Science Friday - New Battery Technology, COVID Rise From Unvaccinated Populations. July 16, 2021, Part 1

Episode Date: July 16, 2021

Research For New Battery Technology Is Gaining Steam As countries around the world set their goals for decarbonizing their economies, it’s becoming clear that batteries may play a pivotal role in smoothing out the peaks and valleys of solar and wind power productions, as well as driving a shift to electric vehicles, and providing power for other parts of our lives. Lithium-ion batteries are now the standard. They run electric cars and power your laptop and cell phone. But they have major drawbacks, like overheating and their high costs. The supply chain and environmental impact of lithium-ion power cells also raise concerns: mining the materials—like lithium, cobalt, and other metals—requires polluting, water-intensive processes. While many deposits are only found in foreign locations, some U.S. companies are now looking to mine domestically, concerning environmental advocates. The search for a better battery is on, and promising developments include new chemistries for efficiently storing energy, and smarter ways to plug them into the grid. This week, Ira talks to IEEE Spectrum senior editor Jean Kumagai, and Argonne National Laboratory’s Venkat Srinivasan about the promises, the roadblocks, and what to watch for in future battery technology.     A Tale Of Two Pandemics During the COVID-19 pandemic, we’ve seen many different aspects of the illness—the early surges and community shutdowns, the debates over schools and masks, and, now, signs of hope as more people are vaccinated and communities reopen. But the story is different among unvaccinated populations. In many snapshots of new infections, hospitalizations, and deaths, those affected are overwhelmingly unvaccinated people. Even as the value of vaccination becomes more apparent, some people are still resistant to the vaccines. And in Tennessee, government officials told public health workers to stop vaccination outreach to young people—not just for COVID-19, but for all childhood vaccinations. Amy Nordrum of MIT Technology Review talks with Ira about the latest in the pandemic, and the importance of vaccination in the face of the rising COVID variant known as Delta. They also talk about the role of cities in climate change, a new list of drinking water contaminants for possible regulation that includes the socalled “forever” PFAS chemicals, a disappearing group of ransomware hackers, and more. Subscribe to this podcast. Plus, to stay updated on all things science, sign up for Science Friday's newsletters.

This is Science Friday. I'm Ira Plato. Later in the hour, we'll explore the future of batteries, a key to realizing the vision of a decarbonized, reliable grid. But first, weird weather is on everybody's mind, right? Unbelievable flooding in Germany, mudslides in Japan. Here, heat like we've never seen it before. And if you think about it, it's not just people feeling the heat. The wildlife are being affected, too, in ways that you might not expect.

Amy Nordrim has been following the heat. She's here with that story and other science headlines this week. Amy is an editor at MIT's Technology Review. Welcome back, Amy. Hi, Ira. Thank you. You're welcome. Okay, let's talk about this. So the consequences of heat on wildlife.

Yes, California's Department of Fish and Wildlife said this week that they're expecting almost all of the juvenile Chinook salmon in the Sacramento River in California to die this year because of the extreme heat that they've been dealing with. All the salmon to die. Wow. All the salmon, that's right. And this is a key time for salmon in that river. The adult salmon have come back to the river from the ocean

and they've laid their eggs earlier this year. And now those eggs are incubating for a while in the river before turning into fry. But if the water temperatures get too warm, these eggs won't hatch. And the recent heat waves are causing his water temperatures to rise above the levels that they can survive. And the whole problem is being made worse by drought, which is affecting the whole state right now, and especially the area around the river. It's just less water overall and making that water easier to be heated down to the bottom where the eggs are. Of course, this extreme heat has us all thinking about climate change and the link between the two.

And I understand there is a new study out about the urban contribution to greenhouse gas emissions. Tell us about that. You know, we hear and talk a lot about federal policy and national commitments to reduce emissions, and those are important, of course, but cities can also have a big. impact because most people who are alive today in the world are living in cities. So there's a new study out this week that gave us some interesting data on this. They looked at more than 160 cities worldwide and found that just 25 are responsible for more than half of all greenhouse gas emissions produced by all the cities that they looked at. And almost all of those 25 cities were in China. But they also looked

at cities on a per capita basis. So how many emissions per person the cities emitted? And by that measure, some of the world's most polluting cities are right here in the U.S., places like Los Angeles, Washington, D.C., Chicago, and New York City. Wow, that is an interesting story. Let's talk about other environmental news. There was a new list of chemicals to keep an eye on, and it includes something new. Right, yes. The EPA announced on Monday that it was adding a family of synthetic chemicals, known by the acronym PFAS, to a list of wastewater contaminants that it was considering regulating. So these chemicals are used in all kinds of things to make them resistant to heat or water, stuff like fabrics and paint and cleaning products.

