Catalyst with Shayle Kann - The promise and perils of sodium-ion batteries

Episode Date: February 20, 2025

Sodium-ion could be the next big thing. Last August, Natron announced a $1.4B factory in North Carolina. Other U.S. companies like Peak Energy, Bedrock Materials, and Acculon Energy are jockeying for position in the market. Meanwhile, almost all of the world’s sodium-ion manufacturing capacity, current and planned, is in China. CATL’s CEO Robin Zeng suggested that sodium-ion could ultimately take up to half of LFP’s market share. The potential advantages are exciting: Sodium-based chemistries could be cheaper and safer. They could also use domestically sourced materials, avoiding the geopolitical headaches of minerals critical to the lithium-ion supply chain, like nickel, cobalt, and copper. So, amid all the sodium-ion hype, what's credible and what’s not? In this episode, Shayle talks to Adrian Yao, founder of Stanford’s STEER program, a battery research group specializing in techno-economic analysis. He’s also a board member of lithium-ion manufacturer EnPower, where he was once a co-founder and CTO. Shayle and Adrian talk about the findings from a recent Nature paper Adrian co-authored exploring a techno-economic analysis of sodium-ion batteries. They cover topics like: The differences between sodium-ion and lithium-ion, as illustrated by the battery sandwich  Misconceptions about sodium-ion, for example, that it’s necessarily safer  The biggest challenges: energy density and cost competitiveness How players in the lithium-ion supply chain could pivot to sodium-ion Why the technology’s success may hinge on the price of nickel, copper, and other lithium-ion materials Recommended resources Nature Energy: Critically assessing sodium-ion technology roadmaps and scenarios for techno-economic competitiveness against lithium-ion batteries Latitude Media: Peak Energy’s quest to build US sodium-ion battery dominance Heatmap: Is Sodium-Ion the Next Big Battery? WSJ: U.S. Battery Rush Spurs $1.4 Billion Sodium-Ion Factory in North Carolina Credits: Hosted by Shayle Kann. Produced and edited by Daniel Woldorff. Original music and engineering by Sean Marquand. Stephen Lacey is executive editor. Catalyst is brought to you by EnergyHub. EnergyHub helps utilities build next-generation virtual power plants that unlock reliable flexibility at every level of the grid. See how EnergyHub helps unlock the power of flexibility at scale, and deliver more value through cross-DER dispatch with their leading Edge DERMS platform, by visiting energyhub.com. Catalyst is brought to you by Antenna Group, the public relations and strategic marketing agency of choice for climate and energy leaders. If you're a startup, investor, or global corporation that's looking to tell your climate story, demonstrate your impact, or accelerate your growth, Antenna Group's team of industry insiders is ready to help. Learn more at antennagroup.com.

Hey, it's executive editor Stephen Lacey. Many of you were loyal listeners to a show I created and co-hosted for eight years called The Energy Gang. Well, we're back. Jigger Shaw, Catherine Hamilton, and I are excited to announce our latest project, a weekly news roundtable called Open Circuit. Every week we'll break down how major projects come together, how deals and policies get structured, and what it takes to build critical infrastructure at scale,

all through the lens of current events. You can subscribe to Open Circuit wherever you listen to podcast, or follow it at latitudemedia.com. Latitude Media, podcast at the frontier of climate technology. I'm Shail Khan, and this is Catalyst. Oftentimes we celebrate the potential for sodium mine to have a lower materials cost, dollar per kilogram. We also recognize and admit that energy densities could be lower. But we don't sometimes put the two and two together to recognize that it is very hard.

for a low-energy density system to be competitive on a dollar-b-kil-watt-hour basis because of that math. Coming up, we talk sodium-ion batteries, finally. When utilities need flexible capacity they can count on, they turn to Energy Hub. Energy Hub works with more than 170 utilities, coordinating over 2.5 million devices

