Henry Sanderson of BostonIn a lab in an industrial city an hour's drive outside Boston, Michael Zimmerman, a professor at Tufts University, hopes that a substance he invented in his home can help solve a crisis faced by an electric car industry that has inadvertently tied its fortunes to one of the poorest and least expensive countries in the world. stable in the world.
With his teaching job, Zimmerman runs a startup called Ionic Materials, whose battery material could mark the future of the auto industry as it races to go all-electric after a century of gasoline-powered cars. His hope is that this locally made prototype could pave the way for a new generation of batteries that do not use cobalt, a gray metal, more than 60 per cent of which is mined in the Democratic Republic of Congo.
IONIQ is backed by Bill Joy, a well-respected computer scientist and investor who has spent years searching for the perfect battery. Its shareholders include an automobile consortium made up of Renault, Nissan, Mitsubishi and Hyundai, and French oil company Total.
“The world wants electric vehicles,” Zimmermann says in his office between the parking lot and a shopping mall. “I've never seen such a huge industry say (it wants) to completely replace the technologies used. Every single company, every government, every country — They all want to do it globally."
The list of ionic's backers is a sign of the growing concerns prevalent among automakers about current battery technology and its dependence on Congo. The supply of cobalt is dominated by a few mining companies, including Switzerland-based Glencore, or it is manually mined and sold to Chinese traders in the country. Child labor is also common, according to human rights groups.
In other words, the product that is the shining hope of the new economy - for the time being - depends heavily on some of the most criticized practices of the old industrial economy.
For many experts, the battery will hold sway in this century - just as oil was in the past. Batteries provide the energy used in our daily digital lives, from iPhones to laptops. But it is also important for electric vehicles to replace gasoline-powered vehicles and for some types of renewable energy. Without these batteries, it would be much more difficult for the world to end its addiction to fossil fuels and limit the impact of climate change.
But battery production is complex, and they involve a precise mix of chemical agents that must meet a robust list of performance requirements. Customers expect fast charging, long battery life, and safety to use — in conditions ranging from the cold winter to the heat of the Arizona desert.
Without a major shift in battery technology, demand for cobalt is set to more than double over the next decade - with the share from the DRC expected to rise to more than 70 per cent. Gleb Yushin, a professor in the School of Materials and Engineering at Georgia Institute of Technology, refers to the topic more explicitly. He says the potential growth in electric cars won't really materialize unless there is a big opening in the battery industry.
“There would be no electric vehicle industry without cobalt from the Democratic Republic of Congo. Without the Congo, there would be no such evolution in the EV industry,” says Casper Rolls, who tracks the market for the London-based consultancy Standard Metals Intelligence. .
Zimmermann started thinking about batteries five or six years ago, just as electric vehicles were gaining momentum and the first Tesla vehicles were becoming popular. At the time, cobalt was a specialty metal used mainly in jet engines and smartphones.
Since then, battery sales for electric and hybrid vehicles have risen from about 6,000 cars in 2010 to about 1 million cars sold last year, or about 1 per cent of annual sales. There will be another batch of 340 million electric vehicles (including passenger cars, trucks and buses) to be produced between now and 2030, according to McKinsey analysts.
This led to an increase in battery factories. The number of "Giga factories" under construction, also named after the gigawatt-hour batteries they can produce each year, has increased tenfold over the past eight years, to 41, according to advisory body Benchmark Mineral Intelligence. . Simon Moores, the company's founder, says the battery is set to become "the barrel of oil for the 21st century".
Discovered by 96-year-old American professor John Goodenough while working at Oxford University in 1980, the lithium-ion battery proved so pivotal to 20th century science and technology that it paved the way for the production of portable electronic devices, starting with cameras. Digital video right down to smartphones. It has also become the standard choice for electric vehicles, which use hundreds of battery cells placed together in metal bag-like packages, weighing up to 600kg.
But since Sony began commercializing lithium-ion technology in 1991, there have been few major developments and improvements to the technology, says Zimmerman. He also believes that the battery that supplies the world with energy may have reached its limit.
“Everyone wants to have their smartphone on them for a longer period of time and never damage their car battery,” he says. “My belief is that lithium-ion batteries are at a dead end now, there is really no improvement that can be made with current technology.”
Battery cells rely on four main parts: the positive and negative electrode, a separator, and a liquid electrolyte. The anode, or cathode, is coated with a carefully prepared metal oxide slurry that in most cars includes lithium, cobalt, nickel and manganese. When the battery is discharged, lithium ions flow to the cathode to generate a flow of electrons and electricity. When the battery is recharged, it flows back to the anode, the negative electrode, which is usually made of graphite.
