22. Batteries in Our Future

March 23, 2021.

The Thomas Edison Model:  dispersed generators connected by AC

Intermittency:  how to blend wind and solar with traditional generators

Energy to weight ratio:  

History of the battery.

The Lithium battery:  where is most of the earth's lithium?  Environmental damage.

How batteries are recycled.

Two new batteries:  liquid air and liquid metal

NEWS ABOUT PH&F:  selling chocolate at the Saturday market and in a store in downtown Cordes (Cordes au Bas).

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 2:23

That was the first part of Chopin's Ballad Number One. Since I was twelve, I've always wanted to play that piece, and here I am, 70, and still trying to perfect it. Chopin wrote three other ballads, and they're all wonderful, but number one is the best. Is that a coincidence? We'd have to dig up Chopin to find out. But he stopped composing ages ago. In fact, he's decomposing. That's an old musician's joke. Today's podcast is about global warming and our transition from fossil fuel by way of the battery. So the title of today's podcast is The Future of Batteries. Most thinking people know that our position on this planet is precarious. Even the big boys in the fossil fuels business have now started to face the music. Recently, GM committed to not producing any fossil fuel propelled vehicles after 2035. A couple days ago, Audi announced that it is no longer developing new ice or internal combustion engine automobiles. One day later, BMW CEO Oliver Zips countered that his company has no plans to stop developing ICE cars, hoping, I guess, to capitalize on the idea that auto customers are selfish and will continue to make all sorts of excuses for why they're not buying electric. Hedging his bets, however, Zips predicted that by 2030 half of all BMWs sold will be electric. If humans are to survive on this planet, and by survive, I mean if humans keep the increase in average global temperature below 1.5 degrees centigrade or 2.7 degrees Fahrenheit, we have to reduce carbon emissions to net zero by 2050. Otherwise, we and much of our earthly sister and brother species are cooked. How to get there? One of the ways is to convert all electrical generation to renewables, ASAP. Another way is to replace the internal combustion engine with the DC electric motor. Right now, all electric grids worldwide are based on the Thomas Edison model developed more than a hundred years ago of widely distributed generators interconnected by transmission lines. The generators produce AC or alternating current, which is stepped up using transformers to increase the voltage and shoot the power great distances over high tension lines. Once the electricity arrives at its destination, the voltage is decreased again, again by transformers. When you start adding renewables to an AC grid, an old-fashioned grid, you really throw in a monkey wrench. Renewables, usually solar or wind, generate direct current. This has to be converted to AC using inverters. The big problem with renewables is intermittency, where during daylight hours or on windy days, too much power is generated and the solar and wind farms have to be scaled back to prevent grid instability. This wastes a lot of generating capacity. What is needed is some sort of storage located in the vicinity of the solar or wind farm so the extra electricity can be released during nighttime or when the wind isn't blowing. Replacing the internal combustion engine also throws in another monkey wrench or two. The fact is that gasoline was the perfect battery. One kilogram of gasoline releases the equivalent of 12,000 watt hours of elect of energy. And there is no battery that even comes close to competing with that. The lithium ion is somewhere in between 100 and 200, which is a small fraction of 12,000. However, the other part of the picture is that most of gasoline's 12,000 watt hours are lost as waste heat. In fact, it's over 95% of the energy of the gasoline goes just to make carbon dioxide to ruin the planet. Only about 5% ends up powering the car forward. So the 12,000 watt hours is a bit misleading. The electric motor is far, far less wasteful than a gasoline, an internal combustion engine. So if you can find a battery that has a reasonable energy to weight ratio, you have a technology that will provide transport while not dumping CO2 into the atmosphere. To stabilize the grid and propel us around, then we have the battery. Well, who coined the word battery? Guess who? Benjamin Franklin, that august man of letters, greatest of all Americans, publisher of Poor Richards Almanac, co-author of the Declaration of Independence and of the U.S. Constitution, Grang Smooth Talker who charmed the money out of France's King Louis XV's pockets to fund the American Revolution. Benjamin Franklin coined the term battery in 1748, almost 30 years before the American Revolution, when referring to his modification of the Leiden jar, which was a metal lined jar. Benjamin Franklin added multiple charged glass plates, making a capacitor that stored more charge, but he called the capacitor a battery. But it was a battery in name only. Rather, he had invented a more capacious capacitor, able to hold a great electrical charge, but releasing that charge explosively rather than gradually. A battery, unlike a capacitor, holds a charge and releases it gradually. The honor of inventing the first battery goes to Alessandro Volta in 1800, who sandwiched thin plates of copper and zinc between layers of soaked cardboard, producing a wet cell battery, where the differences in electronegativities of the two metals, that is their propensity to give up electrons in their outer shells, produced a net charge that was conveyed from the cathode, the positive n, to the anode, the negative n, while in the interim doing some sort of work. And it is the battery, the subject of today's podcast, which is about to set off the fifth industrial revolution. Reviewing once again our industrial revolutions mentioned in a previous podcast, numero uno was the use of steam to power machines and magnify human labor. Numero dos, the invention of steelmaking via the Bessemer process, which led to trains, ships, tall buildings, automobiles, and modern warfare. Numero tres was the digital revolution, which led to the personal computer, the internet, and