The Charge Podcast | Episode 6 | Innovation: The future of batteries

[00:01] Eric: We all want more from our batteries. Probably because we're all doing so much more that depends on batteries, he says while looking at his 11 hours a day screen time report. Reality is we're never going to be satisfied and that's okay because it's our demanding nature that drives innovation and it's working. According to Bloomberg, battery energy density has improved by about 10% per year over the last ten years, meaning it's over three times what it was a decade ago.

And in that same timeframe, the price of batteries per kilowatt hour has dropped 90%. Meanwhile, total battery storage, whether EVs, electronics or grid, has increased by a factor of six in the last decade and is expected to grow tenfold over the next decade. The long list of battery improvements just keeps going and going and going. That's a 90’s battery reference for you.

Now add in a little thing called the EV Revolution and the amount of innovation is at a level like we've never seen before. And it's not just EVs that are benefiting. The need for clean, green battery technology applies to countless different applications as you'll soon learn. In this episode, we'll go double-A deep on battery technology looking at what's driving innovation, what's getting battery fans really charged up, and what future technology developments could mean for nickel and other critical metals.

There's no shortage of good material to get into here or battery ponds to get tired of so let's jump right in. I had a chance to sit down with Dan Blondal, CEO of Nano One Materials Corp. He has 26 years of experience as a professional engineer and possesses a keen skill in marketing complicated technology, making him the perfect person to answer some of my very layperson questions.

Here's some of that conversation. Thanks again, Dan, for taking the time. So, first question is a big broad one. What does the future of batteries look like?

[01:50] Dan Blondal: Well, it’s the tip of the iceberg. There's got to be 20, 30 years of lithium-ion battery well, in the future, and who knows what happens beyond that? A lot of the room to improve is on the CO2 footprint, security of supply. Certainly, with all the global uncertainty right now, everyone's looking to know ‘How do we do it here?

How do we do it locally? How do we do it within North America? How do we do it within Europe or the Indian context in South Asia?’ And so, there's all this effort to nationalize and regionalize all of the supply chain. So, we're going to see that playing out for the next ten years because you have to build the mines.

You have to find them, you have to build them, you have to finance them, and then you have to put all the refining in place in between. And that will drive a whole bunch of efficiencies. So, there's the whole revolution in the supply chain BYD and CATL are both very large Chinese battery companies that have figured out how to stuff more batteries between the wheels.
And they've done that by saying, well, instead of taking all these batteries and sticking them in a structural steel box to make it really strong, let's use the packaging on each cell. It might be putting 27,000 cells into a big box. Let's use the cans that these cells are in and use that for the structural integrity. And that way we can lighten the whole battery and we can stuff more between the wheels and we can make this thing drive further.

So, we're seeing an extension of range by the way the battery packs are designed and they're designing them directly into the frame of the vehicle to provide structural support. That's a massive change. Doesn't change the chemistry. Different chemistries have to be built in different ways but it doesn't really change it. So, these are some of the big things we'll see.

All over the place, like Tesla responded to that. They're starting to do the same thing. We're going to see the same thing from Ford and GM and Volkswagen and Fiat Chrysler. Everyone is going to be kind of pushing in that direction.

[03:42] Eric: Okay. There are a number of things you touched on here that I want to dig into, especially this last point on structural batteries. But first, you mentioned CO2 footprint and supply chains, not necessarily the first things you think about when talking about battery innovation but clearly, it's important. Can you explain a bit more about this?

[03:59] Dan Blondal: Yes. So, one of the things is that, again, we work on a variety of different chemistries with this one-part process. We can use it to make nickel rich cathode materials, iron rich cathode materials, manganese rich cathode materials. Each one of those serves different purposes in the market. Some of it it's better at charging, some of it it's safer.

Some of it will get a longer range of vehicles. Some of it, which can be charged more often, have lasted longer. So, they all have different properties. None of them are good at all of the above. So, you end up with, let's say, some of these materials working better for heavy-duty cycle electric vehicle applications like a bus or a forklift or a taxi that's going to be fully charged and discharged every day.

