Battery Revolution Clubhouse Recording - Battery Supply Chains

0:00Transcript

0:00Yeah, I mean, thank you, Catherine. I just want to quickly also say hello as well. Maybe a bit of background because there's also, I think, many new people who have found Battery Revolution. You know, as you can see in the title, it's our ninth session. The quick history is that Catherine and I, we actually met on Clubhouse and we had some good chats and then we thought, you know, we should create a platform for other battery enthusiasts, you know, to share their insights and also share it with people who are just getting started and getting interested. And I think really, you know, creating this dialogue. And it has been an absolute blast. We had, you know, really fascinating topics already like battery recycling, second use, you know, battery swapping and charging. And I thought it's been a lot of fun, you know. And yeah, maybe just one thing I also want to say again on the podcast, you know, sorry, I'm a bit slower. I just released the trailer as well.

0:46So essentially what's happening there, you can find the entire recording on batteryinsiders.com. And maybe just one thing to mention, you know, if you don't want to be part of it, you can let us know. But also just from an editing standpoint, I have to be honest, it really helps if I don't have to do too many edits. So yeah, maybe also think a bit consciously, you know, if you don't want to, you know, say something, that's fine as well. But yeah, just, you know, it helps. But yeah, you know, this has been an open forum. You know, please raise your hand, especially also women. I would encourage that highly. You know, that's really fascinating to, you know, to have diversity as much as possible. And yeah, that's really getting this conversation started and looking forward to discuss this topic. And yeah, as Catherine mentioned, today the topic is supply chains, battery supply chains, which I personally think is an incredible, fascinating topic, incredible, important topic.

1:31You know, I know that many people are dealing with this topic at the moment and there's many questions to be answered. Yeah. And I think we also have Andrew here who has some questions and some thoughts. You know, happy to move it to you for the beginning. Yeah. Yeah. Hi, everyone. Andrew here. I'm a PhD student here at the University of Oxford working on, I guess, battery research, in particular lithium-ion electrolytes. But I also, I guess, how I come to, how I got into, I guess, like, I guess the reason why Catherine sort of brought me on as a fire starter for this battery supply chain topic is really because I co-write this newsletter called Interpolation Station. It's a sub-tech newsletter. You can take a look via my bio or if you click through on my Twitter. But essentially, it's a newsletter that sort of covers, sort of covers, you know, all the latest progress, I guess, in research, you know, academia, industry. And, you know, if you've paid any attention to any news really recently in the past year and a half, you've really noticed that the, you know, batteries, renewable energy, energy storage is really being thrust into the limelight.

2:51And a big, you know, a loud proponent of that has been a lot of, a lot of attention is being given to the supply chain, particularly, you know, from the, from a raw material standpoint. And I just wanted to, I guess, kickstart this conversation. So I guess, you know, the battery supply chain is really, really vast. You know, there's, there's many, many moving parts, many, many different components. It's truly, you know, globalized and it's a globalized supply chain. So I thought, you know, maybe, you know, when I first started trying to understand the supply chain, I just thought it would be good to maybe talk through the different processes that, that occur, you know, that to really, how do we end up with this final battery that gets, that gets, I guess, placed into a car. And then we get to drive around powered on electricity. So I guess it really all starts in the ground, right? So, and, and I guess a key angle where I approached this was also trying to understand, you know, how many days or how long it takes, or like how long do these materials or do the processes take in relation to each other?

4:01So the first step, I guess everything sort of starts in the ground. We have raw minerals, right? We're talking about mining. We talk about ores. So really we're talking about, you know, metallic ores that we're trying to extract from the ground. But also not really mentioned too much. There are also, there's a, there's a tie-in with the petroleum industry. And there's a lot of petroleum products that, that are used. So for example, polypropylene organic separators, which are also a critical component in lithium-ion batteries. The electrolytes use organic solvents. So these are all sort of derivatives from the petroleum industry. Artificial graphite, which is, which is typically used in the anode materials. And that really starts off as petroleum coke. And so, you know, in terms of, in terms of extracting them from the ground and then transporting them to the next processing step, this sort of raw mineral stage takes around 15 to 30 days. And so you can imagine, you know, where we're mining cobalt in the DRC and where we're getting, we're getting nickel from Indonesia.

5:09We're getting, we're getting graphite from Australia. And then everything's sort of integrating into these various processing places. And, you know, most of this actually, maybe we'll touch on this later, is centered in China. But then we come to the next station. And so the next station is this metallurgical processing step where these ores are broken down and reacted into these different sulfates and salts. So there's a chemical processing step and this is sort of an intermediate step. But this intermediate step also takes quite a while. So that's also around a sort of 15-day turnaround, including transportation. We then come to the third stage in this value chain. And that's really turning these intermediate salts, sulfates and like processed ores into precursors. And so this is the sort of step that then, that is just before making, you know, the cathode active materials and things like that. And this is where you would purify materials. You would turn your lithium, your mined lithium materials into those commercially ready lithium hydroxides, carbonates and other things, you know, for like iron phosphate as other intermediates.

6:20And so that whole step takes around eight days. And so eight days later, we then, we then, there's, you know, a bunch of people that make these things and sell them on to the next step. Or if you're vertically integrated, then you're moving on to the next process. And this is sort of where we have, where we finally produce these battery grade materials. And so that, that is, you know, are we, how we baking together our precursor materials and forming cathode active materials? Or we're mixing salts into solvents and making the final electrolytes? Or we're getting these, all these metal foils that we then coat, you know, these powders onto that then get wound into these batteries. And so that step is around five days. And so we're sort of getting, so really you see like the long tail of time really goes, is dedicated to the raw material processing and transportation. But once we have these battery grade materials, then we sort of come to, these materials are what sort of get shipped or supplied to a gigafactory or a mega, you know, battery factory.

7:20And so they take these materials, they mix them into slurries and they coat them onto foils and they wind up the foils, inject electrolytes, make the cell, right? So now you have a cell that's produced, you have a battery that's produced. And that's produced battery actually. So I don't know if you guys have seen, but like the videos like that, like Tesla or VW and all that, you know, they're putting out all these videos of cells that are just shooting off the line almost faster than the eye can imagine. But really the limiting step here is that once you've made a cell, you have to put it through this process, which is called formation. And it's sort of like, you know, if you buy a new car, you don't, you run the engine at a RPM limit, you know, to break it in, you sort of have to break in the battery as well. And so it goes through a series of slow charges and discharges.