There's thousands of different kinds. And they've been nicknamed forever chemicals because they don't break down in the environment and they can build up and accumulate in the body over time. But they aren't regulated currently in drinking water. There's no limit to how many of these chemicals can be in your water. So that's what the EPA indicated it was interested in doing by adding them to this draft list. And we find these chemicals in flame retardants, nonstick coatings, and as you say, they're forever. That's right. Yeah. I mean, there was a study published last year that estimated as many as 80 million people in the U.S. might have PFAS in their drinking water. And the nonprofit environmental working group also founded in rainwater and almost all of the tap water that they tested across the country. So this draft is now open for public comment. And it may still be a few years before the list is finalized and any regulations are in place. So it's kind of a first step in a long process, but this is a step in that direction.

Let's turn to the ubiquitous COVID news. The pandemic, it appears, has evolved into two societies. And I mean, those who are vexed and those who are not. That's right, especially as the Delta variant takes hold. I mean, it's now responsible, as health officials predicted, for more than half of new COVID-19 cases diagnosed here in the U.S. And people who are fully vaccinated are well protected against this variant. But those who are unvaccinated or those who are only protected. partially vaccinated and just got one dose of the Moderna or the Pfizer vaccines, they're at greater

risk because this variant is more transmissible than the original one. So we're seeing increases in the number of cases, hospitalizations, and deaths in places that have low vaccination rates. And virtually everyone who's being hospitalized or dying of COVID-19 now in the U.S. is unvaccinated. And we do have cases of people who have been vaccinated and are hospitalized, but they are not in the high danger category. Right. Yes. They're not as likely to die or have severe illness as those who are unvaccinated who are stricken with the Delta variant. And it seems weird. I guess I'm using that word pejoratively to see that Tennessee has moved the dial backwards on its efforts to encourage kids to get vaccinated and not just for COVID, but for all

vaccines. Yes, the state health department decided to really stop all of its outreach it was doing to teens to get them vaccinated, as you say, for COVID-19, but also for other things like HPV. And the top vaccine official in the state said this week that she was fired for trying to reach out to teens and encourage them to get the COVID-19 vaccine. They were putting out public service ads to teens specifically and holding some of their vaccine events at schools. And it's no longer going to be doing any of that after being criticized by some Republican lawmakers. Yeah, this seems like a purely political move. Yes, absolutely. Yeah, certainly not in the interest of public health, it would seem. Let's talk about some hopeful COVID news. There's recent

into a kind of multi-antibody against all coronaviruses? Right. Yes. So scientists took antibodies that COVID-19 patients or people who had a similar virus had produced, and they tested them against all kinds of different coronaviruses. And they found one antibody that could bind to all different variants of COVID-19, as well as even to other coronaviruses, which could potentially be useful in treating patients. And so that's basically just basic research. We haven't, people are going to say, When can I get that vaccine, right? We're not even close to that yet.

Right. This was just an initial result that was reported. There'd still be a lot of steps to getting this, you know, approved as an actual treatment. There are a few antibody treatments out there already. So this could be another option to help patients who did get COVID-19 or hospitalized to recover more quickly. This could be another option for them eventually. You have a story this week about a group of ransomware hackers vanishing. Tell us about that.

That's right. Yeah. So ransomware is it's a certain. kind of attack where hackers remotely take control of your computer and demand a ransom to return access to you. And Patrick Call-O'Neill reported on this for us this week. There's a notorious gang of ransomware hackers who are believed to operate out of Russia or with Russia that has been responsible for a number of very large ransomware attacks in even just the last few months. But on Tuesday, they actually went dark. The websites and servers they used to run their criminal

operation all went offline at around the same time. And security experts, really don't know why, whether it was, you know, Russia cracking down or the U.S. officials taking them offline or the group just deciding to, you know, give up, possibly go under the, under the radar, it reappear later. So we don't know exactly how long will last or what was behind it. But in the short term, anyway, security experts were excited to see this happen. Because President Biden said he told Putin to cut it out. I think he said it's something like, or else. So we don't know if Putin actually cut it out, meaning that he stopped. the hackers or that something else happened. Exactly. It's not yet clear yet what the cause is

behind this group's removal or who was responsible. But yes, the U.S. has certainly been putting a lot more pressure on Russia and other countries as well to crack down on the cyber criminal gangs and circles operating within their borders. A few weeks ago, we talked about the controversial Alzheimer's drug at docanamab, which was approved despite pushback from Alzheimer's experts. And it also had a really serious price tag on it. This week, the FDA pulled back on that approval somewhat, and a few major medical centers said that they wouldn't plan on prescribing the drug, but you have a story about an Alzheimer's approach that may be even more helpful and a lot cheaper. Absolutely. It's free, in fact, almost, or virtually. Yeah, there's been a lot of attention over

the years on developing new pharmaceuticals for Alzheimer's and other forms of dementia, of course. But new research published this week in neurology showed the benefits of just keeping your mind active later in life as a way to fight against these diseases. So the analysis followed almost 2,000 older adults over a period of about seven years, and they tracked how often these people did really simple activities, things like puzzles or reading a book or a magazine or certain kinds of games like chess or checkers. And they looked at whether there's an association between doing these activities and when people in the group developed Alzheimer's. And those who did them the most often they found, which was like several times a week, developed symptoms on average of Alzheimer's five years later than those who did them the least often, which was just a few times a month. So there seemed to be a strong association here between doing these activities, you know,

a few times a week and delaying the onset of Alzheimer's disease. And that is interesting because we always talk about anecdotal evidence about do puzzles, you know, try doing this with the mind tricks. But this is really concrete evidence, right? Right, yeah. It's a very strong, robust study. And, you know, there's been evidence over the years that this might be, you know, a good thing to do. But this is the first time to really put a time to it.

