SPEAKER_04 0:00

All the jelly rolls were out of spec. And when the winders produce a out-of-spec jelly roll, a big red flashing light would come on. So the management of the company told the engineers make the lights green. Make the lights green for when the investors come through. And they did.

SPEAKER_01 0:46

And I'm Kevin Eberman. Today we have the privilege of having Jeff Don as a guest. This is a real treat. I first met Jeff Don in 2003, so we've known each other for 22 years. Yeah. And Kevin, you've known him for a long time as well.

SPEAKER_02 1:06

Yeah, maybe right away in 1999 or 2000, something like that.

SPEAKER_01 1:13

So, Jeff, welcome. Hi Vincent, hi Kevin. You're known all over the world as a as a professor doing research in lithium-ion batteries. And we thought it'd be interesting to start maybe with how did you get into batteries? What was the initial spark that got you there?

SPEAKER_04 1:32

Yeah, well, I went to the University of British Columbia to do graduate work. And in those days, you didn't have to have a supervisor selected because universities had enough money to support you until you found a supervisor. So I went walking around the physics department talking to all kinds of professors, doing all kinds of things. And I was, I went to talk to this one fellow named Rudy Herring, and he took a crystal model down from his filing cabinet. It was titanium disulfide. And he held it up and he grabbed a piece of chalk off his chalkboard. And he said, Jeff, with an electrochemical cell, you can take little atoms like lithium and insert them between the layers of titanium disulfide. And he moved the chalk in between the layers. And he said, When you do that, the physical properties of the material change. So titanium disulfide is a is a semi-metal, but when you put the lithium in, it becomes a metal. Here you have a way to change the properties of materials by tuning voltage. It's a new handle for physicists. You know, we use pressure, we use temperature, but now we can change composition by tuning a dial. Well, I thought this was just so cool. Fortunately, I had scholarship support, so he took me, and that was great.

SPEAKER_01 3:13

Fantastic. So the first impetus was actually the material properties, exploring the material properties and not so much energy storage.

SPEAKER_02 3:21

Right. This adjustability, continuous, like very precisely controllable adjustability of the material property.

SPEAKER_04 3:28

Yeah. You know, and then at the same time, Stan Whittingham and the Exxon guys were using titanium disulfide as a positive electrode material for lithium batteries. And Professor Herring realized that titanium disulfide, the man-made material, relatively hard to make. And also because it's man-made, it's not long-term stable. If you bring titanium disulfide into the air, it smells. It smells of H2S. And he realized that molybdenum disulfide had basically the same layered structure. And the ore of molybdenum is molybdenite. It's molybdenum disulfide. You can dig it out of the ground. And along with Klaus Brandt, Jim Stiles, and Nelson Shen, who were postdocs and a research assistant in Rudy Herring's lab, they showed that you could make a rechargeable lithium battery using molybdenum disulfide. And then the question was, you know, what to do. And it turned out that Rudy Herring was good friends with Norman Kivill, who was the CEO of Tech Mining Corporation. And Tech has big molybdenum mines in British Columbia. And uh Norman Kivell put up the money to start uh what became Molly Energy. And Jim Stiles and Klaus Brandt went off to Mali to start the company.

SPEAKER_01 5:02

So they identified with molybdenum disulfide and lithium metal, we have an electrochemical couple that's gonna give us an energy density that is competitive against the competitor.

SPEAKER_02 5:16

Did they pencil that out and and see what they thought it would be compared to what was out there? Was that known?

SPEAKER_04 5:21

The competitor in those days was NICAD. And the lithium aluminum disulfide cell got about almost twice the energy density on a weight basis compared to NICAD. Volumetrically they were close, but by weight the lithium battery was way better. So there was an immediate benefit. Yeah, and also you know, the nickel cadmium cells, if you ever use them, you learn that their cycle life is not the greatest unless you treat them with kid gloves.

SPEAKER_02 6:00

Did they have a memory effect in nickel cadmium?

SPEAKER_01 6:03

Yeah, nickel cadmium has a memory effect. There's a memory effect. Rudy Herring, Norman Kievell start this company, MOLLE, MOLLE Energy, with the idea of doing a molybdenum disulfide lithium metal cell. And at that moment, what's happening in Asia?

SPEAKER_04 6:21

Well, what moment do you do you mean? When Molly Energy was just started, which was nineteen seventy-eight, or as Molly got going uh, you know, a little bit further down the road. You see, in nineteen seventy-eight, when Molly started and when Exxon was doing its work, there was nothing happening in Asia at that moment, okay? And the word of you know, the progress at Exxon and maybe some bits of news about Molly Energy, these reached Japan, and the Japanese companies started work in rechargeable lithium. So virtually every Japanese electronics house, so Sanyo, Sony, Panasonic slash Matsushita, they all had battery arms, they all made NICADs, they all made alkaline cells. And for them it was natural to get involved with lithium batteries as well as the next step, right? Yep. So they did. And exactly when they started, like I can't tell you, but it was somewhere in the early 80s, is when all the Japanese efforts began. Right.

SPEAKER_01 7:40

So Molly gets founded, you're a grad student with Rudy Herring, and so Molly's checking along as you do your master's and doctorate, and you leave UBC and go to the NRC.

SPEAKER_02 7:55

Is that right? But do you have contact with those guys the whole time? They're kind of you know them, so uh are you in touch with them the whole time while you're working doing your degrees?

SPEAKER_04 8:04

Yeah, there was back and forth between UBC and Molly. Uh when I was ready to graduate, I was offered a position at Molly, but I decided I wanted to do the more academic path and see where that would lead. So I had offers from Brookhaven National Labs and from NRC in Ottawa. And the Ottawa the NRC being the National Research Council. Yeah, the National Research Council in Ottawa. The NRC thing was really interesting to me because Ross McKinnon, who was a graduate student at UBC two years ahead of me, he went to NRC. And while we were together at UBC, we were just a really good team. I always say he was the brains and I was the hands. But anyway, I thought I thought that if I went to NRC and hooked up with Ross, we could do some really great things together. Turned out to be the case. You know, we were really studying the fundamentals of intercalation in a variety of different materials. And we published something like 30 papers in the three years I was there, which in those days was quite amazing, quite a quite a feat because you didn't have computerized slaves running all your experiments and so on and so forth.