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aren't driven by technology alone. They're shaped by markets, by policy, by capital, and by the institutions that connect them. I'm Alfred Johnson, CEO of Crux, and host of a brand-new podcast. podcast, Critical Capital. Each episode, I talk with people deploying capital, shaping policy, and building the clean economy. Tune in as we unpack how progress is actually made. Listen to critical capital on Spotify, Apple, or wherever you get your podcasts. Catalyst is supported by Fish Tank PR, an award-winning PR firm focused on climate and energy tech, renewables, and sustainability. FishTink is known for generating prominent and effective media coverage for the brands they work

with. If you want a PR partner that's thoughtful, shoots straight, and gets results, you'll like fish tank PR. To learn more about fish tank's approach, visit fish tankpr.com. That's FISCH, fish tankpr.com. I'm Shayal Khan. I invest in revolutionary climate technologies and energy impact partners. Welcome. All right, so this one, I think, is a long time coming. Sodium ion batteries have been on the scene, so to speak, in the battery world for the past few years as a possible long-term replacement for at least lower density, lower cost lithium ion batteries, LFP batteries in particular. The theoretical benefits of sodium ion are multifold. Here's my subjective ranking of those benefits from, I think, most certain to least certain.

Supply chain in geopolitics is a big one. There is a possibility of it being semi-drop-in for existing manufacturing capacity, or at least easy to manufacture, similarly to how we make lithium ion batteries, cost potentially, question mark, and safety, potentially, question mark, question mark. Anyway, that's a bunch of things, and if you could hit all those things,

there's a clear reason why sodium ion would be really exciting. And indeed, we've started to see the predictable pattern of announcements from big battery suppliers and many of the largest in the world and in China who say they're working on sodium ion, or they've developed sodium ion batteries of one kind or another, as well as a number of players who were trying to do sodium ion domestically here in the U.S. or in North America. So what are sodium ion batteries? Why sodium ion batteries? And what do we think it would take to actually materialize these theoretical benefits that they hold, in my mind, particularly with regard to cost, which is the characteristic that matters more than all others combine?

So I wanted to talk to Adrian Yao about this. He's been working on this question. for years now. He's a former battery entrepreneur himself in lithium-ion world, of course, but he joined Stanford a few years ago where he leads the Steer Initiative, which is a partnership between Slack, the linear accelerator lab, not the business tool, and the Stanford Precourt Institute for Energy. Anyway, Adrian and some colleagues recently published what I think is the best paper that I've seen in Nature Energy that is examining the cost question for sodium ion and projecting how the techno-economics could play out depending both on scale and the technology roadmap. So let's dig in. Here's Adrian. Adrian, welcome. Thanks for having me. All right,

let's talk sodium ion batteries. Why don't you start by explaining how sodium ion battery works, I guess in reference to a lithium ion battery, like what's the same, what's different? Sure, yeah. So I think anyone or people around me know that every time I talk about batteries, I talk about sandwiches because sandwiches are a great analogy. So I'll do the same here. Basically, when we think about a sodium-mion battery or a lithium-mine battery, basically you can think of it as a sandwich with two pieces of bread, right? Those are your electrodes separated by some kind of lettuce separator. That's a very boring sandwich. Soaked in some kind of soup, right? And so when you're charging and discharging, all you're doing is just passing sodium ions or lithium ions back and forth between

the two pieces of bread through the lettuce in the soup, right? And so I think it's important to recognize that when we think about both lithium ion and sodium mine batteries, that those are umbrella terms, right? There are different flavors of sandwiches within both of those, and that's important to get into. So we focus on lithium ion first, right? One side of the sandwich is almost always graphite, and that is the negative side of the sandwich, the anode. And so we mostly distinguish lithium ion batteries by the positive side of the bread. And so this is basically swapping out, you know, sourdough for whole wheat or something like that.

And so there's obviously mainly two kinds of chemistries here. There's one that is nickel-based, and this is the high energy density kind that uses your typical elements like nickel, manganes, and cobalt. and these are the more appropriate potentially for longer range vehicles and so forth because of their high energy density. Now, the other very common class of bread here is the phosphates with iron, and this is really the LFP kind of chemistry. Of course, they have an energy density penalty that many of your listeners know, but they are safer and cheaper, and so they're widely adopted for basically standard range vehicles. or almost 100% of new grid scale kind of battery energy storage installations today. Now, when you're assembling the sandwich, the positive side is really the side that is endowed with all of the ions, be it sodium ion or lithium ion, that will be useful for the lifetime

of the battery. And so when you basically finish off manufacturing and seal it off in this proverbial, say, Ziploc bag that has the positive side of the bread. It has all of the ions for the rest of the useful life. So if we come to sodium ion, it's identical in structure, and that's very useful. And that's one of the exciting things about sodium ion is that basically it can leverage a lot of the existing know-how and manufacturing expertise that we have. Zooming in a little bit again on this kind of chemistry, similar to lithium ion, the negative side of the sandwich is almost always the same. It is also a carbonaceous material like graphite, but very importantly, it is not graphite.

