Blue Solutions has been running solid-state cells down a serial production line for twelve years. More than three million have been built since 2011, from two plants on two continents: one in Brittany in France supplying Europe, one in Canada supplying North America. Most of those cells are in Europe, with some in Africa, Australia and North America.
The generation currently in the plants is the third.
Richard Bouveret and Sriram Ramanoudjame came to the Future Battery Forum in Berlin to talk about the fourth, and their definition of the product is deliberately plain. A battery has a positive side and a negative side with an electrolyte in between. In a conventional cell that electrolyte is liquid. In theirs it is solid, and the consequence is a smaller box for the same energy. "For us, the future is today," as they put it.
The research is older than the production line. Their previous CTO made his first solid polymer electrolyte in 1987.
Gen 4 runs at 20 degrees C and charges in around 20 minutes. The energy density they attach to it, a nominal 450 Wh/kg, is a target rather than a shipped number: the claim is that pre-samples are reaching it. The cell is due to market in 2029.
Why the 2029 date has not moved
That date is the part of the conversation the company defends hardest, and it does so by criticising everyone else.
The complaint is that solid-state companies announce start of production timings too quickly. The reason offered is not chemistry. It is that many of them were formed as spin-offs of universities or research labs and do not have the industrial background to anticipate the difficulties and the roadblocks that appear in a scale-up phase.
Blue Solutions has been through one. It is producing Gen 3 on its own sites now, which is the basis for the claim that it knows which steps are necessary and can work on the roadblocks before they arrive.
The company is also less small than its profile suggests: 450 people, of whom 200 are in R&D, 50 hold PhDs, and around 150 work on process. That split is the point they keep making. Product and process are one question, not two, and all of those people are on Gen 4 now.
The 2029 timing itself comes from customers rather than from the lab. OEMs share their platform plans, and what those plans call for is a few volumes on some premium platforms by the end of the decade. 2029 is also when Blue Solutions intends to start its own gigafactory.
One consequence of taking process seriously is a flat rejection of an idea that circulates whenever a new chemistry appears. Asked about dropping solid state into existing lines, the answer is that this is not the feedback they get from gigafactories. Change the slightest part of the product and the impact on the manufacturing process and the validations is large enough that re-adapting the line costs more time and money than it saves. A drop-in solution is, in their view, neither practical nor real. A line has to be dedicated to a product, or the targets on safety, quality and delivery will not be met.
The anode nobody had a route for
Blue Solutions' anode is pure lithium metal, with no current collector on the anode side at all. That is the differentiator, and it created a problem the rest of the industry did not have.
Recycling companies have plenty of expertise, and partners exist for the cathode and the electrolyte. For lithium metal there was no established route, so the company worked one out itself. It now recovers 90% of the lithium, and says it could go further, though not under the same conditions.
This is not a plan. With cells built from 2011 onwards, the earliest packs are reaching the end of their lives after ten to twelve years, and the route is being used.
The same long exposure feeds the product in a less obvious way. Blue Solutions also makes electric buses and operates them, so it sees its own batteries in service and knows what a pack looks like after ten years. That data goes back into how the next one is designed.
Fifteen per cent would be a good outcome, and 3C is fast enough
Bouveret is direct that solid state will be a slice of the market rather than the market. Lithium-ion stays for mass market vehicles at least until 2035, and the giants of Asia will not be beaten at their own product.
If solid state reaches 15% of total world demand, over a horizon he puts at 15 to 20 years, he considers that a fine result, and still a large number of terawatt hours. The applications named are the ones where energy density is worth paying for: trucks, commercial vehicles, machines that run 24 hours a day, and premium and sports cars replacing internal combustion models.
The refusal to chase specifications extends to charging. Some competitors are targeting 5C or 6C rates. Blue Solutions says the OEMs it talks to tell it 3C is fast enough, and that what those customers rank alongside charging speed is quality levels, cost performance and demonstrated delivery capability. Taking the right compromises on the product, rather than maximising one line on a datasheet, is how Ramanoudjame describes the approach, and he attaches a word to it that is rare in this sector: pragmatic.
Licence, cells, or a complete pack
The commercial model is loose on purpose. No dogma, in Bouveret's phrase.
A customer that wants a licence gets one, and can build Gen 4 in its own gigafactory. That is framed as respect for relationships that already exist between OEMs and their battery suppliers, and as an admission that no single company is going to supply solid state to the whole automotive industry. A customer that wants cells gets cells, alone or with partners. A customer that wants a complete pack with a BMS gets that too.
The named partnerships follow the same logic. Foxconn, to develop a battery for two-wheelers in Asia. BMW, for premium cars. Others on integrating batteries for trucks, and further agreements they say will become public. Nothing gets developed without a customer behind it who knows the end use better than they do.
The most interesting move is the one that helps the competition. Blue Solutions intends to supply its lithium metal anode as a component to other cell manufacturers, having noticed the brick sitting in their roadmaps, because it offers the highest gravimetric energy density available. The reasoning is that a technology only reaches a vehicle if there is a strong supplier base behind it, and one supplier is not a base. The company points to a German OEM that started working with it despite having already invested in another solid-state supplier, on the standard automotive principle that you want a second source for backup, cost and roadmap reasons.
There is also a software argument running underneath the hardware. The battery is treated as a system with electronics and connectivity built in, on the view that how long a pack lasts is determined as much by how it is used as by its electrochemistry, and that means knowing where the batteries are and how they are being run.
Five years for a factory, twenty for a mine
The constraint Bouveret returns to is upstream, and it is a timing mismatch rather than a geology problem.
A gigafactory takes about five years to build once the decision is made, and in most countries it attracts government grants. A mine takes 15 to 20 years, sometimes with a success rate around 50%, and gets nothing comparable. His view is that Europe should have started a decade ago for the two to be in sequence, and that governments will have to support mining the way they have supported cells.
Blue Solutions has signed with a mining company in Chile and with US, Canadian and European companies, with the intent of making sure extraction is done cleanly. Refining gets the same attention, because it consumes a great deal of energy and should be running on hydro or other clean power rather than coal, and because new processes use less of it. The point he keeps circling back to is consistency across the chain: making a clean battery from material taken out of the ground in a dirty way does not add up.
Lithium is not the obstacle. It exists in Europe, in Serbia, Germany, France and Portugal among other places, and whether to extract it is a political decision rather than an economic one.
Asked what will decide who wins, neither man says chemistry. Raw material, and talent.
This piece draws on the full conversation, which is available with a complete transcript on the episode page.