Transcript source
2021 Sir Robert Price lectureTranscript
[Image appears of Adam Best listening on the screen and then the image changes to show Katherine Paroz on the screen talking to the camera and participants can be seen in the bar at the bottom]
Katherine Paroz: Welcome everyone. My name is Katherine Paroz. I lead the People Team here at CSIRO and I’m so pleased to be here today to welcome you to our 2021 Sir Robert Price lecture. As the executive sponsor of the CSIRO Alumni Network I would like to give a special welcome to our alumni members in the audience today. I’d like to begin this morning by acknowledging the traditional owners of the land that we’re meeting on today and to pay my respects to their Elders… to their Elders, past and present.
This lecture series was set up in 1990 by the CSIRO Division of Chemicals and Polymers in tribute to Sir Robert’s influence on organic chemistry. These lectures bring industry, CSIRO, and university scientists together. Robert Price made a significant contribution to the growth and development of chemistry in Australia, and to the development of public sector research. He went on to become the Chief of the CSIRO Division of Organic Chemistry, and later became the Chairman of the CSIRO Executive. Throughout his career he was known as a great organiser with the ability to get people together and encourage collaboration. He believed in the need for active interaction between Australian research institutes.
We’re continuing his approach today, working with RACI, ATSI, and developing our CSIRO Alumni Network to encourage greater connection across the innovation ecosystem. We now have over 4,000 alumni members and organise a wide range of events, activities, and opportunities for them to stay in touch or get involved. To help set the scene for today’s presentation I’d like to hand over to Dr Adam Best who will talk about CSIRO’s battery value chain activities. Over to you Adam.
[Image changes to show Adam Best talking to the camera and the participant bar can be seen at the bottom of the screen]
Dr Adam Best: Thank you very much Katherine.
[Image shows a few slides flicking through on the screen and then the image changes to show a new slide showing a pie chart with a world globe at the centre showing different uses for batteries and materials and text headings appear: CSIRO’s battery value chain activities, Battery materials, Batteries, Deployment, Recycling, Mining and refining]
Let’s, so you can see my screen. Whoops got the wrong… oh it’s gone pear shaped. So, today CSIRO we have a range of battery activities which is really important towards the battery value chain. We work from everything in mining and refining with our Minerals and Resources colleagues, into battery materials, particularly the value adding of those mineral materials into things such as lithium carbonate, graphite, manganese, cobalt, nickel, and the like.
And then we also work into the area of batteries and assembly thereof – so looking at anodes, cathodes, unique electrolytes, and more recently cell manufacture and testing. We’re also very interested in also how we can do packaging of batteries and how they can be used and then deployed to the grid, or even within a home, or electric vehicle concept. We also have interest in the first use of batteries, second use, repurposing of batteries. But more recently we’ve now put together a consortia of our business units to work into what’s really critical, recycling. Today though, our speaker will be speaking to us about battery materials and their role in the development of energy storage as we know it today.
[Image changes to show a new slide showing text: Our speaker, “The lithium battery – From a dream to domination of energy storage”, M. Stanley Whittingham, Professor and Director, NECCES, 2019 Nobel Prize Laureate in Chemistry (together with Akira Yoshino and John B. Goodenough), Director of the Northeastern Centre for Chemical Energy Storage (NECCES), a U.S. DoE Energy Frontier Research Centre (EFRC) at Binghamton, Professor of Chemistry, Binghamton University, State University of New York]
We’re very pleased and proud to be able to welcome to you today M. Stanley Whittingham, Professor and Director of the Northeastern Centre for Chemical Energy Storage, which is a US Department of Energy Frontier Research Centre. But for many of you he is also the 2019 Nobel Prize Laureate in Chemistry, together with Akira Yoshino and John B. Goodenough. At present he is also the Professor of Chemistry at Binghamton University, the State University of New York. And I’m very pleased to welcome him to speak to you all today. Thank you Stan and over to you.
[Image changes to show Adam listening on the main screen and the participant bar can be seen at the bottom]
[Image changes to show a new slide showing a photo of M. Stanley Whittingham, and photos of a rotating sun, a wind farm, and a solar farm and text appears: CSIRO Sir Robert Price Lecture, The Lithium Battery – From a Dream to Domination of Energy Storage, M. Stanley Whittingham, Binghamtom University (SUNY), Honorary Fellow, New College, Oxford]
M. Stanley Whittingham: Can you hear me now?
Adam Best: Yeah, I can hear you Stan.
M. Stanley Whittingham: Good. I was muted for a while. So, thank you for the invite. I always like visiting Australia so it was a big disappointment when this pandemic came around and stopped this trip and several others I had in mind. But I hope to see you all next year at the IMLB meeting in Sydney.
So, what I want to do is tell you a little bit about the lithium battery, where it started and where it’s at now. But first let me thank the US Department of Energy here who supported my work for the last 30 plus years. And I’ll talk about climate change and renewable energy. In Australia, you all know this fellow on the left hand side, the sun, it’s a bit more of a foreigner to us in the winter here in New York. In the middle is a wind farm with I think 32 Megawatt hours of storage, which is used for smoothing and shifting. And I suspect you all recognise the storage facility on the right which was the largest in the world and it was in Australia, the Tesla facility.
[Image changes to show a new slide showing text: Roadmap for Today, Lithium batteries, 1972 – 2021, From an idea to domination of electrochemical storage, Potential impact on a cleaner environment, Batteries enable renewable energy, Batteries enhance resilience to natural disasters, What are they?, What are their limitations?, Some scientific opportunities, High Ni content, and 2 Li redox systems, Supply Chain – Australia can do it]
So, I’m going to discuss how this has changed over the last, I guess, say few decades. So, I’ll start in 1972 and then climb up until today. I’ll just show you how it can be used to enable renewable energy and equally important how it can enhance resilience to natural disasters, whether we’re talking about hurricanes in New York City, or fires in California, or fires in Australia. I’ll very briefly describe what they are. I expect everyone knows already, so I’ll go over that pretty quickly, what are their limitations, and describe some of the scientific opportunities that are still out there and then describe what is probably the most important thing these days, is the supply chain to actually making the batteries and deploying them. And Australia is one of the few continents that have every component to do this. So, Australia could do this all by themselves.
[Image changes to show a new slide showing a black and white photo of a male looking at a battery, a close view of a battery, a paperweight solar clock, and three small cells]
So, let’s go back to the beginning and I’ll have to thank what was then Esso, now Exxon, now Exxon Mobil I guess, who had the foresight to actually invest in lithium batteries, in fuel cells, solar cells, a lot of renewable energy in those days. And we built a number of batteries, and I show you a couple on the right here. This is a paperweight we gave away to prospective customers. We have a battery, a clock, and the little solar cell. This particular one is probably the only one still existing, but it sits on my desk right now. It’s still working and that’s at 45 years old. So, a well-made lithium battery will last forever. At the bottom here are some three cells, they’re about six inches by four inches by about an inch thick, these were used at the EV Show in Chicago in 1977 and they turned a motorcycle head lamp on and off all week long with no problems at all.
