Battery science matters for a just energy transition
Battery science matters for a just energy transition
So let's make environment & human rights part of the conversation.
Happy Weekend! For this piece, I spoke with:
Greg Less, Technical Director at the Energy Institute’s Battery Fabrication and Characterization User Facility at the University of Michigan
Y. Shirley Meng, Professor of NanoEngineering and Materials Science, University of California San Diego and Founding Director of Sustainable Power and Energy Center
Kevin Brigden, Senior Scientist at the Greenpeace Research Laboratories, based at the University of Exeter
Let’s dive in.
If humans are to keep from warming the world more than 1.5ᴼC, carbon dioxide emissions need to decrease 7.6% every year. Transportation fuels about a quarter of current emissions. That makes electric vehicles crucial to keeping us from passing the “point of no return.” Modeling helps companies prepare to meet that EV demand.
About a year ago, Greg Less joined a team of economists who wanted to predict how quickly the world’s drivers would switch to electric vehicles. As a chemist, Less had the job of understanding what that adoption curve would mean for the metals inside each EV battery.
Millions of new EVs — some say a billion or two are needed — means pressure on the world’s mines to produce metals to create the batteries needed to power them. Knowing how many EVs customers will buy, or need to buy, can tell industry to prepare their supply chains.
But Less and the team ran into a big problem. The model was built on various announcements — of battery range, of government policies — which come off the presses like rapid fire. Every four months, the team had to change the model’s inputs, producing very different numbers. The entire model had to be changed at least once.
“The paper never went to publication because the students couldn’t keep up with having to rechange the model,” Less said.
Predicting the future in a rapidly changing industry is risky business. Projections can be as consequential for local communities and ecosystems as they are precarious for investors.
Twists
It was that much stranger, then, that the World Bank and International Energy Agency rolled out similar projections a couple months ago.
They predicted demand would skyrocket five-fold for some materials like graphite, lithium, and cobalt. The reports were a golden ticket to mining companies, especially those trying to boldly mine where no one has mined before: the ocean. If demand would keep ballooning, their investments and mining operations could balloon with them.
Right after the World Bank’s projection came out, I spoke with Less. At the time, the world’s largest battery producer, Chinese CATL, was the center of rumors that an uncommon battery type would make a resurgence in Tesla EVs. If those rumors were true, the World Bank projections for lithium and cobalt would be all wrong, Less said.
Exactly a month later, Tesla received approval to make a Model 3 car with CATL’s rumored battery, called LFP for its lithium-iron-phosphate make-up. The IEA wasn’t as lucky. Its report was published four days after LFP joined the club of popular batteries, but it claimed that the battery was “being phased out” of cars.
So just as we were discussing uncertainty, a wrench was thrown into the prediction engine. (The World Bank and IEA reports did acknowledge uncertainties and caveats, although buried.) The predictions do, however, fuel industry shifts.
Similar presumptuous market predictions bound together the future of nickel and cobalt. Human rights allegations pressured companies to reckon with abuse in their supply chains, but it instead prompted most companies to abandon cobalt entirely, potentially leaving small-scale miners without work. China’s Svolt released two cobalt-free batteries shortly before the cobalt-free LFP announcement. But when cobalt prices shrunk to a third their 2018 size, and Tesla signed onto another long-term cobalt supply deal.
When cobalt was under pressure, nickel companies had sprung into action. Nickel content in batteries ballooned, and companies began swarming top nickel producer Indonesia, where I do most of my work in highlighting allegations of land-grabbing and environmental degradation. Nickel-rich batteries may then be kept afloat by more abundant nickel, when other chemistries could have lower carbon and social impacts.
From Flickr
Mining on uncertain ground
Choosing LFP — to choose one example — over more common nickel and cobalt-dominated chemistries has the potential to avoid ecological damage.
“Now you’re looking at iron, a ridiculously plentiful element, and phosphate, which we throw on our grass every year [fertilizer]. So, two plentiful ingredients, and then you just have to worry about lithium,” Less said.
