Lithium News

One of the biggest challenges to Tesla Inc.’s (TSLA – Get Report) long-term growth has nothing to do with the company’s Model 3 production line in Fremont, CA, or with competition from traditional automakers.

Instead, it has everything to do with pulling a somewhat obscure chemical element.

Historically, cobalt has been a key ingredient in building high-energy-density lithium-ion batteries, like those used in electric vehicles. In some batteries chemistry, cobalt makes up as much as a third of the chemistry in a lithium-ion battery. Around half of the world’s cobalt production goes into rechargeable batteries, and concerns about supply constraints and the environmental and human impacts of cobalt mining have made it a controversial component of electric vehicles.

Likewise, industry watchers have pointed to a disconnect between Tesla’s lofty growth plans and the projected availability of cobalt.

But Tesla CEO Elon Musk dropped a bombshell on the industry earlier this spring when he revealed that the battery cells in the Model 3 use less than 3% cobalt, a fraction of the amount that other state-of-the-art battery chemistries are using.

And Musk recently doubled down, saying on Twitter that Tesla’s next-generation battery will use none of the element:

Those numbers are consistent with the results of a Model 3 teardown commissioned by one of Tesla’s German luxury rivals. Testing found only 2.8% cobalt content in the car’s cells.

The 2170 battery cells being produced by Panasonic at Tesla’s Gigafactory in Nevada were designed by both firms and the intellectual property behind them is reportedly exclusive to Tesla.

That difference between Tesla’s battery tech and rival car companies could become increasingly relevant as electric cars make up a bigger share of total vehicle shipments; companies using cobalt-dependent battery tech will be stuck with material margin squeeze from the rising cost of cobalt while Tesla sidesteps it.

Meanwhile, shares of Tesla are correcting Thursday afternoon, following a practically nonstop rally from shares’ lows at the end of May. From a technical standpoint, Tesla still looks bullish on all timeframes.

Anesco executive chairman Steve Shine said the developer plans to keep more of its battery assets to fund new projects “because the returns we are seeing are good”.

He also suggested the market should stop dwelling on the “merchant risk” that is frightening debt investors and instead get used to a merchant model that can be exploited by smart operators.

“The smart investors are investing in storage, like they did with solar. The ones that invested earlier made good money,” Shine told The Energyst.

He said while limited long-term visibility on revenues may be limiting investor appetite in the short term, market fundamentals should give comfort.

“Battery storage is key to increased renewables penetration and 2030 and 2050 targets, so logic says this has to take off and the smart operators are buying assets off us,” said Shine.

“We would like to own more assets ourselves, because the returns are good.”

Get used to it

Shine contrasted investor perception of risk in storage with a somewhat different approach applied to property speculation.

“People talk about ‘merchant risk’, which frustrates me. Banks put a lot of money into new buildings in London, with no guarantee of rent for the next 20 years, never mind Brexit,” he said. “Yet we depend on energy every day – and as long as the Balancing Mechanism has been around there has been instability in the market [providing opportunities for flexible assets].

“So it is not ‘merchant risk’, it is just ‘merchant’ and the banks need to get used to it.”

Shine said banks are starting to get comfortable and make initial investments and believes “it will snowball … we got to 13GW pretty quickly”.

Behind the meter

While the company has traditionally developed grid-scale, in front of the meter assets, Shine said Anesco is also looking behind the meter (BTM) and was in discussions with industrial and commercial (I&C) firms to install assets that will achieve a two-year payback. The firm has also installed three batteries at a food processor enabling it to harness its own generation from food waste “all day long”, said Shine.

However, he said I&C sector BTM projects, due to the number of stakeholders involved, is “quite slow…. It can take over a year to come to fruition”.

Charging regime change

Shine said businesses should not be put off looking at BTM storage due to regulatory uncertainty, as Ofgem works to change how businesses pay grid charges.

“There has to be some charge”, even for those increasingly off grid, said Shine. “They will still rely on the grid for back-up, so there has to be some charge for it. But it shouldn’t be more than what they are paying now in terms of use of system and they will still get power cheaper. And the industrial and commercial customers can get investors to pay for it, take a smaller benefit and meet carbon targets.

“So [charging regime change] is not a reason for I&C companies not to do something.”

Co-location and return of solar

Anesco’s subsidy free storage and solar development at Clayhill Farm was seen by some as a success due to perfect circumstances – not least an adjacent development with spare connection capacity.

But Shine is bullish.

“We have another three in the pipeline so it is not a one-off,” he said, adding Anesco already has a potential buyer for the three sites, “and the next one will be built on demand.”

While Shine says the returns from standalone batteries are better than [unsubsidised] solar alone, he is confident “the government will do something with the CfD, and certainly the Capacity Mechanism – and then we will start to see returns for new solar, for sure”.

Interested in demand-side response and battery storage? The Energyst is surveying businesses to understand challenges and opportunities. Your views will help form the research component of a new market report. Tell us what is working, and what is not, here.