[Image changes to show a new slide showing photos of a coin cell, a Battery brochure, and gold Nobel prize badge, and text heading above: At the Nobel Museum in Stockholm]
So, that’s where we stood back in the mid ‘70s. Just a reminder, look at this little coin cell here, and if you want to see it again, we managed to find one of these plus a button cell – it seems smaller – 18, or 15 months ago, and an original brochure giving the technical details of lithium ion battery from back in the ‘70s. And these now sit in the Nobel Museum in Stockholm.
[Image changes to show a new slide showing photos of a small electric vehicle, a Peterbilt electric truck, a garbage truck, two electric vehicles outside the UK Ambassador’s residence in Stockholm, a wind farm, the sun, and two Smartphones and text appears: Lithium Batteries are now dominant – can help all create a cleaner world, Clean the environment with electric vehicles, Still many challenges, Range vs cost, Sustainability – Recycling, Energy storage enables renewable energy, Cleaner sustainable technology, Assist in mitigating global warming (messing up), More efficient grid, Energy storage enabled the communications revelation]
And let’s look at where we’ve come since then. And I show you a range of electric vehicles. The small one here shows my wife in one we rented almost two years ago now in Bermuda. Tourists are not allowed to drive cars there but about two weeks before we arrived they started importing these little electric cars and tourists are allowed to drive those. We quickly found out range anxiety is real. They told us you could not get from one end of the island to the other and back again without recharging but don’t worry there is a charging station at the other end. So, we drove there. The charging station was indeed there but it’s still under construction and we had to drive part way back and you can see we’re recharging it and we went and got dinner at the same time. That’s one extreme.
Next to it is what we call a 16 wheeler, a large truck. Here are the lithium batteries, and next to that is a garbage truck and the garbage truck is probably the best use of electric vehicle, with stop, start, radio all day long. And these are at Packall which owns Peterbilt, and this is about an hour north of Seattle in Washington State. And I got the chance of driving both these around their test track in December of 2019.
When we went to Stockholm, the UK Ambassador brought over two electric vehicles from London, a jaguar, and a London taxi. The London taxi’s developed in partnership with Volvo, and she used this taxi to get to and from the Royal Palace for the various events. I think equally important to vehicles is energy storage. It enables renewable energy. It’ll help clean up the environment and I say it refers to mitigate global messing up as we’re getting extremes both on the cold end and the hot end. And obviously we all know it, enable the communications revolution.
[Image changes to show a new slide showing a photo of two astronauts on the International Space Station and text appears: The Astronauts on the Space Station, - Li-ion Batteries – 2019]
But another application which fewer people are aware of, is when we were in Stockholm, two of the physicists and I got to talk live to two astronauts on the International Space Station. The lady is an American, her mother was Swedish, hence the Swedish flag, and the gentleman’s from Italy. And they had just replaced all the nickel metal hydride batteries on the outside of the Space Station. They get charged by solar energy with lithium ion. They were very happy because the lithium ion took up half the space, weighed half as much, and were supposed to last twice as long. So, that was that, became an extreme example.
[Image changes to show a new slide showing photos of energy storage facilities and text appears: Electricity from Renewable Energy needs Storage, Renewable lower cost than new coal, 94% of planned 2020 generation capacity in Texas, Minimal cost during operation, Minimal staff, No fuel cost during operation, Coal, oil or gas, But intermittent so need storage, Storage can eliminate peaker-plants, 1.2 GWh Li-ion facility and Moss Landing, Cal., Largest in the world, Operational Dec 11, 2020, Replaced gas fired system, Expanding to 1.6 GWh in 2021, Approved for expansion to 6 GWh]
But let’s look at the viability of batteries, and the viability of renewable energy and I show you an example here, well two examples. Renewable today, certainly US, is cheaper than coal and if you look at Texas – which is not exactly I will say a climate friendly state – you’ll see that 94% of their planned new generation capacity, as of last August, is renewable and it’s mostly solar, with wind and some storage. And I show you a storage facility under construction in Texas now being built by Tesla. It will provide 100 MW of power. It’s not clear how long it lasts. It seems to be super-secretive but we suspect it’s probably four hours so, it’s 400 MWh there. The big advantage of renewable energy, once it’s built there’s essentially no maintenance. So, you need minimal staff, the fuel is free, whether it’s the wind or the sun. And, but the challenges, it’s intermittent so you’ve got to have storage.
And I show you at the bottom now, what is the world’s largest storage facility, or battery storage facility. This is at Moss Landing in California, about an hour and a half south of San Francisco. It is built inside and outside an old gas fired plant. So, the inside of this building was where the gas turbines were. It’s now full of lithium ion batteries. The great advantage of that is all the grid infrastructure was already there. So, this is 1.2 GWh. It started up last December and it planned to expand to 1.6 GWh this year and they got permission to go to 6 GWh. So this shows the viability of batteries in an economic sense and viability of both solar and wind. They’re clearly both lower cost than putting in new fossil fuel plants.
[Image changes to show a new slide showing a diagram explaining the generation of energy through wind and solar and the usage of that energy and text heading appears: Green Energy Sources challenged by usage, Profile Storage needed for smoothing and peak shifting]
Let me just show you again the real issue we’re trying to address using batteries. You’re probably all familiar with this typical usage curve. We use very little electricity at night, and we have a peak around 5pm, 6pm when everybody goes home and it seems to be common around the world. So, you have to have power plants that can generate this peak period and in say New York City, this peak will be much higher in the summer than it is say in the fall or the spring. So, the idea, if we could store energy at night time we could use that energy and knock off this peak, and basically flatten this whole curve. So, the interest is to use wind and solar to do that but they don’t quite work out. So, certainly in places in the US, certainly Texas, where there’s a lot of wind the wind is strongest in the middle of the night when we don’t really need it. The sun is strongest in the middle of the day where you’re already at a plateau. So, we have to be able to shift this energy usage over to these peak periods and that’s where batteries come in.
[Image changes to show a new slide showing photos of energy storage facilities and text appears: Different types of Electric Energy Storage, Pumped Hydro, By far the largest by storage, Gigawatt hours, Highly efficient 73%, Limited new sites, Batteries (chemical to electrical energy), By far the most flexible and common, Portable and stationary, Milliwatts to Gigawatts, Very fast switch on and off, Fly Wheels, Very few, one near Albany for power smoothing, Hazardous – not likely for mobile applications]
So let me just show you some methods of storage. Some of that largest areas for hydro, and I’ll show you a site which is about an hour’s drive from where I’m sitting right now, halfway between Binghamton and Albany. New York has many of these facilities. This one can generate a Gigawatt hour of power and typically these are used, well essentially fuelled up, during spring and fall and used a lot in the winter and the summer where we need more power. The challenge however is they take around about two minutes to start up so you’ve got to have something to fill in that gap and batteries are one of the most useful ways of doing that. And the big advantage also of batteries is that they are by far the most flexible and common. They can be portable. They can be stationary. So, a utility can move them around if they want to. They can go from Milliwatts to Gigawatts and they can have very fast switch on and switch off, in less than a few seconds.