You know, how long does this help you delay these symptoms? And it really does seem to make a big difference. Finally, I want to ask you about a study where slime mold. Slymold is making decisions. Tell us about that. Yes, so as it turns out, organisms that have no brains can still make decisions, according to a new study published this week by researchers at Harvard and Tufts University, the team grew a certain type of slime mold in a petri dish and arranged glass discs around the outside, and they found that the mold was growing in the same direction, the vast majority of time, so toward where more of the disks were concentrated. And they think that certain ion channels in the mold have helped to detect the forces around it. it in its environment, like the strain created by these disks weight, and decided to grow in that

direction. So it's a pretty interesting situation where something without a brain can still make a decision and have a form of cognition. So what was the slime mold looking for? Did somebody put bait like in a mouse trap or in a maze? What was the motivation for it making that decision? Well, that's one of the interesting things is there was no food available to it. There's no chemical signal in this experiment. It was just purely a physical force. So it was the weight and the distribution of these glass discs that it was attracted to. And the scientists I spoke with said that that might, you know, have been kind of a proxy for what they might be looking for in the wild, like a, you know, a log that was fallen over or a tree or something that has a lot of mass that is distributed over

a wide area. That's their theory anyway as to why it moved toward the area where there were more of the disks concentrated. So it had to make a choice, which direction to grow and it made a choice. It did. It made a decision. It was most of the times they tested it. It did the same thing. So it seemed to be a deliberate choice. Yeah, and a really interesting case of this organism making a decision in a way that we wouldn't typically think of decisions being made. Well, I have to make a decision to end our conversation, although I wish we could go on, Amy. Thank you for taking time to be with us today. Thank you, Ira. And some people have accused me of being sort of like a slime mold. Amy Nordrum, commissioning editor at MIT's Technology Review. Always great to have her with us. After the break, improve. battery technology will be key to a green grid balancing the demands of wind and solar production. But how do we get there? We'll talk about it. Coming up, stay with us. This is Science Friday. I'm Ira Flato. As countries around the world set their goals for going green,

a key to the elimination of fossil fuels in the future will be a reliance on batteries to store renewable energy production to smooth out the peaks and valleys of solar and wind power. Lithium ion batteries are now the standard. They run electric cars. They power your laptop and cell phone, but they have major drawbacks like runaway overheating and high costs, not to mention that crucial supplies of lithium and other metals necessary for making them lie in other countries at the end of polluting water-intensive mining processes. So the search and research is on, for the better battery of the future and the best way to use them. That's what we'll be talking about this hour as part of our series on disruptive technologies, those that are upsetting the way we

traditionally live. Let me introduce my guests, Jean Kumagai, a senior editor at I-Tripple-E Spectrum. She joins us from New York, and Venkat Srinivasa, Director of the Argonne Collaborative Center for Energy Storage Science. That's at the famous Argonne National Laboratory in Chicago, Illinois. Welcome both of you to Science Friday. Hi, Ira. Thank you so much, Ira. Pleasure to be here. Let's start at the beginning, okay? Just how does a battery work? Yeah, so every battery has a few components to it. It's got an anode, a cathode. These are the electrodes which store the energy. You have a separator to separate the anode and the cathode, and the ions have to move between these two electrodes, and so we have an electrolyte in these batteries.

and then we have to collect the current. So we have two current collectors, one connected to the anode, another one connected to the cathode. So these are the components that go into the battery cell. These cells are then put together to make a module, and ultimately they make a pack. That's the pack that you see in your Tesla car or in some sort of a unit that you might have to store energy from the solar panels that you might have on your roof. And what are the major drawbacks to lithium-ion batteries? So a number of things a battery has to do if you want to use it for an application.

So for example, you might need a lot of driving range. So that means energy density. You might have to have low cost. You have to have the cycle life to be able to use them a number of times. You have to have the calendar life so that they last maybe 20 years. And you've got to be safe. And you also have to think about where the materials are coming from and what the supply is going to look like. So all of these metrics are going to be dictated by the anode and the cap.

and the electrolyte materials we're going to use in the battery. So if you look at batteries today, they tend to be more expensive than we need them to be to ultimately use them for these different applications. We have to improve their cycle life pretty significantly. But you mentioned this in the very beginning. One of the biggest bottlenecks and the challenges we're worrying about is a supply chain, especially of the cobalt, nickel, and the lithium that goes into these lithium-ionion batteries.

