium went to 80,000 USD a ton.

[00:23:49] I was like, alarm bells rang. What can we make that and resembles a battery?

[00:23:56] I don't know. It's got the same properties as lithium ion.

[00:23:59] And sodium was quite close. But sodium has got a lot of questions as well in terms of actually how it works.

[00:24:06] There's a number of different cathode materials. There's not just one.

[00:24:10] One of them contains cyanide, for example. Do we want to use that? I don't know.

[00:24:15] But anyway, CATL came out with a Prussian white battery.

[00:24:18] Less than six months later, they're like, oh no, we're not going to use Prussian white, which is the cyanide based one.

[00:24:24] We're switching to oxide, something they're more familiar with.

[00:24:26] So, you know, to switch a chemistry and marketing that quickly just shows the uncertainty in the market.

[00:24:33] Right now, you will hear very little about sodium ion in China.

[00:24:36] I published something recently about it.

[00:24:39] I think there were 700 kilowatts of sodium ion batteries made in China.

[00:24:45] So what is that? That's like enough for about 10 or 12 Model Ss.

[00:24:51] So there's nothing really happening with sodium ion in China right now with lithium at low pricing.

[00:24:55] But, you know, I have been following that sector.

[00:24:58] And so there was announcements of sodium ion cathode plants being built.

[00:25:03] And a lot of sodium ion cathode plants being built.

[00:25:06] It was pretty easy pivot for some of the players in the cathode area already.

[00:25:10] So, you know, you guys know about the battery industry a little bit.

[00:25:13] There's a lot of hype every couple of months is a hype and people throw resources into that hype.

[00:25:18] And so there was a lot of money poured into sodium cathode materials, even though there's not actually a preferred choice.

[00:25:24] And then a little bit, not too much, like one or two sodium ion gigafactories.

[00:25:31] And in a recent episode of Recharge, you also mentioned about the development in the solid-state battery.

[00:25:37] I think we've been discussing about solid-state battery for also quite a long time.

[00:25:42] But can you explain what is this technology?

[00:25:45] What problem is this solving and how far do you think we are from a mass commercialization of this chemistry?

[00:25:51] Yeah, I did a lot of research, fundamental research in solid-state batteries back in the day.

[00:25:56] Should have stayed with it. That was 2010 even before.

[00:25:59] But so ever since then, everyone's expecting solid-state batteries next year and next year.

[00:26:03] We used to have conferences on solid-state batteries and everything.

[00:26:05] And as being the needle has barely moved since then in terms of where we are with solid-state batteries.

[00:26:12] I think companies are going back to the drawing board a little bit.

[00:26:15] So we've seen a little, you know, some of these listed solid-state battery companies in the US kind of revisit.

[00:26:22] And they're not revisiting the chemistry, which is a science of it.

[00:26:25] They're revisiting the engineering of it.

[00:26:27] And which was a lesson we learned from the Chinese battery makers.

[00:26:32] All right, we have functioning scientific technical products.

[00:26:38] How can we squeeze more out of it without putting hundreds of millions into R&D of the actual chemistry?

[00:26:43] And that's what we're seeing.

[00:26:44] What we see now basically is a little bit of a retreat, a step back from pure solid-state, which is a dry cell,

[00:26:51] which is polymer gel electrolyte lithium ion battery cells, which basically you replace the liquid with a polymer.

[00:26:59] There's basically like a PEO polyethylene oxide.

[00:27:03] It's like gel you put in your hair and you mix the LiPF6 in with that and put it into a cell and basically works fine.

[00:27:11] Except it needs to be operated at a slightly higher temperature than room temperature to achieve the same performances as liquid electrolyte.

[00:27:20] But I think we've seen from CATL and a few others like Prolozium, I think is another example.

[00:27:26] The Taiwanese company who's building a Gigafactory in France, right?

[00:27:30] You might be familiar with those guys. They got a lot of money off the French government.

[00:27:33] So they're building a gel polymer version of a solid-state battery, which the purists mightn't agree is a solid-state battery.

[00:27:40] But in a pure sense, it's not a solid-state battery, but CATL is going to push out there the quasi-solid or whatever they call that.

[00:27:49] Battery based on a gel polymer, which is the easiest to do for Gigafactories at the moment because it kind of works well with the equipment they already invested in.

[00:27:59] You can more or less disperse gel polymer the same as you disperse liquid electrolyte.

[00:28:04] And the pure solid state based on basically a dry cell is still eludes us a little bit.

[00:28:11] We're seeing some great work on the production side of things,

[00:28:14] which is the biggest problem with the solid-state batteries based on oxide.

[00:28:19] So just the electrolyte, that's all we're changing here is the electrolyte.

[00:28:22] Solid, which is like glass, more or less a glass kind of texture, which as you can imagine cracks easily.

[00:28:28] So you have solid oxide, which is kind of glassy and you have sulfites based and they're at war with each other.

[00:28:33] Which one is the better electrolyte to use?

[00:28:36] And the new function, except that how do you transfer that from the bench level up to making a Gigafactory using these materials?