A third area that has been looked at, I would say without too much success, is fly wheels converting kinetic to electrical energy. There’s one that are near Albany again, about two hours from me, it’s used for power smoothing. It cost so much the company went bankrupt. Another company took over the operation and as they didn’t have the CapEx it’s now making money for them. The challenge here, they’re like huge hand grenades so they’re very hazardous, not suitable for mobile applications and are basically built into concrete bunkers.
[Image changes to show a diagram explaining an example of intercalation and text heading and text appears: What is intercalation?, Originally associated with the addition of a day or month into the calendar, February 29th, Now in science, The reversible insertion of a guest species in a host lattice, Guests may be ions or molecules, Hosts can be inorganics, DNA, et al]
Just in case there’s anybody in the audience that doesn’t know what the word intercalation means, this is what all lithium ion batteries are based on. It was originally associated with the additional, for example February 29th enters the calendar every fourth year, you took it out the following year and that year was no different than the previous year. So, it’s totally reversible. In science we use exactly the same definition.
So, it’s a reversible insertion of some guest species into host lattice. The guests can be ions or molecules. The hosts can be inorganics, it can be DNA, a whole range of different materials. And I show you an example here for one. We started out with titanium disulphate. This has a structure of titanium in between two sulphur layers and then what we call a Van der Waals gap with a very weak bonding. There you can insert the lithium, intercalate it. The lattice just expands by about 10%. The structure otherwise does not change at all. When you take the lithium back out again it just contracts back to where it was. And this is why in a good lithium ion battery it will cycle for thousands of times because you’re not really damaging the structure.
[image changes to show a new slide showing a diagram of a lithium-ion battery cell and text appears: What is an Intercalation – based Lithium-Ion Battery Cell, 1970’s Technology]
So, just in case again, there’s no one in the audience that doesn’t know what the battery is, and I’ll rush through this. Every battery has an anode, an electrolyte, and a cathode. In a lithium-ion battery we have it intercalate from electrodes on both sides. For the anode, this is graphite, on the cathode this is TiS2, or it could be some other layered material. But let’s look at why TiS2 is special and why really it’s still being looked at today and some special characteristics.
[Image changes to show a new slide showing a graph showing the discharge curve on the left, and then a diagram of the makeup of TiS2 and text appears: Soft conducting lattice of TiS2 gives almost perfect cathode, TiS2 has a layered structure, Semi-metal, Mixed conductor, TiS2 is almost ideal cathode, No phase transition, No need for CB conductor, The Exxon Team – A.H. Thompson, J.A. Panella, R.R. Chianelli, A.J. Jacobson, M.B.Dines, BG. Silbemagel, F.R. Gamble, A. Shriesheim et al]
It has this layered structure I showed you. Here are the octahedra of TiS6. Lithium sits between the sheets and you can take them all out and put them all back in. There’s no phase change. So, this is a single phase material all the way from zero lithium to one lithium. And this is represented in the discharge curve which is very smooth and when you recharge it you can follow the same plot back up again. And the difference involved between these plots is just the IR loss in the electrolyte because you’re running this at 10 mA per square centimetre. The other big plus of TiS2 is it’s for all practical purposes a metallic conductor. So, that shields the lithium-ions from the titanium and the sulphur. So they can move very, very fast. So, the ions can move fast, the electrons can get in and out of fast, out of it fast, and you don’t have therefore to mix the conducted diluent like carbon black into the material, which we have to do for most of today’s materials.
These are my colleagues that made it all happen at Exxon, Mart Thompson the physicist, my technician Russell, sole state chemist – and I can go through all these folks, Al Shriesheim was my director. He then moved on to Argon National Lab for a long period of time. But all these folks were extremely supportive to make it happen.
[Image changes to show a new slide showing a Whittingham et al 1976 graph, a Steele et al 1976 graph, and a Nazar et al 2018 graph below the text heading and text: Soft conducting lattice of TiS2 gives “best” Li cathode, also for Mg, TiS2 has a layered structure, Semi-metal, Mixed conductor, TiS2 is almost ideal cathode, Highest capacity for polarizing Mg2+, ED less than half that of Li+]
So, I talked about so-lithium. Sodium is much more complicated. Sodium ion is bigger so it has to actually separate in layers before it can go in. So you get a series of phases. This is a second stage phase. This is trigonal prismatic co-ordination, and trigonal anti-prismatic which is octahedral. So, you’ve got these multiple phases. You’ve got a much larger chains of voltage here which is obviously a challenge. But the metallic what we call soft lattice of TiS2 allows ions like these doubly charged magnesium to move in and out readily, calcium can also go in and out. And this is work of Lindon Nazar at Waterloo, Canada and you can see the curve here is very similar to the curve for lithium. The thing to notice though is this is at one point about two volts compared with two volts of lithium. So, this is a huge penalty, voltage penalty going from lithium to magnesium. Also because the lattice static interactions,this cell had to be run at 60 degrees centigrade and you can see it’s only run at 0.04 milliamps per square centimetre. But it shows proof of concept. You can build magnesium cells and they do work but the energy density of this cell is less than half that of a lithium cell. So, there’s probably not much future in magnesium cells. And if you go to say an oxide lattice to get your voltage up then the magnesium is even harder to diffuse through that lattice.
[Image changes to show a new slide showing showing a photo of a burnt battery on the right and a photo of dendrites on the left and text appears: Lithium-Ion Batteries contain no Lithium Metal, because – Lithium metal itself, Dendrites, Graphite intercalation, 1991 to present, Russ Chianelli, Exxon, Avestor, AT&T]
So, let me point out that a lot of people keep saying, well why are these lithium ion batteries and not lithium batteries, this is the reason why. You’re plating out lithium if you charge pure metallic lithium sensored electrode deposition of any metal, you tend to form these dendrites on mostly lithium and these dendrites will penetrate through the separator and short out the cell as shown on the right hand side here. These were cells built by Avestor in Canada and utilised by AT&T in Texas and I think within a few months of installing them four or five of these caught fire and they’re no longer sold in the US. The issue here was clearly omission and I’m going to point this out to you that to get the power they wanted they used a very thin polyethylene oxide separator. And the dendrites could grow through that.
