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this talk will be in English but you can
also ask in German our speaker is there
flexible
so that's the organizational
one all
right now okay I can we go to the
talk this talk will place in English but
you can also hear a translation if you
use media CCC then you can put the
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in um I the next talk is why we are
addicted to lithium and how to kick the
habit our speaker is Frank
wer and he gained our about our speaker
he gained his first experience in
journalism in Golem's science department
in
2015 and yeah there he make his first
journalism experience he studied
industrial engineering and he is an old
participant of this Congress his first
stage experience he made on 32
C3 h on the F FR stage and on 34 C3 he
also has a talk about accumulators and
today he goes more special in with
lithium and lithium e own battery and
the history and from the history to the
State ofthe art
so be curious and I give over to
Frank yeah hello um yeah I had a similar
talk actually not similar um two years
ago uh when we could still meet in
person uh I was on the stage and I had
to talk about batteries um since then
I've learned a lot more especially about
it I batteries and uh also alternatives
to lithium ion batteries but that will
be the topic of the second part of the
talk um uh this is why we are addicted
to lithium and how to kick the habit
that's the next one that will be
tomorrow evening um today uh let's talk
about electric cars and why I mean you
can see a couple of electric cars right
here and uh why we need lithium to build
them
at least so far and uh you can see I
mean you've seen this one um this is a
bcop bucock electric Roadster um bucock
is uh more famous for building steam
steam engines and more recently nuclear
power plants but they also built
electric cars uh a bit over 100 years
ago and uh this is one of them and uh as
you can see um it wasn't very modern uh
at least not in our terms uh back then
it was uh among the best electric
vehicles you could get and around 1900
there was a bit of a craze of uh cars uh
when they were completely new and
everybody who had a lot of money wanted
to have a car and electric cars were
very popular with a lot of people in
fact about half of all cars were
electric and um at least around 1900 uh
this one was uh 10 years later
um at that time uh it was a luxury item
uh very clearly and as I said half cars
were electric um of the rest about one
quarter was a steam engine powered and
another quarter was by internal internal
combustion engines and uh this changed
um electric cars were of course quite
comfortable at least as long as you
could uh have somebody else maintain
them uh you could just sit in there and
uh start driving slowly um he 25 km per
hour that this one reached were quite
fast for electric car of car of the era
um usually they were quite slow um
electric cars uh were not a fast thing
at all
um uh the range uh of such a car uh with
Le with Le acid batteries um was um
Limited
160 km um I actually doubt if that was
correct um there is a letter uh that was
sent to the company and the company said
yes we verify that was the case and uh
we are very sure that nobody recharge
the car along the way um but there were
no independent tests of of any kind so
um nobody quite knows um in any case uh
at the speed of 25 km per hour it was an
ordeal just to get from A to B um was
very similar to the frer and at the same
time uh of course other cars like the
Ford Model T around uh
1910 uh were much more popular um and in
later years uh more than 100 um more
than 100 times as many uh for model T's
were built than the most popular
electric cars and at that time electric
cars were pretty pretty much out
um using an electric car at the time was
very difficult much more difficult than
it would be today because there was no
such thing as modern Electronics so you
could have your electric car and charge
it overnight but you would wake up the
next day and uh if you were unlucky and
you overcharge the battery the battery
would be gone uh it would be destroyed
um so charging the battery really
required somebody to to watch over the
car at all times and uh well that didn't
make it very com very comfortable
experience the way we would uh have it
these days uh also took a long time and
the energy capacity of the battery
wasn't as good as it is today um also
lifetime was very limited um these days
uh let's say in the at the end of the
20th century you could expect about 5 00
charge cycles from lead acid battery um
back then it was less uh nobody quite
says how many but it was fewer than that
um there were other uh Technologies
available
um uh
yeah at the end of the 20th century you
had cars like the ev1 the ev1 uh also
used Le AET batteries and you see range
was about 90 km um even though at the
time they said it was 126 or later they
used nickel metal hydride batteries and
they had about 228 kilometers um as they
said but um the standards testing
testing regime changed uh uh in later
years and it was by modern standards
it's about 90 to 170
kilom um ev1 was very expensive car
