SPEAKER_03 0:00

It worked out. We even had a fire, a lithium fire in the process, so that was exciting.

SPEAKER_01 0:03

Are you sure you're supposed to say this on it? Welcome to the Battery Potential podcast. I'm Vincent Chevrier. And I'm Kevin Eberman.

SPEAKER_03 0:30

Welcome to Battery Potential. Thank you. This is going to be exciting. We're going to have a good time. Kevin? Yes. We uh very excited to be here and uh a part of the co-hosting on Battery Potential. It's gonna end up being an important archive, I think, eve uh if nothing else.

SPEAKER_01 0:47

I certainly hope so. You know, for me, the reason for this is I've so much enjoyed at conferences talking to the old timers of the battery industry. Yeah. And I have this memory of sitting at a conference with Michel Goutsi and a new professor. Yep. And I was like, Michel, you know, tell us a story about LFP. And uh you know, and he talks about his story with Fostech, and the professor left with this impression, like she was like, My mind was blown.

SPEAKER_03 1:24

The world was opened up.

SPEAKER_01 1:25

Right. Yeah. It was like, I thought LFP only came from China.

SPEAKER_03 1:28

Ah, right.

SPEAKER_01 1:29

Right. I didn't realize that LFP was first commercialized in Quebec and in the US. Yeah.

SPEAKER_03 1:36

And good point.

SPEAKER_01 1:37

Yeah, there's this whole history that exists.

SPEAKER_03 1:39

Yeah, good enough originally for LFP, but yeah, turning it into the real thing and commercial. Yeah. Yeah. I I worked with Valence in those early years, and they were putting the LFP into a into a power pack that was the shape of an old-fashioned laptop, and you like you you connected it to the entire bottom of your laptop.

SPEAKER_01 1:58

Those old Toshiba laptops.

SPEAKER_03 2:00

They click the whole thing with the 1865s in the back.

SPEAKER_01 2:04

Yeah. Those are great. So so really the objective of battery potential is to talk about that era in the 90s and 2000s where lithium-ion was nascent, and it wasn't clear who was gonna win that race, right? You had Sony, you had some Asian players just starting, and you had some North American players just starting. Yeah. And it was the race, there was a lot of academic breakthroughs in North America, Canada, US. And you know, it was neck to neck.

SPEAKER_03 2:40

Yeah. Right.

SPEAKER_01 2:40

And the objective of this is to say, okay, today Asia completely dominates the market.

SPEAKER_03 2:45

Right. Right.

SPEAKER_01 2:46

Ninety plus percent of sales made in Asia.

SPEAKER_03 2:49

Right. Yeah, yes, and mostly China, even though it started in Japan. Japan, then Korea, then China, yeah. Now just amazing, all shifts it away.

SPEAKER_01 2:57

Right. 95% of graphite made out of China.

SPEAKER_03 3:00

Yeah. Right, at unbelievable prices, like five to ten dollars a kg for these super refined materials. Right. Incredible.

SPEAKER_01 3:07

GPMs of impurities.

SPEAKER_03 3:08

Right. And like surface coated and rounded and you know, just exquisite, narrow particle size. It's incredible.

SPEAKER_01 3:15

Right. But in the 1920s, we didn't know who was gonna win that race. And so the objective of battery potential is a retrospective.

SPEAKER_03 3:24

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 3:24

Is to look back on this era and yeah, and so for me, I listen to a lot of podcasts. Yeah. And one issue I have with with the way that technology is presented in current media is that it's so forward-looking that often it's difficult to parse what is important, what is not important. Sort of, you know, what is hot air and what is not.

SPEAKER_03 3:47

And yeah, because the people don't even know, right? Because when you're looking forward, you kind of so many things on the current landscape that could rise to become important and others will will not. And you don't you don't know when you're when you're looking forward.

SPEAKER_01 4:01

You don't know, and people have to be aspirational, right? You have to have lofty goals or else you never reach them. Right. But at the same time, as an audience, it's hard to parse. Right. But in retrospective, yeah, it's what happened. Right. What did we live? And I think there'll be really interesting lessons to take from those experiences.

SPEAKER_03 4:18

And I think generalizable to other technology areas. You know, so many technologies started or were a race between US and Japan or others, and then moved to Asia. So I think it'll be an example of all that.