SPEAKER_01 9:25

Yeah. Yeah. Well, I think it's quite the feat even in present day.

SPEAKER_02 9:29

Yeah, it is. It is. Yeah, that's impressive. And so the you were looking at multiple different active materials during that, or was it more like digging into just a few?

SPEAKER_04 9:44

Oh, we looked at all kinds of different things. We looked at um titanium disulfide more detail. We looked at other layered materials like tantalum disulfide, zirconium selenide, zirconium sulfide. We looked at non-layered materials like Chevrelle phases. We looked at a really interesting material, rhenium trioxide, which has a perovskite structure without an atom in one of the typical perovskite structures. And this is a really cool material because if you it has what's called the compressibility collapse. If you push on it a bit, then all of a sudden it just goes woof because all these little octahedra that are bonded at corners rotate and the thing becomes really small. Wow. So we wanted to see how lithium intercalation into this stuff would affect this compressibility collapse. So we built these lithium batteries that could be have the electrolyte pumped up to five kilobars. Oh wow. And and sure enough, the whole voltage curve changed and everything happened when you ran the thing under pressure. It was really, you know, we did a lot of cool things. It was fun, really fun.

SPEAKER_01 11:03

Awesome. So that sounds great. So what made you leave the National Research Council?

SPEAKER_04 11:08

Yeah, well, this is an interesting story. I had to be careful not to name names, I guess. We can uh edit out later. I was I went to visit a senior researcher at NRC from whom we had borrowed some equipment because I wanted to ask him questions about the equipment. And in those days, there was no internet, and you know, if you publish papers in journals, people would either have to go to the library and photocopy them, or sometimes they'd write you a letter and say, Could you please send me a preprint of your article? So in those days, we would typically order 50 or 100 preprints of everything that we published. So I still have in a file folder somewhere a lot of our old papers that were, you know, from those days. Anyway, I visited this senior researcher. Something like 1985? Yeah, I have an old box that has old stuff in it. Anyway, I went to visit this senior researcher, and he had all his preprints from his whole career on these Dexion shelves laid out from number one to number 303. I remember vividly. And I know how high a stack of 50 reprints was, and in all his stacks, it was basically 50 reprints. And what that meant to me is in his whole career, almost nobody cared. Right? And I didn't want that to happen to me, so I decided let's try industry and uh see how it works out.

SPEAKER_01 13:02

So your motivation to go to industry, put another way, was the desire for impact, the desire to make a difference. Yeah, exactly. And at that time, if you're looking around, are there other places in North America doing any work on lithium?

SPEAKER_04 13:18

There's a parallel effort at Hydro Quebec, which started in around 78 also. It was led by Michel Gautier at the time. He's still, you know, he's a few years older than me, but he's still active in the field. Anyway, they were working on lithium polymer at that time, and it was um competitor to Molly.

SPEAKER_01 13:44

So anyway. So the only two companies working on lithium were in Canada. None in the US. Well no, I guess Exxon was there.

SPEAKER_04 13:52

Exxon was there, Bell Labs had an effort, you know, and Energizer had an effort too in the late 80s when John Zhang went there to work with Jim Acreage. So there were there were efforts in the U.S. also. But nobody was commercializing anything other than Molly. So the story's interesting. So I joined Molly in 1985, okay? And did you go to them or did they go to you?

SPEAKER_02 14:19

Did they call you and say you got to come join us, or did you see?

SPEAKER_04 14:22

Basically, I phoned Rudy Herring, who was a technical advisor at Molly, and I said, you know, Rudy, I need to get out of the NRC, and you think Molly would have me. And he said, Oh yeah, let me make it happen. So it happened. Nice. Right. Oh, cool.

unknown 14:36

Okay.

SPEAKER_04 14:37

Any anyway, I joined Molly in 1985, and my role was to find an alternative to molybdenum disulfide. Because even though it's a naturally occurring material, the energy densities were low. We knew we could do much better, and that was my role. So the R the RD group was pushing forward to change the chemistry, and at the same time, development and manufacturing were getting the original MOLLY cell ready for mass production. So a factory had to be built, and it's the building is still there in Maple Ridge, BC, and being used by the company. And it was I think the fall of 1988 that the first shipments were sent to Japan to an NEC laptop computer and an Nippon telegraph and telephone cell phone.

SPEAKER_01 15:40

So that Molly cell, what was the chemistry? The one that gets the first one that gets sold.

SPEAKER_04 15:46

First one that got sold was lithium and molybdenum disulfide. Yeah. And the electrolyte and salt? Oh, the electrolyte was lithium arsenic hexafluoride in a 50-50 mixture of PC and EC. Hmm. Oh, fascinating. Okay. Yeah. But you know, this is where during my time at Molly, I became more aware of what was going on in Japan. So, as an example, I was working on the alternate positive electromaterial, which turned out to be lithiated electrolytic manganese dioxide. So you take EMD, you add a bit of lithium hydroxide, heat it to like 350 degrees, you get this material that's pretty good. Three volts cycles well. Anyway, we had a visitor from Sanyo. His name was Mr. Noma, N-O-H-M-A. And he gave us a lecture. We're sitting in the conference room, and he's he's describing exactly what I'm doing. And I'm just going, holy crap, you know, this is like my God. You know, and and while Molly was operating um the NTT guys, they had a joint venture with Molly called AET, Advanced Energy Technology, and six guys from NTT, including Junichi Yamaki, who is a very famous lithium battery researcher at the time, were in Molly working on their lithium metal chemistry and using the Molly piloting facilities to make pilot cells of their stuff. So they were doing one thing, uh, we were doing another thing. We're sort of like in the same space, but not talking too much.

SPEAKER_02 17:42

Yeah. Yeah. Trying to protect your intellectual property there or interesting.

SPEAKER_01 17:51

The molybdenum disulfide cell gets commercialized. You develop a new cell, and this new cell does it get commercialized?