Some of them are better at energy density range, which you might have in a long-range electric vehicle. Those would be the nickel-based compounds. And you don't charge those really all that aggressively and not all that often compared to a bus or a taxi. And so, when we start to look at the underlying materials that go into these batteries and where they come from, from a nickel mine or iron mine or a lithium mine and when they come into these cathode materials, they go through a whole bunch of transformations. They'll go to a smelter or refiner; they'll get processed into a very high purity material.

And there's a lot of waste along the way. So, one of the things [] empty can process does. It eliminates, let's say, the need to go from nickel-to-nickel sulfate to a cathode material. We eliminate the nickel sulfate in between. We still use nickel but we don't have to use the sulfate. The problem is sulfate is not..

That doesn't end up in the battery and actually is just kind of this intermediate form of the material. And all the sulphate goes to waste ultimately. And in fact, it's twice as large as the cathode waste. So, oh, that's been fine. And while the world ramped up from the early 1990s till now, there's hundreds of thousands of tonnes of material being made in the world. But when we go to millions and tens of millions of tonnes per annum to feed the whole electric vehicle market and the whole renewable energy storage market, that kind of waste stream is untenable.

The West simply won't tolerate it. So, we have to find ways to eliminate these wasteful steps that have been okay for now but aren't really scalable in the future. So that's a big part of what we're trying to disrupt. We're trying to change the way the whole supply chain feeds into battery materials because we see this big wall coming of waste that has to be dealt with.

[06:30] Eric: Makes a lot of sense, especially when you consider the scale of what's to come. Okay. Now I want to circle back to an idea you mentioned earlier about batteries being incorporated into the structure of cars. I've read a bit about this. It seems manufacturers are reimagining the whole car, not just the battery. Is that right?

[06:48] Dan Blondal: Yeah. But now they're starting to think, “Okay, well, how do we make that? How to make the battery part of the structure of the vehicle.?” Look, we've been there. I think your listeners will probably understand this. We've been there with a cell phone for a long time. When was the last time you could take the battery out of your cell phone?

It's integrated into the cell phone and the reason it's there is to make it thinner. It's all about thin and being as light as possible so they can stuff a bigger screen on it. And the same thing is happening in electric vehicles, except we're just there. We're just where cell phones got with the first iPhone 12 years ago.

So that's starting to happen in electric vehicles, except of course, the change cycles are measured in five and seven years, not in one year cycle. So, it's going to take some time for all this stuff to happen.

[07:33] Eric: Yeah. Given the size of the global auto industry, I can appreciate that these things don't happen overnight. But even though the EV revolution feels like a long time in the making, there's no denying that it's here now. And clearly some impressive things are starting to happen. So what else are you excited about? What else can we expect to see in terms of new tech?
[07:52] Dan Blondal: Well, so as I mentioned before, there's different flavors of lithium-ion batteries. They all have lithium in them, right? So, there's a lithium-ion phosphate, lithium nickel, manganese cobalt oxide, lithium nickel manganese cobalt. And each one of them serves different purposes. Some of them are more mature than others and some of them are emerging. They'll come up in the next five to ten years So these are just evolution just in lithium-ion batteries.
And then there's what we call a solid-state lithium-ion battery, still a lithium-ion battery. So, what we do at Nano One is still the same. It's still a lithium-ion battery. But the anode, the other electrode, moves from graphite to pure lithium metal. And that makes the battery thinner and denser. And this technology's been around for 20 years already, but it's commercially very difficult to make these.

And there is one producer actually in eastern Canada in Quebec called Blue Solutions that have been making solid state batteries for some time and they are more energy dense. But there's all kinds of cost implications right now. These will be coming out in the next five to ten years. We'll start to see them in drones and smaller applications long before we see it in electric vehicles.

But these, it's an emerging technology. It's still a lithium-ion battery. But instead of, the anode is changed and they get rid of some of the flammable components inside the battery by going solid state instead of… there's liquids inside the battery that allow the lithium to move back and forth to the developing solid materials that allow that to happen and that aren't flammable.
And so even though that's an incremental improvement, it's a huge change to how batteries are built. And it will take five, ten, 15 years before we see large-scale adoption of those types of batteries. And then there's different chemistries, there are lithium sulfur and sodium ion. There are flow batteries which have nothing to do with lithium-ion batteries.