Graphite is chemically incompatible with basically sodium. And so we use a material instead called hard carbon. So similarly, we then often characterize sodium ion chemistries by their positive side. And this is where I think it's very important to begin to ensure that we don't treat sodium ion as a monolith. There are very different chemistries that we need to be clear about because they have very different implications on safety and cost and supply chain. So just as we have these layered oxide chemistries like the NMC in lithium ion, we have layered oxides in sodium ion, mostly relying on nickel, manganese,

and instead of coal, more like iron or copper. Now, similarly, just as we have phosphates in lithium ion, we have phosphates or pyrophosphates in sodium. And this is really nickel-free, cobalt-free, and really relying mostly on iron. And then there's yet another class called Prussian Blue, which some of your listeners might have heard of, that are typically much lower energy density but can pack a punch in terms of power and potentially less relevant, for example, mobility applications or high energy-density applications. So that's really kind of the usual suspects.

The one last key difference between these two, if you're looking at these two sandwiches, side by side, is basically that where the substrate metal foil that the negative bread is attached to, usually in lithium ion, has to be copper. In sodium, it can be aluminum, and that's lighter, it's cheaper. It has some other benefits that we can get into later. But apart from all of that, everything else is identical. And so even the manufacturing, and so that's why the drop in replacement is kind of very interesting. Right. So you alluded to a couple of these, but I think we just spend a minute talking about why there is excitement about sodium ion. There are lots of different battery chemistries out there. I'd say sodium ion, outside of lithium ion, at least in the current state of affairs in the world, is probably getting the most attention.

So I want to run through the list of potential benefits why you can imagine a world where sodium ion takes a significant share. of global energy storage, certainly stationary, possibly mobile applications as well. So let's run through the theoretical benefits, and then I think we could spend some time talking about the market and how real some of these benefits are.

But one big one is like it's a very different supply chain and perhaps one that is a little bit more palatable geopolitically, right? Potentially. I say it is in some cases, then it isn't in some cases. So if we kind of come back to, like how you put it, the theoretical benefits, I would categorize them to three buckets, right? There's a supply chain

argument, there's the drop-in manufacturerability argument, and then there's a safety argument. Now, for all three, there are asterisks because it's never that simple. And so we'll come back to those asterisks, I'm sure. But if we just look at lithium, right? Lithium in the supply chain bucket, the first bucket. Lithium, of course, famously went on this wild ride in 2022. This is kind of post-COVID supply crunch. Nickel, as well, went through a supply chain crunch in 2022, really because of the Russian invasion of Ukraine. And so that caused lithium ion itself to see some major price swings. And that's why in 2022, the price of lithium ion spiked for the first time. Spike is maybe a dramatic word. It just went up for the first time in its entire history.

and thereafter crashed. So those are some of the key supply chain issues. Another key geopolitical supply chain issue is graphite. Graphite, over 93% of the world's batter-grade graphite comes out of China. And it's kind of a now kind of a retaliatory geopolitical weapon to use graphite export controls to hit back against the semiconductor. export controls that we have on our end against China. So those are some of the things that, you know, you can point to as a potential means to have

sodium mine be successful. Sodium carbonate soda ash is basically like $200 per ton as opposed to where lithium mines sits right now, $10,000 per ton. But in the height of 2022, lithium was at basically $60 to maybe some cases $80,000 per ton. So it's a very big difference in that price spread. So that's a supply chain argument. Can I just add to that? I think the other potential benefit from a supply chain perspective is like, you know, this isn't necessarily true forever, but certainly as it stands today, not only is the lithium production predominantly outside of North America, it's in South America and in Australia, but lithium refining is almost exclusively in China.