SPEAKER_04 18:00

New cell did not get commercialized, but it was almost ready to be commercialized. We had a a big rotating kiln that was installed at the Maple Ridge factory, which was going to mix well, heat the mixture of lithium hydroxide and EMD together at the multi-ton scale to feed the electrode making plant. And then the rest of it was exactly the same. You know, it was just an electrode. So it was a drop-in replacement for MOS2. And you know, I have some old promo literature from Molly, which talks about the so-called MOLLE cell two, twice the energy, twice the power. Nice glossy marketing brochures, right? But it was never released because of the issues developed with the first MOLLY cell, which we can talk about if we want to.

SPEAKER_01 18:56

Before we get, yeah, yeah, definitely want to, but before we get there, something that's interesting to me is today I want separator, I can call up five different companies that have separated. I want electrolyte, I can call up five different companies that sell electrolyte. But 1985, yeah. What where did you get all the material? Did you make everything yourself? Where did you get separator? And the other thing, too, is that the construction of a NICAD and the construction of an alkaline cell is completely different. You're just forging new grounds. This is pretty interesting, too.

SPEAKER_04 19:27

Yeah, so all the original coding equipment in the pilot plan at Molly was all built in-house. The coders were completely built in-house. The very first separators were the membranes from disposable diapers. Wow. Okay. But then Herc Selenes, which ultimately became Sellguard, was supplying separators. You know, and we knew things like the shutdown is really important. This means when the cell gets sufficiently hot, the separator melts and the pores close and it stops the short circuit current. We wanted the lowest shutdown temperature possible, which comes from polyethylene. But when that melts, you have no mechanical stability. So you really want two polymers. You want polyethylene and polypropylene. The polyethylene melts and the polypropylene remains stability. Well, nobody made a dual purpose separator like that. Yep. So we went to a company in Vermont called Burtech, Ulrich von Sacken, if you know him, he went there with gigantic spools of polyethylene and polypropylene. And they were put on a on a machine where the two membranes could be laminated together. Nice. And we used an adhesive called Roscoe Bond to stick them together. Roscoe Bond, we learned, was inert to the cell components, and Roscoe bond is used in the filmmaking industry to take a logo, spray Roscoe Bond, and stick it on somebody's shirt, you know, and it might say Acme, Acme moving company, you know. Right. So we sprayed a thin layer of this Roscoe bond on the same thing that would make a t-shirt. You're using that. That's awesome. Diapers and t-shirts. I love it. So we made our own laminated separator to improve safety. And this was not incorporated in the product, it was going to be in the next level of product. But there was another company that was heavily involved in separator at that time, and that was 3M. So 3M made a product called E002. I remember it well. It was a polyethylene separator, and it was made by the temperature induced phase. Separation process, which Kevin maybe knows what it is. I know, yep. And E002 was pretty pretty decent separator. The negative electrode had no current collector at all. It was just lithium foil, and it was a relatively big excess, so that there was the core of lithium in the middle of the lithium that was being cycled.

SPEAKER_02 22:23

Even winding in the center core was different from how you would do NICAD, so you had to figure out that as well. Yeah, you had to build your own winding equipment.

SPEAKER_04 22:32

Yeah, in the pilot plant, we built our own winding equipment at the beginning. But in the factory, the winding equipment came from a number of different companies. I can't remember all the names. Yeah. Not that really.

SPEAKER_02 22:45

You know, today when when cell companies are starting, they find that it's really hard to get yield. Do you remember anything about that? Like in their early days and their first product where they have how their yield was?

SPEAKER_04 22:57

Molly, Molly was always looking for investment, right? And the manufacturing plant was up, was running, and this big investment, this company was coming through that was Molly was trying to entice to invest. So they wanted to have a tour of the dry room to see the winders operating, the cells popping off, you know. At that time, every six seconds was fast. Now it's like 60 60 a second. Now then it was one every six seconds popping off. All the jelly rolls were out of spec. And when the winders produced an out-of-spec jelly roll, a big red flashing light would come on. So the management of the company told the engineers make the lights green. Make the lights green for when the investors come through.

SPEAKER_02 23:53

And they did. Yep. I'm sure that this story has happened many places, many times.

SPEAKER_01 24:01

Did they land the investment? Yes. Very nice. So obviously, dealing with lithium metal is a huge challenge. You need excellent dry rooms. Obviously, a fantastic advantage of the lithium ion chemistry is you don't deal with lithium metal. Can you describe some of the challenges that dealing with lithium metal required?

SPEAKER_04 24:25

Yeah, lithium metal is uh with liquid electrolyte, it's is quite a nightmare. So we learned at the beginning in uh coin cell tests, you know, not wound cells, that lithium cycling efficiency improves dramatically when the stack pressure on the electrodes increases. So if you have very low pressure on the electrode stack, you've got very few cycles. And you would increase the pressure more and more. And about 200 pounds per square inch, maybe up to 500 pounds per square inch, things became pretty pretty decent. So then the question was okay, you're gonna wind a jelly roll and stick it in a cylindrical cell. Where's this stack pressure gonna come from? Because the separators, you know, aren't that strong, and the winding tension you can apply isn't that huge. So you wind this jelly roll, and then the outer layers for sure have no stack pressure at all. So what's gonna happen? And it turns out that you electroplate and electrostrip lithium in the first few cycles that's really porous and crappy, and that expands, and the thing presses out against the walls of the can, and you automatically generate the stack pressure you need. So this whole worry just disappeared. Um by fluke. You know, and then another another thing that we learned, and there's some it's amazing, there's really nice papers by Fred Lammon and David Wilkinson and Dave Wainrate on this topic that the current lithium metal community is generally not aware of. But these papers show that you get better lithium cycling efficiency if you charge slow and discharge fast. Okay, so if you charge at like a 10-hour charge and discharge in three hours or charge in five hours and discharge in two hours, you bet get better cycle life. And this is because the rapid discharge strips off the protrusions that would cause dendrites to form. First. I've visited a few lithium metal companies who have asked me to come and talk about the Molly Energy Days, and I show these papers from Journal of Power Sources, and I think they were all in Journal of Power Sources from like 1987, 88. They've never never seen them. Never seen them. But they discovered the same thing on their own.

SPEAKER_01 27:23

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, because we've we've gone through a full full generation now, yeah, or more from those days.