And, Gene, everything else in the battery has been pretty revolutionary, right, for how we live our lives so far, hasn't it? Yeah, it's kind of amazing. You think back even 10 years ago or 20 years ago, all the electronics that we have in our lives now, the smartphones and electric cars, all of these things, you know, just grid storage for the power grid to back up solar farms and wind farms. I mean, that just wasn't possible before the commercialization of all these batteries, lithium ions in particular. You know, the last time we probed the future of batteries, it was 2017, and the big news was Samsung Galaxy phones catching on fire, the thermal runaway problem with lithium ion batteries. Evancod, how does that happen? So batteries are energy storage devices, meaning there are a lot of energy stored in a very sort of compact form. We want it to be compact because we want to have very lightweight. We want to be able to not take up a lot of space or weight when we put them together.

The problem with that is there is very small distances between these electrodes. So if you think about a typical separator, it might be in the order of 15 microns. That's a tiny, tiny separative thickness. So if you have any shot of a shot at the battery, the anor and the cathode touch each other, then you get to a fire, you get to all the problems that we saw. So one of the tricks when you manufacture batteries is you have to be very careful not to have any defects. And you've got to be very careful to be very precise in how we make them. so that we can avoid those kinds of thermal runaway challenges.

There are other reasons why batteries go up in flames, but the main thing that we worry about in a battery is the electrolyte, which happens to be flammable. So one of the biggest innovations in the future is trying to find a way to remove the flammability of these electrolytes and try to make something that is not flammable. If we can do that, then we can make these batteries considerably safer than what they are today.

So, Gene, if there's an ideal battery, what would it look like and what would it be able to do? You know, it depends on what you're using it for. So if you're using it to back up the power grid, you want something that's big. You want something that's very long lived and you know, you want something that won't catch on fire. So a lithium ion battery, I mean, those are available, but it may be not the best chemistry. There are other types of batteries called flow batteries that are made with components that are not flammable. And they're not, Flow batteries have a lot of liquid, I mean, as it name suggests. So they're not really good for mobility. They're not good for electric vehicles. But for a stationary application, like a power grid, they're pretty ideal. And they can be made very, very big.

There's an installation in China right now that I think is 200 plus megawatts. And that's the significant size for a battery installation. Is that a liquid battery? That is a flow battery. What's a flow battery? I'm going to let Venkat answer that. Venkat, what's a flow battery? So, yeah, there are two kinds of batteries

that all the battery people talk about. One of them is the lithium-ion battery where it's a box, and inside the box we have the anode and it stores the energy in the box. A flow battery is a bit like your internal combustion engine, meaning in an internal combustion engine, you have a gas tank,

but you hold all the gasoline, which has the energy, and then you pump the gasoline to your engine where you combust it to get the sort of the energy out to the wheels. A flow battery is very similar. You have these liquids or gases, but mostly liquids. Sitting in a tank, you then pump the liquids, meaning you flow it to a cell where you react it, and then you take the products and you store it somewhere. One way, when you go from one side to the other, you will charge the battery, and then when you bring the liquid back from the second tank to the first tank, you will discharge the battery. So basically you have a tank which contains all the liquids in it, which then flows to a cell where it reacts.

And basically what happens is that these chemistries are extremely safe because the tank is where all the energy is sitting. The cell is where all the reactions are happening. And so if you want to, you can shut off the tank and eliminate the cell and the tank so that you don't have any of the reactions happening because you physically stop the flow of the liquid from this tank to the cell. So these tend to be significantly safer. In fact, I've been reading about significant different kinds of battery technologies that are made just for what I would call these big grid batteries, right, as opposed to the batteries in your laptop. And I'm speaking, for example, about something called a molten liquid battery that Massachusetts company called Ambrie is experimenting with. And then you have batteries that Harvard is experimenting with.

for liquid metals. These are Venkat. These are whole different kinds of batteries than we think of the kinds that are going into our cell phones. Absolutely. The advantage of the grid is that you don't need high energy density. These batteries are not moving anywhere. So you can afford to think about chemistries and technologies for energy storage that are very different from a typical cell phone, laptop, electric car,

where energy density actually matters a lot. So the ones that you mentioned, the liquid metal batteries, where there are metals that are sitting in liquid state at very high temperatures where they are molten is a solution that works very well for the grid but will not work for electric cars. And Gene mentioned this before. When you think about lithium ion batteries, they work very well for electric vehicles because they have the energy density. But when you go to grid storage, you don't need the energy density and all of a sudden

flow batteries and these liquid metal batteries start to have some advantages and lower cost because of the way they're put together. I mean, isn't it crucial that we fit? figure out how to create a new power grid to share all of this electricity. And what would that look like? What would kinds of changes would that take? I've heard technologists talk about that's exactly what the blockchain is good at, having tentacles in all these different places and regulating the flow of electricity. I don't know that you necessarily need the blockchain to do this,

But you definitely need intelligence on your power grid in order to balance supply and demand. So traditionally, you had these very large generators. They were very reliable. You could operate them 24-7. They were burning coal or oil or some other fossil fuel, nuclear power, also very steady. And then when you start to introduce solar and wind power, then the supply, the generation, becomes very less predictable and lots more spikes in supply. And so figuring that out is, again, engineers are trying to figure it out.