[Image changes to show a new slide showing a battery and on the left an arrow moves down the through the dates 1972 to 2021 and on the right side an arrow shows the stages of technology changes and a text heading appears: An Intercalation-based Lithium Battery Cell, 1970s Technology]
So, ever since then graphite intercalation compounds have been used as the anode and that’s shown in this next slide. So, at Exxon we worked from lithium metal in ’72. We knew we had dendrites so we switched to lithium aluminum. This is good for maybe 100 cycles at most. Akiro Yoshino in Japan was looking at polyacetylene as a active electrode. He found out that graphitic carbon worked very well as an anode material shown here but the challenge here is you need 72 grams of carbon to store 7 grams of lithium and the carbon anode takes up half the volume of the cell. So, if we want to get higher incidence we’ve got to get this carbon out of there now and this is still used. To date it’s been in use for more than 30 years now.
So, a lot of effort to switch to tin or silicon and the holy grail is to go all the way back to lithium metal again. On the cathode side we start with TiS2. John Goodenough read our papers and he was working on the magnetic behaviour of lithium cobalt oxide. He recognised that it had the same structure so he tried it out in electro chemical cells and we all know what happened then. Cobalt is power expensive, there’s child labour issues in the Congo with it. So, a huge effort now to replace the cobalt with as much nickel and manganese as you can. So, these are known as NMCs or as Tesla and others do, you can use nickel and aluminum to replace the cobalt.
[Image continues to show the same slide on the screen]
And this is the dominant material mostly today. John also came up with the all-green lithium-ion phosphate, a much lower cost material, safer material, but much lower energy density and you’ll see some numbers in a moment. We’re working on the manganese analogue of that which takes the voltage up to four volts from three and a half. And the major effort we have now is to say we want to have the phosphate stabilizing group but if we can put two lithium ions into that lattice then maybe we can get back to the energy density of these layered oxides.
[Image changes to show a new slide showing a comparison table comparing different types of batteries and their percentage of volumetric capacity, and Wh/kg and Wh/L and text heading and text appears: Today’s Intercalation Batteries are Still Limited in Energy Storage (IEEE Proc. 100, 1518, 2012), Today’s batteries, Attain much less than 30% of their theoretical volumetric capacity, Issues, Carbon is a major issue – half volume of cell – Make Li metal work 9Si, Sny, Fe), Need higher Li content cathodes – e.g. LiMo2, Li2VOPO4, Need higher ionic and electronic conductivity, Thicker electrodes reduce amount of current collector and separator]
So, a comment people quite often make to us, “Well you folks got the Nobel prize, no more R & D needed right?”. We say, “Absolutely not, just look at the numbers inside that red oval”. This is the percentage of the theoretical capacity actually attained in real cells, and this is for volumatic capacity, anywhere from 11% to 25% at best. On a rate basis, they’re all roughly 25%. So, clearly we can do better and I’m part of the Battery 500 Consortium in the US and our goal is to get this number up to 500 Wh/kg, which means getting this up to 50% and I’ll show you some data in a moment. Basically we have to get rid of the carbon or most of it. We’ve got to get more lithium per transition metal ion, right now layered oxides only use about 60% of the lithium. And ideally we get better materials which have a higher ionic and electronic conductivity. Then we can make an electrode sticker and eliminate more of the current collectors and separators. So, let’s look at what the challenges of doing that are.
[Image changes to show a new slide showing a graph on the right plotting a line of Discharge Capacity and Thermal Stability and text appears: Dominant Cathodes today are the Layered Oxides, Lix [Ni, Mn, Co, Al] O2 – NMCA, LiCo02 dominates electronics, Mixed metal NMCA now dominates, major effort to eliminate Co, Cost and environment issues, Vehicles going from 333 to 622 to 811*, Challenge of energy vs safety]
As I said lithium cobalt oxide is the dominating material, or was. It’s still used mostly in cell phones, Smart watches, and so on because it has the highest energy density per unit volume and that’s what you’re worried about in those devices. The mixed metal oxides are dominant for most other applications and there’s a huge effort today to actually reduce the cobalt content and if possible to eliminate it altogether. And to put this in perspective, since the beginning of this year the cobalt price has doubled because there’s a huge demand for it. So, we have to worry about cost and environment here, where the cost is driving the change to reduce it. So, in the vehicles we’re going from one third nickel to 60% to 80%. And for those of you who don’t understand this number [28:02], I explain it at the bottom here. So, the first number is the percentages of nickel, then the percentage of manganese, and percentage of cobalt.
But to get really high energy density or high capacity we have to go to the higher nickel and that’s shown in this now famous plot out of Dr Sun’s lab in Seoul, South Korea. And you can see here is nickel at 85%, it has the highest capacity, but it has the lowest thermal stability. So, if you want high thermal stability, 100 degrees more stable, this only has one third nickel in there and a lot more cobalt and obviously a lot lower capacity. So, our ideal is to get into this blue box, high nickel, high thermal stability, and the thermal stability is directly related to the capacity retention because it determines how reactive the material is with the electrolyte. We should be reminded that nickel four plus, cobalt four plus are metastable materials. So, these compounds if given a chance will release oxygen and that can give you thermal runaway and capacity failure. So, we have this challenge of energy versus safety.
[Image changes to show a new slide showing a photo of a battery meatball, a Li/NMC Battery pouch cell, and a line graph plotting Cell energy and Cycle number over the years and text heading and text appears: Layered Oxides are the Dominant Battery Cathode, Battery 500 Team Achieved >350 Wh/kg with NMC 622, LiNi0.6Mn0.2Co0.2O2 shows excellent cycling, Achieved 350 Wh/kg goal, Uses meatball morphology]
So, let me show you where we stand now. As I said, it was about 25% efficiency before. So, in our Battery 500 Consortium we’ve now achieved 350 Wh/kg with this 60% nickel and you can look at how the time line changed things. When we started out in 2017 we could get just about 50 cycles at 300 Wh/kg. A year later we were up to over 200 cycles at 300. In 2019 we’re still somewhere just maybe 225 cycles but now we’re at 350 Wh/kg. And as of this last score we’ve now got more than 400 cycles at 350 Wh/kg. So, we’re getting 90% retention for over 400 cycles and I should emphasize this is using a lithium metal anode and their new electrolyte system.
And the material we use are these meatballs, so the primary particles are maybe a couple of hundred nanometres in size but the secondary particle is from five to 20 microns in size. So, these pack well giving you a high energy density. The cells we do all our testing in are these little pouch cells, 2.0 Ah capacity, and these are built by my ex-graduate student, Jie Xiao, at Pacific North West National Lab. And the cells are tested at the Idaho National Lab. So, you build them in one place, test them in another place, and that gives us, I think, better reliability, better trustworthiness. And these cells have about 700 Wh/L. So, they’re beginning to look very good but we, we’ve got to 350, we want to go higher.