8:08And during that time, producers also run these different qualifying tests to work out, you know, are these cells, you know, A grade, A minus grade, B grade, you know, and then they'll sort of, they'll sort of allocate what sort of products that these cells then get allocated to. And so actually this step takes around five to six days as well. And then the final step, you know, in the supply chain before it ends up in a car takes an additional five days. And that is the sort of assembly of these individual cells into packs modules, the addition of, you know, battery management systems, the power electronics, the circuitry that comes together. And then finally into the end product that I guess we as consumers are most familiar with. So, yeah, so just, that's just, I guess, like as a, well, this is probably a long fight, it's more like an ember. It's, yeah, it's a long conversation or a fire starter topic, but just like a, just a very broad overview of how long, you know, we work through these stages in the supply chain.

9:08But I guess as I was working through this, it would be really good, you know, I don't know if people in the audience want to sort of chime in on, you know, how much value is actually added to the end product. You know, there's all this news about batteries coming below $100 per kilowatt hour. And then there's also, there's talk about soaring mineral prices and raw material prices. So how much value is actually being added as we go from raw material to end battery, you know, is it, is it, or is it typical where the, the actual material price is taking up a large proportion of that? So I think, you know, that'll be a topic that I would love to sort of discuss with everyone. Also, you know, material demand forecast. There's been a lot of, a lot of conversations about, you know, do we have lithium? Do we have enough cobalt? Do we have nickel? The geopolitical landscape, you know, how do we deal with these globalized supply chains?

10:07What are the barriers of entry for new players that want to participate? You know, particularly because the prices of these batteries are so low, right? What are the risks? I guess, what does a healthy and robust supply chain look like? And also, you know, we can also touch on, you know, these clubhouse, chats love to, love to talk about recycling, love to bring up, you know, circular supply, which is, you know, a really, really important topic. So at the other end of the supply chain, you know, what is, what do we do with our second life? What do we do with our end of life? And maybe sort of encompassing this whole thing. There's a critical, critical element for the supply chain, and that's really human talent. You know, how do we encourage a diverse supply chain of human talent to really make these things happen? How do we expand existing skills? How do we raise public awareness? You know, these are some things that I think we would, I think it would be really good to talk about.

10:57So that's, I'll hand it to the rest of the panel now. Thank you so much, Andrew. That's a great way to start up a topic. I see that Casey, Milo, and we're all very interested to participate. So let's go in that order. And off to you, Casey. Yeah, thank you for that great starter, Andrew, and a new subscriber to your newsletter. So very excited to see that going forward. Yeah, I was just wondering if anyone on the panel or Andrew, if you could just help put that description of the supply chain into perspective. How does that compare to other supply chains such as petro oil or any other supply chain that you may know of? Maybe I can answer this question. So the supply chain, what Andrew described, it is like he described, but maybe for simplification, I would summarize it to three steps. So that's mining, processing, and active material productions, basically anode and cathode productions. So for simplification, I mean, it covers those steps which Andrew said.

12:16And it's very interconnected with other supply value chains. Supply value chains is very robust, very complex, and very long. But also, it interconnects with other supply value chains. Like Andrew said, even oil industry, when you are producing, processing the oil in the binaries, you are creating petroleum coke, and petroleum coke is then used for the synthetic graphite. And synthetic graphite is the major material for the batteries. I mean, number one material. There is much more graphite in one battery cell than any other material. So more than lithium, more than nickel, more than anything else. So there are other robust and complex supply value chains, but this one is new one. So basically, when we are talking about electrical vehicles, we don't need only to build the battery plants, but we need to build also whole supply value chain, very complex, very diversified supply value chain. And that's the number one task which we need to do to build supply value chain. Yeah, I will just add, I've heard this comparison, you know, when you look at sort of these established clean tech, I guess, like these clean technologies, people love to sort of think about how, I guess, people think about how will batteries scale into the future.

14:01And we love to draw parallels with the photovoltaic industry. And I guess, you know, one differing factor, and I believe this should also map onto our interpretation of the supply chains, is that, you know, if you look at a battery, just as Mylas mentioned, you know, it's very complicated. You have all these different elements coming together, right? Literally, all these different elements from the periodic table sort of working in harmony, you know, all these different chemical reactions, all these different interactions. But the inverse of this is really photovoltaics. You know, you just have, you have a single element or, you know, like this is a dramatic simplification, but, you know, you really have, you know, polycrystalline silicon. And right, so you really just have, you know, the single material that really can be processed into the highest purity grade that humans know how to purify, basically the best out of anything. If you look at the semiconductor industry is photovoltaic grade silicon. And it's that one material that then just sort of continues through the process.

15:16Whereas the supply chain for batteries, I think, is a lot more intertwined and probably a little bit more complex as well. So I guess that's, that would be my interpretation. Yes, you are right, Andrew. The one battery cell is almost like very small chemical factory. Means that when you are charging battery and when you are discharging battery, there is chemical process happening there, complex chemical process during the charging and discharging during the operation of the battery. So many elements are coming together. It's not static. It's not material. It's a electrochemical process. Yeah, 100%. And I think, you know, a lot of this, you know, it's a miracle. It's almost, you know, I guess like coming from the researchers' perspective, it's a miracle already where we've gotten today in terms of the reliability of batteries already. And I think, I think a big part of that is, a big part of that comes down to the quality of the raw materials that are going into these batteries, right?

16:35So this, the upstream processing steps. And I think, you know, there's a lot of, you know, some people talk about, you know, there's, there's, you can't just use any sort of nickel supply or any lithium supply. It has to be battery grade, you know, lithium hydroxide or lithium carbonate. And that's like a very important factor when it comes to understanding, you know, these materials might be, might be abundant on earth, but really a lot of the supply chain risks come from how quickly the supply can ramp up to meet demand and also how quickly and how much of that supply is actually fulfilling the purity and, you know, the battery grade requirements to actually, to actually make the products that, that meet the quality requirements as well that we as consumers demand. Yeah, Andrew, I was wondering if you could speak more about just like what does battery grade materials mean? Are we talking 99.9% purities or is there some, some other aspect to make it battery grade?