SPEAKER_01 4:32

I just wanted to tie in Edison's famous quote about batteries.

SPEAKER_03 4:36

When I tell people we're gonna do this podcast, I first thing I do is I tell them about the catch pen, so I can't wait.

SPEAKER_01 4:42

So Thomas Edison in 1883 said the storage battery is, in my opinion, a catchpenny, a sensation, a mechanism for swindling the public by stock companies. The storage battery is one of those peculiar things which appeals to the imagination, and no more perfect thing could be desired by stock swindlers than that very selfsame thing. Just as soon as a man gets working on the secondary battery, it brings out his latent capacity for lying.

SPEAKER_03 5:11

Yeah. I think I learned that within year one of joining 3M and working on batteries. Hey, you know what Thomas Edison said. Wow. Right.

SPEAKER_01 5:22

Exactly. Visionary, yeah. Yeah, exactly.

SPEAKER_03 5:25

Well, but now I work in the venture area, so I'm constantly talking to startups, and still sometimes battery wants in. I mean, all startups have this sort of aspect, but the battery is definitely Edison was onto something.

SPEAKER_01 5:38

Right, exactly.

SPEAKER_03 5:40

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 5:40

But these guys that we're gonna interview in these upcoming podcasts, it'll be what happened in the past, what actually happened, what they achieved. And there's a lot of arcs that are interesting to look at that we hope to touch on. And our first guest is going to be Jeff Don. Jeff Don, which we both know. The Don of Batteries. The Don of Batteries. That's right. Which we both know very well. And before he was a professor, so everybody knows him as a professor, yeah, famous professor, out of Dellhouse University in Halifax. Yep. Before he was a professor, he worked at Molly Energy. Right. In British Columbia and Canada. And Molly commercialized a lithium metal battery in 1985. Lithium metal, like we're trying to get to now.

unknown 6:27

Right. That's right.

SPEAKER_01 6:29

What's on the future roadmap of everybody? That's right. They were doing in 1985. Yep. Yeah, and they commercialized a lithium-ion battery only a couple years after Sony commercialized.

SPEAKER_02 6:39

I didn't know that. Yeah. Okay, that's cool.

SPEAKER_01 6:41

Yeah, yeah. They had a lithium-ion battery as well. Wow. That came after the lithium metal battery.

SPEAKER_02 6:46

Okay. Wow.

SPEAKER_01 6:47

So, you know, North America was neck to neck. That's the topic that we will be interviewing Jeff Don about.

SPEAKER_03 6:53

Yeah. Yeah, that'll be really awesome.

SPEAKER_01 6:55

And there's a lot of other arcs that are really interesting to explore, you know, down the line. There's the whole arc of the alkaline battery makers in North America. Yeah. Explorer.

SPEAKER_03 7:07

Yeah. Right.

SPEAKER_01 7:08

They all had their lithium-ion programs internally that eventually they divested of.

SPEAKER_03 7:14

Right. And what happened there?

SPEAKER_01 7:15

Right.

SPEAKER_03 7:16

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 7:16

It's a fascinating story. Right. And you can draw a direct line from what they did to CATL, which is the biggest maker of lithium batteries in the world. I didn't know.

SPEAKER_03 7:28

I didn't realize you could draw a line. Wow. Okay. Straight line. It'll be fascinating. We'll see. Okay. I'm excited. You're going to I'm going to learn things here, Vincent. This is great.

SPEAKER_01 7:35

Yeah. It's such a rich history. You know, then there's another arc, which is the LFP arc. Fascinating.

SPEAKER_03 7:43

Right.

SPEAKER_01 7:43

Which I'm sure I'm going to learn a lot about.

SPEAKER_03 7:45

Because we had cobalt oxide in the first battery, and LFP would be this iron phosphate is another. Came later, even though it was like it was it was known as a material early, but didn't didn't uh come out in a battery. Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 7:58

Yeah, there's a few key inventions that enabled it as a as a cathode material. Um but valence phostec energy and A123 were all super early players in the lithium-ar and phosphate industry.

SPEAKER_03 8:15

Right.

SPEAKER_01 8:15

And that all got taken over by China. Yeah. Completely. But the first efforts were Canada and US. Yeah. There you go. Again. Again. So a lot of fascinating history.

SPEAKER_03 8:29

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 8:29

And um those guys that were there, yeah. We'll be interviewing them.