nobody quite says how expensive exactly
it was uh but it seems to have been much
more than $100,000 uhar per car um for
the simple reason that um not a lot of
them were built about 500 were built
with the lead acid batteries and another
500 um with the Nic metal hydride
batteries and uh when you build
something in such small numbers it will
always be extremely
expensive um these days things change um
I mean just compare these numbers uh you
have like a bit more than 100 kilometers
realistically and now you have 400 or
500 kilometers uh by the same standards
um this is the the model of 2022
actually this is uh Tesla Model 3 um
standard range Plus in the newest model
uh I think you cannot quite buy this one
yet but uh new models will be will be
delivered with that kind of range um um
so something changed uh very drastically
and that was of course lithium and
lithium ion batteries uh becoming
affordable um at least much less uh much
less expensive than they used to be um
that's not to say that the Tesla is a
cheap car it's not at all uh it's like
45,000 US dollar or Euros uh whatever
you want and uh it's it's still not
cheap uh we still have a ways to go to
get affordable cars of course they're
cheaper cost than Tesla 3 but um yeah
even getting here is a tremendous amount
of progress and a lot of things had to
be done um and one of the origins that I
didn't I didn't even know that this was
uh among the origins but uh two years
ago uh John good enough enough got the
uh got the Nobel Prize for uh his uh
discovery of his help in building uh
lithium iron batteries and he said that
this was an important step it was
inventing the sodium sulfur battery uh
sodium sulfa was an important technology
uh at the time even though it didn't
really translate into uh building
electric cars with uh new Battery
Technology um it was the first time that
uh new new battery used uh didn't use
hydrogen ions to go back and forth but
that the chemistry was was based in this
case on sodium um the original patent
said Alkali sulfur battery um because
they hoped they could use lithium
because lithium is uh has higher voltage
and it's much lighter so and because
it's much lighter um you can get much
higher energy
density um but it turns out that if you
want to use this setup uh this exact
setup for lithium uh you run into
trouble because this this is a high
temperature battery uh this runs with
sodium at about 300 to
350 uh de Celsius it's very hot uh
because you want to have uh liquid
sodium and liquid sulfur um and in
between you have a solid ceramic uh
through which uh sodium ions can go um
the electrons take the take the other
way they go around the battery uh and
that's how you get the energy out of the
battery
and uh that was invented in 1966 and
people were um inspired by this um they
were inspired that you could use um
these ions uh you could use Alkali ions
like lithium or sodium to build
batteries and uh yeah um just a little
bit on on lithium and sodium uh sodium
uh if you look at it is about three
times as heavy as lithium um it's bigger
it has one angrum diameter and uh the
voltage directr chemical potential is
minus 2.7 volts um for lithium
essentially everything is better um it's
smaller it's lighter uh and it has more
potential so you get about3 volts more
in a
battery and that makes lithium um pretty
much a perfect material except for one
thing there is is not a lot of lithium
on Earth um I mean there is a lot if you
just count it in terms of tons but um if
you look at lithium um lithium ores are
about one have about 1,000 uh um have
about
.1% concentration of lithium and uh
whereas sodium you can get like 40% or
something like
that um The Next Step step was to get it
at room temperature and uh important
invention here was by uh staning
wittingham and staning Whittingham was
actually actually working on uh super
conduct electric
superconductors and uh he was using
tantalum sulfide uh and he found out
that he could change the properties of
tantalum sulfide by intercalating uh I
mean it's a as you can see there are
several layers here and you could just
put some
uh some other uh atoms in between to
change the properties of the uh of the
material to get
um uh to get a different superconductor
and maybe a better superconductor and at
some point uh he had the idea hey we
could build a we could use this to build
a battery because uh the ions in these
layers also chemically react with the
atoms in the in the layer and
um yeah that was the first step um it
was not a perfect material at all um the
batteries that he built were uh in terms
of energy density not much better than
uh lead acid batteries but at least they
worked um kind of for about five
Cycles so they were not too good um but
there was a guy who was good enough to
build batteries and that was John uh
John bister good enough
uh he has a brilliant name um and he was
not a hero he was he was just a guy who
worked and he worked a lot um he was a
meteorologist in World War II uh in the
1950s uh he was a chemist he had become
a chemist and uh he was supposed to
invent an ceramic that is magnetic and
could store information for the
computers that were just coming up in