Lithium-ion batteries represent the most widely used energy storage medium for mobile demand, such as smartphones, electric vehicles, and renewable energy. Scientists around the world are actively working on devising new ways to make these batteries last longer. Now, a significant breakthrough might triple the energy density of lithium-ion batteries.

The news was reported by a team of researchers at the University of Maryland (UMD), the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) Brookhaven National Laboratory, and the U.S. Army Research Lab. Writing in a new study published in Nature Communications, the researchers described a new cathode material, an engineered form of iron trifluoride (FeF3).

Unlike most cathodes used in commercial energy storage hardware, iron trifluoride is composed of environmentally-friendly and cheap elements. Both iron and fluoride offer inherently higher capacities than traditional cathode materials.

A battery essentially consists of electrochemical cells connected in series or parallel to provide voltage and capacity. Each cell contains a positive (cathode) and negative (anode) electrode, which divided by an electrolytic solution, simply called an electrolyte, with dissociated salt that allows ion transfer between electrodes.

Typically, graphite anodes used in most lithium-ion batteries have a much larger capacity than cathodes. “Cathode materials are always the bottleneck for further improving the energy density of lithium-ion batteries,” said Xiulin Fan, a scientist at UMD and one of the lead authors of the paper.

“The materials normally used in lithium-ion batteries are based on intercalation chemistry,” said Enyuan Hu, a chemist at Brookhaven and one of the lead authors of the paper. “This type of chemical reaction is very efficient; however, it only transfers a single electron, so the cathode capacity is limited. Some compounds like FeF3 are capable of transferring multiple electrons through a more complex reaction mechanism, called a conversion reaction.”

The FeF3 cathode has the potential to triple the energy density of lithium-ion batteries, according to the researchers. If this potential is ever fully reached, it could accelerate our transition away from fossil fuels to renewable energy. Imagine driving an electric vehicle with three times the range currently available or a home that can store three times as much energy from its solar panels during the night.

Of course, FeF3 cathodes aren’t exactly new to science. However, historically this type of cathode has been plagued by three major complications: poor energy efficiency (hysteresis), a slow reaction rate, and side reactions that can cause poor cycling life.

The researchers overcame these challenges by doping the FeF3 nanorods with cobalt and oxygen atoms through a process called chemical substitution. This tweak allowed the researchers to manipulate the reaction pathway of the cathode, making it more “reversible.”

“When lithium ions are inserted into FeF3, the material is converted to iron and lithium fluoride,” said Sooyeon Hwang, a co-author of the paper and a scientist at Brookhaven’s Center for Functional Nanomaterials (CFN). “However, the reaction is not fully reversible. After substituting with cobalt and oxygen, the main framework of the cathode material is better maintained and the reaction becomes more reversible.”

Using a technique called transmission electron microscopy (TEM), researchers at the Center for Functional Nanomaterials (CFN) fired a powerful beam of electrodes on the new cathode nanorods. The imaging experiment, which had a resolution of 0.1 nanometers, revealed the exact size of the nanoparticles that comprise the cathode structure. This step was important, as it showed the researchers that the cathode had a fast reaction speed when changing between different phases of the charge-discharge process.

Unfortunately, TEM can only be used to peer inside a limited area of the sample. So the researchers turned to the National Synchrotron Light Source II (NSLS-II), where they directed the X-ray Powder Diffraction (XPD) beamline through the cathode material. By analyzing how the light scattered, the scientists could “see” additional information about the material’s structure.

Researchers say that their strategy could be applied to other high-energy conversion materials.

Cathodes present a bottleneck when it comes to improving the density of li-ion batteries.

Compared with a li-ion battery’s conventional graphite anode, cathodes are limited. A conventional graphite cathode, in a process known as intercalation, can only transfer a single electron. But compounds like iron trifluoride can transfer multiple electrons.

Past efforts to use iron trifluoride for cathodes had introduced new problems. Energy efficiency was reduced. Reaction rates became slower, and side reactions resulted in poor cycling life. By adding cobalt and oxygen atoms to iron fluoride nanorods, the UMD-Brookhaven-Army team was able to manipulate the reaction pathway and make it more reversible. The iron fluoride material was synthesized at UMD and tested at Brookhaven.

As a next step, the scientists are looking at using their new material in other applications and other types of batteries. The UMD scientists said their research strategy could be applied to other high energy conversion materials, and future studies may use the approach to improve other battery systems.

The most immediate use of the material would likely be in consumer electronics before it found its way into electric vehicles and stationary energy storage.

“From a performance perspective, this is pretty impressive,” Christopher Robinson, an analyst with Lux Research, told Utility Dive. “1,000 cycles is pretty impressive.”

In terms of applications, however, Robinson said stationary energy storage would not be the most obvious use for the iron fluoride technology. Energy density is not necessarily the most important factor for stationary storage, he said. Levelized cost over the life of the project is a more important metric and, on that scale, even small efficiency losses relative to conventional li-ion chemistry add up.

“I’ve read the paper, and I’m impressed,” Robinson said, but he added that with other technological advances it has taken a decade or so before they entered the commercial marketplace.

Chemical engineering professor Lynden Archer believes there needs to be a battery technology “revolution” – and thinks that his lab has fired one of the first shots.