SPEAKER_03 8:33

Yeah, that's right. Yeah. Yeah. Oliver Gross, probably. And uh maybe we'll interview Yet Ming Chang. That'll be good. That'd be good.

SPEAKER_01 8:43

Michel Gautier. Michel Gautier, yeah. That'd be on my list for sure.

SPEAKER_03 8:47

Perfect.

SPEAKER_01 8:48

And there's a few valence guys that'll be really interesting to talk to.

SPEAKER_03 8:51

Yeah, okay, good. Yep. Great. This will be super interesting. I mean, it's it's sort of mysterious. Like if you if you're new to the whole thing, you might listen to what we said and think, yeah, why didn't they why didn't they do it? You know, is it is it just that the US gave up on manufacturing, and it turns out it's it's not really just that. There's more to the story. Yeah. So I think that'll be interesting.

SPEAKER_01 9:14

You know, there's this whole mix of government involvement, technical challenges. You know, some companies failed because of recalls and fires, and you know, it's a whole mix of things. Right. Right, right, right. And it's um batteries are just really hard to make.

SPEAKER_03 9:30

Yeah, that's right. I mean, yeah, it's I what I always was drawn to about them is that you it's there's there's physics, there's chemistry, there's uh mechanical engineering, uh data science. There's data science, there's so every field is there in the battery. All about every technical field. Yeah, exactly. And it's I had a really interesting conversation with one of our friends, Egbert Figemeyer recently, about is battery research really science or is it engineering? That'd be an interesting thing to talk to some of some of our guests about. Uh he's on the side of it's engineering, because you know, you've got the whole point is that you've got so many constraints. You know, it's gotta fit in this little can. Is it volume, is it weight? Yeah. Exactly. The volume, the weight, it's gotta last a certain amount of time, and it's gotta not be too expensive. Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 10:17

Safety.

SPEAKER_03 10:17

Right, exactly. So the the it's incredibly complex, and yet it has to meet all these things at once.

unknown 10:23

Right.

SPEAKER_01 10:24

You've got to hold it in your hand.

SPEAKER_03 10:25

Yeah, exactly. Exactly. Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 10:28

So maybe we should give a little bit of our backgrounds.

SPEAKER_03 10:31

Yeah, that's a good idea.

SPEAKER_01 10:32

So Kevin, how did you get into batteries?

SPEAKER_03 10:36

Hmm. Yeah. Well, you know, I was uh in doing material science working on solid oxide fuel cells uh during my PhD days at MIT. And in my last year, there were two things I did that connected me into batteries. One was I taught a class with uh Yemeng Chang, a lab class on um lithium ion batteries. So we were making we made little swage lock cells where we pressed pellets and um it was very difficult. We had way too much resistance in the cells. It was hard to get data. Uh, but yeah, it worked out. We even had a fire, a lithium fire in the process, so that was exciting.

SPEAKER_01 11:11

Are you sure you're supposed to say this on air?

SPEAKER_03 11:13

And then the other thing was um I worked with a couple of people. Well, one was a postdoc who worked with me, and then was his the other was his wife, which was Per Enroot and Christina Lempa on Rud. And they went to um Arthur D. Little, which became Hereon, and they needed someone to analyze cathode materials, like crystal structure and so on. So I was learning about it through them doing work on the side while I was doing my PhD on analyzing crystal structure of cathode materials. So after a postdoc over in Germany and coming back, I actually had two opportunities at 3M. One was to work on polymer electrolyte membrane fuel cells or lithium ion batteries. And I kind of thought, well, one is a non-existent market, and the other one has been around since 1991. And now it's 1999, so it's like more of a sure thing. There's right, there's money to be made, and what I do will is more likely to turn into value. So honestly, that's why I went for the lithium ion battery instead of the fuel cell work. And it was uh from there on in, it was it was like a big takeoff. I started on silicon anode, and then within a year it was working on NMC or nickel manganese cobalt cathode materials, and we took those from like a few grams with an invention with Jeff Don and Songwau Lu all the way to uh to a business. So that was that's how it all started for me.

SPEAKER_01 12:34

That's right, that's right.

SPEAKER_03 12:35

How about you?