Cobalt is essential to prevent battery overheating, and the stability it brings to the battery also allows users the opportunity to charge and discharge their vehicles over many years. But it's also the most expensive metal to use — hampering carmakers' ability to lower the cost of electric cars to compete with their gasoline counterparts.
Analysts at Liprom, a London-based brokerage and investment bank, estimate the cost of cobalt per kilogram of the battery's cathode material to be about $12, compared to the cost of lithium of $8 and $5 for a nickel. Metals account for about 25 percent of a battery's cost, they estimate. While new sources of cobalt are being developed in Idaho, Alaska and Australia, they are not scheduled to produce this mineral until after 2020.
Zimmermann, a materials scientist, began research in a relatively unexplored field – electrolytes (electrolytes), which are usually subjected to combustion in batteries. If a solid was used instead of a liquid, the theory goes, the batteries could be safer and lighter. He says it could also allow automakers to reduce or even eliminate the amount of cobalt used in the cathode.
The first solid, conductive material was discovered in the 1830s by British scientist Michael Faraday, but it never worked in a battery that operated at normal temperatures. While working at his home, Zimmermann worked out a polymer material that could do just that.
"It was actually an ugly piece of plastic in a roll with a few holes all over it, but we had to say," recalls Joy, who was researching solid-state battery technology while working for venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins. 'What a wonderful thing.' This is absolutely amazing because it has proven the feasibility of this substance that has been sought for so long." Carmakers, from Toyota to Mercedes-Benz and British engineering group Dyson, are making so-called solid-state batteries like the technology created by Zimmermann and there have been nearly $400 million investments in the technology during the first half of the year, according to the company. Wood Mackenzie Consulting. It expects such batteries will make up the vast majority of electric vehicle technology by 2030, but will not enter the market until 2025.
“There are still a number of challenging problems to solve for the all-solid-state battery to become a commercially viable product," says Peter Bruce, professor in the Department of Materials at Oxford University. "But those issues are now being addressed."
Ionic is one of a number of startups hoping to commercialize the next battery boom. This is an area that has seen its fair share of failures, such as the bankruptcy of Pittsburgh-based Aquion Energy, which raised money from Bill Gates and Kleiner Perkins, in March of last year.
Meanwhile, battery makers are racing to reduce the amount of cobalt used in traditional technology. Yoshio Ito, head of Panasonic's auto business, told reporters in Tokyo last month that the company wanted to reduce cobalt use in Tesla's electric vehicles within two or three years. Tesla said it aims to "reduce cobalt use to almost zero in the near future."
Most automakers are moving toward batteries that use more nickel and less cobalt, which can be reduced by 75 percent. These products are expected to gain market share over the next few years.
Venkat Viswanathan, a professor at Carnegie Mellon University, believes it is possible to reduce cobalt use by using chemical liquid electrolytes. “Ionic Materials is one solution to making a cathode with less cobalt, but the liquid electrolyte pathway is also something many battery makers are turning to and it has reasonable solutions,” he says.
But even with the switch to batteries with lower amounts of cobalt, demand for the metal is still expected to more than double by 2025, according to Wood Mackenzie. “It's hard not to use cobalt at all, reducing the amount used is possible, but not using it is very difficult at this point," Viswanathan says.
For his part, Zimmermann says that batteries that use a low amount of cobalt still pose a high risk of fire, which requires expensive monitoring technology.
In his small office, he plays videos on his laptop of nails diving into the latest production of a low-cobalt cathode with liquid electrolyte, a process he calls "nail penetration testing". There's smoke, fire, and bad things about to happen, he says, as we watch cells get burned in a metal chamber. In this type of fire, toxic gases are produced that require firefighting teams to wear special fire-fighting clothing. "It's basically unsafe," he says.
Zimmermann adds: “Cobalt is an expensive metal – and it is mined from unreliable sources in the Congo, so people want to bring in less cobalt. When less cobalt is added, the cathode voltage goes up and the current liquid electrolytes cannot work at such higher voltages. But The polymerized material can work."
Ionic says that it has tested its polymeric material with cathodes that either were made with less cobalt or that the cobalt was not originally made in its manufacture and is now working with companies to commercialize this technology. If successful, it says it could make its way into batteries in a few years and into electric cars after that.
Such technologies are important to tackle climate change, says Joy, who co-founded Sun Microsystems and wrote some of the important programs that underpin the Internet, adding that the current mix of materials "has reached its limits".
"What happened when Sony invented lithium-ion, I would say we ended up with things getting recharged. But they gave up. Not only in terms of safety and costs, but also in terms of abundance, because there isn't really enough cobalt to power the world." Share it
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