an explosion in the very nature of business activity, as well as making possible nuclear weapons, which may prove to be our ultimate undoing. Numero quattro is the biological revolution, which is right now changing the face of agriculture as well as the very definition of life itself. And now the fifth revolution, shifting energy generation from the oxidation of carbon to directly capturing it from sunlight or the movement of air molecules, and then storing that electricity in batteries. Ten years ago, the situation was not yet clear. How to store DC current produced by solar and wind. A popular solution among engineers was cleverly dubbed pumped storage hydroelectric. This involved pumping water back uphill in a hydroelectric facility during the daylight hours when there is a plethora of DC electricity, and then extracting the potential energy during the nighttime hours. But this very feasible solution assumed the pairing of renewable energy facilities with a local lake equipped with a power plant. The topography does not always cooperate, however. Another idea promoted by the fossil fuel industry was the natural gas peaker plant, judiciously positioned around the grid to balance the grid, thereby preventing brownouts or blackouts. But to save our collective tushes, using still more fossil fuel is definitely not in the cards. So it's some sort of battery that is needed, and lo and behold, thanks to the cognitive ingenuity of humanity in recent years, there are now several technologies that are showing promise. Batteries can be classified by how fast they can release power, how much power they can hold, how much they weigh, their lifespan, and what materials they are made of. For transportation, especially passenger cars, you want a high ratio of energy output to weight. Buses and trucks are less critical and the energy to weight department and ships even less demanding. The high energy to weight ratio batteries are now mainly represented by lithium-ion batteries. On the horizon, in the same position lithium-ion batteries were 25 years ago, are solid-state batteries that will eventually offer 500 to 1000% more charge per unit weight than lithium ion batteries. And they will charge in minutes rather than hours. There's a reason that lithium ion batteries offer so much power per unit weight. It's because lithium is the third lightest element in the universe after hydrogen and helium, which are both gases. Lithium is a metal and the lightest one at that. Lithium ionizes very easily. Each atom has only three electrons whizzing around its nucleus, and it's the third and outer electron that is so easily knocked out of its orbit. That is, lithium is easily ionized. But lithium is scarce. Only two ten thousandths of the Earth's crust is lithium, and of that two hundred and thirty billion tons of it are sitting at the bottom of the ocean, part of the nodules that are waiting to be picked up. The rest of the lithium is found in brines pumped up from valleys just west of the Andes Mountains in southern South America. Lithium is also found in a mineral called spodumine, which is usually found in pegmatites, huge crystals that are often associated with granitic outcroppings termed batholiths, which literally means large rock. Famous batholiths include Enchanted Rock in Texas, Ayers Rock in Australia, or Le Rocher, which means the rock in Isia Côte d'Ivoire, an area I know well. As both villages where I work with Project Open Fairness are just a few miles away from Le Rocher. Batholiths are ancient magma that oozed through cracks in overlying sedimentary rock, which was then worn away by erosion, leaving behind the much harder igneous outcroppings. They cooled so slowly that the mineral separated out into large crystals. One of those large crystals we just mentioned is spodumine, a salt of lithium, aluminum, and phosphate. Spodumin grows slowly, but the lithium battery industry is expanding rapidly. In 2019, the lithium battery industry was valued at over$31 billion. By 2023, a mere four years later, it will have doubled. From 2013 to 2018, the per cell price of lithium batteries declined 73%. It will decline another 17% by 2030. That is, within 30 years, the price of lithium-ion batteries will have dropped by 90%. Tesla's share price has expanded 35%, 3,500% in a mere 1.5 years. And I think a lot of that has to do with their figuring out how to make lithium batteries less expensively. If only I had the money to invest, I would have invested in the money, I would have invested that money in Tesla so that I could use that money for doing my works in Africa. And it's running at 700, it's uh it's split five times, so it's at 3,500 per original share, but it'll be well over 10,000 in the in a year or two. Um so if you have money, invest in Tesla. I don't have money, so I can't. However, if you'd like to put some money aside for Project Open Fairness and we could grow it, that would be a great idea. Anyway, back to the batteries. You would be right to conclude that lithium ion batteries have a bright future. However, like all earthly reality, bright is almost always accompanied by dark. There are three dark sides to the lithium ion battery. One is child labor. Some of the cobalt used in two or three types, two out of the three types of lithium batteries, is mined by young boys in the Democratic Republic of Congo, DRC. They typically earn$1.50 a day and are sometimes killed or maimed in the process of mining the cobalt. The third type of lithium battery, known as the LFP or lithium iron phosphate battery, involves no cobalt but has a lower energy density than the other two lithium batteries. All the Teslas sold in China and throughout the Far East are LFP cars, at least the ones that are like Model 3s. When you get into the more expensive ones, they're going to use the other two technologies. Ongoing research is focusing on methods of eliminating cobalt and replacing it with another element such as sulfur. A second dark side to lithium is the environmental cost of mining it or brining it. To extract lithium in its form as lithium carbonate from minerals, which are mixtures of elements, the spodumine, which is the mineral that I mentioned is near the batholiths, has to be roasted and then treated with acid. With the brining method, lithium is crystallized out of uh, and then of