You can build in smarts into the grid so that you know actually instant by instant what is happening in different parts of the grid so that you can balance things out. You can use battery or energy storage to kind of smooth things out. you can use other things. There are things called flywheels that kind of capture energy as a spin. We were talking earlier about electric vehicles. Once you start having lots and lots of fast chargers, you know, that sort of becomes an issue for the power grid.

So it will be something that will have to be addressed definitely in the, you know, really in the, I think, in the very near term. Yeah, I feel like we are in the middle of this big debate right now as to how the grid of the future is going to look, right? One way it could look is that you have transmission lines built all across a country, and so, and then you build out solar and wind. So even if, say, there is cloud cover in Arizona, there is still wind blowing in Texas, and because they're gritting between those two, you could find a way to keep the electricity at a constant supply. and then to Gene's point, if you can predict the weather, if you can predict cloud cover, you can predict demand, then maybe all of this works out.

So that's one view of the world. You have an incredible grid that sort of connects everything. But I think that is butting up against some of the realities of the infrastructure, the money that it's going to take, the permitting that it's going to take to do that. So there's another view of the world which is to be more distributed, right? So it's rooftop solar, neighborhood solar, neighborhood wind,

with batteries where you start to sort of grid these things up and you have these microgrids or mini-grids. or mini grids or what have you, so that you're not relying on a large-scale infrastructure sort of projects to happen. The answer might be something in between, right? There could be some grid infrastructure being built out, a lot of sort of the home consumers

trying to buy solar and batteries, maybe neighborhoods making the same changes and cities making those changes. I think this is an active debate and how that debate proceeds is going to dictate what technologies we need. So I do think we have to start getting to a conclusion on the debate sooner than later.

Avent cat, do you see every home full of batteries this way? Yeah, my dream would be that every home has a battery. Batteries are going to be everywhere, I think, in the next 20, 30 years. There are going to be installations where we have these solar farms, wind farms, with batteries to store them. And every home, I hope, would have a battery, which is taking solar energy from the roof and putting it down so that you can self-consume it or set it back to the grid and make some money out of it.

But I do think ubiquitous storage is something we should be aiming. for, it does look like it could become the reality. Just a quick reminder that this is Science Friday from WNYC Studios. Talking to Venkat's Renewasan and Gene Kumagai about the future of batteries, both the materials, the infrastructure, even the sustainability. What are some of the solid state batteries like, Venkat? How are they working? Yeah, so as I was mentioning before, if there's one big change we have to do to remove the

sort of the safety problems. You have to remove the liquid electrolyte and put a solid. Solid electrolytes have been around for a long time. We've always tried to think of a way to get those solids to work. The problem has been that they're not very conductive, which means that you can't charge and discharge these batteries are an appreciable rate. So it's very slow to charge and discharge them. In the last five to ten years, there's been some tremendous progress in solid state batteries where we've seen materials that have the conductivity. So people like me are extremely hopeful that because of those changes, these will become ubiquitous sometime in the future. Having said that, there are still some significant challenges that these materials face. Oftentimes, what happens

is that they don't have a good cycle life. So you may have the conductivity, but you don't have the cycle life. And that's a challenge. The second one is it's not clear we can manufacture them at any appreciable scale. And manufacturing of batteries is where all the action is. We've got to be able to make these gigafactories of the solid state technology, and that has not been proven yet. Well, you're at Argon, and you guys are very big and famous for your kinds of electrical research. How do you decide what you're going to be looking at and where to invest your resources battery-wise? The way we do this as Argon is we look very carefully at where the market needs to go. So where do we think we need to be five years from now, 15 years from now?

And then we ask ourselves which technologies are the ones that might be satisfactory for those applications that are going to emerge in the future? So Gene mentioned flow batteries. We looked a while ago asking what is going to be the big need on the grid. And we came to the conclusion that if renewable penetration becomes significant, maybe in the order of 60, 70%, then you're going to have a need to store energy for a long time, what we call long duration storage, where we may be thinking about storing energy for one week, maybe even one month, because you may not have the sun shining for approximately a month in winter, for example, in certain places in the country or in the world.

So we have to start thinking about cheap batteries that can store energy for those applications. So then we start doing the R&D needed to ensure that we're discovering the materials for those applications. So it's really thinking end to when from what the needs are going to be to the R&D. I know you're somewhat of an historian about batteries and electricity. And one of the things I've discovered over the years when we speak about electric cars, I've seen research that showed that there was a fleet of electric taxis in the 1890s, and people have thought about electric batteries and battery production for many, many decades, haven't they? Yeah, yeah. You know, well over a century.