SPEAKER_04 27:34

Yeah, and this charge slow and discharge fast to maintain good lithium morphology. This is key to the whole problems with lithium metal and the safety-related problems. Yeah, yeah, probably still key. It's still key.

SPEAKER_01 27:54

And we can get into that whenever you're ready. Yep. Yeah, so let's get into it. So Molly has all these cells on the market, primarily being sold into Japan. They're used in laptops and mobile applications, and then what happens? Okay.

SPEAKER_04 28:15

So I think it's the winter of 1989. Molly has put cells into the NTT phone and the NEC laptop, and there's the first report of a safety incident in Japan. What is it? So people scrambling around, and the message sent to the Japanese was probably a manufacturing defect. A tab came loose or internal short or something like that. And then another incident occurred. And these are happening, you know, just while the thing is being charged or while it's being used next to someone's face. There's smoke and sometimes flame emitted from the phone. So people wondering what the hell. So in RD, we had to just drop everything and try to figure out what was going on. Didn't you test all yourselves for safety? And we did. So Molly had, you know, there were no safety regulations for lithium metal batteries in those days. And Molly worked along with UL and USDOT to develop the safety regulations, and many of them are still virtually the way they were at the very beginning. So the development group at Molly was in charge of this safety testing. So some of the tests were things like this you have to show that your cell can withstand um an external short circuit when it's brand new after 300 charge discharge cycles, and it has to withstand an oven exposure test 150 degrees C. So we had to get these cells at 300 cycles to do the safety tests. So we cycled them the usual way, which is a slow charge, fast discharge. So like a C over 5 charge and a C over 2 discharge. 300 cycles, everything passed. You know, so the first things that came back, all the issues in Japan were from the phone. There was never an issue with the laptop, ever. Okay? Only the phone. And why? Well, because the phone is used in a completely different way. In a phone, you charge relatively rapidly, but then you want the thing to operate all day long. So it's a slow discharge, a more rapid charge and a very slow discharge. And this leads to a lithium morphology that's very porous and it's not tolerant to high temperatures at all when in contact with electrolyte. Once we learned that the problems were in the phone, we started testing these cells in a more phone-like duty cycle, and we learned that even after just 25 cycles, they couldn't pass these oven tests or external short tests. You know? Wow. So if you had any kind of an internal short with a cell with lithium like that, you were in deep trouble. And this is the problem with metallic lithium.

SPEAKER_02 31:45

But so you knew that cycle life was better with slow charge, rapid discharge, but you didn't know that safety changed. Correct. Correct.

SPEAKER_04 31:55

And this is the major problem with lithium metal. Unless you have complete control over the way the user operates the cell, you have no control over the safety properties of that cell. If somebody is charging fast and discharging slow, it's bad. Really bad. We came to the conclusion that this was an intractable problem.

SPEAKER_01 32:26

Yeah. And the cells had to be recalled. And they were. Yeah. Yeah. This article I found about Molly stated that 10,000 phones were recalled. It only called out the phones. So maybe it didn't get recalled for the laptops. Yeah.

SPEAKER_04 32:41

10,000 phones seems like too few. Uh Molly put two Molly put two million cells in the field, and the phone had nine double A's in it. So 10,000 phones is only 90,000 cells. It just sounds too little.

SPEAKER_01 32:59

So this recall occurs, and you have this other chemistry in the wings, but it's still lithium metal, right? It was manganese-based, but still lithium metal on the anode. And then Molly has to take a decision as to what to do. So what does Molly do?

SPEAKER_04 33:20

Well, around 1987, I'm in charge of the research department. And we're reading Good Enough's patents and Good Enough's papers about lithium cobalt oxide, lithium nickel oxide, and we just decide, or I decide, we have to start working on lithium ion. So we started 1987 on lithium ion. And we learn how to synthesize lithium cobalt oxide, we learn how to synthesize lithium nickel oxide. We have to find a negative electrode material. So we I spend a lot of time getting all kinds of carbons from all kinds of places all over North America and Europe. And we started to see, okay, what carbons will reversibly intercalate and deintercalate lithium? So things like petroleum coke worked really well. So we could make pretty decent lithium ion cells with lithium cobalt oxide and petroleum coke, you could use propylene carbonate, worked fine. But at that point, I just decided why are we doing lithium cobalt oxide? It's way more expensive. Let's do lithium nickel oxide. So we decided we're going to do lithium nickel oxide, or I decided, and everybody said, yeah, let's do that.

SPEAKER_02 34:48

So we I'm a little surprised because from experience, lithium cobalt oxide is dead easy to make, and lithium nickel oxide is hard to make. So you must have at least thought of that.

SPEAKER_04 34:57

Oh we oh yes, that we recognize that for sure. But still, okay, the advantage of lithium nickel oxide in terms of cost was okay. Sure. Yeah, we learned all the issues with lithium nickel oxide. In fact, Good Enough published all this stuff long ago about nickel in the lithium layer and all that. Sure. So we built a pilot facility with a rotary kiln, six-inch diameter tube, I don't know, 12 feet long. And we could feed in lithium hydroxide and nickel hydroxide in the input end, and it would roll down and come out lithium nickel oxide at the other end. Well, this is after we learned how to make it in the 500 gram scale. So we could make four kgs an hour roughly from this thing. Was pretty decent, right? So this is where the story gets really interesting. So, of course, Molly is having this recall. It's running out of money. We're looking for investors. Who's gonna invest in a lithium battery company that has a product that's unsafe? Anyway, Molly was looking for people to come in and buy it out or partner, whatever. And one of the one of the companies was interested was Rayovac. So Rayovac, if you know, is ever ready Duracell, and then Rayovac is the third alkaline cellmaker in the United States. Anyway, there was a guy at Rayovac named Bob Locke. Kevin may remember Bob Lock. Yeah, I know Bob Locke. Yeah. So uh Rayovac came to visit us, and I was thinking, you know, we gotta show these guys something cool. So in those days, every cordless phone used three NICADs in series to power the phone. And I said, Holy crap, we can make one lithium nickel oxide lithium ion cell with has 3.6 volts, and we'll make three of them in parallel. Three coin cells in parallel. We'll run this phone. Yep. So we made we worked on making lithium nickel oxide, carbon, petroleum, coke coin cells, and they work really well. And then the Rayovac visit was coming up. So I told my technician Mark Juzco, who you may know. Oh, yeah. I told Mark, you know, take three coin cells and spot weld them together in parallel in the shape of a triangle. Off he went. Twenty minutes later, he came running back. He said, They explode when I weld them. I said, What? What do you mean they explode when you weld them? So we went back, and sure enough, you spot welded on the positive electrode side, and the coin cells exploded. And this is because we were welding them together fully charged. All right. So then we did an experiment where we charged them to different voltages and spot welded the positive side, and when the voltage was above about 3.9 volts, they exploded. And then we did the same experiment with lithium cobalt oxide coin cells, and they didn't explode. Wow. They didn't explode all the way to 4.2 volts. You know, and this was the first indication of the safety problems that were associated with lithium nickel oxide, and all high nickel materials have this volatility about them. But you know, I tell you, for me, this was devastating because we put our heart and soul into lithium nickel oxide and we cracked it. We had good cells, and then it just seemed so unfair that this last step was the killer. John Goodenough's 90th birthday. I was invited to give a lecture there. And this is the lecture I gave. I gave the lecture, I took my old Molly Energy research reports that showed a graph of you spot weld at different voltages, and then all of a sudden, this line you go above this point, and all the cells explode. And the whole message of this lecture was all you guys developing lithium air and solid state, and whatever the case may be, don't leave safety till the last step.