the 50s and he invented the fite course
that you might have heard of and uh at
least the material for the fite course
and then for next 10 years he was doing
research in this lab on uh the
properties of Ceramics especially the
electrical and magnetic properties of
Ceramics and uh that helped him later on
uh though not at the time he was just
doing fundamental research um in at the
end at the beginning of the 70s uh he
had to go get out of his lab uh his
university wasn't funding him anymore
and so he was forced to go into industry
um and he said uh he was forced to do it
but it was not a bad idea and
uh he had the idea that uh instead of
titanium di sulfide which is was
Whittingham was using um he could use
something else uh namely Cobalt oxide uh
he was doing a lot of uh uh work with
oxides and Cobalt oxide was one of
them and uh you can see that um Titanium
sulfide because of the sulfur is quite
heavy actually and titanium is not a
perfect material to react with lithium
and so what you get is a voltage of
about 1.8
Volts for the battery um and he said
okay let's use Cobalt and he knew how to
get the right structures out of material
he knew uh the correct reaction
conditions and everything because he had
worked for 10 years on that sort of
stuff and uh so he could he could create
a Cobalt oxide that could that was built
up in layers and you could build you
could put the lithium into the layers
where they could react with the Cobalt
and uh that way he could build a lithium
ion battery uh that was much better it
had More Voltage uh I think 3.8 is a bit
too low it's
3.9 um and the material has lower Mass
and that way you could get a much uh
much higher energy density from it you
also needed a much smaller anode because
the amount of energy you get out of one
lithium atom depends on the on the
voltage and when you have lower voltage
when you when you have half the voltage
that means you need twice as many
lithium atoms to to get uh the same
amount of
energy and uh
yeah so you need anodes um the problem
with anodes is uh and wittingham didn't
have a good an not that's why his
batteries only lasted for five Cycles um
that changed
with ysami I hope I hope that name is
correct uh he is from Morocco and I
don't I don't speak the barber language
I'm sorry
um uh he thought hey we could use
graphite and uh in graphite you could
you can put lithium ions uh in between
layers
uh because I mean that was the top um
that was the view from the top and you
can see uh uh graphite is built up of
layers just like Cobalt oxide and uh in
between these layers you get the lithium
ions uh and I'm sorry I didn't have
enough time to animate it uh like here
and just put them in between the layers
but you can imagine how that works um
the uh
every lithium ion needs six carbon atoms
uh to be stored and that is quite heavy
uh the carbon weighs about 10 times as
much as the lithium so that is kind of
limiting but it's still very good and
you can do it thousands of times without
destroying the graphite um the important
step here was actually to find an
electrolyte where the ions could move in
so the ions could move in it but the
electrolyte wouldn't get between the
layers and destroy the graphite and uh
something similar uh was also needed for
for all the other layout materials and
eventually uh that was found and uh it
worked out and uh
yeah uh these days uh things have
changed uh Cobalt uh lithium Cobalt
oxide is no longer the main material for
a long time it was and it was very
important um the problem is though
Cobalt is a very rare material and you
have all heard about how it is mined um
and so uh people want to get away from
it but primary motivation was not um
getting away from uh uh uh Cobalt mines
and Congo the primary motivation was to
get better batteries and the batteries
that they had was um you had
uh you could uh exchange uh the cobal
for nickel and nmc materials is nickel
manganese Cobalt and the idea is to get
as much nickel inside the battery as you
can um without getting the nickel um I
mean if you have nickel if you have only
nickel the problem is that the nickel
has about the same diameter as the
lithium atoms and it gets into the layer
where the where the LI where the lithium
is supposed to be and you don't want
that and uh so you need manganese and
Cobalt to stabilize the entire
structure um eventually that worked out
uh it was a bit of a uh bit of a
challenge to to make that work uh but it
worked out and about 20 years ago people
started to figure out how to how to make
such materials and nmc111 was the first
uh the numbers just uh say how much uh
how much
manganes and Cobalt there is so 111
means it's equal parts uh 811 means uh
it's uh 8 Parts nickel one part
manganese one part Cobalt and you see
it's just making everything better uh
the problem with Cobalt is that you
cannot get all the lithium out and uh
with nmc 811 there's essentially per
gram of the material there's the same
amount of lithium but you can get much
more of the lithium out and that's why
you have a higher uh higher energy
density it really seems to make
everything better you get more uh energy
from a cheaper
material uh and it's more compact it's