17:54Yeah, I think, oh, it's, a lot of it, a lot of it is just talking about a lack of, yeah, basically you just need to try to get rid of as much impurity as you can. And I guess like big picture, you know, you think about just as Mila said, you know, during, you know, during the operation of a battery, you're, you're constantly charging and discharging, which means, you know, you have electrons moving, which we're using to do work and provide energy, but within the battery, you have ions which are moving from the anode to the cathode, from the cathode to the anode, through the electrolyte. And so, you know, you have a lot of different chemical elements and compounds moving relative to each other. And you can imagine if there is just, you know, battery grade, you know, the stuff that we buy to run our experiments and lab are all, you know, 99.99% pure. For example, I work with electrolytes and we have to do this sort of quality check in terms of how much moisture is in there.

19:03And really the standard, you know, it's in the, you know, individual digits of PPMs of water. So this is like parts per million, you know, so for every million units of electrolyte mixture, you can have one or two or a little bit of water, you know, but even that little bit of water over the course of, you know, a thousand cycles, 800 cycles moving back and forth. These chemical reactions running will build up over time and cause, you know, unreliability and degradation reactions, right, that will shorten the lifespan of these cells. yeah, a lot of it's just, you know, as many nines as you can get in terms of purity. yeah, if anyone has an actual figure, you know, so that's a typical figure I understand for the electrolytes. For the actual solid components, yeah, I would love to see if anyone else has those. I can tell you something about graphite or some anode, but let's simplify it for the graphite, which is largest material and also more simple.

20:12But even more simple material like the graphite is very complex and very complicated. It's not only purity. It's a shape of the graphite, a microscopic shape of the graphite. It's also the coating of these graphite particles. The ions of the lithium ions are able to intercalate between the sheets of the graphite in graphite. So basically it's complex process, chemical, it's not only purifying the material. It's a much more complex process. I will give you an idea in the value. When you are mining the graphite somewhere in, let's say, Mozambique, you are, the mining value starts with zero, but then you are adding the value through processing these mine graphite still there on the mine side to concentrate the graphite to, like 97% of the graphite. And that's when it is delivered somewhere, let's say, in China or in the United States, it would be $1,000 per ton. And when you are in the final processing of the graphite, somewhere in the processing plant in China or the United States, it would be like $11,000 per ton.

21:36So there is $10,000 value in the chemical processing, what I would call specialty chemical processing, and there is only $1,000 of the value in the mining and concentration of the graphite. So specialty chemical processing, very important, or the most important part for the precursor for the anodal cathode materials. Yeah, and I would add that on the lithium side, going from hard rock lithium, the cost of production is around $400 per ton. You can sell it on the market for $550, so your profit is around $150 to $175. But if you actually process that into battery-grade lithium hydroxide, it's around $4,000 to produce, and you're selling it at $12,000, so your profit is around $7,000 to $8,000 versus just $100,000, $200,000 on the mining side. So if you look at it in terms of if you have a plant that's producing 50,000 tons per year, that's around a $400 million profit margin that's a taxable operating profit, which translates to $850,000 to $1,000, $1,250 jobs at that plant.

23:09So I think the value-added components, I work in Canada and I'm part of the initiatives that are happening right now to try to develop the supply chain here further from just actually extracting raw materials but actually doing the value-added activities of the processing and the precursors, the active materials especially, like the most 50% of the value of the battery is in the cathode. So basically trying to be able to capture that economic opportunity and this is sort of the driving force for a lot of jurisdictions, you know, like the European Battery Alliance, Western Australian government, we saw even Finland produce its battery strategy, the idea there is, you know, there's a lot of economic activity that's going to happen and there's a trend towards localization because, you know, there's sort of a saturation point in terms of the cost savings that you can kind of achieve as a product technology development at this point. You know, there's definitely still more but it's not going to be at the same rate that we've kind of been able to produce in terms of cost reductions.

24:23So, you know, if you look at the battery day for Tesla, the key theme there was vertical integration and consolidating their activities to be able to achieve the cost reductions that they need to achieve in order to be able to make a car for $25,000. So, I think, yeah, to the point there, I think, Andrew, you were asking about where the value lies, right? Is it in the materials or is it in the other activities I think this is sort of my take on it. Thank you so much. We have also Juca and Cecilia just joined us on the stage. Would you like to share your thoughts on this, Juca? Yeah, I think we have a good discussion here about the supply chain, but of course, now we are looking quite heavily on the history of the battery supply chain and what is being manufactured today. But I think we should really also consider the fact that maybe three to five percent of global battery manufacturing capacity is installed today or is under development.

25:36So, what we are going to have in next 10-15 years will require quite diversified raw material source kind of portfolio. and this is why, for example, here in Finland, we have plenty of operations going to find more raw materials from organic sources like forest industry waste. And of course, when we look into the stability side of the batteries, we know that there are different kind of combinations that are more stable and allow more impurities like low grade iron phosphate. We can build energy storage systems with low C-rates, with very cheap and abundant raw materials compared to what NMC would require on automotive side with very high charging requirements and so forth. And so, to the impurities side, I think there's also going to happen a big leap on the supply chain because we've used solvents and organic electrolytes, liquid ones which are quite reactive. So, when you have the impurities in the cell, you will have these side reactions with the impurities and those will passivate part of the electrolyte and passivate the cell and build short-circuit opportunities.

27:08That's why the purity is kind of wanted to be there. after being involved with the Chinese battery manufacturing for almost 20 years where we might have quite open room coating systems and no one has dry rooms or clean rooms to do batteries. We learned that even in quite high-class impurities you can have high-quality batteries provide enough quality for certain applications. If we look on the high-grade side we lose the focus that the raw material base has to be wider. There's a lot of sources for these components. Light separators used to have cellulose base separators in the end of 1980s in the lithium-ion battery. But then we went to the polymer separators. And that was only because we had very volatile chemistries that tended to burn batteries down. So we will be able to go back to the certain old innovations that we already discarded as in a two week or something else. And that will open up a huge amount of raw material sources. And I have been now working for the side in the paper industry kind of point of view that if you take one paper machine it can provide separator for almost two terawatt hours annually for battery cells.