There was a time when cars were new, when electric cars were competitive with gasoline-powered cars, were competitive with steam-powered cars. I mean, it's sort of amazing, but there was a company in, I think, Philadelphia that made electric taxis. And so there were fleets of these taxis in New York cities and elsewhere. And I read some statistic that maybe 90% of taxis in New York City at some point were electric. You know, when President McKinley was shot, he was conveyed in an electric ambulance. So it was, you know, there was a while when electric cars really looked very, very promising. Thomas Edison was very invested in batteries for electric cars. He really thought that was the future.

Yeah, I was going to make a joke that I guess it took us 100 years to go back to where we started, which is exactly what you said. We may have 90% of taxis in New York very soon being all electric. The price of oil has been the dictator for so long. and I think we're reaching a stage today where cheap solar, cheap wind is changing the economics pretty significantly. We just need to get the batteries to be cheap and get them to last a long time and this revolution is going to take off. We have to take a quick break, but we will be back with more on the future of batteries.

Lachin Kumagai and Venkat Sarinna Vassan. Stay with us. This is Science Friday. I'm Ira Flato. We're talking this hour about the future of batteries and what it will take to get there to an all-battery society. It's part of our ongoing series about how technology touches our lives. With my guest, Gene Kumagai, senior editor at I-Triple-E Spectrum, and Venkatzerina Vassan, director of the Argonne Collaborative Center for Energy Storage Science. That's an Argonne National Laboratory.

Gene, when we look at what a battery needs to be good at, at least for electric vehicles, there's a value to fast charging, right? People are used to getting to the pump with their cars. pressing the pump, they're there for two or three minutes. Now we're talking, what, 15 or 10 minutes, which is, why is this easier said than done? Yeah, there's a real kind of, I think, expectation about your car, because people are accustomed to pulling up to the pump, filling up, and then going. And so there are behavioral changes that will have to happen. And I think people who have electric cars are making that shift.

you know, that kind of mental cultural shift. But if you haven't kind of prepared yourself, you might be in for a surprise. You know, if you don't pull up to a fast charging place, you might be there actually for an hour or two. And then there are different ways in which electric cars wear out the motor in your electric car. That can go on for decades, but your battery will wear out much sooner. And so there are different ways in which internal combustion engine cars are different from electric cars. Ventat, though, it does seem to be improving with the charging rates. I know when I take my electric car to a fast charging rate station, I plug in my car and it's

almost, let's say there are 20 miles left on it. I've watched the charging rate go sometimes to a thousand miles an hour when the battery is drained, and then it knows how to slow itself down when it gets close to the end. Yeah, so battery chargers are extremely smart, and battery companies have been very carefully crafting it so that they do not do anything back to the battery while also trying to charge fast. We actually have a large program at Argon trying to charge batteries in less than 10 minutes. It's a Department of Energy funded project, but the goal is to try to get it to be less than 10 minutes. It's not easy. I want to be very careful to say that, but that is the ultimate goal.

Our sense, and I agree with Gene, I think consumers are going to have to learn that they should be charging in workplaces, charging at home overnight so that the batteries are charged when they needed to be. But we also think it's helpful to have those fast charging stations with batteries that can take the fast charge without having any degradation for ones that don't want to have that kind of a compromise or if you're stuck on the road going on a road trip and you don't want to be waiting around for an hour. I want to move on to a major component of future batteries. There's sustainability.

And I mentioned at the beginning of the conversation the environmental and human cost of the materials like lithium ion batteries. There's cobalt and nickel and lithium, and they all take a toll to extract from the earth, don't they, Venkat? Absolutely. So it turns out that we are using elements in the battery that are either not easily available or is available in places where it's hard to extract them from the ground. You exactly mentioned the three that we're worried about, lithium, nickel and

cobalt. Of these three, nickel and cobalt are significant challenges, both from a supply chain, availability perspective and from how much is there in the Earth's crust to begin with. So we have to think hard about finding ways to take out what is in the earth in a very responsible fashion. We have to think about recycling. We have to think about finding substitutes. So there is an active research going on right now thinking about this problem. But it's a rich, rich subject that we have to solve, especially considering that we're expecting the scale of batteries to go up tremendously, right? I mean, we're talking about electrifying everything.

That's going to take a lot of batteries. That's a lot of cobalt and lithium and nickel if you don't make any changes. Does it matter, Gene, then that we are seeing some of the companies that want to use the batteries. I'm talking about GM, making a deal to begin mining lithium in the United States in the Salt and Sea area of California. And also you have Tesla signing a big deal in Gaston County, which is North Carolina with Piedmont lithium. now that they said they would take what 20% of what Piedbant can do if it resurrects its mining system? Does that make a difference? I think it will make a difference in terms of having a local source,

but they will still have to mine the lithium, I think, in the same way, unless they develop a much better extraction method. And if you've ever seen photos of lithium mining, it is just enormously environmentally disruptive. you're kind of pushing it out of the ground with water and then forming these giant pools and then you let the liquid evaporate and then what is left over, you know, you extract the lithium from that. But these facilities, they go on for just hundreds and thousands of miles. I mean, it's a big thing. So lithium is an abundant element, but it is not, you know,

it's not like mining for gold or diamonds or something. You know, it's not like in a neat vein. It's just sort of dispersed in the ground. Well, then Ventcott is it counterproductive to decarbonize our economy if we're doing it with toxic metals? So, yeah, we should be very careful how we, this revolution gets rolled out, I think. So I'm a big proponent of recycling. I think that we should be thinking hard about taking all the batteries that we have.

