Short Wave - Shoring Up The Future With Greener Batteries

Episode Date: May 1, 2023

Today on the show, next-generation energy innovators Bill David and Serena Cussen challenged us to think about the future of clean energy storage. They spoke to Emily Kwong at the 2023 annual meeting for the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) in Washington D.C.See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for sponsorship and to manage your podcast sponsorship preferences.NPR Privacy Policy

You're listening to Shortwave from NPR. Testing, testing, testing, one, two, three. Okay, hey, shortwavers, Emily Kwong here. I am talking to you through a microphone powered by a battery. You know batteries. They store chemical energy and turn it into electrical energy to power your phone, your remote control, and most certainly this interview we did a few weeks ago

at the American Association for the Advancement of Science or AAAS annual conference. We are live at the Walter E. Washington Convention Center in D.C. I was joined on stage by Bill David, an STFC Senior Fellow at Rutherford Appleton Laboratory and Professor of Energy Materials at the University of Oxford in the UK. Back in the day, he was part of a research team that helped develop the lithium battery. And now he focuses on clean energy storage. Storing it so it's in the right place at the right time for the right people.

I also got to interview Serena Cussin, a next generation battery innovator and professor. certain energy storage materials. She heads up that department at the University of Sheffield, also in the UK. I get to work looking at solutions for energy storage and developing the next generation of materials that will form part of that fabric of net zero in the future. You know, so often the focus of climate conversations is on energy production, right? Wind, solar, nuclear, how are we going to power the planet in a green way?

But Serena and Bill made us all think about green energy storage, because what's the point of generating power if you can't store it in a clean way? How do we make sure that we store that energy in such a way that when the wind isn't blowing, the sun isn't shining, that we have access to the energy that we need to carry out our day-to-day tasks?

And Serena thinks there's no one-size-fits-all solution, no one battery to rule them all. One of the things that we have to keep in our minds is, what do you want and what can you have? You know, you've got to think about the plethora of storage technologies that might be available, the renewables that you want to make the most advantage of, and then what can you do to bring all of this together?

Live from the Siamike stage at AAAS, we ride the carousel of clean energy storage options for the future and glimpse the materials that might one day power the world. This is Shorewave from NPR. All right, so when I think of a battery, my mind B-lines to those double A's rattling around, round in that one drawer in my kitchen, short-term energy storage, that lasts a few hours. But talking to Bill and Serena, I realized modern society is also powered by long-term energy storage

that lasts for days, weeks, and even whole seasons. So nowadays, that's coal, oil, and gas. But what if there was a way to take the energy from renewables, from cleaner sources of fuel, and store that long-term, too? Those are the kinds of problems. that Bill and Serena are working on. Let's talk about fundamental principles. I know that most basic batteries have two electrodes and an electrolyte, which is like battery acid in the middle.

Excellent, yeah. And one of those electrodes is positive and one is negative. Yeah. And the negative is called a cathode. The negative is called an anode. The negative is called anode. And the positive is called a cathode. A cathode is positive.

An anode is negative. how are the batteries that you're building different or similar to what we understand as our basic battery today? So all of the technical terms that you've used there are the ones that we use as well in modern-day lithium-mine batteries. And so you have to have this combination of materials that are each doing a very specific role. So you should have something that's part of that cathode that likes accepting electric. So we use transition metals to be able to do that. If you are making an electrolyte, you want to have something that is electronically insulating. So what are we doing that's different today is current electrolytes are based on liquids.

They're quite flammable. There's potential safety issues with these when you move to very high voltages. So one of the things that we're exploring is can we remove that liquid electrolyte and replace it with a very safe, ceramic. Oh. That is that is safe to use at elevated temperatures that could potentially go to very high voltages and is inherently very, very safe. And you picture it as being quite stationary. On a microscopic level or an atomic level, lithium ions are actually mobile and moving through it. And some of the inroads were making, they're approaching the kinds of lithium mobilities that you get in liquid electrolytes, which is hugely exciting. On the cathode side, which is made of metals,

Which is transitional metals like cobalt. Yes. Which is kind of bad to mine. We don't want to be digging cobalt out of the earth. That is very true. We rely very heavily on elements that are quite scarce. There's huge challenges around critical elements in lithium mine batteries, particularly cobalt, like you mentioned.

There's the ethical concerns around the mining of cobalt. The invasion of Ukraine in the last year has led to huge increases in the price of nickel, for example. And that's another metal that we rely on heavily in modern day lithium mine cathodes. So one of the things that we're doing today, and scientists around the world are working on this, how do we get the same performance out of a material that no longer relies on these sort of critical elements? Can we move to more earth abundant alternatives? So instead of relying on things like cobalt or very high nickel content, can we move? to things like iron or manganese, which are much more earth abundant. One of them, for example,

would be lithium-rich, manganese-rich materials where you're getting potentially very, very high energy densities. The challenge for all the students in the audience is, how do we make these very, very stable? How do we retain their performance over quite long lifetimes so that we get all of the benefits of moving to a more sustainable chemistry, but we don't lose out on performance? Ah, so the batteries being as quality in charge. Delivering that sort of high energy density for a very long lifetime. That's tough because consumers have very, they have a lot of battery opinions. I think range anxiety is something that...