SPEAKER_02 39:48

Right. Yeah, well good message.

SPEAKER_01 39:53

Yeah. And at that point, was there no chance to pivot to LCO to lithium cobalt oxide?

SPEAKER_04 40:00

Molly pivoted immediately to LCO. Oh, okay. Immediately. Yeah. Uh yeah. I mean the decision, the decision was made almost instantaneously.

SPEAKER_01 40:11

Okay, so you identified the combination lithium cobalt oxide, carbon, and at that moment Sony had not released its first commercial lithium ion cell, correct?

SPEAKER_04 40:26

Oh, we had decent lithium ion cells in '89, you know, on the lab scale. They were good. Well, then we wanted to use graphite, right? And Molly was always a company that was heavily invested in electrolytes that work well with lithium metal. And the best thing we had was a mixture of PC and EC 50-50. That worked fairly well with graphite. The problem was with 50% PC, it was still, you know, co-intercalating a bit. So we had to learn to get rid of the PC. And it's amazing how long these things take. You just think, oh god, PC and EC, they're so so similar. Like it could not possibly make a difference. But sure enough, it did.

SPEAKER_01 41:14

Coming back to the recall, so Rayovac is courting Molly. What happens with that moment? Does something happen with Rayovac and Molly?

SPEAKER_04 41:25

No, Rayovac decided not to invest. So then what happened was Mali's running out of money. And it goes into receivership, which is like bankruptcy. And the province of British Columbia was the largest creditor of Molly. So they were, I mean, they they had the largest stake in Mali. So they were the ones that um appointed the trustee to look after the sale of the company or the sale of the assets or whatever. And it was decided that the value in the company really was in the brains of the people involved. And it would make sense to sell the whole company really as it was. So they shopped it around North America. There were no no interested people. VAC showed interest but didn't step in. And as soon as the playing field was expanded to Japan, then almost immediately NEC Corporation and Mitsui came in and bought up Molly for something like five cents on the dollar. Didn't RailVec have a chance then? They could it could have been taken by Railvac. It could have been, but it wasn't. But Railvac was not a big company, right? It's like one-tenth the size of Energizer at that point. It was very small, right? Okay. Anyway, so why did NEC and Mitsui get interested in Molly? Well, Sanyo makes electronics. Sony makes electronics, Sony had a battery arm. Panasonic slash Matsushita makes electronics, they had a battery arm. NEC made electronics, they had no battery arm at all. So for them to get into the lithium space, which was clearly going to be the future, buy Molly. And they did. So Molly Energy became known as NEC Molly Energy Limited starting in 1990.

SPEAKER_01 43:39

So you just said a sentence there. Lithium was clearly going to be the future. And it sounded like NEC realized that. How come nobody in North America realized that?

SPEAKER_02 43:51

Yeah, right. Why yeah, yeah, and you and you didn't mention, like wasn't Energizer didn't come and look at it, and Duracell didn't, and no electronics company, and yeah.

SPEAKER_04 44:00

Companies had efforts going on. Energizer, they built some kind of a factory in Gainesville, Florida to make lithium ion. And I don't remember exactly when that was, but it actually never operated. I guess people realize that it's easier to make money selling alkaline cells, and that's what they decide to do. Yeah, so in those days, Japan was the leader. Once from 1990 on, Japan was the leader for some period of time.

SPEAKER_01 44:36

Yeah, because Sony released the lithium ion cell in 1991, I believe. Yeah.

unknown 44:42

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 44:43

Camcorder. And what I've heard, I've never seen the proof of this, but that they they lost money on the making the cells, but they didn't care because they were selling electronics.

SPEAKER_04 44:53

Yeah, that's a point that's you know, if you have this integrated device, you can bury the cost of the cell in the price of the total device, just like your phone.

SPEAKER_01 45:15

So NEC takes over, purchases Molly. You're still at MOLLE, and then what happens?

SPEAKER_04 45:24

Well, around the summer of 1989, when all this was happening, and there was one one particular thing that really pushed me to say, I need to try something else. And this was working our tails off to make cathode material enough for an electrode run. So you need four kgs or ten kgs or whatever to make a coating run. And it would go into the coder, and sometimes it would go onto the go around the roller and onto the take up spiel, and it would all just peel right off onto the floor. And this drove me crazy because you would try to say, what the hell is going on? Why is this happening sometimes and some other times? And it was just these some of these problems are just frustrating as hell at the time. Yep. Anyway, so I decided I wanted to try something different. So I applied for a couple of jobs, one of them a professorship at SFU, and the other one, I don't know what would have come of it, but I was offered a position at Belcor to work with Jean-Marie Tarascon. No way. Yeah, we might have killed each other. Or on the other hand, a lot of good things might have happened. I don't know. Right. But anyway, I I decided to take a professor position at SFU starting in the summer of 1990. So I worked at Molly for about six months while it was under NEC's leadership, which was was fine.