[00:28:45] It's quite difficult.

[00:28:46] Doesn't really integrate well with the current equipment and investment put into liquid electrolyte battery by lithium electrolyte, traditional batteries.

[00:28:55] We did have an announcement recently from Samsung saying they'll be making, they get a lot of these announcements,

[00:29:00] but they'll have a commercial solid-state battery and maybe they will.

[00:29:03] But it probably won't be in your EV or mine.

[00:29:06] It'll have a higher application, maybe for airplanes or space applications.

[00:29:11] But the thing is like for all the money, all the energy density you get, so there's a lot more energy density because you're carrying less weight.

[00:29:19] And you can use a metallic lithium electrode, which will drastically increase your energy density.

[00:29:27] But until recently it was thought, right, there's a shortage of lithium, right?

[00:29:32] We're all heard by the shortage.

[00:29:33] Now there's not a shortage, but lithium solid-state battery electrolytes use a lot of lithium.

[00:29:39] So if we were to transfer the whole industry over to solid state, there's no way we'd have lithium for it.

[00:29:44] So there's a few real world bottlenecks in the way as well.

[00:29:47] But yeah, primarily it's the how do you mass produce solid-state batteries?

[00:29:52] Because we're at the R&D level, we're seeing some very good performance off companies like QuantumScape and others.

[00:29:58] And they're building quite big cells and Solid Energy Solutions, I think SES, have some interesting cells as well.

[00:30:05] They're making 100 amp hour cells, which are very big cells and they're performing well.

[00:30:09] So these are certain words startup companies other than CATL, which CATL makes a lot of announcements.

[00:30:17] It's hard to figure out what their future roadmap is.

[00:30:20] They're talking about quasi-solid one minute, talking about high nickel the next minute.

[00:30:23] They're talking about LFP, they're talking about LFMP, they're talking about sodium ion like take a horse.

[00:30:28] That's how we do evolution.

[00:30:31] They're picking everything.

[00:30:34] But yeah, people have been saying that a solid state is in 10 years.

[00:30:38] For 10 years ago they've been saying 10 years and last year they're saying 10 years.

[00:30:41] So who knows?

[00:30:42] But I would be disappointed if we didn't have commercial solid-state cells in EVs.

[00:30:47] We have some apparently in China already, but outside in EVs by the end of the decade.

[00:30:53] It would be a disappointment I think for the industry that we haven't succeeded in that goal.

[00:30:58] The DOE especially has been investigating solid-state electrolytes for more than 20 years.

[00:31:05] So what is your view on the key development that you're currently expecting in the factory market moving forward?

[00:31:13] You know, I used to be focused on the key developments.

[00:31:16] So I consult two Gigafactory cells.

[00:31:19] Let's build a Gigafactory.

[00:31:21] So I'm working on Gigafactories and I always tell them don't try and do anything innovative or even competitive.

[00:31:29] Just build a Gigafactory. That's it. I can get you.

[00:31:32] Everything you require to build a Gigafactory, just build one first and then worry about innovation.

[00:31:37] So primarily we're just focused on rolling out NMC and LFP for the next decade, if not more.

[00:31:43] There's investment already taking place in the infrastructure supply chain right up to equipment.

[00:31:48] Equipment, even personnel equipment, it gets difficult to source Gigafactory production equipment at the moment as well.

[00:31:55] And very especially in the Western world, like it's difficult to find EPC engineering procurement firms that can even install this equipment or build these factories for you.

[00:32:05] I mean, there's much greater gaps in the industry than the price of lithium as well.

[00:32:10] So my view for the towards the decade is let's keep it simple.

[00:32:14] Let's just build a standard NMC primarily, even though a lot of work coming in is LFP and Gigafactory.

[00:32:23] So the LFP factory, not to reinvent the wheel would be to build the prismatic cell basically that CHL make, which is the 280 amp hour.

[00:32:31] They also had a 100 amp hour.

[00:32:33] The 100 amp hour was very useful for EVs and energy storage, right?

[00:32:38] So it covers both markets. And I think this is a cell a lot of new Gigafactories are looking at making.

[00:32:45] So they want to cover all customers if they can with one cell.

[00:32:49] And CHL was very successful doing that.

[00:32:53] And I think that's the blueprint basically to follow.

[00:32:58] So, yeah, my takeaway is like we've already had NMC for about 40, 45 years.

[00:33:05] We haven't really moved beyond it.

[00:33:07] And I think we're going to have it for another 20, 25 years at least as the primary battery.

[00:33:12] And so I always encourage my customers just to follow the blueprint because there's some battery companies just as old as CHL in Europe.

[00:33:23] And they've yet to release a commercial battery you can buy.

[00:33:26] And we look at CHL after three years, the third biggest battery maker in the world.

[00:33:29] Now the biggest.

[00:33:30] That's interesting. You're saying that just do one thing and scale, right?

[00:33:35] Instead of trying to make a lot of innovation.

[00:33:38] Innovation will just be bottleneck.

[00:33:41] Yeah. If you want to get to scale, your most simple process first or else you'll just be tied up in the weeds for a long time.