And they're kind of more towards… they're somewhere between what a lithium-ion battery would do and what our dam would do for storing energy. They kind of fit in between those two in terms of the markets that they address. And they can all serve different purposes.

[10:00] Eric: Okay. Can you get into maybe a specific type of battery chemistry and why that type of chemistry would benefit, say, a long-range battery or a certain situation that the battery would fit in the type of chemistry that belongs in that battery?

[10:15] Dan Blondal: Yeah. So, certainly for the foreseeable future, nickel rich batteries, these are batteries that have lithium, nickel, manganese, cobalt, aluminum, but mostly lithium and nickel in them. Those are going to be the most energy dense batteries. And they will be largely serving the long-range electric vehicle market simply because they just provide more instantaneous range to the vehicle.

And I don't think that there's any way that's going to change. We're going to see massive growth in that market. And then on the flip side of that, you have battery materials like lithium-ion phosphate. There's no nickel, there's no cobalt in there. It's iron, phosphorus and lithium. They tend to be much longer lasting than NMC, much lower cost because you're dealing with iron instead of nickel.

But they don't quite have the same energy density. But they will serve the heavy-duty market where you're charging the battery much more frequently like you would in an electric bus or a forklift or even a small consumer electric vehicle that has a small battery in it. It's got a small battery. It's cheap, much cheaper than a large battery.

But that means you have to charge it more often. And the batteries are simply more robust. They will last longer. You'll get more cycles out of them. So, it will serve that kind of bottom end of the electric vehicle market much more favorably than nickel rich materials. And that's not to say it's going to take away any nickel market share.

All the market shares on this stuff are on a meteoric rise right now. And we're going to need them all in order to address the demand across the whole supply chain and all the different market segments.

[11:53] Eric: How often do we see new battery tech hit the market? Is it every five or ten years or what can we expect new advancements in part of it?

[12:02] Dan Blondal: Well, you can look back historically. And so, lithium-ion batteries were invented in the seventies, commercialized in the early 1990s, and we haven't seen them really hit electric vehicles since the last five, ten years. And right now, we're still in Gen-one of the way that we make. There's a lot of work to be done.

As I mentioned on the supply chain and the way we build the battery packs, the way we build the cells. There's lots and lots of work there. So, any new technology, let's say like if you replace lithium with sodium or we go to lithium sulfur batteries, if those technologies can be proven out and they're not yet, they will go through the same kind of design cycles.

They will take decades to become dominant players. And really the market, it can be very hard for them to supplant lithium-ion batteries because there's so much of a head start on the manufacturing and supply chain. There's so much momentum in the manufacturing of lithium-ion batteries. Very difficult for one of these new technologies to completely eliminate it.

They will address certain markets. In some cases, they will address certain niches in the marketplace. And they may be quite good but they'll never have the low-cost energy density simply because they just don't have the manufacturing scale. But lithium-ion batteries have been building since the early 1990s.

[13:16] Eric: So, when there's a new kind of battery that comes around, how difficult is it to integrate? Would the whole EV battery system need to be overhauled?

[13:24] Dan Blondal: Yeah, the voltage has changed. The current, the power you can pull out of them changes. Whether you have a whole bunch of them in a series and parallel, all of those changes. The charging infrastructure may very well change. So yeah, there's a huge amount of very specific manufacturing technology being put in place for lithium-ion batteries.

So that's the barrier to entry that is building right now. This can make it hard for any of these new technologies really to come into play. But the reality is lithium is the smallest element you can move around in a lithium style battery and it packs the most energy, packs more energy than sodium. It may be more expensive than sodium right now but at the end of the day it packs more energy and is going to have the greatest energy density. So, it's likely to remain unchallenged for at least a couple of decades.

[14:13] Eric: Right. So, all this can and will happen. It's going to take a lot of time like you've mentioned a couple of times.

[14:18] Dan Blondal: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

[14:19] Eric: And I guess all that means nickel continues to be pretty important.