course the brining method, uh lithium is crystallized out of salt brine. So the the spodumine method has to be roasted and treated with acid, not good for the environment. And the brining method is crystallized out of salt brines. And the floor of the Atacama Desert of Argentina, Chile, and Bolivia is an ancient ocean bed, like Salt and Sea in California, and like the Salt and Sea and other places in the southwest of the United States. There's places where there's a whole lot of salts just lying around because there were seas that were dried up. And that's what the Atacama Desert is. So there's all these piles of salts lying around. Well, to extract the lithium from the salts as lithium carbonate, uh obscene quantities of fresh water are pumped up from below the desert's parched surface and mixed with the salts, and then the solution is allowed to evaporate over a two-year period, allowing the lithium carbonate to be selectively crystallized out. So that's the second dark side to a lithium. A third dark side is called thermal runaway. The lithium ion battery is designed to work between 15 and 45 degrees centigrade, or 59 to 113 degrees Fahrenheit. Situations that take the battery outside those temperature parameters lead to overheating that can happen in less than a second. So it's more like an explosion. And to prevent an explosion and subsequent fire, manufacturers install multiple and overlapping hardware and software. But despite their best efforts, explosions and fires do happen. A few Teslas have self-immolated, mostly because people modified the software to make the batteries hold more, uh, and then uh they blew up. Um and then another time a Boeing 747 crammed just with lithium-ion batteries, caught fire over Dubai and crashed, killing all aboard. Uh most lithium-ion battery disasters happen because of human error or dishonesty. Nevertheless, it's it's tricky. It's a tricky technology. Uh, because lithium is limited in supply and involves high environmental costs. The lithium battery industry is actively working on methods for recycling the batteries. Right now, most consumer electronics are just dumped in the trash when they've outlived their usefulness, at least in the United States. Here in France, where I live now, we uh everything gets recycled. Um you would never think of throwing it in the trash. And uh everybody goes to the recycling place and does that. Um but in the United States and other places, um the it they consumer electronics end up in the trash, and then the lithium-ion batteries sometimes uh catch fire. Um there are still uh, in any case, uh any of your consumer appliances need to be recycled. China, the EU, and South Korea are currently the world leaders in recycling lithium-ion batteries. The old method of recycling, known as pyrometallurgical recycling, was to simply melt the batteries and pour off the metals and separate them. As you can imagine, this generates a lot of noxious fumes from the hot plastic, and anyone living close to such a plant is going to have health problems. A more advanced method is known as hydrometallurgical recycling. This involves shredding the batteries in a vacuum to prevent fires, then draining off the electrolyte, the liquid through which the electrons pass through the from the cathode to the anode, and then treating the shreds with acid to dissolve out the metals, leaving just the plastic. And there are companies and research facilities in Britain, the US, Germany, Australia, and Singapore that are working on developing recycling methods that will be superior to both pyrometallurgical and hydrometallurgical technologies. In any case, they'd better hurry up as there is a growing supply of old lithium-ion batteries. A little positive note to tame all this, um a lot of the car batteries, lithium-ion car batteries, once they reach 70% of their capacity, um, are replaced, and then they can be used all the way down to zero to um to stabilize the grid. So on battery farms, lithium-ion battery farms made with old batteries, uh, is a thing that's going to be happening. Um Elon Musk announced last year that Tesla had developed the million mile battery, meaning more charge and discharge cycles before replacement. So new technological tweakings are in the works, and uh they're we are nowhere close to uh being finished with the lithium-ion battery. Now we come to the heavy batteries, of which there are currently two technologies that are being built commercially the liquid air battery and the liquid metal battery. Neither of these batteries is intended for cars. However, they can be used in buses, trains, uh, trucks, and on ships, um, but they're really designed mainly for uh stable. Stabilizing the grid, that is, marrying them to solar and wind farms in order to minimize the uh problems um with the uh intermittent intermittency effect. The liqu the first of these is called the liquid air battery. Uh it's a ridiculously easy technology involving uh off-the-shelf uh products and a capital outlay uh half that of lithium-ion uh technology. Um and why it hasn't been uh uh pushed before is mainly because uh there was no need to stabilize the grid. But as uh renewable energy uh imp increases in in percentage of the power that's being generated, uh then the need to stabilize the grid uh is becomes more and more important. So there's a company in Britain called High View Power uh that has been awarded a 10 million pound grant, so that's about$17 uh$17 million from the UK government to build the first commercial scale liquid air battery. It offers a longer duration than lithium ion. Its components such as tanks and pipes are modular and scalable. There is no environmental depletion associated with it, that is no rare earths and no chopping up of um old granitic batholitz. With a liquid air battery, ambient air is pressurized to 15 atmospheres, which sounds like a lot, but it's not. And uh then but uh that to make liquid air, that is to make air molecules, that is oxygen, nitrogen, etc., into a liquid. Uh and then they can store that, and there's actually a company that does this routinely uh and and breaks out all the different gases. So uh this kind of thing has been going on for a long time uh and then stored in thin wall steel vessels, which they've been doing for ages. Uh and the so it can be shipped by truck or train.