28:58So when we look into these industries that are already in high scale and precise 10 meters per second coating speeds we have completely new kind of universe of thinking how the battery manufacturing can happen in next 10-15 years. So let's kind of consider also what is the future not only what has been done in the past 10 years and that's just kind of the thing that I wanted to point out that impurities are just fine when you can incorporate them I'm done. Thank you so much Yuka. It would be interesting to hear the panel's thoughts on how are we looking at the future of supply chain and be creative about what everyone thinks about what will evolve in the future and what are some of the technology advances that would happen. I would like to hear the panel's thoughts on that as well. For now let's move on to Cecile and followed by I look after the technologies that are used and one thing for me interesting is that the technology evolves very quickly not only about the chemistry of the battery but also if you have a new possibility to make your battery management system differently or if you have another possibility to cool differently then very quickly this can enable different technologies different chemistry so I personally wonder how OEM or how we can figure it out how to organize a supply chain in order to be able to move on very quickly because you can spend a lot of time organizing something and then all of a sudden you don't need that anymore because the technology has changed and maybe you need to supply something different so I think the game is very difficult because you can nearly not make very long term plan and you need to be ready to move on very quickly at any new technology that helps you to get an advantage compared to your competitor so I think it's very difficult I don't know what other people think about that I would be interested in hearing other opinion on this should answer it the number one task what we have today before us is not to speculate like you said right now Cecile with what kind of technologies we will use but number one task before us is to build supply value chain means that to scale this supply value chain people don't realize that again I am going to talk we need 10 years ago we had in the world 20 gigawatt hours of the battery production last year we had more than 200 gigawatt hours of the battery production so it grew up 10 times but from now from 200 gigawatt hours to 2030 we need to produce at least 3 terawatt hours of the battery production but according to Tesla we need to build 20 terawatt hours of the battery production for that one we need much more graphite much more lithium much more nickel and so on and it takes about one year to build the giga plant but it takes about 10 years to build mine and about five years to build processing plant so now monumental task before us is to build and scale these mines processing plants and all these materials so that's number one task we don't have time right now to play with I mean in the process we will play with the technologies what we are going to use but right now it's the scaling the production of the materials okay and in in this case is there a risk that people spend a lot of money investing on something so for example increasing one specific material but all of a sudden you need that maybe less or it decreases so much the value that the investment you put in front would not be recovered for example I don't know maybe it's a nice question but I'm just not risk going that I don't think so because battery battery technology it goes very slowly it doesn't very go very fast we have there is some joke in the battery industry for more than 200 years there are many breakthrough technologies in the battery but they never materialized so basically battery technology is like even this lithium-ion battery it was we are working on this technology for 50 years and for 50 years we are upgrading to today's stage which is technology is already perfected but I don't see the big risk in these major materials for this decade because also because of the scale of the batteries what we need so basically once you will build this gigapance right now we have in pipeline like almost 200 gigaplans from one five years ago to 200 those battery gigaplans they are not easy replaceable they are going to use this material for at least next 10 years next 20 years these materials which they are going to start to use today thank you so much thank you both I think you can KCG you guys have something to add real quick and then we move on to the new cameras on the stage yeah I agree with Milos that I don't think we should focus on what's after lithium with electric vehicle adoption taking off lithium-ion is going to be the dominant technology in my view it's just going to be what's going to be the flavor of lithium-ion is it going to be NMC is it going to be aluminum is it going to be lithium iron phosphate so for purposes of this chat I'm really focused on learning more about the lithium side of things thanks for that KC Jukka do you have any thoughts on this yeah to Cecile about the vehicle battery system manufacturer and application builder kind of perspective that's why we are going for vertical integration because then you actually provide your end product to clients and they don't really care the chemistry what you have in the car because you can optimize the hours per kilo in the whole system in the packaging and in the vehicle aerodynamics and so forth and there are a lot of other things that actually matter now almost with any battery technology in lithium-ion you can get that 300 mile range and to miles I would say that the risk in investment in this current situation is in the fact that we have the iron phosphate with a long track record compared to NMC and NCA for example but the base patents are going void all of them which means that the price reduction in that side will encourage even more usage of iron phosphate and it will replace even in automotive sector quite quickly many of the vehicles and I'm daring to say that by 2030 90% of automotive batteries are iron phosphate and that's my insight but it's very focused so that's my points thanks thank you Jukka Andrew do you have something to add real quick and move on to the newcomers yeah I'll just echo what Jukka was saying and really this is to Cecile's point that I think in terms of batteries are here to stick around the most de-risked material is probably lithium but also pre-2020 or even mid-2020 there was a really interesting projection or forecast that came out of the Faraday institution here in the UK which partnered with McKinsey Bloomberg New Energy Finance and they had these projections for EV battery cathode chemistries which showed basically LFP scaling from maybe 2% to 0% in 2030 and then these high nickel chemistries dominating and if you guys have followed the media or anything almost immediately after this report was published Tesla announced this strategy they switched to LFP everyone realized from these pack level system level integrations LFP can compete with these higher energy chemistries and so there is some sense of volatility here but really I think all of these different technologies have to play nice and there's enough capacity for everyone to make the cut but yeah I mean all these perceived risks I think on a micro level these individual perceived risks from you or my perspectives as a whole will dictate how these markets move forward so yeah let's move on to the new speakers thanks so much Andrew we have Vasco and Yuan Fund and the rest have just done on the stage let's go in this order that we see on the screen over here Vasco do you have something to contribute to the topic yeah thank you very much for bringing me up I'm an engineer myself I followed your very impressingly technical discussion I just want to draw your attention to an important point that in the end the consumer decides and the consumer decides on an emotional and not only on a rational base so whatever you think the KPI is range or power density or whatever don't make the calculations without the end customers and I truly believe it will prevail battery driven cars will of course dominate in the future but I just want to give you an example diesel engines became incredibly popular in Germany they were marketed as very efficient engines like 25 years ago or so and in the end people didn't care about the efficiency they loved the torque of these engines they loved the extremely high torque at low RPM and they didn't care about the efficiency either because they just translated it into higher power higher powered engines so in the end the customer had a mixture of rational and emotional factors to decide the technology and this is also something very common in industry history not the best system prevails not the best combination of technology sometimes it's the client that makes the decision and there is this famous beta 2000 versus VHS video standard that ultimately VHS won again an example the client decides not the best technology but as I said as an engineer I hope the best technology will prevail and I just want to remind that don't forget a good narrative for the client and don't forget that the client might have other KPIs than the experts and maybe range is not for example the only important KPI that was my take Thank you Vasco Yan Fan Ji has something to add to the topic Actually I echo Vasco's speech just now about the diesel engine so I mean supposedly theoretically is a more efficient and more cleaner source of power I think now I do have some questions that is probably not the supply chain but a little bit related to that is there any research done I'm not so fluent in this topic but do we have anything done for the repurpose of raw materials used for the battery and second question is with the increase of usage and production of the batteries do we have any idea how we're going to control the waste and you know just to make it I was told that it's very toxic a few years ago I'm pretty sure that part of the technology hasn't changed so will there be anything to for the recycling and not recycling just to dispose of the waste and I'm pretty sure there are a lot of the things that cannot be recycled and certainly with the battery for example Tesla car the car is completely I mean unusable but the battery is still probably usable are there any ways that we can repurpose that battery for example in a remote area bring some electricity to people things like that source thank you very much I'm done speaking thank you so much for raising this maybe some other people have some thoughts as well maybe I just thought I'd drop in here as well from the emission standpoint that electric cars are way better around the world there's research on this one now than fossil fuel cars so I think that's always important to highlight as well and of course it really depends on the grid where the electricity is coming from but even with that especially if you look like Europe and US etc it's always at least now it's better to have an electric car rather than a fossil fuel car and of course there's some emissions of course you have emissions also through the production and that's kind of meaning that you have some certain mileage where the fossil fuel car would have less emissions from the car itself but just through the usage fossil fuel versus electricity it's better to get an electric car just thought I'd drop this in maybe also just one thing on the recycling part because we had a really fascinating discussion on this I don't know two weeks ago so it feels like and I think it's quite also important to highlight that batteries can be almost 100% be recycled like definitely over 90% so they're highly recyclable it's the beauty right if you have chemistry involved you can recycle these and there's fascinating discussions also why it's so expensive in some countries versus for example in China etc and there's many reasons for that but I just want to highlight that batteries can be highly recycled and there are right I mean you have companies like Umicore and euro but you have also lots of big