[Image changes to show a new slide showing a line graph on the left plotting voltage and capacity and a photo of a meatball, and an article can be seen on the right and text heading and text appears: How to get even Higher Energy Density – Use all the Material!, Today 12% capacity loss on 1st cycle, If eliminated allows 400+ Wh/kg cells?]
So, we’ve got to use more of the material and the challenge of these materials, and now we’re up to 80% nickel is a charging curve. When we discharge it we never get all of the lithium back in again. So, we’re losing in this case 30 mAh/g which is somewhere between 10% and 20% of the total capacity. This is very valuable capacity because there’s about three and a half volts, so a very stable region of the electrolyte. The other way you get higher capacity is to push the charging voltage up, but you’ll see in a moment that causes degradation. So, we’ve been studying what’s the cause of this and how can we solve it.
[Image changes to show a new slide showing three plotted line graphs showing comparison of Diffusion rates on the left and Raising temperature rates on the right and text appears: 1st Cycle Loss Appears to be due to Slow Li Diffusion, Diffusion falls fast at high [Li], Raising the temperature reduces loss]
Again, pretty clear this is diffusion related. So, the black circles here are interfusion of lithium, so pushing lithium into the lattice. And you can see once we get above that 70% lithium the diffusion co-efficient drops off by over three orders of magnitude. And you can look at, the challenge here is basically if you were all sitting in a lecture hall today, if 70% of the seats were full, and more people came in then the existing people have to move if those empty seats are in the middle of the lecture hall. In this case Anton Van der Bentz also determined the actual mechanisms, the die vacancy mechanism. So we need two vacancies next to each other. That’s why it falls off so fast.
There’s not a challenge in taking the lithium out, so it’s the same issue emptying the electrode and whether it can come out smoothly. The last few percent maybe an issue but we never go that far anyway. So, no difficulty fast charging it. So, to double check that this is really a diffusion process we tested cells at room temperature and then elevated temperature. So, we charged them to four different voltages just to see how much capacity we can get out. So, at 4.2V, you see the charge and discharge curves are right on top of each other. When we discharge them now we’re holding them for about four hours at 2.8V, so we get more of the lithium back in so we lose less of the capacity, 4.4V it’s still looking good. But you can see at 4.6V we’re now getting separation with the charge and discharge, and it’s even worse at 4.8V.
[Image continues to show the same slide on the screen]
So, at these higher voltages, what’s happening is the electrolyte is reacting with our layered oxide and forming resistant films on the surface. So, we’re outside the stability limit at 4.6V and 4.8V, 4.2V is clearly too low a capacity to be of interest so we raised this now to 45 degrees Centigrade and you can see at 4.4V it’s still very good. We’ve got most of this first loss back. Holding it at voltage gives us a little bit more but not much more. But at 4.6V and 4.8V we’re clearly getting side reactions occurring and this is not good and you can see it’s even worse first cycle loss at the 4.8V. So we wonder how can we make this work better, how can we get rid of this.
[Image changes to show a new slide showing two voltage and capacity line graphs on the right and text heading and text appears: LiCo02 serves as a clue to eliminate 1st cycle loss, Why does liCo02 not show as a 1st cycle loss, At 45°C NMC shows minimal loss, Elimination at RT should be possible]
So we looked at pure lithium cobalt oxide because lithium cobalt oxide should give us a clue because there’s no loss in the first cycle loss. So, let me just repeat some of the data I’ve just showed you. We’ve done a little bit more extreme. So, in this case we just took out 120 mAh/g both out of NMC and the cobalt oxide. So, the black is just as we did it before but now we held it for 120 hours. So, by holding it at 120 hours we got all the lithium back in, clearly a diffusion control process. Raising it to 45 degrees Centigrade we got most of it back in and then this holding got the rest back in. Cobalt oxide it makes no difference, or should I say very little difference. So, again diffusion controlled, it’s not clear whether it’s the bulk or the surface issue we have.
[Image changes to show a new slide showing three voltage and capacity line graphs and a diagram of a surface coating on a sphere shape and text heading and text appears: Coatings/substitution helps eliminate 1st cycle loss, Why does LiCO02 not show a 1st cycle loss/, At 45°C NMC shows minimal loss, Elimination at RT should be possible, Modify NMC by substitutions/coatings]
So, our reaction was we should be able to modify the NMC to make it look more like cobalt oxide and we can do that by coating it or substitution in the lattice. And our preliminary data showed it just plain 1% of a lithium niobium oxide solution and then firing it at about 400 degrees Centigrade, we got a surface coating, then it went a few nanometres into the surface here. And I think you could see we’ve now reduced this first cycle loss by about 50%. So, we think with a bit more study we can eliminate it altogether and get all that capacity back.
[Image changes to show a new slide showing a diagram showing first cycle loss in a battery cell and a line graph plotting capacity and cell voltage of a LiFePO4 battery and text heading and text appears: some Opportunities for Future Study, LiFePo4 is low cost stable cathode, high rate, due to single phase lixFePO4, But low energy density, 4V LiMnPO4 should be viable, So can a 2 e redox system be found?, VOPO4 is an example]
So, let’s just look at some opportunities for the future. I talked back to the IS2. There was a lot of work in the ‘80s in British Columbia and Vancouver. Geoff Darnell(?) was involved in that looking at molybdenum disulphide. It was of great interest because molybdenite is a naturally occurring order, so they could obtain it very simply. I’ve talked about cobalt oxide. Lithium-ion phosphate is very interesting because it’s very stable. It has this tunnel structure with one dimensional tunnels and no first cycle loss. So, it’s clearly not a diffusion issue in this case. So, here’s a cycling curve and the first cycle and the second cycle and the hundredth cycle are basically the same.
But as I showed earlier, the energy density for this material is too low for many applications which are volume sensitive. So, we’re interested in looking at two electron systems. We can’t put two lithium ions into the iron one because it gets outside this stability range of the electrolyte. So, we decided to look at vanadium. With vanadium you can go from five plus to four plus then to three plus. And clearly I wouldn’t be talking about this unless it did work.
[Image changes to show a new slide showing photos of two males and a female holding an award certificate, and a Science and Technology highlights book, and text heading and text appears: Are 2 Li-Ion Intercalation Cathoes Structurally Viable? Yes, 2018 Report Feb 2019, DOE Ten at Ten Award July 2019, R & D Fundamentals, Advancing the state of battery science, “DOE-supported researchers made key advances in battery science and technology in 2018, For the first time, researchers at DOE Energy Frontier Research Centre reversibly inserted and extracted two lithium ions from a multi-electron lithium ion battery cathode, with full recovery upon recharging – a capability that could greatly increase battery capacity”]
So let me just show the results here, and I’ll show you the results that make, I guess, the students happy. The fellow here is one of Claire Gray’s students. The girl is one of my students and they’re getting the, a DOE Award from the Under Secretary of Energy from the Federal Government, and this work was highlighted in the 2018 Federal Report. So, we showed that you can get two lithium ions into this but doing these new materials, understanding them, you need really a big interdisciplinary team to do that. So, this is part of our Energy Frontier Research Centre led from Binghamton, but included Rutgers, Cambridge with Claire Gray and Anna Ma, and theorists and experimentalists at San Diego, Santa Barbara, Michigan, Stony Brook, MIT, Argon, and some other National Labs. So, we had a big team and this is the way you really have to do research. And it’s something that you can do more easily in the National Lab than you can do it academia.