[14:22] Dan Blondal: Yeah, it's extremely important. Look, you can't make a lithium nickel oxide battery alone. Nickel needs to have other elements in there to stabilize it. An [14:32] battery as the as it's called, is very energy dense but it only lasts a few cycles. So having manganese and cobalt or aluminum in there helps actually stabilize it so that you can get many cycles out of it.
And it remains, it's kind of the most energy dense battery particularly for mobility applications and will be so for the foreseeable future. But we will see there's a battery material that's manganese rich, still has nickel in it and there's no cobalt. It's an entirely different structure of material, very fast charging called LMNO. And it will play an increasing role over the next decade.
We'll start to see more appreciable adoption of those materials coming into the end of the decade and into the ‘20, ‘30s. But it still has nickel in it and will play a really key role. And then as I mentioned earlier, the lithium-ion phosphate will start to take over largely wherever there is really a heavy-duty cycle where that battery is being charged and discharged much more aggressively simply because it lasts longer and is cheaper.

And it's important that all of these exist because lithium-ion phosphate will help reduce the demand and the cost pressure on nickel which will actually make it more palatable for all the nickel applications. So, there's a balance here. Who knows what it's going to look like? But in a decade, it could be 30, 30, 30.

Nickel might still be the dominant one. Maybe it's half the market, the nickel-based batteries and the non-nickel batteries take up a portion of the rest of the market.

[16:09] Eric: Right. It sounds like a small child learning the alphabet, the L, M, N, O whatever. It’s hilarious. I like that. But to your point, nickel is going to stay a primary player, whether it's a small amount or a big amount, I mean, it's going to be needed and the demand will stay consistent.

[16:28] Dan Blondal: Well, it's a big amount. Actually, the demand is going nowhere, but up. There's no doubt about that. Demand for all of these battery materials, be it lithium, nickel, iron, phosphorus, manganese, cobalt, they're all going up. It's just a matter of how much nickel you're putting in each battery. But the demand is far outstripping the changes in the chemistries and I think anyone in any of those raw materials spaces is going to be seeing nothing but a wall of demand and not enough supply.

So, there's enough growth in demand for everyone for the next decade. And who knows what happens beyond that? Because it's hard to see where all of it will come from. It's simply daunting how much change there is going to be.

[17:13] Eric: Wow. Anything you want to add at the end here, Dan? Anything you can think of off the top that you want to get in there that we missed?

[17:20] Dan Blondal: No, I think the key thing here is and I think, look, this podcast is about nickel and the key thing to understand is nickel is here to stay. It's extremely important to the battery industry. There will be other players but don't worry about them because I think there's more than enough demand to go around for everything.

We at Nano One have our fingers in all of the different chemistries and we'll be playing off the ball. Strategically, they're all going to be very important and we're trying to establish our mark in every one of them nickel rich, iron rich, manganese rich materials. They're all part of that pantheon of batteries that are going to help us move our society into a net zero future.

And that is more environmentally sustainable and more secure of supply. I think that's going to be a really important part of it too. So, we're nothing but looking forward to a massive shift in this marketplace in a really kind of healthy future.

[18:22] Eric: Well, I got to say that feels like the right note to wrap up on. As Dan pointed out, this is a podcast about nickel. So, yes, we're going to give nickel some extra love. But as he also said, there are a number of other battery technologies out there, each with their own advantages in serving specific needs. Some use nickel, others don't.

But there's some room for every technology and every player to play a part. Because ultimately this is about building a better, more sustainable future and that's going to take the whole village. Dan echoed a sentiment we've been hearing throughout this podcast. We most definitely need more nickel as much as we can get. And he made it clear that this is going to be a reality for a long, long time to come, no matter how the battery tech space unfolds.

He also made it clear that it's not just nickel we need more of. Whether it's supply chain, structural engineering or actual battery chemistries themselves, we need more investment and more innovation across the board. That's the only way we're going to meet the world's growing electrification demands. The good news is that's exactly what seems to be happening. And while it's taken a while to get here, we're on the cusp of something truly transformative.

This EV revolution is driving incredible momentum and advances in technology that will impact us in so many positive ways. When you consider the future of batteries and their impact on the future of our planet, it's safe to say I'm pretty charged up.

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