Range anxiety! I mean, we've talked about the chemistry, right? You know, we've got huge opportunities in terms of developing chemistries. What has to go hand in hand with that, of course, is an infrastructure to support that. Do you think we as consumers, though, need to shift and stop being so demanding of our energy needs? I mean, I think it's a really interesting point. When you look at cities that have moved to pedestrianized areas, for example, like if you look at London, there's congestion charges for driving into the center of London. The idea that you don't have to drive everywhere, this is something that I think is definitely worth considering.

And how do we move to maybe electric bikes, public transport, so not every single. individual drives the car to work every day. But again, all of that requires infrastructural change and then policy change that will drive it. But that will require long-term storage solutions. You see, renewables like solar and wind are really good at generating electricity for the grid. But we haven't figured out a way to store that energy and ship it around the world with the same ease as oil and gas and coal. One idea that Bill is exploring is ammonia, the same stuff found in cleaning products and fertilizers. And last year, he co-founded a company called Sunborn Systems that's looking to convert combustion engines to run on ammonia.

Ammonia is actually the second most produced chemical in the world that takes 2% of the world's energy. And it turns out that chemically speaking, ammonia could be used as fuel. The problem is that the way we manufacture ammonia today depends on methane, a known file. fossil fuel. Bill broke it all down for me. Right, okay. So methane, gas. Do the British say methane? Yeah, we say methane. You say, okay, but I do. I want to make sure you got the right molecule, actually.

It's CH4? Correct. I can't believe I remember that. At this point, you're going to take over, actually. Okay, so. I know. Right, okay. So now all the energy, actually, when you're putting your gasoline in the tank, it's actually breaking bonds to make the energy.

The simplest one to think about is methane, because it's got four CH bonds. There is nothing magic about hydrogen. What's magic is the bond. Oh. Okay. So I'm going to do a, you know, you're going to have to guess this one, actually, because I've got CH4. It's like a game. It's a game, yep.

And actually, what I'm going to do is I'm going to take the carbon atom out. Okay. And I'm going to put the nitrogen atom in. Which is ammonia. Known as the Haver process, this is how ammonia is industrially produced around the world today. by combining nitrogen molecules with hydrogen molecules from methane, a fossil fuel, so it's not a green process at all. But what if that hydrogen ingredient came from water?

And what if those water molecules were split using the electricity from renewables? That would make the ammonia process greener because it wouldn't require carbon atoms. This is a problem Bill thinks is worth solving for the future of long-term energy storage. For him, that means working closely with people, from the places where wind and solar energy hold the most promise. The continents of Australia, Africa, South America, and in parts of the U.S., in the southwest, pretty much at every longitude in the tropics.

So they're the ones who're going to be producing the most solar and a lot of wind energy. And already there are plans to ship ammonia. From Africa, from Australia, from elsewhere, traded around the world. And what we need to be able to do is equity. And it's not just on the shores, our shores, your shores. we need to make sure that the people in Africa get a fair chance of doing the deal. Yeah, I want to talk about this because, you know, there's designing and discovering,

but then there's actually deploying, and it took hundreds of years to get to the energy storage solutions we have now, but we have a matter of decades to address this climate crisis. What kind of thinking is necessary in science to actually make this storage solutions you're describing equitable? Serena, how do you think about the equity question as a scientist? Yeah. Well, I guess one of the things we have to recognize is an awful lot of the research that I get to carry out. And, you know, I love my job. Yeah.

It's funded through public money. So every discovery I make is co-created with the public. And so anything I do has to bring some benefit to the public. It's hugely important that we are able to communicate what we're doing in our labs, the sorts of discoveries we're making, how that will be deployed to people's benefit. And I think, you know, if we're considering what a fair and equitable future looks like

and what a just transition to net zero looks like, it does have to benefit all members of our society. And when you mention policymakers and politicians, I think it's a hugely collaborative piece of work that's ahead of us that scientists and engineers do have a role to play in. But it's something that everybody in society has to be a part of. And I think we have to feel like we all have ownership over us.

I'm optimistic about the future, actually, and I do believe that we can do it, but we have to be honest about what we can do and what we can't do, and we're being steered in the wrong directions by powerful forces. We also need to make sure that we actually do it globally. Yeah. And there's tensions there, but, you know, don't forget Africa. Bill Davis and Serena Cousin, it's been a pleasure to talk to you. I think spaces like this at AAAS are just the thing you're describing. So thank you so. Thank you. much for talking to me. And thank you for being such a great audience. It's been

great to have you all. Special thanks to Alex Drewenskis and Carly Strange for their audio engineering and to Lisa McAvoy, Maya Johnston, and the Triple AS staff for their support. Today's episode was produced by Burley McCoy. It was edited by

managing producer Rebecca Ramirez and fact checked by me, Emily Kwong. Our senior director of programming is Beth Donovan and the senior vice president of programming is Anya I'm Emily Kwong. Catch you later. Bye.