And, you know, right now my drawer has five batteries sitting there. from old phones that I'm not using. I should be finding a way to send it to somebody who can recycle this. And it turns out today it's very hard to recycle these batteries. There is a lot of technology that needs to get developed. But we need to think very, very hard about recycling. And to Jean's point, you know, recycling is going to take some time. We have a decarbonization problem.

So we have to start rolling out these batteries quickly, which means that we have to find responsible ways of mining them simultaneously with thinking about recycling. So I think we have to think about solutions across the spectrum. Let me go to that point about why it's so hard to recycle the batteries. Tell me about that. Why is it so hard? So, you know, the batteries are made into these sort of exquisitely designed materials.

So the cobalt is not sitting as cobalt. It's actually sitting in a structure of lithium, nickel, cobalt, manganese, and oxygen. So that's the form in which it's sitting. The lithium is also sitting in the electrolyte that is a liquid. And after 15 years of chocolate, of charcoal, and discharging the battery, all sorts of things have changed inside the battery. So when you pull out these elements, you can't just reuse them because the elements have changed in structure, they've changed in shape, and they don't work as well. So the way we're doing it right now is we're saying, let's heat it up, make it into the raw material form, pull out the cobalt and the nickel, because those are the ones that are economic, maybe the copper, if that makes some sense.

The rest of it will just burn and be done with it. and the cobalt, nickel, and maybe the copper, we will use in the battery when we recycle it. So there are only three basic elements that we're pulling out. If we try to pull out the other things, like for example, the lithium, it tends to be more expensive than pulling it from the ground. So economics has dictated that we might as well go mining as opposed to trying to recycle. So the big challenge that we're facing is that we have to find a way to economically get recycling so that the cost of recycling is less than the cost of mining these metals to begin. begin with, barring any sort of regulations, right? Obviously, that's another way to solve the problem is to regulate the industry. But if you purely look at it from economics, the problem today is we've

got to make recycling cheaper. And we're not just talking about recycling your double A's or triple A's from your laptop. We're also talking about the cars now that have these giant bank of batteries in them. That is correct. And one of the things that in Gene may want to comment on this, if you have these megawatt-hour installations of lithium-ion batteries on the grid somewhere, we have to think about how are we going to remove those things in a safe fashion, ultimately break them up into smaller pieces, ship them to a recycler and get them recycled. And there's going to be cost associated with that. And that cost is something that somebody is going to have to pay for in the end. Gene? Yeah. The interesting thing about recycling electric car batteries is that they can

have a second life. You don't have to immediately send them to the recycler. You can use those for grid storage. And I think there are installations where they are doing just that. So they can continue to go on, as Venkut mentioned earlier, your space limitations when you're doing grid storage. It doesn't matter, really. The performance of those batteries might have declined over time. It's still good enough that it can be used for grid storage. And so that kind of reuse will be very important because figuring out the recycling, all the different chemistries involved in such, just the infrastructure for recycling, that all has to be figured out and it will take some years. Who's going to figure that out? How do we figure that out?

There are, I mean, the great thing about engineers is that they are always trying to figure this stuff out. They are just, you know, how can we do this better? How can we do it like more efficiently? you know, is there a better, like, chemistry, you know, different materials? They are working on this. And there is, I would say, there's actually like a battery boom going on right now and also a battery recycling boom. So there are lots of companies. There are lots of government labs, lots of university labs that are working on these

problems. What about competitors? I mean, I remember driving a Toyota Marai, which was running on a fuel cell, which is powered by hydrogen, Gene. Is this really competitive? You have to build a whole infrastructure of hydrogen power stations also. I mean, Toyota's working on this. We hear of other smaller companies working on it.

How much of a competition is this, really? There are a lot of people talking about the return of the hydrogen economy, but what you just mentioned is the big sticking point. You can work on the sort of end of the, hydrogen economy, like the use of the hydrogen. And you can work on the beginning of it, you know, generating the hydrogen and, you know, using solar farms to generate green hydrogen. But then the whole middle, like the sort of messy middle, is very, very expensive. So batteries right now look more attractive. Ben Kat, you would agree?