ones in China and all around the world now doing battery recycling and it's highly recyclable as a device but of course there's still many challenges to be solved but I just thought I'd drop this in there because often that's maybe not mentioned thanks so much Simon let's move on to Reza and followed by Elements that is joining us on the panel yeah thanks I was just wondering you know I guess what some good info from Simon thanks for sharing and the recycling part I guess what keeps me awake during the night is is this you know that part of the supply chain you know having different sort of chemistries even talking about the lithium-ion itself and you know considering that there might be some other technologies that appear you know in 10 years 15 years from now on so what would be the like the challenges around recycling of the batteries at scale and you know keeping in mind that all sort of applications out there it's not just the EVs and all sort of you know form factors might be used and you know that's that seems to be quite challenging at least to me when you look at the scale so I was just wondering how what is your perspective on this and how would you see that to be to become a reality at the end of the day that we don't get you know a pile of batteries in our environment thank you I'm done talking Simon would you like to take this one to continue the conversation I can do it quickly and I also want to really you know refer to the discussion we already had so you know on batteryinsiders.com you will find a recording on the battery recycling session hopefully you know if the weekend goes well I'm going to do it this weekend to go through all the recordings and upload them all I think one thing I just want to mention on the recycling is you know that I think you mentioned on the volume right if you can handle the volume I mean the fun reality right now is that you know many recyclers I know they don't get enough batteries right now because there are not enough batteries which are ending up in the you know in the recycle stage because lots of people want to get second life batteries you know that's that's quite hot right many people want to get this for interesting applications so I think it's just you know so actually the volumes are right now are not that high but of course that's a massive they're going to be a massive ramp up from that and I personally think you know it's a super exciting space you know I think the recycling space you know you have some big players but there's also a lot of innovative you know startups medium-sized companies joining but I think also maybe one thing I want to add to this one right is about localization because you know I mean batteries to ship all batteries especially it's quite tricky right it's like a dangerous good you don't want to ship them around all the time and if you look actually where cars end up and I think other people here from the automotive space they know that you know often for example phospho cars ICEs would have ended up in Africa right for like a second use or third use etc and so now the question is for example where will all the electric cars end up right and I think these kind of you know supply chains are also quite important and then do we for example it doesn't make sense to have for example a strong you know recycling industry connected to the mining industry right because there's a lot of materials like cobalt etc coming from you know DRC etc which of course have their own implications and I would be really interested to talk about these you know supply chain issues with other people interested in this as well but yeah I think I just want to say you know there's a lot of movement happening I definitely think it's doable right I don't see a reason why not and one last thing maybe to mention because I mentioned before LFP and different chemistries actually there's you know I mean a battery has about 3% lithium or so right I think it's also important to highlight so that much and it doesn't really you know people mostly don't recycle lithium because it's not much value people are much interested in materials like nickel and cobalt etc but if you now for example do LFP batteries you don't have the cobalt and nickel in there anymore right which makes it less attractive to actually recycle them so these are just some knockoff effects right where you change chemistries then this will influence again how profitable is it to recycle etc so the circular battery economy is a very fascinating one very important one but yeah still many moving parts as well but maybe someone else I saw lots of people clapping or raising their hands if anyone else wants to drop in thanks yeah I was clapping and I definitely do agree that the change of chemistry will have an impact on the whole recycling in general and I do agree that recycling is something that is important as a part of this topic for battery supply chain which is how do we reuse or how do we maximize the world's resources especially in producing batteries and making this industry as green as it should be let's move on to Animash who's followed by Stefan and Ingo and Dennis as well so that everyone has a chance to speak thanks Catherine hey guys Andrew firstly really succinct summarization of the whole supply chain at the start of the conversation really a great way to kick things off so I have one main question I was hoping I was curious to learn a bit more about so as Andrew and as well as Miles mentioned that the kind of I would say the elements and the kind of O's that are going into producing batteries it's a very very complex and diverse supply chain however if you look at the common materials that we have like cobalt sulfate or lithium hydroxide or carbonate nickel sulfate even on quarter on quarter there is a fair bit of price of cost volatility involved in terms of the market price of these compounds and as you mentioned roughly almost roughly like 58 to 70 percent of the cost of the cell is the material is the bill of materials so how do you think this sort of volatility impacts the production or the output of these battery cells at least do you think there are some sort of financial instruments that are able to mitigate this sort of volatility if it has a meaningful impact I've definitely heard of industry analysts especially people from Benchmark Minerals talk about how there's been a general shift from previously they would sort of EV and battery producers would procure the raw materials on a quarterly basis but now we're seeing these long-term supply agreements go on for more than a year also these long-standing supply agreements for raw materials and I think that feels like something that should help stabilize the market I think what's happening you have Elon Musk going on stage and screaming we need nickel we need nickel so I think it helps set the signals for everyone where investors can be a little bit more confident in investing in the primary industry to increase the supply of these raw materials in a way that matches up the timelines of the ramp-up needed for the EV growth I just think if you have longer-term sales agreements and you have a clear indicator that if you dig it out of the ground it will be used people will pay for it hopefully that will help alleviate that volatility yeah yes I don't know if the people realize magnitude of this problem to build the supply value chain again last year we were using like 200,000 tons of the graphite in the anode if the test last projections are right in 2030 we need to use 20 million tons of the graphite so from the mines needs to be built processing plans to be built so to answer your question also the prices of the everybody is trying to lower the price of the battery cells but if there is going to be shortage of the supply of the materials will be expensive so it's going to be difficult to balance the price of the price of the battery cell with the supply of the battery material I just want to quickly jump in because this sort of checks off one of the points I had written down which is basically everyone is celebrating these dramatic price reductions and I'm just thinking about when the prices are really low like they are now obviously this is a good thing but it really drives a barrier of entry for new players to enter and participate in the supply chain because if you think about the risks involved a lot of these big players have had the time over these 10 years with higher prices and more leniency to work out how do we develop processes to create these high quality materials and nowadays if you have to make a battery at these really low prices there's no room for experimenting there's less room for playing around and maybe bringing in innovative processes so it's another dynamic to factor in Thanks so much for that Andrew that's a really good point I think Stefan and Ingo Dennis Nigel you have just joined the panel as well would you like to chime in here Hi everyone it's Stefan here I actually work on the other end of the value chain working on the EV promotion EV sector promotion and electricity supply to customers I have quite keen interest about the battery supply chain itself first of all I wanted to echo Animesh comments and thanks to Andrew I was religiously listening at the beginning about the description and the summary of the different steps in the value chain so that was super helpful I think my question revolves around two things one it's and I think this is what Andrew also hinted at the beginning about the carbon footprint of the whole battery supply chain obviously the key credentials environmental credentials of the EV industry as a whole is about trying to decarbonize as much the industrial process from the mine to the customer and I think it probably defies the point if at this stage we are mining lithium and I'm just taking the example of lithium in Chile Bolivia or Australia to name a few and then to ship that to manufacturing processing plants in China and ultimately to ship that to OEMs in Europe or in North America so I'm just wondering what sort of comments you may have about that and the second aspect of the question is relating to geopolitics at the moment obviously China is the biggest producer of batteries around the world but the rest of the world is trying to catch up and Europe in particular we have multiple national initiatives whether at EU level or also between the likes of France and Germany and if you look at the numbers the capacity at the moment is pretty low of 20 gigawatt hour and the projections if you believe in those projections at least the pipeline is for capacity in excess of 500 gigawatt hour in the next 10 years but to be able to make that happen obviously we need to have the supply chain in place and in particular the mining and there are lots of projects around Europe whether you're talking about Spain or Cornwall or the Czech Republic which are probably closer to those facilities so I was just wondering if the panel had any thoughts about the ability of the European market to match that mining capacity and that mining ramp up with the forecast in terms of lithium battery production thank you very much I'm done speaking should I answer this question I will try there are many companies who are many mining and processing companies who are following this development in Europe of building these giga plants 500 gigawatts gigawatts dollars so but the I mean there is not one one company or I don't see the clarity in the whole supply value chain to be built for 500 gigawatts I mean there is like a company lithium company in China Republic who is building probably will build lithium mine and lithium processing plant but I don't see all the materials so Europe will be still heavily dependent on China in near near future because China controls the processing of those materials and China controls also a lot of mining of those materials in the other countries well that is kind of the situation today but again the volumes that we need to grow and what even Elon Musk said that 20 terawatt hours annually we are still very far away from that which means that we really need to outsource different