SPEAKER_02 47:18

Yeah. Did they move people over from Japan to get involved, or was it just kind of remote?

SPEAKER_04 47:26

Uh there were a number of things that happened. Uh yes, a lot of Japanese folks came over. Okay. Um, the most famous was Dr. Nagaura. So Dr. Nagaura was one of the guys who was heavily involved in the Sony commercialization of lithium ion. And he he was a hired gun and came to Mali to work on um both the lithium metal cell and the lithium ion. So when the NEC and Mitsui took over, they weren't convinced lithium metal was dead. So they initiated something called the confirmation test. So the confirmation test was build half a million lithium MOS2 cells. Wow. Assemble them into 50,000 10 cell packs. Oh boy, build a whole whack of chargers, dumb chargers, that could just cycle in the phone duty cycle. Faster charge, low rate discharge. So the confirmation test took like three years or something. And what it showed was under this, under these conditions, some of these packs were failing just during normal cycling. Yeah. And at that point, the decision was okay, enough. We're not doing lithium metal. Uh, and we're going lithium-ion full bore.

SPEAKER_01 49:02

So you you move to Simon Fraser and then you keep consulting for Molly. What chemistry does Molly go to market with their first lithium-ion battery?

SPEAKER_04 49:13

They go to market with lithium cobalt oxide graphite. Okay, right off the bat, eh? Yeah. And do you remember in what year that is? I think 94, probably, around there. Did they still have PC? No, the electrolyte was by that point, people had uh understood that the linear carbonates were useful. You know, this is another thing. Back in the 80s, the late 80s, you know, dimethylcarbonate, diethylcarbonate, ethyl methylcarbonate, these things weren't readily available. They became available and used as lithium ion started to mature. And there was no LIPF6 either. Um, you know, in 85 there was no LIPF6, but that came available too as time went along. Okay, because of the need from lithium ion. Yeah, yeah, okay.

SPEAKER_01 50:08

So did you have to synthesize any of those components at Molly, or were you able to buy the PC and the EC?

SPEAKER_04 50:15

Okay, so the original manufacturing plant, it had a gigantic still for PC and a gigantic still for EC. These things were massive, huge stills, and that's because you could get EC and PC from suppliers, but they weren't pure, so we had to distill them ourselves. And that might have been occurring in the early days under the manufacturing of the lithium ion. I don't know, but it became pretty easy to get battery-grade solvents relatively quickly after that.

SPEAKER_01 50:48

What about the binders and the slurry mixing?

SPEAKER_04 50:51

I don't know what went, I can't remember what went into the commercial system, but in the lithium metal cell with MOS2, we were using cyclohexane as the solvent and epdm, ethylene propylene, dyene monomer as the binder. EPDM is the best way to describe it is the sole of a hush puppy shoe.

SPEAKER_01 51:19

Yeah. The article I found about Molly made this statement that $120 million had gone into investment into Molly, which in today's dollars is on the order of $340 million. And I think that number is interesting because sometimes there's a narrative of North America didn't try hard enough, right? And clearly that was a huge effort and a ton of innovation, large installations. Right. Yeah, I mean, can you speak to the context and the size of the effort? Molly was a publicly listed company. Yeah, just give us a sense of the of the scale of the effort.

SPEAKER_04 52:00

Before receivership, there were probably 300, 400 people, maybe at that time, something like that. But anyway, you know, Molly then after established manufacturing facilities in Maple Ridge, and they produced lithium ion cells in Maple Ridge, BC, until 2000 and 2009. Okay, and somewhere around the year 2000, the Japanese uh sold the company to E1 Corporation of Taiwan and became E1 Molly Energy Canada. It still is E1 Molly Energy today. But in 2009, um they had to expand production capacity. The machines at the British Columbia plant were not state of the art anymore. The number of parts per minute were low compared to new machines. And the ownership decided to install the new equipment in Taiwan and shut down manufacturing in British Columbia. So since 2009, the operation in British Columbia has just been the RD, part of the RD effort of E1 Molly.

SPEAKER_01 53:29

So if you think of Molly being this pioneer in the lithium metal and the lithium ion space, you mentioned working on lithium ion in 87, 89. So what do you see as its legacy? Like you you've seen people that worked at MOLLE and people that worked with you, and you've seen them go throughout the market, and you've seen the technologies. What do you see as the legacy of MOLLY?

SPEAKER_04 53:56

Yeah, so this is another interesting story. Around 1999, you know, lithium ion was used in phone and computer almost entirely. And people wanted to use it in other applications, but everyone said it just doesn't have power. Lithium ion doesn't have power, so you can't make a power cell out of it. So Jan Reimers and Ulrich von Sacken started working on high power cell, and they used lithium manganese spinel, LIMN204, as the positive electrode. And at the Power 2000 conference in Santa Clara, I think it was, they demonstrated a Milwaukee electric tool drill that just beat the pants off the NICAT competitors. This was the first demonstration of lithium ion and power application for power tools. And today, I would say Molly is, if not the best, but one of the best makers of power lithium ion in the world. Yep. So they've they've stayed in that niche and they've done extremely well. I was just at a conference in Singapore where Molly introduced the P65B. This is a 2170 with 6.5 amp hours, a power cell.

SPEAKER_01 55:38

Yeah, they're really best in class for power to this day.

SPEAKER_04 55:41

So that's their legacy, you know, and it all traces back to Jan Reimers, really, who was running that Spinel program. And, you know, the guy who was saying, okay, let's make this interaction with Milwaukee Tool and Mark Reed, who set up that interaction and so on. Those guys just did fabulous work.

SPEAKER_01 56:02

And if I'm not mistaken, the cells that Molly makes now are they are high nickel. Yes, they are high nickel. Back to the origins.

SPEAKER_04 56:10

I gave a lecture at University of California, San Diego, to Shirley Bang's group one time. It was about this circle. You start with lithium nickel oxide, it is unsafe. You go to lithium cobalt oxide, then you discover NMC, then you keep adding more and more nickel in NMC, and eventually you're almost back to where you started from.

SPEAKER_01 56:40

Yeah, and what would you say to people who are considering lithium metal for future?