it's just almost everything is better
except um it has uh it's more sub um uh
it's not as resistant to heat when you
heat it up um it tends to release the
oxygen I mean it's an oxide so so
there's oxygen in there and it releases
oxygen and unfortunately it's inside of
an environment with an electrolyte that
is a hydrocarbon and hydrocarbons burn
and when you release oxygen into
hydrocarbons they start to burn and they
start to heat up the
battery and now you have a hot battery
uh in a confined space and if you have
it an electric car the entire car can
start to burn and sometimes that has
happened uh
and so you need uh you need to put a lot
of effort into making sure that there's
always enough coolant and that if one
battery heats up it doesn't heat up
other batteries uh that will start
heating up themselves and so on and that
is a major problem
um regardless um what we have seen in
the last 10 years is uh that we can
build batteries much cheaper one of the
main reasons uh was building much bigger
factories um it's the same as with the
early electric vehicles uh or the ev1 uh
they were only built like in a few
hundreds of
them and uh the small number of uh
batteries or the small number of cars
means that each car or each battery was
very expensive and if you go back uh if
you go on YouTube and you look for uh
videos from Battery factories in around
2010 or so or 2011 uh you will see a lot
of hand manual labor being done I mean
every battery in those factories got
touched by people and manipulated
multiple times and it gets it's very
slow it's very expensive and uh that's
why uh prices were extraordinarily High
uh you paid over $1,000 for a kilowatt
hour and now it's uh about $130 per
kilowatt hour in battery pack um but you
can get below that you can get below
$100 if you use different
materials because uh things have changed
um the factories have become much more
efficient much bigger much more
efficient uh production is much cheaper
and uh the cheaper production uh means
that now these days materials start
playing a role
um it used to be the case for very long
time that uh the price of lithium had no
bearing on the cost of a battery or the
cost of cobalt uh it didn't matter I
mean when you pay $1,000 just to make
the battery who cares if your if your
Cobalt costs 10 $10 more or less nobody
cares uh when your battery costs about
$100 or so um you care a lot whether
something inside the battery now
suddenly costs $10 more or less or 20 or
30 and uh that has changed and these
days uh as you can see at the end of the
graph uh at the end of the graph I I put
uh lithium iron phosphate batteries uh
for comparison and they were much
cheaper you can get uh at least 10
kilowatt hours uh for $1,000 in a
battery pack uh on sale level it's even
cheaper and uh that is because there is
no Nickel in there there's no manganese
in there there is no Cobalt in there um
the mining companies hate it they
absolutely hate it um but um the battery
companies of course they like it a lot
because it's much it's much cheaper and
you can you can offer a battery that can
drive a car um for a much more
reasonable
price uh we can we can uh see this here
on the on the graph um actually because
uh lfp is much more resistant to heat
uh you can build them much lighter you
don't need as much uh weight and
structures to keep the batteries cool
and to keep them safe and that way even
though the battery cells with nmc 811
have much higher energy density the
battery pack uh can be almost the same
uh the energy density of the battery
pack can be almost the same uh simply
because you can save so much weight um
uh Chinese companies like byd
and catl uh have built the blade
batteries or cellto pack
Technologies and uh those have resulted
in uh a revolution uh this year is the
first year that uh lfp batteries is more
than 50% of the total production and it
was really funny uh earlier this year I
heard an analyst from Bloomberg talk
about lfp and he said it's a mirage this
will just disappear here and uh yeah uh
in the industry there are a lot of
people who uh essentially deny the
existence of alternatives to rare
materials um especially those who invest
in those rare materials and stand to
benefit a lot from uh from high prices
especially from uh high prices and
Mining um we will see that change and uh
the same is true for lithium as well um
you can uh avoid using lithium and
batteries uh and I've talked about this
two years ago uh that this is possible
um two years ago I didn't know just how
far the the technology had progressed I
have read a lot about sodium ion
batteries since then and U this will be
a topic of the talk
tomorrow um but for now uh we can we can
have a look at the markets and we will
see that uh in a matter of 12 months
from uh November 20 to November
2021 uh the price of lithium has risen
fivefold uh it went from the lowest
price that we have ever seen for lithium
or at least for a very long time uh to
the highest price that we definitely
have ever seen I mean lithium has never
been more expensive than today and this
is not going to stop uh
because right now uh all manufacturers
of uh cars especially cars building uh