“What we have now [in lithium-ion battery technology] is actually at the limits of its capabilities,” said Archer, the James A. Friend Family Distinguished Professor of Engineering in the Smith School of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering. “The lithium-ion battery, which has become the workhorse in powering new electronics technologies, operates at over 90 percent of its theoretical storage capacity. Minor engineering tweaks may lead to better batteries with more storage, but this is not a long-term solution.

“You need a kind of radical mindset change,” he said, “and that means that you’ve got to almost start at the beginning.”

Snehashis “Sne” Choudhury, Ph.D. ’18, has come up with what Archer terms an “elegant” solution to a fundamental problem with rechargeable batteries that use energy-dense metallic lithium anodes: sometimes-catastrophic instability due to dendrites, which are spines of lithium that grow from the anode as ions travel back and forth through the electrolyte during charge and discharge cycles.

If the dendrite breaks through the separator and reaches the cathode, short-circuiting and fire can occur. Solid electrolytes have been shown to suppress dendrite growth mechanically, but at the expense of fast ion transport. Choudhury’s solution: Confine dendrite growth by the structure of the electrolyte itself, which can be controlled chemically.

Using a reaction procedure the Archer group introduced in 2015, they employ “cross-linked hairy nanoparticles” – a graft of silica nanoparticles and a functionalized polymer (polypropylene oxide) – to create a porous electrolyte that effectively lengthens the route ions must take to travel from the anode to the cathode and back, dramatically increasing the life of the anode.

Their paper, “Confining Electrodeposition of Metals in Structured Electrolytes,” was published June 11 in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Choudhury and Dylan Vu – a rising junior majoring in chemical engineering – are co-first authors.

“Imagine being in a maze, where at every juncture you encounter a roadblock,” Archer said. “In energy storage, the goal is to pack as much energy into the smallest space possible to minimize overall device size. And so one can’t really have long separation distances between components in an absolute sense, but we’ve shown that increasing length scales by introducing tortuous transport pathways is possible.”

Choudhury, who is headed to Stanford University for his postdoctoral work, also devised a method for direct visualization of the inner workings of their experimental battery. The group confirmed theoretical predictions about dendrite growth with Choudhury’s device.

“This is something I’ve wanted to do for, I guess, three Ph.D. students’ lifetimes,” said Archer, who’s been at Cornell since 2000, with a laugh. “What Sne was able to do was design a cell that allowed us to, very elegantly, visualize what is occurring at the lithium-metal interface, giving us now the ability to go beyond theoretical predictions.”

Another novelty of this work, Archer said, is “overturning something of a canon” in battery science. It’s long been held that, in order to suppress dendrite growth, the separator inside the battery must be stronger than the metal it is trying to suppress, but Choudhury’s porous polymer separator – with average pore sizes below 500 nanometers – were shown to arrest the growth.

“Even if one designs a softer separator, but with nanostructuring that creates tortuousness, you can get there,” Archer said. “Part of what we tried to do was to balance the desire to create technologically relevant systems with the desire to understand things fundamentally. If you do that, you are able to design new systems.”

That one of the co-authors – Vu – is an undergraduate is not unusual at Cornell in general and his group in particular, Archer said.

“That’s been a priority, to basically add value to the undergraduate experience by exposing them to research,” he said. “That’s a lot easier said than done, because undergrads aren’t generally here for research. … And Sne has managed, in a sort of miraculous way, to write a paper of this quality with every undergraduate he’s worked with.”

Mukul Tikekar, Ph.D. ’17, and doctoral students Alexander Warren and Zhengyuan Tu also contributed to this work, which was supported by a grant from the National Science Foundation.

The alliance of Daimler, Ford and Renault-Nissan working on commercialising a fuel cell car has hit a road block as Renault-Nissan pull out. The partners had aimed to develop shared components but now decided to focus on electric cars first.

Still their involvement in R&D of hydrogen technology will continue despite the alliance of the carmakers from Europe, the U.S. and Japan based in British Columbia having entered a dead end.

Renault-Nissan’s latest decision follows the consensus among Daimler and Ford to dissolve the partnership. They had failed the initial target of introducing a serial FCV in 2017.

While Renault and Nissan want to pour their resources into battery-electric cars for now, they are still expected to cooperate with Daimler and Ford on fuel cell project. Concrete details were not disclosed for now.

The last statement from Ford and Daimler read in this regard: “Both companies will continue to explore ways to cooperate on developing fuel cell stack modules.” Ford‘s plans “will take fuel cell stack development in-house, as well as leverage the supply base,” while Daimler CEO Dieter Zetsche indicated earlier this year that the company will focus more on battery-electric vehicles.

This leaves Toyota and potentially Hyundai as the leader in the field. Japan in particular has been proactive with policies advancing hydrogen infrastructure. According to the state’s ‘Strategic Road Map for Hydrogen and Fuel Cells’ the country’s aim is to set up 160 stations and to have 20,000 FCEVs on the streets by 2020 reportedly.

China however recently announced their plan to advance hydrogen and fuel cell technology as well.