SPEAKER_04 56:48

I'll tell you the story about Martin Eberhardt. So I was at the very first Beyond Lithium Ion Battery Conference, 2009, IBM Almaden. So I was invited to give a lecture that compared lithium ion to lithium air and lithium sulfur. So I gave my lecture. And before me, Martin Aberhard and Mark Tarpening, I think, the original founders of Tesla gave a lecture. And at lunchtime, we could go out into the parking lot and look at EVs. But it was a zoo. There were like 400 people out there looking at EVs. You couldn't get near anything. So I went back in and just sat there. And then the afternoon there was a shitty talk, and I went out to the EV area, and there was this guy standing next to a red Tesla roadster, Martin Eberhardt. So I went up to him and I said, Martin, I really enjoyed your talk. And he said, Oh, Jeff, I enjoyed your talk too. I said, Martin, you can tell I'm a battery guy. What do we need to do to make the batteries better for these electric vehicles? He said, Look at this car. You open the door. You can sit in it, right? You open the front. You can put your luggage in the front, right? You open the back. You can put some luggage in the trunk. Not much, because the battery packs, you know, extended into the trunk a bit. This thing goes 240 miles on a charge and it's goes fast. You we can make a great car out of the lithium batteries available today. These were lithium cobalt oxide computer cells, right?

unknown 58:31

Yeah.

SPEAKER_04 58:32

I said, okay, Martin, well, what do we need to do? He said, listen, if you reduce the cost by a factor of five, no one will drive gas. So anybody that's doing lithium metal, if they're not paying attention to cost, they're gonna go nowhere.

SPEAKER_02 58:56

In a way, the motivation of how it how the lithium ion went to Japan, it came from the fact that those guys were in electronics. And they so they had that they're married the cell, the rechargeable cell with the electronics already. And in the case of the big US companies, they're the battery companies were not also electronics companies. So they wouldn't have seen that advantage, and they would have said, well, there's more money in alkaline. Um, so that's I that's kind of what I got from you. I don't know if I misunderstood it.

SPEAKER_04 59:23

No, I think that's exactly right. That's exactly the main difference. All the Japanese electronics houses had battery companies. In the U.S. Motorola, no battery company, RCA, no battery company, General Electric, no battery company, et cetera, et cetera, right? It was just completely different.

SPEAKER_02 59:43

Now, how do you think about it today? We're many years since the end of that story you told, but yeah, now the market's gigantic. We're in electric vehicles and so on. And we've got companies that have tried to get started in the US, some of them have failed. What what do you think should happen now in in North America when it comes to making cells?

SPEAKER_04 1:00:02

Well, here's an example. Tesla set up its first gigafactory in Nevada with Panasonic equipment, Panasonic engineers, and learned how to do it. And then they decided we're gonna build our own thing in Texas, and we're gonna do things radically different because we think we can, and we think if we do things radically different, we can really cut manufacturing costs a lot and reduce CapEx and OpEx and so on. So I think this model should be replicated where companies from the leaders, so China, are encouraged to come and build plants, and then we learn from them, and over time we just do it on our own.

SPEAKER_02 1:01:22

Over time, what will happen? Yeah, they'll hire locals, and then the whoever needs those cells, maybe the car companies, will build it themselves with their own employees.

SPEAKER_01 1:01:32

Yeah, sometimes at conferences, I'll hear the argument that the US or North America has to leapfrog Asia. What would you say to the argument of leapfrogging Asia that you hear at conferences sometimes?

SPEAKER_04 1:01:47

Well, what what are you gonna leapfrog them in? That's the question. You know, you might say, oh, we're gonna be leaders in solid state. China's way ahead in solid state now. Or we're gonna be leaders in silicon containing negative electrode materials. Well, right. And the costs are gonna be lower. It's only if by some if the US patents hold up, maybe there'll be some ability to protect the US silicon-containing carbon companies. We'll see, right?

SPEAKER_01 1:02:36

What do you think the role of government should be in production where you have to sort of compete on a global scale with pricing?

SPEAKER_04 1:02:44

I'm a little bit familiar with the Canadian scene, and there has been a lot of activity in Ontario and Quebec to entice foreign companies to come and set up facilities. So, for example, PowerCo. is in Ontario, they'll be making batteries there. North Vault was wooed in a huge way by the government of Quebec, who lost something like $300 million just down the tube when North Vault folded. But the Namaska Lithium facility, which is now was originally Pallinghurst and then Liveent and now Rio Tinto. Rio Tinto. Yeah. You know, all of these have received a lot of government support. And also the vehicle plants also that are in Canada, EV facilities. So the Canadians are working hard. Oh, and and there's a critical minerals roadmap for Canada that was prepared by Natural Resources Canada. What do we need to do to get our graphite into lithium ion batteries? Same for lithium, same for nickel, and so on. So things are happening.

SPEAKER_01 1:04:13

Jeff, you and I were actually at the same NRCAN roundtable where there was a discussion of how does North America compete with Asia? And there's a number of different mechanisms that that exist, right? You can do some things on based on environmental regulations, which is sometimes in Europe the approach, or you can do tariffs, or you can subsidize. But so there's different levers that can be pulled. But it is interesting that Canada seems to be thinking about this very carefully and putting things into practice to support the industry. Yeah, I agree.

SPEAKER_04 1:04:50

It's a complicated question. You know, another another thing that's really on the back of my mind is we should be doing everything we can to get more people in electric vehicles. Okay. It should be whatever it takes, in my opinion.

SPEAKER_01 1:05:11

I'm just curious, just bringing this conversation back to Molly. When Molly was launched, was there ever a view that these lithium-based batteries, whether it was lithium ion or lithium metal, could ever have the market size that they have now?

SPEAKER_02 1:05:29

Or go into a car someday.