You know, if you're doing soda ash refining or whatever, like that's a supply. chain hasn't been stood up yet, so you can imagine it being stood up domestically from the start. And I think a lot of people are excited about that. Right. Okay, so that's supply chain. So like replace lithium with sodium, you've got cheaper, maybe lower volatility, maybe the opportunity to onshore. You mentioned number two, which is the drop in manufacturing potential. This is one that I know is more nuanced than often is given credit to.

But what's the high-level idea there? Well, the high-level idea, I think we touched on just now, is basically the structure of the battery itself is almost identical to that lithium ion. They're both sandwich structures. The electrodes are, the material powders are brought in, mixed into slurries, coated onto foils, calendared, slid, slid, slid, slated, stacked, if it's a, you know, pout cell or wound into cylindrical or prismatic cells. All of that stays the same between lithiumine and sodium mine. And so basically the potential to benefit from what is already a learned process where we don't have to spend so much time traversing down that learning curve is really the opportunity here.

Compared to other new emerging battery chemistries that might even use, for example, liquid-based electrodes or air as an electrode or something like that. So that's really the argument here for, and why? sodium mine has gotten so quickly, so much hype. So what people say sometimes is that if you wanted to swap an existing battery manufacturing line over from lithium ion to sodium ion, you could do it pretty quickly and pretty easily and you wouldn't need to reinvest in a bunch of new CAPEX. From what you know, how true is that? It is, I think true in some cases not true in others.

I think if you're a small player in China today, you could. And I think there are anecdotal evidence of such things happening. I know some cell makers who are experimenting or maybe toying with the sodium mine space, seeing that there's a lot of activity in LFP, low-cost LFP, because of how cheap it is. And there's just much more demand for it. And so they can swap their lines. Obviously, there's a lot of cleaning. There's a lot of cost contamination that you need to control.

But in general, it's doable. But if you were to think about like a 35 or 10 gigawatt hour plus factory that you were going to be building for a dedicated supply, it is generally designed for one product that you make. And that flexibility could be there or most likely you're really not going to experiment too much at that scale with swapping out with a chemistry. I mean, even sticking in a new material from the, even sticking, for example, a new graphite product number or part number would require quite a lot of heavy lifting. So the portability, the giga scale, is pretty, maybe not as what we think. Yeah, maybe the better way to think about it is it's not like we're going to be retrofitting

a ton of gigafactories from lithium ion to sodium ion, but because it is such a similar manufacturing process, It's better understood. It's probably lower risk. You can imagine if you're building a greenfield sodium-mion battery factory, it's like less of a leap than something entirely novel. And I think a lot of that driver is in the equipment space, right? If you were to create a new complete battery architecture

with a different kind of electrode where you're not coding and calendaring and splitting it, it's formed in a certain way or whatever. The capital equipment side of things, that supply chain is not built out. Whereas for sodium ion, you have the same players. So you're the same usual suspects that you can make the same kind of chemistry on the same equipment. Okay. So that's the first two. Supply chain benefits potentially drop in, semi-drop-in manufacturing potential benefits.

And then there's safety, which to my understanding is kind of the least like certain of the three. But what's the argument for why a sodium-mion battery would be safer than a lithium-mine battery? This is the one that I also put a lot of the biggest asterix on. It's certainly, I think this is why the discussion of the chemistries begin to become very important, because safety is really driven by materials chemistry, the flavor of the bread, effectively. So saying kind of a blanket statement that sodium ion is safer than lithium ion, I can tell you that is objectively wrong, right?