Mining companies operate on the scale of decades, not years. Most minerals deposits sending metals into the market now were acquiring land and permits two decades or more ago. Mining sites discovered recently may only begin operation after a decade of securing permits and technology. That makes these projections essential to a mining investment, but it puts them on shaky ground. The discovery of a better technology could have drastic effects in how much earth is mined.
From Kevin Brigden, a chemist researching energy storage with Greenpeace:
I think the thing that I find frustrating is that assessments come out with very strong numerical values, but those numbers are based on a range of assumptions, and those assumptions have a dramatic effects on results… Very small changes in battery technology can actually have a big effect.
For example, Canadian seabed miner DeepGreen used Morgan Stanley projections from 2017 to justify the urgency to mine the deep ocean for minerals. Scientists have called for a halt to drafting the first regulations and operating licenses for the practice in order to study the potential impacts of seabed mining, which are as unknown as the deep ocean itself.
Additionally, with recycling, mines for some metals may become wholly unnecessary, says Y. Shirley Meng, a leading battery scientist at UCSD. Most major reports on the future of clean energy batteries note the simultaneous dearth of recycling infrastructure and the desperate need for it.
Interviewing in Y. Shirley Meng from our respective work stations.
Less and Brigden say predictions on what batteries will be needed to transition to clean energy will likely turn out wrong. One of the hottest metals now could become obsolete. For Meng, it represents a disconnect between the politics powering those projections, industry and scientists.
“I think that politics definitely play a strong role in the energy technologies. I think that’s undeniable, but at the same time, I think eventually the good technology always wins… Predictions are hard to make but in the technology for batteries, in 200 years history, we were able to increase energy density ten times, reduce the cost by ten times, we’ll see how much further we can push.”
The future is uncertain
Climate crisis demands people shift a whole host of other lifestyles and infrastructure. And those changes impact which metals are chosen to create batteries.
For example, one of the primary forces driving scientists to design the best batteries is cycle life. Companies want most EV batteries to carry roughly 300-miles-worth of energy so that drivers don’t have to charge often.
But in a clean energy future, we will not only have a denser grid of generators, we’ll likely have more charging stations. That makes traveling long distances easier, because you don’t need to worry where you get the next charge.
Designing a battery to last 300 miles is designing for a prediction that likely won’t hold up. Very few people even now regularly drive 300 miles before gassing up.
Four batteries currently exist for EVs on the market. They all rely on lithium ions to create an electric charge, and they differ in the metal mixtures that store those ions.
But there are countless more types of batteries and other types of energy storage devices in research and development. Some don’t use metals at all and have already hit the market. Hydrogen fuel cells, for example, combine hydrogen and oxygen to create energy that are already powering some trucks. But with few and sporadic hydrogen pump stations, it’s not an attractive option now, and companies will tend to design bigger engines.
Hydrogen fuel cell electric vehicles face a conundrum similar to batteries: How do you manufacture a car for an infrastructure that doesn’t exist yet?
The kicker
Two sweeping changes have gotten a jumpstart amid the pandemic, and they’ll likely affect which metals will end up in EV batteries.
EV sales are down because no one wants to buy a car. People are realizing they can work from home, and there’s little need to commute. No other single activity contributes more to greenhouse gas emissions than commuting for work.
Demand for public transportation may increase, and that calls for different kinds of batteries and technologies. That may prove a boon for Meng’s championed technology, the sodium-ion battery, which she projects to be much cheaper and to have a far smaller footprint than lithium-ion.
Also, renewable energies have become a safer energy investment than other types. Natural gas may not recover fully from the pandemic and the one-two punch that left two pipeline projects decommissioned. As a result, batteries of much higher capacity will be in greater demand sooner.
We have no idea how we will reach clean energy, but we know current lithium-ion chemistries weren’t chosen because they have a smaller ecological or social footprint.
I’m Ian Morse, and this was Green Rocks, a newsletter that doesn’t want dirty mining to ruin clean energy.
Like this post? Show some love by clicking the 🖤 below or above!
Subscribe with just your email, and weekly reports with round-ups and original reporting will come directly to your inbox. It’s free! (for now)
These topics are relevant to anyone who consumes energy. If you know someone like that, share freely!