SPEAKER_04 1:05:32

You know, I have this really nice article from the Financial Times BC edition or something from 1979. Okay. And it quotes somebody named Brian St. John from Tech Mining Company, who were, of course, the funders of Molly, right? And in this thing, he's talking about electric vehicles, and then later. Around in the article, they quote the president or the CTO of British Columbia Hydro, and he's talking about load shifting with batteries and energy storage with batteries. This is 1979. It's all the holy cow. And I used this article. You know, I I have a lecture that I give on the history of lithium-ion batteries, and I put that thing on the screen, and I have red boxes around these quotes, and it's like everybody was thinking about it long ago. And this is, you know, Stan Whittingham went to the 1979 Chicago EV show with his lithium TIS2 battery, big pragmatic things, right? He shows this in all his talks that he gives. So people were thinking about it at the very beginning. Everyone knew the energy density was better, the lifetime was better, even though it was crappy, it was better than NICAD.

SPEAKER_02 1:07:02

I'm thinking about you at the very beginning of our conversation, we asked about what was your motivation that got you into the batteries and then what got you out of out of Incirc and into Molly. And it there are two things, two themes there. One was this sort of intellectual excitement around you could manipulate the properties of this material very, very carefully with controlling the voltage. And then the other was the impact. So though, and then you went back to university life after that. But I've worked with a lot of professors at 3M over the years, and of course, we worked with you for 20 years. I've never met anyone who's as focused on impact as a professor as as you are. I'm kind of wondering where you are now in your career. What do you think about that? Did you have you know your impact per year and your impact now? Do you think you had more impact as a professor and more impact with Molly, or is it kind of hard to say, or and how do you feel about the impact?

SPEAKER_04 1:07:56

You know, for me it's really important to do something that's useful. And this is why partnering with industry has always been very important to me. You know, the years with 3M were pretty darn cool, you know, the NMC work, the silicon work. These were big things that have both had huge impact. You know, 3M didn't make a lot of money off silicon. They in principle could have made a lot more money off of NMC than they did through licensing and the sale of patents. And now, you know, in our partnership with Tesla, we work on a lot of different projects that have impact. You know, some of our research is now in vehicles, right? And that's really cool. But for me, it's all about what we call in our lab blood flow. You have to work on something that's important and challenging, and when you make a discovery or a mini breakthrough, it gets you excited and your blood flows, right? And that that is what we live for. That's right. That is what we live for, and I'm serious, and you know, the graduate students get it after a while.

SPEAKER_01 1:09:26

I remember as a master's student and as a doctoral student with you, Jeff, a sentence that often came back was, How can you sleep at night? Yeah, right? How can you sleep? You got this experiment going. How can you wait to see the results?

SPEAKER_04 1:09:42

This is why I started working as an early bird. You know, Rudy Herring would get to work at seven, and we'd have experiments running. And in those days, your experiments, voltage versus time, came out on a strip chart recorder, a piece of paper, a pen going back and forth. So they see their voltage curve would progress overnight. There'd be another one foot of paper that came out. He'd get there at seven, and I'd come in, and he'd be saying, Jeff, come and look at this. Look at what this means. This is so cool. And I was thinking, God, I I gotta, I want to look at my data first. So I had to get there before him so that I could say, Rudy, look at this. This is what this means, right? And it's been the same for me ever since. So I want to be the first one. And I have experiments that I go and check, you know, throughout the lab where I know there's cool stuff going on. That's awesome.

SPEAKER_01 1:10:43

Well, are there any sort of learnings or conclusions that you get from your from the experience of Molly and your industrial experience? Sort of concluding thoughts.

SPEAKER_04 1:10:55

The Molly years for me were some of the best of my career. They were super excited, exciting. The average age of the company was 28 when I joined. Everybody was so dedicated and working hard, and you know, we worked together, we partied together, we did everything together. It was really a really special time. And we were working on first of the world stuff, you know. It was really awesome. You know, and thinking back to that time, and you say, you know, you guys blew it. You know, in some senses, we did. We we missed the with the fact that the safety of lithium metal depends on how it's charged and discharged. And I don't know whether we would have said, hey, we can't manufacture this if we had realized how bad it was, because I think the momentum, you know, and the investors were all expecting us to go ahead. So I suspect if a bunch of researchers said, Don't do this, it wouldn't have stopped it, you know. So it was the world's biggest experiment on lithium metal. You know, Sony, Sanyo, Panasonic, they all had cells ready to release. Ah they watched Molly and they said, We're not gonna release this stuff. You know.

SPEAKER_01 1:12:33

Holy cow. Yeah, I mean, that's an interesting point, right? That's that's there there is a risk in being first to market.

SPEAKER_02 1:12:39

Yeah. The other thing I hear is you had a few big moments that you've told us about where you could say, like you said, you we made a mistake or whatever. And in your case, you had a couple that maybe other people would have walked away from the whole field when one is the lithium fires, and then the other is this nickel. Like, dang it, we're ready to go on nickel, and we have to switch over to to cobalt because we uh we didn't see the safety. But that's what you do after, and uh that didn't slow you down at all.

SPEAKER_04 1:13:08

Like I told you, that the this safety of lithium nickel oxide that just put me in the darkest of moods for a few days. I just felt it just felt so unfair, you know. God, we picked it because it made sense and it worked, and then damn it, it wasn't it exploded when you welded on the positive side of a charged coin cell, and you just knew there's something bad happening here.

SPEAKER_02 1:13:34

Right, exactly. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_01 1:13:39

It is fascinating that this sort of like the endpoint was pretty clear right off the bat. Lithium metal, lithium nickel oxide, that would give you the highest energy density.

SPEAKER_02 1:13:47

There you go.

SPEAKER_01 1:13:48

That was identified in late 80s, and the last 40 years have been trying to optimize around. Can we make that work? Can we make it work? Can we make it safe?

SPEAKER_04 1:14:00

Yeah, I've been in this place since 1978. There's still challenges, there's still things to solve. Really important things for the world. Yeah. Should we wrap it up?

SPEAKER_01 1:14:13

Yeah, I think so.

SPEAKER_04 1:14:15

Yeah, it's been a great, great conversation, you guys. It's sort of fun. Yeah, it is very fun.

SPEAKER_01 1:14:21

Thank you so much, Jeff. Fascinating.

SPEAKER_04 1:14:23

Love hearing about it. Yeah, I learned a lot. Yeah, I don't think I told too many lies either.

SPEAKER_01 1:14:32

Probably none. Battery potential is produced by Cyclical, a battery consulting and services company headed by Vincent Chevry and Larry Krauss. Music by Big Flavor.