So we need to be a little bit more nuanced there. So we can deep dive into some of those, the chemistries that, for example, phosphate-based chemistries similar to lithium ion. LFP is safer than NMC. So NFPP, which is the pyrophosphate version of sodium ion, is safer than NFM, right, the layered oxide cathode variant for sodium ion. some of the other potential safety benefits that sometimes gets under the radar but sometimes gets more attention than it should maybe is that the transport of batteries could also benefit from some safety benefits of sodium mine and that is really because of that earlier point I made just now where the negative electrode the anode can actually use aluminum as a current collector I wouldn't get into the electric chemistry but basically that allows you to ship the cells at zero volts, basically completely discharge. That really minimizes the risks

of thermal runaway happening, say, on a ship, which is really, really dangerous, or, you know, in the air, obviously also dangerous. But this also is somewhat uncertain. If you look at the majority of sodium mine cells being shipped today commercially in China, they're not actually shipped at zero volts. And so there's a question of why. And it could have, for example, a detriment to maybe the cycle life of the batteries eventually, or maybe that's just not standard practice. I don't really know. I don't know if anyone still has full confidence in the ability to do so, but that is another yet potential benefit on the safety argument. Virtual power plants are becoming a reliable way for utilities to manage capacity,

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Whether you need to position yourself as a thought leader in between project announcements or translate complex ideas and technologies into tangible, compelling stories that resonate with the media, Fish Tank can help. check out fish tankpr.com. That's F-I-S-C-H-Fish-Tankpr.com. Okay, so those are three potential benefits. Let me editorialize for a second and say that, in my mind, none of them matter at all, but for the fourth thing, which is cost, right?

You can have a supply chain benefit. You can have a great opportunity to do drop in manufacturing. You get a safer battery, and it won't matter a lick in the market if it's not cost-competitive. And so you've done a ton of work looking at the current and future cost profile, potential cost profile of sodium ion batteries. So I want to spend some time on that. Maybe you can start by giving me the two sides of a barbell, which is like what do we know about current sodium ion battery costs today to the extent that they're being produced? And then at the other end of the barbell, I know you've done a bunch of work about what the cost floor could be, what the theoretical.

cost floor of a sodium ion battery looks like is. So can you paint me those two pictures to start? Yeah. So I think when we think about costs, we really need to, and in the battery world, of course, dollar per kilowatt hour is the defining kind of metric. That's a figure of merit, right? I'd like to break that down into two components, right? There is a, to come up with dollar by kilowatt hour, you have a dollar per KG component, right? That is a materials cost component. And then you have a KG per kilowatt hour component, right? That is a metric of materials intensity.

And multiplying those two together will give you a dollar per kilowatt hour. And I think oftentimes we celebrate the potential for sodium mine to have a lower materials cost, dollar per kilogram, because of the stated benefits just now of, you know, potentially the supply chain of sodium carbonate versus lithium carbonate, right? That, we often celebrate that. In the same sentence that we also recognize and admit that energy densities could be lower and almost always get lower because of, you know, inherent atomistic properties of sodium versus lithium. But we don't sometimes put the two and two together at the end of that sentence to recognize that

it is very hard for a low energy density system to be competitive on a dollar per kilowatt basis because of that math. And so if we look at some of the cell costs today, they are higher. Sodium mine costs are higher. And this is attributed to a couple of things. Despite the potential floor of the materials to be low, the cost of materials still needs to come down its own scaling curve. We can model that. We can know potentially when that could happen.

But there are also cell design considerations that really drive cost. If we look at this cost reduction of lithium ion over the last 30 years, it is really, we can characterize it with a learning rate of maybe like 22%, or something like that. It's very aggressive. It's very spectacular. And it's really a contributor to a lot of the electrification that we see today. How much of that was driven? by materials cost coming down versus how much of that was because of improved cell designs,

meaning how we actually assemble and design this sandwich, is actually much more the latter. I mean, it's like entirely the latter, right? Because materials cost, I mean lithium costs at least have gone, even if you take away the spike, they're still higher than they were a decade ago. Well, lithium actually is, this is maybe another point that we should clarify. lithium is only about 7% right of a by mass of lithium ion cell

it's really that's why the cathode materials right this is why Elon Musk has said once that this should be we should call it a nickel carbon battery as opposed to lithium ion battery

but whatever we call it the the price of materials has come down but not as much as it's not really the main contributor to the price reductions basically

as we get better at reducing the amount of inactive material used in a battery, basically reducing materials intensity. That has been the primary driver of cost reductions. And if we look at where sodium mines are today, they're still in a regime where electrodes are not as thick as they can be to really minimize cost because that is one of the key drivers to minimize inactive overhead.