batteries or want to buy batteries some
of them started building uh their own
battery factories especially Tesla but
also others and uh they didn't look
where they would get their lithium from
and they didn't invest in in lithium
mining or anything and the big problem
is uh you cannot just say uh you cannot
snap your fingers and get lithium out of
the ground it takes a long time to build
the the mining equipment and build up
the mines so you can start mining
because I mean you're taking dirt from
the ground and then you start to invent
for each mine you have to essentially
start inventing your own process how to
get uh clean lithium out of the dirt
you've gotten out of there because that
dirt you get you're digging out is or
stones or whatever um is mostly not
lithium and you have to really get all
the impurities out and this is a very
difficult process and depending on where
it is it takes five to 10 years to get
it
right and uh something similar I mean
that's why that's why uh right now we
really locked into to whatever
Investments have been made five years
ago so and uh nobody quite predicted how
much more demand there would be for
lithium ion batteries and uh yeah if you
want to make many any more batteries
than uh the investment allows for 5
years ago um then you have to go look
for something else something that is not
there you um something similar happened
with nickel but uh changing from nmc to
lithium ion batteries uh to to lfp to um
lithium ion phosphate uh really
prevented uh that from happening I mean
nickel is more expensive but just by by
26 % or so um so there will be no fast
battery growth uh without further
substitution um because you cannot build
lithium ion batteries without
lithium and
yeah yeah uh thank you um if you want to
know where the where the uh 16 color
pictures came from originally uh where
were converted from uh I can I can
absolutely recommend Hawkins electrical
guide uh you can find it on archive.org
uh was published in uh 1914 so this
should be a public domain everywhere
and I can absolutely recommend reading
this how electric car work back
then um any question please uh and if
you don't want to ask in in English
that's fine just ask in German uh if you
need an answer in German uh please
please just say so
okay
so thank you very much for this
interesting talk and first of all if
you're are curious uh tomorrow there is
part two of this talk
and there you can you can see the part
how we can get rid of that problem of
our addiction to
lithium I'm surely isn't there I'm very
interested and now we have questions
first question
question is how big is the impact of
lithium prices in the context of the
general electronic
shortage okay
um the lithium price used to be on the
order of about4 to5 us per kilowatt hour
um that was last year this year it's uh
more like $20 or something like that and
uh when you look at the cheer end of the
batteries uh which is um on the cell
level that is uh when you have a battery
you you first have to have the the
actual battery cell and then you have to
take your battery cell and build a big
battery pack so you can put it into your
car um those are more expensive but on
the cell level uh the individual cells
uh the cheapest cost something like 60
or 70 US doar per kilowatt hour
something on that order and when you
have to add uh like 15 or 20 us to this
kind of price uh that's quite a lot um
it's not just lithium that got more
expensive also some other components of
the battery but this is certainly the
most prominent and uh most of the price
increases uh hasn't uh really gotten
through yet um the price that is
referred to there is really the spot
market so if you just want to go and buy
a thousand tons of lithium or whatever
or lithium carbonate um that's one thing
but uh most of the lithium is bought in
contracts uh fixed contracts and uh the
new contracts uh are not not yet
negotiated so um these contracts will be
made like in next few weeks or months
and they will demand much higher prices
than they used to and that's when the
actual the actual price will will come
through and uh
everybody expecting something like 20
20% or something like that more uh than
used to be and this is very strange
because in the last 20 years batteries
have essentially almost always gotten
cheaper every single year and uh this is
not the case right now um this the first
time that uh battery prices are on
trajectory to start getting more
expensive
again next question is what what can we
as the end user do to make it a little
better except for the regular things
like
recycling um recycling right now
actually doesn't matter too much the
problem here is that uh those batteries
are too damn good um they last a really
long time uh I mean thousands of Cycles
um you can actually see that that the
batteries will last longer than the cost
themselves um so with electric cars
recycling is actually for many years to
come uh recycling will not be very
important to um to alleviate any lithium
or raw material shortage um this will
this will take a lot more time until uh
those batteries are actually finished um
right now it's um don't buy SUVs um