[Image changes to show a new slide showing a flow chart of a multi-electron cathode structures being made and text heading and text appears: VOPO4 – A possible Multi-electron Cathode?, VCI3 and P2O5 in 95% ethanol, Solvothermal 180°C for three days, Monoclinic H2VOPO4, heat Treatment 550°C for 3 hours]
So, let’s just look at how we made this material. This is, this is a structure. Again it’s a 3D structure with tunnels in it. In this case the tunnels intersect so there’s no blockage of ions. We make this material just by simple solvothermal reaction. It’s made in ethanol with a little bit of water added so the vanadium doesn’t get over reduced. And we make this nice structure with protons in it. But we want lithium so if we heat treat this gently, get all the protons out, we empty lattice, and we thoroughly characterise this lattice.
[Image changes to show a new slide showing a line graph of voltage and capacity on the right and a photo on the left of cuboid particles and text appears: Proof of Concept achieved for multi-electron cathodes – Li2VOPO4, Small cuboid particles allow two Li Ions to be reversibly intercalated]
And what we’ll end up here are these beautiful cuboids all the same size. These are 100 to 200 nanometres in size. And if you look at the electrochemistry of these nan… and I should mention, obviously phosphate is an outstanding electronic insulator. So, what we do is we add graphene to this, Graphene works wonders with a number of these materials much better than carbon black, and using graphene we now get this plot here, this [40:49] at about 4V is vanadium 5 to vanadium 4, and this one about 2.5V is vanadium 4 to vanadium 3. You’ll notice a lot of bumps here. This is where the lithium’s tending toward it.
So, in this region this acts as a single phase material which means the lithium ions move extremely fast, no problems there. We’re still working on the high voltage plateau because the reaction weight there is much slower. But the key thing to note here is the first cycle is in black and the 50th cycle is in purple. So, it is in fact working better on the 50th cycle than the first cycle. So, we’ve got proof of concept that we can stuff two lithium ions into a crystalline lattice many, many times without damaging that lattice. And we show now the same for sodium ions.
[Image changes to show a new slide showing a photo of a bus on a road and text heading and text appears: Questions – Energy Density, Safety and Cost, Why are the lower cost and safer phosphates not used more for EEs and Evs?, LiFePo4/LiMnPo4/LiVOPO4 systems expected to increase markets, A123 used LiFePO4 for EES, Tesla using LiFePO4 for smaller cars in Asia (+Germany), and in future in US, Is Energy Density so important?, Does this effectively eliminate all non Li technologies?, need safer and stable electrolytes – can solid state give the required power densities?, Can PEO be improved sufficiently for non-fleet EVs?, Blue Solutions thinks so]
Let me raise now a few questions for a discussion and these relate to energy density, safety, and cost. And really the questions I’m raising here, why are the lower cost and safer phosphates not used more for energy storage on the grid and even in some vehicles? It’s only in China lithium ion phosphate is used, or was used as the major cathode. It dropped out of favour maybe two years ago because of government disincentives. It’s now coming back in again. I expect they should increase in the markets.
In the US, A123 used lithium ion phosphate and there was a facility at Binghamton using that, but all the recent energy storage facilities have used the layered oxides, much more expensive, high energy density. So, there’s a question mark there. Tesla is now talking about using lithium ion phosphate in the future in their small cars in the US. The cars they’re building in China they’re using lithium-ion phosphate and exporting these to Germany. So, the question we’re really asking is, “Is energy density so important for the grid that they’re not willing to use the phosphates?”. And if that’s really the case then this virtually eliminates all non-lithium technologies, and I don’t believe that can be really the case.
[Image continues to show the same slide on the screen]
Whatever we do with lithium batteries, we need safer and more stable electrolytes. And the question being raised everywhere now is can solid state give the required power densities. The only solid state batteries on the market today are those coming out of Blue Solutions. They bought the technology from Hydro Quebec – I showed you earlier where there were problems. They’re using much thicker PEO and their solid state batteries are being used in the Mercedes buses and will be available commercially later this year because they give a much higher energy density therefore a much longer range and they will not need recharging during the day. So, they’re used in these buses and re-charged overnight. And when I talked to Blue Solutions a couple of weeks ago they believe they can get the polymer electrolytes to have a better conductivity so they can be used in personal cars because right now these batteries operate about 70 degrees Centigrade, not room temperature.
[Image changes to show a new slide showing text heading and text: Conclusions and What’s Next, Lithium intercalation systems will dominate for the next 5 – 10 years, NMCA likely to be dominant, LiFePO4/LiMnPO4/LiVOPO4 systems again increasing markets (driving Li prices today), Need safe and stable electrolytes – can solid state give the required power densities?, Need new manufacturing technologies, Materials and cells, Need clean recycling technologies, Sustainably society, Need Regional Supply Chain and manufacturing, Europe is great example, integrated mine to product, clean energy manufacturing, North America needs to do the same; Australia can do it – EES is wanted]
Let me just finish by a few conclusions. It’s my belief that lithium intercalation systems will dominate for the next five or ten years, basically for two reasons. They’re produced in such large quantities now, and the price is coming down every year so it will be very difficult for any new system to break into the market. A new system needs a high price introductory market. I think the phosphates are going to increase the market share and right now according to Blumberg, there’s so much lithium ion phosphate being built in China that the lithium car carbonate prices are now higher than the lithium hydroxide prices, which doesn’t make too much sense. So lithium prices, just like cobalt prices have almost doubled since January 1st.
But for all of us trying to get into this business if we’re not in Asia, we need new manufacturing technologies so we can leapfrog the Asian systems. We need to be able to recycle all the batteries which may mean designing them so they can be recycled. So, they’ll give us a sustainable society, and we need reasonable regional supply chain and manufacturing so that the components aren’t shipped around the world two or three times and Europe has set up a great example for all the rest of us. They got a plan in place funded by many billions of Euros integrating mines in Scandinavia using clean hydro power so the project can be built in Germany next to the auto plants. Some of us are trying to push North American governments, that’s US and Canada to do the same. Clearly if Australia wants to do it, they can do it. They’ve got all the minerals that are needed to make batteries there and clearly with all the sunshine you’ve got, electrical energy storage is warranted at probably every substation in the country, not just the one that Tesla built.