And yeah, the materials can, cost can come down. But ultimately, it is the denominator of this dollar-by-kilo-hour figure that is causing prices to be higher. It's a fundamental detriment to energy density that hurts. It's competitiveness. So are you able to put some just rough numbers to this barbell then, like roughly where do we see cell costs today for Sodium ion? And then in a future wherein there is significant cell architecture optimization, what can you realistically imagine the cost getting to. Yeah, so current prices for LFP are basically at, I think it was reported to be about $56 per kilowatt hour in the middle of last year. I think that number is down to maybe 40-something

sub-50 now. It's kind of crazy how quickly it's fallen and how low the price it can be. If I model out the price floor basically bill of materials only take out manufacturing costs, I can see a world in which we get to 35, I can see a world in which we can be at 35 today. For sodium ion? No, for lithium ion. Oh, for lithium ion. Okay, yeah. Right.

For sodium mine, it's still my understanding to be above $80 per kilowatt hour for the NFM-type chemistries, the layered oxide chemistries. And because of the further energy density penalty that you have with some of the pyrophosphate materials, my understanding is it could be higher than that. And to put some numbers, and really to kind of illustrate this point about the materials cost versus the kind of the effective dollar per kilowatt hour that comes out the back end, if we just look at, if we just look at LFP, for example, right, if we assume that it costs, say, $3 per KG to make, right, in just the manufacturing cost.

That's basically the KPEX associated with a spray dryers, a furnaces and whatever, whatever have you, to make the powder. Call that $3 per kG. Now with that one kilogram, you can eke out, say, 500 watt hours or half a kilowatt hour. So that makes it effectively $6 per kilowatt hour for that material.

If you take another material, it may be a sodium mine variant, and you don't take in an argument that you have better manufacturing costs, for example. It's going to still cost you the same to make a material and that's $3 per KG.

But you can only eke out maybe 250 watt hours from it, so basically a quarter kilowatt hour. That means that that translates to $12 per kilowatt hour, right? So basically even if you add on the LFP minerals price, which might be $2 per KG, to make this ultimately a material $10 per kilowatt hour, even if your sodium onside were free, like your minerals cost were zero.

it would still be at a price disadvantage. So that really helps illustrate why the material's intensity is so key. And materials intensity, again, is just basically how many kilowatt hours can you eke out, well, how many kilograms do you need per kilowatt hour of delivered energy storage? How much of this do you think is just because we're in the early days of sodium ion, relatively speaking, right? Like, as you said, a lot of the cost reductions that we've seen in lithium ion and an LFP, in particular, have come from having improved that exact metric over time. And so are we just at the front end of a curve on sodium ion that's going to look similar? I have separate questions about whether, like, translating a theoretical cost curve to reality based on the realities of the market and the capital investment required and, like, the market demand for the early premium products and all that kind of stuff.

But, you know, setting that aside for a second, like, if. we invested to scale up manufacturing of sodium ion, are we likely to see a similar cost trajectory, a similar learning rate to what we've seen with lithium ion and ultimately a lower cost floor in the end of time? So my answer is no. It's not about scale. It's not about just taking the chemistries in sodium mine today and then scaling the hell out of it.

Because kind of coming back to the example, example just now, that's assuming we can make a new Sardyman material today, or just any other material today, at the same costs. Basically, there's going to be an overhead of manufacturing costs for a given material. So, regardless of what that is, and that's assuming all the scale that has gone into and the learnings that we've gone into establishing experience for material like LFP, the what drives the cost at the end

is the material's intensity. So where do we need to then invest? Should we invest on scaling? Or should we invest on increasing energy density? And I would say it's the latter. It's really about how can we engineer these

both materials and cells to have higher energy density. And so that is somewhat of a maybe a positive light on this in that as a sodium-mine developer, you don't necessarily need to have

in battle this chicken and egg problem of I need to scale to get to low cost and therefore low cost can get me to scale and that kind of circular thing. I think we can actually get to low cost if we focus on getting the energy density's higher.