kind of ways to get these raw materials and that's why the forest industry is looking into and actually doing pilot lines already from lignin so the certain waste process from the forest industry allows us to get raw materials from the anode sides and actually I think the issue with many components here like lithium is that because it has been so cheap it hasn't been researched very well around so in Europe there are deposits in many places we have in Finland very big spotium deposit there's some in Spain and I believe all around Europe because it's quite light metal and it has been circulated in the top of the crust so there's even in the sea water you have lithium so the sources are there and we just need to develop much more efficient methods to collect them and then we need to diversify the raw material sources in a way that we have more abundant ones and I think that also partially solves that carbon footprint issues because we might even synthesize from CO2 graphene in certain waste processes so if you have a necessity to actually do the carbon capture you could do it in a way that it processes and provides battery raw materials so I think we are just beginning of this battery revolution and there's a lot of tricks in the back yeah but we need to build a robust supply of the materials very quickly in 10 years we need 100 times more material so we need to build mines we don't have time to play in this decade we don't have time to play with commercializing those new technologies which may be commercialized or maybe never commercialized means that we need to build supply value chain with proven commercialized technologies which we already have them now because we don't need it in 2035 we need it in 2025 we need in 2030 it takes 10 years to build a mine so if we want to have this supply from this mine in 10 years we need to build it now thank you so much all true can I say a short point here yes please this is not probably only with the new innovations because we did have already 30 40 years ago innovations in the lithium-ion battery industry that we had to put on the side because of the volatility of the liquid electrolytes and more volatile cathodes but now we are going back to more easier handled components like solid electrolytes and iron phosphate cathodes which have more robustness so it allows us to open back these already mass produced things so we are not in that grim situation that we need to do huge mining operations just to be able to reuse the old technology that we already know that worked very well 20 30 40 years ago thank you both I think these are great discussion topics and we will be having a separate discussion on deep dive for all these mining companies and their approaches I would be happy to take on these discussions at a later time but now I just want to reset the room real quick we have about so if we could move on to Ingo Dennis and Nigel so we can everyone have a chance to speak Ingo please the mic is yours thanks Catherine so I'm here in Germany electrical engineer I have to make three remarks and then final question to the panel here first remark I have a map here about capacities planned in Europe it's about 20 plants gigafactories and they will ramp up to 600 gigawatt in 10 years the European automotive industry produces 10 million cars they need 500 gigawatts to produce 10 million cars per year and that has to be done in the next five years first remark second remark we have actual shortage in battery supply for all electric vehicles every company has long delivery times you can't get a car quite fast as it really is needed third remark about recycling recycling as Simon said is an issue it's actual it's a political issue that's everywhere in discussion but it's not a volume it's minor skill problem at the moment we will have to recycle batteries at the end of the life cycle and the end of the life cycle actual we say for the car batteries in 10 years if it's second use for battery storage or energy storage another 10 years so that will ramp up in 20 years and if you look at lithium phosphate batteries they have even higher life cycles up to 8000 charge cycles that will prolong this time even more so now coming to my question as we said carbon footprint is a big issue in the public discussion and I think also for the customer at the end I think quite interesting development here in regards of today we have these wet coating processes in the factories and afterwards you have a lot of solvents to clear up to dry the coating process and to dry the batteries again and there's a move to dry coating processes and that reduces I think quite a lot of energy usage for the battery production so my question is if anybody in the panel knows or have a feeling about the energy used for these coating processes in the total value chain here tough question yeah I don't know if anyone here that intimately I can answer this question that would be good thanks Boris since now it's yes this is a service I'm working in my company is to make more efficient the electric production because it's totally inefficient now 50% of the energy is going to make the electrode and then it's around to make a cell it's around 44 45 kilo hour to storage 1 kilo hour this is extremely inefficient efficient and not efficient in energy is inefficient in space that is you need a huge space to produce the electrodes and that in future the factories which is extremely clear that they can continue making energy factories this is not sustainable for money if this is extremely expensive and it's really slow to make energy factories then that they need to do is more in the same space and then they can increase the production because after to make the electrode there are a lot of ways to improve the assembling of the cell with more robots more but the electrode is a prehistoric technology that has to change and I can talk forever because this is a work in the last five years in that reinventing how to mix the process how to coat the material and how to dry the materials without waste this amount of energy and without use solvents and use water as solvent mainly so you don't have the huge problem that there are now that nobody is talking about thanks for us we have to connect thank you let's move on to Dennis and Nigel uh Mylas would you like to jump in really quickly here yes I would like only very quickly there are 200 giga giga operating on the same principles how many of them are using different process of production of the batteries zero we have the first one in Tesla which coming with a better process but it's only pilot line is not operating yet maybe it will operate next year but basically we need battery now when it comes to the dry coating processes there are plenty of industrial processes that are dry coating and the battery industries can lend from those processes and the whole energy consumption thing with those wet slurries it of course boils down to the recycling of the energy inside the facility so how much wet hours are consumed by a certain process one has to consider the whole factory and how the energy is recycled inside the factory how do you form it by discharging other cells and charging other cells using DCDCs and so forth so there's plenty of things that might distort the idea that how much energy is consumed in battery production but I have a strong feeling that that amount reduced greatly by dry processes and solid electrolytes in situ polymerization of electrolyte for example a lot of tricks in the back that are used in other parts of the different industries that can be combined and brought to the battery industry so it's not like going out with training wheels we just add up new technologies thank you so much both so just to reset the room we have 15 minutes left if Dennis if the mic is yours hi thank you I'm Dennis from Malaysia probably I just would like to know more about the silicon anode material maybe my laws can able to pick up this question whereby the silicon anode is just not only promising the performance would this silicon anode were able to bring down the price tremendously and whether this come to Andrew whether this lithium material that will be possible within a very realistic time three to five years can this lithium be able to discharge to zero volts and yet can still be charging it back without affecting the material and and the third one will be whether can the lithium cells be able to balance by itself without using a circuitry to balance if you join to maybe 100 or 200 in series hope my question is clear thank you yes the silicon anode for this decade I don't see it like possible maybe next decade this decade it's doping graphite anode with the silicon Pesla is doing already like 3% of the silicon they may do it in the end of the decade like 15% of the silicon but to replace the graphite anode with the silicon I don't see it yeah I think just from you mentioned the zero volt discharge I think from like a crystal structure like a thermodynamic stability standpoint the traditional lithium-ion setup you know where you have a graphite silicon mixture for example on the anode and then a cathode middle oxide I think it's quite hard it's very hard to you if you just charge zero you sort of destroy all the structure within these crystalline materials but there's all this talk about these new anode batteries well I guess relatively new there's been a few so like these batteries where you don't actually physically put in an anode on production you just have a copper foil and then all your lithium sort of starts in where you can ship the batteries however you want and then in situ move the lithium and create the anode once the cell is assembled so that might be a path towards that although I'm not really sure is there a particular reason why we would want to make a zero volt battery is it for transportation purposes safety to reduce the battery measurement system systems research into more more into developing the battery management system into more complexity if the cell can be very flexible then you don't have to put in so much time on the BMS yeah I think so talking about the BMS part of the supply chain I think as cells if we get cells with higher energy capacity power densities then we get a little bit more breathing room in terms of battery management right so you know it's like if you don't necessarily have to you know if you fall off the cliff on the voltage and go to zero and kill your battery if you don't need to go there to fully provide the energy for your certain application then I think that's another way of succumbing those limitations we should have a battery revolution chat on battery modeling and management because I think that's a pretty interesting topic as well yeah definitely Andrew that's something that we'll be talking about in the next couple of weeks as well in the interest of time let's quickly move on to Nigel Boris and Barton Nigel the floor is yours Hi hello Catherine thank you for bringing me up hello Clubhouse members interesting conversation so I'm basically here to just you know follow and listen to everyone's concern to see how my technology will fit into the energy space grid EV which can also be applied in the oceans for I'm breaking up if you could hear me yeah so I'm just listen to everyone's concern and see how again we can fit into all these spaces without disrupting our ecosystem and everyone's concerned about mining and all of these invasive materials that are going into these batteries so I want to make sure that the industry that I'm going to support that's going to be able to support the planet your children my children and my grandchildren and your grandchildren so I rather pay the price today and help them right because I know the way I brought them up was too sheltered and I'm not sure if that applies to everyone else's children but basically I want to make sure that the system that I use is going to be here to support them including the other burdens that they're going to have to try and fix the planet from what I've destroyed it over the past and to how should I say pay down the debt that our government here in the U.S.