SPEAKER_01 12:36

Yeah, for me, you know, I was an undergrad student and I was gonna go and work for the summer with a prof that I liked in my department, my physics department. And uh it was gonna be biophysics, and he told me I was gonna work on, and he could see that I was completely uninterested. And so he said, Well, what do you want to do? I said, I want to do energy storage. And he said, Oh wow, you already knew. Yeah. And I was like, Yeah, it fascinated me. And I was like, and he said, Well, I know this guy, Jeff Don in Halifax. Call him up. And so I worked as a summer student. At the end of that summer, I said, Hey, I want to come back as a master's student. He said, Sure. Wow. And uh did my master's and doctorate with Jeff. Nice. And then did uh postdoc at MIT with Cedar.

SPEAKER_03 13:22

Yes, right.

SPEAKER_01 13:23

And uh from there went to 3M.

SPEAKER_03 13:25

Right. And worked with you. Yeah, that's right. That's right. That's right. So yeah, you knew from the get-go energy storage was what you were interested in. What when was that? When did you when did when did you uh like were you were talking about like your senior year of college or something like that when you're doing that?

SPEAKER_01 13:42

Yeah, third year university.

SPEAKER_03 13:43

Oh yeah.

SPEAKER_01 13:44

And it was I had we had a topics class where we had to give a presentation. I see. And uh my subject was hydrogen, actually. It wasn't lithium batteries. Yeah. But it sort of made me think about energy and how fundamental.

SPEAKER_03 13:56

Yeah, that's awesome. Yeah, I was not that clear at all. I worked on all these different materials areas like foundry and crystal growth and superconductivity and mechanics of ceramics and all that. And somehow, yeah, I think it was because of the you know, going over into fast ion conduction in in solid oxide fuel cells that it was like, well, this is very similar to fast ion conduction in cathode materials, for example.

SPEAKER_01 14:19

Yeah. Yeah, a lot of crossovers.

SPEAKER_03 14:21

I think it shows in you now still, because you know, you you you you left 3M, but you're still doing it, you know. Yeah, that's right. So then I left it. The passion is still there.

SPEAKER_01 14:29

I left 3M in 2021. Yeah. And uh started Cyclical, which is a consulting company in batteries, with Larry Krause. Yeah. Which we will also interview Larry Krauss. Yeah, that'll be awesome. Um, which is another, you know, fascinating topic. So he led a large effort between Argonne National Labs, Hydro Quebec, and 3M to work on a lithium polymer battery.

SPEAKER_03 14:54

That's right.

SPEAKER_01 14:55

Again, one of these topics, you know, this is sort of like a so semi-solid state cell. Yep. Again on the roadmap of so many companies.

SPEAKER_03 15:03

Yep. Lithium metal battery again. And now they're still now they're trying to do it. Yeah. It's on the future roadmap that he was working on it then. Yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_01 15:11

And that was that was early 90s.

SPEAKER_03 15:13

That's right.

SPEAKER_01 15:14

Yeah.

SPEAKER_03 15:14

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 15:15

So we'll uh Yeah, that'll be great. We'll cover that story too.

SPEAKER_03 15:18

Yeah, for sure. And how I I'd be curious how he says how he because he's the one who figured out after this huge program was built in 3M to do lithium polymer battery, he's the one who said, nope, it's not gonna happen. But we gotta start a lithium-ion group within three hours.

SPEAKER_01 15:33

He identified that in like 94 or 5.

SPEAKER_03 15:36

Something like that. Yeah, yeah. And uh, you know, he was given very little resource to do it, but he built and it became obvious he was right eventually. Well, no, I don't know if it's ever obvious. Only to people on the inside, right? Not to the management. Yeah, exactly. Um yeah, yeah, this is gonna be exciting. Uh I'm I think I'm gonna learn a lot, even though I've been in this field the whole time, you know, since whatever that is, since uh well, you could say since 97. Uh and still doing things in there today, but yeah, and I met all these people before, I think, but I don't think I know all the stories. So exactly.

SPEAKER_01 16:15

I think there's so many fun stories to hear. Yeah. I can't wait to hear them.

SPEAKER_03 16:20

Yeah, for sure. Thanks, Vincent, for uh taking me on the ride. It's gonna be great.

SPEAKER_01 16:25

All right, let's go. Battery potential is produced by Cyclical, a battery consulting and services company headed by Vincent Chevry and Larry Krauss. Music by Big Flame.