[Image changes to show a new slide showing a photo of Stan giving a speech at a podium and text heading and text appears: Three messages from the Nobel Banquet Speech, Science is interdisciplinary, Knows no boundaries, Chemistry, Physics and Engineering, Science is international, Knows no boundaries, UK, USA, and Japan, Li battery enabled the electronics revolution, Energy storage enables renewable energy, Cleaner, sustainable technology, recycling, Assist in mitigating global warming (messing up), More efficient grid, Culture Facts Matter]
And just three messages from the Banquet Speech for any young folks in the audience. Just to remind everybody that science is interdisciplinary. The most exciting areas of science are between the different disciplines in chemistry, stream chemistry and medicine, or chemistry and material science. Science is also international, and I use these as examples because I’m a chemist. John Goodenough was a physicist, and Akira was an engineer. I’m British by birth but I made my inventions in the US. John Goodenough was in fact born in Germany, as an American, but he made his inventions in Britain, and Akira made his inventions in Japan.
Clearly we need energy storage to make renewable energy work. It’ll also help us mitigate global warming and let us leave a cleaner environment for our children and grandchildren and make a much more efficient grid without expanding the grid with all this cost. What I like to point out to younger folks, you need to understand the cultures of other people because Americans don’t think the same way as Europeans. And certainly none of us think the same way as Asians. And I don’t know quite where you put Australians in the mix there, but none of us think quite the same way. And clearly facts do matter, science matters, and fortunately in the US we’re now in a, I think in a better position where we have a Federal government that listens to science and will listen to facts before making decisions. And I will stop there and thank you all.
[Image changes to show a grey screen]
Dr Adam Best: Thank you very much Stan for that fantastic presentation and taking us through, through the history of batteries and where our science field is going. I’d like just to point out to the audience that there is a Chat box on the side of your webcast screen there where you can post questions and we’d be pleased to have a quick discussion with Stan now and ask you some questions.
[Image changes to show Adam talking on the main screen and Stan and Katherine can be seen inset in the participant bar at the bottom of the screen listening]
So, I do already have some questions here for you Stan. So, one little question that’s come in from Rafael was, “Given the scarcity and global demand of lithium, how easy is it to recycle lithium batteries for reuse?”.
[Image changes to show Stan talking on the main screen and Katherine and Adam can be seen listening in the participant bar at the bottom of the screen]
M. Stanley Whittingham: There’s a fairly large number of companies starting to get into that business now. There’s a Canadian company building a plant in Rochester in New York. That will be the largest in the US. They’re using a hub and spoke method. One of their spokes they’ve already built there and another one in Ontario. Their main hub will be in Rochester. They claim they’ll be able to recover all the materials and they’re doing it essentially without much government funding as far as I can tell.
The key thing in recycling large batteries is if you take the battery out of the vehicle it’s then hazardous cargo to ship. So, the key message everyone’s giving now is you take the spent car to the recycling facility and next to the battery recycling you have the car recycling because you can just ship it on as a regular car with no hazardous cargo issues then. So, they say they can recover the lithium and all the metals. I’m not sure how much of the lithium actually goes back into batteries or into other uses. There’s a lot of people working on that at the moment.
[Image changes to show Adam talking on the main screen and Stan and Katherine can be seen inset in the participant bar at the bottom of the screen listening]
Dr Adam Best: Yeah absolutely, absolutely. In your presentation you talked about the work you’re doing with the Battery 500 Consortium and the 350 Wh/Kg battery with the lithium metal anode. So, I suppose the question there is have you solved the prickly problem of lithium dendrites which you pointed out earlier in your presentation? And have you got that, the SEI controlled now?
[Image changes to show Stan talking on the main screen and Katherine and Adam can be seen listening in the participant bar at the bottom of the screen]
M. Stanley Whittingham: Let’s say we haven’t had any fires or any accidents.
[Image changes to show Adam talking on the main screen and Stan and Katherine can be seen inset in the participant bar at the bottom of the screen listening]
Dr Adam Best: Well, you don’t want the forms to fill in that’s for certain.
[Image changes to show Stan talking on the main screen and Katherine and Adam can be seen listening in the participant bar at the bottom of the screen]
M. Stanley Whittingham: So, I know National Labs, if they have a fire it’s a really big issue. But they just like me, as soon as you get up to 2 Ah or bigger, we tend to put them in explosion proof ovens, so if anything does go wrong it’s totally controlled. But no, some of the National Labs have facilities so batteries can be tested to the limits where they will literally burn up. But I don’t think we’re about to blow the MWh size batteries with lithium metal yet.
[Image changes to show Adam talking on the main screen and Stan and Katherine can be seen inset in the participant bar at the bottom of the screen listening]
Dr Adam Best: So, there’s still challenges at that SEI? Are you still seeing, are you still seeing instability in some of the cycling performance or…?
[Image changes to show Stan talking on the main screen and Katherine and Adam can be seen listening in the participant bar at the bottom of the screen]
M. Stanley Whittingham: Yeah, most of the cells now we can get, three, 300, 400 cycles without too much difficulty but we are using ether based electrolytes, using LiFSI as the salt. The carbonates will not cycle lithium well, they will not plate lithium well. It’s not clear that these electrolytes are the ones that will be finally commercialised. But clearly we have to go back to something like that. In the old Exxon days, we used ether electrolytes, di o-Xylene, and things like that. They plate lithium much better than the carbonates do.
[Image changes to show Adam talking on the main screen and Stan and Katherine can be seen inset in the participant bar at the bottom of the screen listening]
Dr Adam Best: I see. Another question here from Ethan. It was mentioned that hydro power has about 73% efficiency. What is the typical maximum efficiency of a lithium battery?
[Image changes to show Stan talking on the main screen and Katherine and Adam can be seen listening in the participant bar at the bottom of the screen]
M. Stanley Whittingham: Yeah, it depends on how much power you get out of it. It’s over 90%. So, you lose very little and if you take it out, charge it slowly and take it out slowly it’s higher than that but under typical operations that’s I would say, C over 3, something like that which is what you use in an automobile. It’s well over 90%.
[Image changes to show Adam talking on the main screen and Stan and Katherine can be seen inset in the participant bar at the bottom of the screen listening]
Dr Adam Best: Question from Adam Fishman here, about your VOPO4 system. Can you comment on the manufacturability of that? How easy will that be to scale do you think?
[Image changes to show Stan talking on the main screen and Katherine and Adam can be seen listening in the participant bar at the bottom of the screen]
M. Stanley Whittingham: No problem at all if we use solver thermal approaches. That’s how they make all the zeolites, by hundreds of tonnes a year, exactly the same method that go into all your soap powders and everything else. It’s a, and the temperature is the temperature, the waste heat in any chemical plant or refinery, so the heating is free.