But that becomes inherently a engineering problem on the cell side, which we can push, but still needs to be supported, unfortunately, by R&D breakthroughs on the material side. And that's kind of the takeaway here, is that just focusing on scale won't get us there. I realized we didn't finish the other end of the barbell, right? So you said that current sodium ion cell cost might be $85 a kilowatt hour. You said current LFP cell prices are like, you know, sub-50 a kilowatt hour, and you can see how the cost can be in the 30s today. You did a bunch of modeling to

project out what the theoretical long-term costs of sodium ion could be. I think assuming some of these cell architecture improvements that you're describing here. Both cell and materials. Cell and materials, right. So, but where can you, what is the floor? Where do you think it could get to? Say we solve those problems? So this is where it becomes important to kind of pull out what are those roadmaps. So the work that you're talking about is in this, the work that we talked about in our recently published nature energy paper where we identify and roadmap what some of these directions could be. And these directions include both cell engineering side improvements. That means, for example, increasing the thickness of the bread of your sandwiches to get to higher

energy density and therefore reduce costs. That is a very known and very mature strategy that lithium ion has benefited from. there's also the other side of basically where can materials go? How much can we develop these materials to improve their ability to store sodium so we're in release sodium? And so some of those routes are...

And so basically this can include, for example, developing new catheterate materials that have a lot more capacity, developing and of materials that can have a lot more capacity, combining them, or in some cases even foregoing, for example, the anode material altogether and opt for more of, say, anode-free direction, similar to the lithium-anode-free direction that people are taking in lithium, where you basically plate the ion as a metal on the

opposite side on the negative side to really drive up energy densities. And so basically, if you look at all these combinations, an anode-free sodium mine cell is one of the most competitive technologies out there, because you don't have a negative electrode material that adds to cost,

as well as the ability to really increase energy density. Those numbers can get to potentially break the line where LFP sits, and get to something that's more competitive, sub basically $40 or $50 per kilowatt hour. However, that is all dependent on the cathode.

Sorry, it's all dependent on the materials developments that we make in enabling this Android-free operation, as well as, for example, significant increases to the capacity of the cathode. I mean, not to be overly negative about it, but just to pair it back, what I sort of feel like I'm hearing from you, is, all right, we need materials breakthroughs,

we need cell architecture breakthroughs, we're going to do a ton R&D on this. And if we're successful in doing all of that, the promise at the end of the day is that in some future state, let's call this a decade away, we might be able to get sodium ion prices to roughly where LFP prices are today.

That assumes no further cost reductions in LFP, by the way, right? And in fact, what really, and when I've talked to a lot of people in sodium ion world, like a lot of what they're banking on is is materials costs for lithium ion going back up again. Like if lithium prices spike again, this equation changes. So you've got to kind of believe something

about what's going to happen to lithium ion materials prices in order to get really excited about this because otherwise you're just saying, like, all this work, all this effort, and a decade, and we get in 10 years to where lithium ion already is. Is that like an accurate way to think about it in your mind? I think there are a couple ways to look at the cost side. But the first on the outlook side, I think either we make some major breakthroughs in R&D to enable higher energy densities and therefore lower costs,

or we believe something will break in the lithium ion supply chain. And that increasingly could also be the case, right? I mean, again, coming back to graphite, where the majority of the graphite in the world, it comes out of China and is already used, it already was, export controls were just placed on it a couple months ago. It could cause domestically made lithium ion to see a spike in prices. And whether that can, whether sodium ion can compete with that or leverage that opportunity to break the LATAMI. LFP price curve is a true opportunity. We actually model this and show that that can actually accelerate the point at which sodium mine becomes competitive.

But again, that is, to your point, lifting of or causing a kink in the LFP overall learning curve to move up as opposed to a sodium mine curve coming down. Now, if we come back to the discussion of costs, I think there are a couple of ways to think about this, right? First, we've talked about increasing energies to reduce materials intensity. That is, you know, maybe we beat that to death. But then there are other ways to think about cost, right? Maybe compete less so on cell level CAPEX,

but maybe focus more on total cost of ownership. And that might include, you know, potentially reduce systems level CAPX costs because of leveraging the safety argument assuming it holds, or banking on a longer cycle life or calendar life or whatever to really reduce the overall levelized cost. And so I would call that the second strategy. And maybe the third strategy is to don't compete on costs,

is to find a performance niche that you can actually leverage some unique advantage of sodium mion. And so I think that's kind of the outlook here. And I think there are different companies in the United States that are looking at each one and kind of banking on one of those three strategies. I guess the other question here is, in lithium ion world,

the costs have continued to surprise us to the downside. In other words, it keeps getting cheaper and cheaper than we think it's going to, we've seen this play out in solar in other places as well, and it's thanks in significant part to what ends up happening in China, as China scales up new technology. So maybe that could happen in sodium ion as well.