because SUVs need much bigger batteries
because they're not aerodynamics I
mean it's a giant brick that you have to
move through through through the air and
uh you it requires a lot of energy to
get the air away so um if you uh buy
smaller more aerodynamic cars they will
automatically need much less energy to
move forward um so that helps um uh in
general um smaller batteries uh the less
the less battery the less lithium that's
always the same and uh I mean it's it's
not like it's not like we will have less
lithium in the next couple of years uh
that's not the problem uh we will always
get more and more lithium in the next
com in the coming years uh it's just the
the demand the amount of lithium that is
needed by the factories and by the
companies that is rising much faster
than the amount of of lithium that the
mining companies can provide so there
there's a gap that is
growing okay and uh the only thing you
can do is uh to push for alternatives to
lithium uh because uh the mining
companies physically cannot provide
enough lithium uh for the next coming
years we have two questions left one
from northern Portugal I'm currently in
Northern Portugal where one of potential
European mining areas are located I
sense a strong opposite with the locals
how realistic is the hypothesis that
there is no need to extract to extract
lithium
here
um in general um it's it's a problem to
I mean there is a not in my backyard
problem here um because you can always
say uh uh yeah we we need lithium but
not from here
and uh one of the reasons I I did this
this talk in two parts uh was to say
that uh lithium ion batteries are
actually important
um in some applications you absolutely
need the maximum amount of energy
density and lithium is the thing that
that provides that so we we kind of do
need lithium that is not the question um
from where exactly
is is indeed a good question um whether
it's from Portugal or not uh I cannot
really I cannot really say that um
because I I haven't actually looked at
the exact circumstances of the of the
mining area in in
Portugal um but you should definitely
have a look at uh making impacts as
small as possible um uh in terms of uh
what is population density uh what are
local
resources um uh what's the environment
like and so on and uh you would really
have to compare that but it has to get
you have to get it from somewhere and uh
you cannot just go around the world and
say but not from here everywhere and uh
uh there as I said I'm I'm not saying uh
Portugal is definitely you definitely
need to go mining in Portugal I I
absolutely that's not what I mean I mean
just like um have a look at the at this
exact situation there and uh if you want
to argue against it then uh you
should uh you should provide an argument
that uh there is uh there's a good
reason not to mine here but uh maybe
elsewhere um in the short in the short
run we absolutely need it um and we need
sodium in addition to that
okay we have a new question and this is
one of the two do you know of any
alternatives to the
18,650 batteries that can handle 2A
curent
Tross
um uh if I knew the capacity of if I
need the typical capacity of a
of an 1865 battery then uh I could
answer that question more easily but I
don't have it on top of my head
so so um if you had given me a c rate
then maybe um uh it really depends if
you need high power uh like just if the
amount of energy in the battery is uh
not quite so important so if you could
do with uh let's say half the amount of
energy inside the cell
and then of course there's if you just
need high power for a short time um then
of course there's an alternative um the
combination of high power and high
energy uh that's more that's a bit more
difficult
um yeah uh running short on time
unfortunately I think there's time for
one more question um otherwise uh I
think there's an overflow room somewhere
um maybe you can go ask the question
there
um yeah one question we have a short one
at what price does Point mining from
seawater will become an OP
option um right now uh right now no
price because um nobody has really
developed a process that is economically
feasible and also scalable um uh as soon
as that happens uh you have to look at
the price they offer and then you can do
the
maap I'm yeah I'm sorry but uh I I can
only report on on what has already been
done and uh anything else is uh
speculation and I don't know enough
about the field to do speculation based
on any good data so um I cannot
speculate intelligently so um I will
spare you the dumb
speculation short question short answer
very very thank you and I I hope you
have as much fun as I had and I'm very
curious of of your part two and if your
question couldn't ask today come in
tomorrow look at the part two and um one
more thing uh very very quickly um I
know that def font is not very readable
um I used p8 to uh to do this
presentation and because I I just liked
it I I like the Aesthetics of it um but
I will use a more regular Presentation
tomorrow because uh uh I've been told
that it's not very readable so um if you
find it not too readable then uh come
back tomorrow will be
easier oh then again thank you and see
you
tomor see
you
[Music]
why