[Image changes to show Adam talking on the main screen and Stan and Katherine can be seen inset in the participant bar at the bottom of the screen listening]
Dr Adam Best: A question from Justin. He’s interested to know if you’ve played with the lithium titanate technology and using that in, as a negative anode? Obviously, it’s very high cyclability as well.
[Image changes to show Stan talking on the main screen and Katherine and Adam can be seen listening in the participant bar at the bottom of the screen]
M. Stanley Whittingham: We looked at it maybe ten years ago but as soon as you use that then your energy density goes to pieces. So no, it’s been looked at actively I think combined with maybe lithium ion phosphate to replace the lead acid battery for SLI operations because it would be quite happy under the hood of your car whereas your regular lithium ion won’t like getting as hot under there.
[Image changes to show Adam talking on the main screen and Stan and Katherine can be seen inset in the participant bar at the bottom of the screen listening]
Dr Adam Best: Mm. As far as the… a really good question here…
[Image shows Adam laughing and a recorded voice can be heard]
Recorded voice: Attention we’re doing a test on your evacuation tone today for your safety. There is no need to take any action. The first tone you will hear will be the alert tone and this will be followed by the evacuation tone.
[Image shows Adam talking on the main screen and Stan and Katherine can be seen inset in the participant bar at the bottom of the screen listening]
Dr. Adam Best: We’re all safe. Don’t worry everyone.
Recorded voice: This is the alert tone.
[Image shows Adam talking on the main screen and Stan and Katherine can be seen inset in the participant bar at the bottom of the screen listening]
Dr. Adam Best: So, sorry for that.
[Image changes to show Stan talking on the main screen and Katherine and Adam can be seen listening in the participant bar at the bottom of the screen]
M. Stanley Whittingham: We’re all used to that.
Dr Adam Best: We’re all used to that. It just didn’t have to be today.
[Beeping sound can be heard and the image changes to show Adam laughing and listening and then talking]
What a circus.
Recorded voice: This is the evacuation tone.
[Alarm can be heard]
Dr Adam Best: Right thank you.
[Image shows Adam listening on the main screen again.
Recorded voice: That was the completion of the test for this morning. We thank you very much for your patience.
[Image shows Adam talking on the main screen while the other two listen inset in the participant bar at the bottom of the screen]
Dr Adam Best: Back to the question. Nick Collins asked the question, and this is a pretty important one considering the volume of batteries that are out there. Do you think there is enough lithium to be available to support the amount of batteries to go into our electric vehicles and the grid? At what point will we reach peak lithium?
[Image changes to show Stan talking on the main screen and Katherine and Adam can be seen listening in the participant bar at the bottom of the screen]
M. Stanley Whittingham: Thanks. One of the National Labs in the US did a big study on that and there’s no problem at all for electric vehicles, because in about 15 years’ time when the first electrical vehicles start getting recycled half of the lithium will come from the recycling. So, there’s lots of lithium in South America. I think you folks have lithium in Australia.
Dr Adam Best: We have a lot of that.
M. Stanley Whittingham: I think the bigger the demand more people will look for it and find ways of making money out of it. So, I don’t see a problem there. If we start having hundreds of Gigawatt hour storage that may be a bit more of a challenge and that’s maybe where people will start looking at sodium and maybe some other systems.
[Image changes to show Adam talking on the main screen while the other two listen inset in the participant bar at the bottom of the screen]
Dr Adam Best: Yeah, yeah. Exactly. Our last question from Yang Liang. And he’s really interested to understand what you think of the conversion type of materials for cathode, for cathodes. So I suppose in that regard, maybe even looking at the lithium sulphur system, for instance.
[Image changes to show Stan talking on the main screen and Katherine and Adam can be seen listening in the participant bar at the bottom of the screen]
M. Stanley Whittingham: So, EFRC spent its first five years half looking at lithium ion fast rate, half looking at conversion systems, like iron fluoride, iron oxy fluoride. The challenge there, the energy efficiency is terrible because the reaction route on discharge is different and [57:17] charge you lose, it’s about a one volt difference. So, no one’s going to be willing to waste that energy. The other thing is the material gets finer and finer as you cycle it. So, then there’s more and more side reactions. On lithium sulphur, the Battery 500 project is looking at high nickel and lithium sulphur. So, lithium sulphur is one, has on paper at least, the best chance of getting to 500 Wh/Kg. Clearly lithium and sulphur are almost free compared with nickel and cobalt. So, if we can make that work that’s probably the system of the future. The question mark is do we need to solve electrolyte to really make that effective. And I suspect the answer may be yes.
[Image changes to show Adam talking on the main screen while the other two listen inset in the participant bar at the bottom of the screen]
Dr Adam Best: Stan, thank you again for your time today. Unfortunately, our time is up and I really appreciate the time that you’ve shared with us today and with your work. I have to say, from my perspective, I have to thank you personally for your work and your contributions. It’s given me a fantastic and an enriching career and I’ve had the opportunity to meet you many, many times, and I’m very much looking forward to welcoming you to Sydney for the IMLB where you’ll be our plenary speaker.
[Image changes to show a new slide showing the webpage for the IMLB2022 against a background photo of the Sydney Harbour and the hosts and committee members can be seen listed on the right hand side of the screen]
We really look forward to welcoming you and hopefully when travel comes back the rest of the world as well. And for those of you who are maybe not familiar with the IMLB, it’s being hosted by CSIRO in Sydney. It’s the world’s largest research meeting around lithium ion, lithium metal batteries and you’ll get to meet some of the foremost thinkers in the field of lithium batteries. And we also hope that this meeting, to actually showcase, as Stan points out, Australia’s natural mineral wealth and our ability to convert our natural mineral wealth into higher value products that can go into the battery revolution. If you’d like to know more about the meeting we invite you to have a look at our website at IMLB2022.org.
[Image changes to show the CSIRO Alumni Society web page and text appears: Our people are our greatest assets and you never really leave the CSIRO community, Join our alumni network, Once you move on from CSIRO, you can still connect with us and your colleagues via our alumni network, Join our alumni network to stay in touch with colleagues and friends, stay abreast of the latest news and updates and receive invitations to exclusive events, www.alumni.csiro.au]
And just in conclusion, again this lecture today was hosted by the CSIRO Alumni Society. So, those of you who have previously been part of this great and wonderful organisation, so we thank you again for joining us today. And those of you who may not have joined the network, we encourage you to do so.
So, with that I’d like to again thank Stan, and also thank Katherine for hosting us today, and thank everyone for their attention and wish you all a very happy day, and look forward to catching up with you at our next Electrochemical Energy Storage Seminar in the next couple of weeks’ time. So, thank you again Stan.
M. Stanley Whittingham: Thank you and goodbye everybody and stay well.
Dr Adam Best: Thank you.
Katherine Paroz: Thank you Stan. Thank you Adam.