Who knows? but the most interesting thing I think to ask right now is like, what's happening in sodium ion? How much are people manufacturing it? What is going on in China? Because there have been some announcements there. Are we at the front end of a sodium ion boom in manufacturing and in innovation? Does it feel like that's coming? Or is it still kind of a little backwater and there's just like an announcement here or there?

Yeah. I mean, I think this is kind of hard to speak to. I think like you said, the reality. is that all of this is driven by China and what happens in China can sometimes be opaque. And so this is maybe relying more on what's anecdotal.

And a couple of things I think is interesting here. I mean, China's potential focus or interest in sodium mine, maybe less so of a techno-economic argument, but maybe more geopolitical, right? Because China, despite

processing the world's, majority of the world's lithium into lithium carbonate, doesn't actually have lithium reserves within its borders. I mean, that mostly is in Australia and the Northern Triangle in South America. So arguably, the West has a better handle of the source of lithium. And so maybe this is maybe more of a play at that. But I think if we look at who are the actual ones building out sodium ion? in China right now.

I think you'll see a lot of tier twos and tier threes players. And I think this is very characteristic of China in that there are generally very many players that jump in all at once, and there's a tendency to stockpile and have access capacity. But I think the ones to watch are really the tier ones. And so that's basically CATL and BID.

Now, I think definitely, you know, Robin Zang, the chairman and CEO of CATL announced basically last November that he expects sodium mine to take up to half of LFP's market share. And I think that's what we really need to watch, is that can we take that at face value? Or is it also potentially a negotiating strategy to continue to put price pressures on the lithium feedstock to keep it low? right? The having sodium ion as a potential substitute is a way to keep, maybe perceived as a way, to keep lithium prices low. And so through some anecdotal or grapevine, through the grapevine talk, it could perhaps be more of the latter. If we look at CATL's activities in 2021, they did come out with and announce that they already developed a

160 watt hour pergigi Prussian blue base sodium Mayan and this is right before as you recall the lithium price spikes and I think they actually managed to weather that storm decently well with longer term contracts so was that part of

the game I don't know but this is I think having alternatives is really what allows prices to stay low and so maybe there is a argument to really invest in bringing that supply chain up just so that we have the ability to weather storms in the upstream supply chain.

The challenge of that, I think, is like, who's investing in that, right? And what justifies it? So, sure, that probably means government invest in it, right? But obviously there needs to be a commercial reason to do so, and it's tricky. That is a strategy that I think is kind of very characteristic of the difference between what happens in China and what happens in the West. In China, they kind of do. first, then evaluate, and then many will die as a result of that. It's intense and very fierce competition. Whereas in the West, we evaluate a bunch, we maybe do, but then we, like you said, we recognize that maybe there's no market driver or there's no market for it, and then we

maybe not do at the end. But so, yeah, this is part of why it's hard to understand exactly what is coming out of China. And whether so, yeah, this is part of why it's hard to understand exactly what is coming out of China. and whether sodium ion has an opportunity to survive only on economic economic principles. All right, Adrian, this was very useful. I feel like I have a better handle on the world of sodium ion now. So appreciate the time, as always. Thanks for coming on. Of course.

This is fun. Thanks. Adrian Yao is the founder of the Steer program at Stanford and the former co-founder and CTO of Enpower. This show is a production of Latitude Media. You can head over to Latitude Media.com for links to today's topic. Latitude is supported by Prelude Ventures. Prelute backs visionaries, accelerating climate innovation that will reshape the global economy for the betterment of people and planet. Learn more at Praludventures.com.

This episode was produced by Daniel Waldorf. Mixing and theme song by Sean Marquan. Stephen Lacey is our executive editor. I'm Shale Khan, and this is Catalyst.