1:17:43has put on to them later on in life here which is trillions and trillions of dollars that they're adding into the ecosystem so I just want to share that information with you guys so if anybody have any thoughts ideas but I have somewhat a solution that will probably help everyone right thank you thank you thanks for that Boris do you have any thoughts to add to the battery supply chain topic and then we can move on to Barton and if we could keep it short and sweet that would be great we have about 10 minutes left to be honest I'm not desperate supply chain I think I have there are more people here that know more about that and I don't have anything new to add you can jump up to Barton fantastic thanks for that Barton thanks for joining us do you have something to add to the topic Barton are you there yeah it looks like he's not there could I ask a question real quick I'm here now can you hear me yeah loud and clear yes we can hear fire button I just want to know about recycling batteries is there any it's been on the internet a lot about various companies going into recycling I want to know if there's a future there or do we have enough lithium for years to come to supply all the electric vehicles out there thanks thank you button I mean Casey do you want to take this one yeah there's enough lithium out there it's just a matter of how easy and how cost effective can we refine it and how safely we can environmentally friendly we can do it and also there are ways to definitely ways to recycle the lithium it's just with many different chemistries out there different bearings of purities and requirements for how you can recycle that there is going to be a future is there's a lot of questions and a lot of innovation we're going to need in the coming years to do that but if the demand is there for lithium and the price is high enough someone's going to figure out how to do it thank you and also for you we had a session on recycling similar session to this one of ours talking about that as well so if you go on Battery Insiders dot com hopefully the next few days I'm just going through all the recordings I had to do some edits etc but we have discussed this topic in quite depth and there's really cool work done out there and it's definitely possible and you had one question yeah just something nobody talked about cobalt I think it's a big part of the battery material too right also have anybody thought about building a smart battery like for instance charging instead of using conduct you know the coil and that kind of thing I'm not I'm so slow on the chain on the knowledge chain so can anybody build chips inside the battery and have the batteries talk to each other and that way to realize the storage and charging and save energy sorry this is probably crazy no it's not nope I agree yeah the BMS side the battery cell integrated chips they have been studied and we have done prototypes over the past 20 years so it's very functional thing and when we go to foilless cell designs we can enable NFC which is radio communication between the cells which will be quite nice help for shippers for example because they can see on their cell phone outside from the box the state of charge is more said in the credit chips in the future it will help a lot I just wanted to quickly add that cobalt is definitely concerned and I think there's many companies essentially every company wants to remove cobalt as much as possible for two major reasons one is the ethical implications when supply chains are a big issue we didn't dig into this too much today but of course you want to avoid any child labor and all these kind of things but I think it's clear to everyone that this is something we want to avoid and there have been issues with cobalt in the past so that's one thing but the second thing also is cost right people really want to get rid cobalt also for the cost reason so that's the reason why companies like Tesla etc you know first one you know remove the like reduce the cobalt content and then see for example right we went from like 111 to like you know 9 0.5 0.5 you can go to another hand is of course you can also use LFP but you don't have any cobalt in there so that's another strategy but I think Casey and Andrew maybe had some points as well I think you hit a lot of them Simon cobalt is used in some flavors of battery it's been used with Tesla batteries and it's great because you pack in a lot of energy density in a small and lightweight space which is great for electric vehicles but it's something that is designed out because there's not a lot of cobalt in the world the majority of the supply comes from Congo but as we learn more and more and innovate on the battery chemistry side that we'll find better different use cases for different chemistries and flavors of lithium-ion yeah I just want to add the problems with cobalt don't just span across the battery industry right you know cobalt is one of the key materials that is used to alloy with steel to make it stronger and one of the key applications is prop shafts used in all vehicles right so the problems with cobalt and what they call artisanal mining it's literally just when these big companies aren't doing the due diligence to make sure they don't have literally children working on these sites that's a big problem I have to say the people that are leading from the demand side I think the EU's policies are really forward thinking and they're talking about implementing these they call it a battery passport and that's tracking the ingredient list the provenance of all these materials and so you can imagine that would allow consumers to make conscious decisions maybe these cobalt in future batteries is sourced from existing piles of batteries that have been recycled and collected from cars that have been grinded up and whatever so I think there is hope for the supply chain yes maybe also just one last thing to add I think if you look at phones for example so I think lithium cobalt oxides you have much more cobalt about a third or so the batteries you would use in a car like NMC etc have much lower contents of cobalt so if you take the batteries from phones the content of cobalt is much higher and I think that's a clear trend what's happening and also one thing you can see now companies like BASF etc but also OEMs to actually directly get involved in mining as well because they're so concerned about supply chain having access to it but second also having it from ethical backgrounds where because that's a massive liability to companies you have seen in the past companies getting sued because of their supply chains because there were issues in supply chains especially ethically etc so I think many companies now have to go in this direction and even legally I think we can see this now in Europe for example there's some strong movement into the direction of tightening the screw on supply chains to make them more ethical and if you as a company don't look into this this can be quite tricky in the future so I just want to mention this it's something really interesting we're talking to potential like quite a range of companies about this topic so it's definitely something quite hot right now but just looking at the time as well Catherine this was one of hours again it always does but I think maybe this is a good chance to everyone before I let Catherine close it for the day please give a great applause to Andrew for being our conversation star it's always so valuable to have that get into the mood and get fired up so thanks so much Andrew if you like what he said give him a follow !