Yeah, so I'm with Gene. I think a little bit depends upon the application for sort of passenger cars, right, it seems like battery-powered passenger cars are going to be the future. It looks like the hockey stick has taken off. Nobody's talking about hydrogen for those applications. But hydrogen is starting to sort of look promising and interesting, and to Gene's point

this sort of hydrogen economy is coming back is more in the area of either, you know, heavy duty trucking, things of that nature or for, you know, sort of stationary storage, right? So grid storage applications where you might be storing, you know, in a chemical form so that you can sort of take

advantage of the fact that you might be making hydrogen locally using sort of solar and maybe using it in some fashion. So we will see hydrogen in different places. There's also hydrogen for industry to kind of burn the hydrogen as opposed to burning some sort of a fossil fuel. So we are seeing a little bit of that, but for most of the applications we are talking about, my suspicion is it's going to be a battery. Yeah. And how much role will consumers have in deciding these stuff, whether it's in deciding these issues? I mean, whether it's recycling of batteries, is deciding how fast to move. Is this basically something we have a voice in? Well, I feel like we've had a voice in this in the sense that, you know, when somebody put out,

I'm thinking about Tesla, a car that costs $100,000, there were enough people from a startup company that nobody knew if the company would be able to sort of stand the test of time. There were enough people willing to buy those cars that allowed this company now to become one of the most valuable companies on the planet. And so we've already, I think, as consumers, taken choices that has allowed this economy to reach the stage where we feel like, you know, electric cars are going to become the ubiquitous sort of mobility device for us in the future. So I do think consumers have a role to play.

I think we'll have to, to Gene's point that she made before, think about the differences between the way we are driving today with gasoline cars and be able to adapt to the new reality of electric cars. If you have to think about the next time we want to have a, you know, we think about our roof system, should we be putting solar, should we think about leasing solar and putting a battery pack. So I do think that, you know, the more consumers get educated about the problems, the more they'll want solutions. Same for, you know, mining, right? If people start to recognize that we want to have responsibly, sustainably sourced batteries, they can demand it. And I think technologists, and I'm an engineer, to James point, I'm always thinking about solving problems.

engineers can find ways to solve the problem if the consumers demand a solution. Just a quick reminder that this is Science Friday from WNYC Studios. Talking to Venkat Srinivasa and Gene Kumagai about the future of batteries, both the materials, the infrastructure, even the sustainability. So my last question, what else do you think needs to happen for batteries to realize their promise? Let me start with you, Gene. Is it a question of finding the right mix of different kinds of batteries for different purposes, or is it a social and governmental question of we're going to decide that by year XYZ,

let's say, 235 or 50, whatever you choose, we're going to have an electric technology and we'll move forward in that form? Well, that is already happening. So you have states in the U.S. that are coming, uh, coming, up with mandates to purchase, to acquire more energy storage, and that's usually in the form of batteries. In terms of batteries promise, fulfilling as promise, I mean, it's just, it's almost like it's already fulfilling as promise. There's no kind of endpoint. You just keep doing it better and better. You keep refining the technology. You keep pursuing different forms.

that can have different applications. And then, you know, so it goes on into the future. I don't see a point when batteries become less important for us. It seems like they will just, you know, for the foreseeable future, meaning the next several decades, I think the importance of batteries only grows. VanCott. Yeah, Venkot, I would, that's what as an engineer, that's what I would put to you,

It looks like we reach the tipping point on batteries, and that's where we're headed. I would completely agree with Gene. We have reached a tipping point, Ira, as you mentioned. What I'm really concerned about is whether we can build the factories and build the mines or the recycling facilities to sustain this boom. I was doing this back of the envelope calculation a few days ago as to what we need in the United States if you want to transition our fleet to electric. And then on top of that, you decide to have grid storage so that we can start

to get to a renewable grid by 2035. And my estimate, and I could be a little bit wrong, but this is back of the envelope, you might be building somewhere around 20 or 30 gigafactories if you have to do all of these things. That takes a lot of money. Every gigafactory cost a few billion dollars. We have to have the materials to satisfy the various metal things that we need inside the gigafactory.

We need people to run them. And we have to start thinking about how are we going to execute on this so that we can get to that ultimate goals that we've laid out for. for the country in terms of electrification. So maybe the biggest concern I have is whether we can execute fast enough, or are we going to find out that we are going to be limited by some element or by the fact that we don't have money to sort of get to this revolution? Good point to end on, because that is the ultimate question.

We'll all find that out together, won't we? I want to thank both of my guest, Gene Kumagai, senior editor for I-Triple-E Spectrum, and Ben Katz Srinivasan, director of the Argon Collaborative Center for Energy Storage Science at Argo National Laboratory. Thank you both for taking time to be with us today. Thank you so much.

Thank you. It's been a pleasure. And that wraps up another hour. Charles Berkwist is our director, our producers, our Christy Taylor and Kathleen Davis. Our intern is Emily Zhang. Our senior producer, Alexa Lim, John Dan Koski, is our news director. B.J. Litterman composed our theme music. Of course, if you missed any part of the program, or we would like to hear it again, subscribe to our podcasts.

You can also email us, our addresses. SciFry at Science Friday.com. I'm Ira Flato.