1:27:38you can also look at this newsletter it's great it's definitely worth reading and worth a subscription then you can also see Catherine myself we have been moderating this for nine times now which is crazy so next week we have our decade or 10th anniversary or so for these sessions so that's fantastic and we also got this club now so battery revolution you see this on the top above our title and we can also follow this club and if you follow Catherine myself we can accept all of you into the club after the session as well so you can be invited be inside and get notified etc and yeah we have these sessions every Saturday and maybe Catherine wants to close for today and give a bit of some ideas maybe what we could talk about next week yeah definitely so this session happens every Saturday at 10pm Singapore time 3pm CET and 9am Eastern time next week we are still looking for speakers so if you are interested to be one feel free to drop us a note either on LinkedIn or just hit us up if you see us on Clubhouse for private chat and some of the topics that we have lined up is EV battery management system design and about battery analytics alternative batteries batteries for aviation batteries for EVs and things to do with investment such as investments in batteries and EV space and specs and batteries and basically what we talked about earlier which is deep diving into all the battery chemistry mining companies and their approaches so please feel free to reach out to us if any of these topics interest you and you have domain knowledge of if you would love to have you engage you and yeah and also just to have more interesting conversations in this regard with regards to batteries in general so if you did reach out to me assignment and do follow us so we can invite you into the battery revolution club as well and thank you all so much for your time and we look forward to seeing you back here next week