unknown 24:03

Uh-huh.

SPEAKER_00 24:03

The liquid air is heated and as it expands, it turns a turbine and generates electricity. It is then recompressed back to a liquid. Like any battery, the kinetic energy from wind turbines and photoelectric cells is stored, in this case as liquid air, and then reconverted into AC electricity as needed. The liquid metal battery is a little bit more high-tech than the liquid air battery. The story starts with Bill Gates giving an MIT professor, Dr. Donald Sadaway, a very fat check for$35 million. He'd been listening to Dr. Sadaway's lectures on YouTube and just loved them and was totally convinced that that guy could invent something really important. Uh I don't know all the details, but it sounds a little like Scrooge McDuck plot if I ever heard one. Anyway, Dr. Sattaway star started a company with some of his students. It's called Ambry, and it just signed a mega deal to provide a 250 gigawatt hour backup to Terascale's new solar and wind farm located in Reno, Nevada. The company will use the renewable energy to back up data from computers from across the nation. And as you may have heard, the new currency, Bitcoin, will be consuming the equivalent of London, England's energy bill, our annual energy bill, just to calculate Bitcoin transactions. So that's going to be a new uh source of carbon dioxide for our atmosphere. And we need to that's why we have to move fast. Um not just because of Bitcoin. That's minor just one London, that's one town. But a big one. The liquid metal battery is made of antimony uh along with calcium, uh, which are in the electrodes. The battery is designed to run at 500 degrees centigrade, which is hot. It's liquid metal. When you discharge the battery, its temperature drops and the antimony solidifies. At this point, the battery can be moved once it's solidified. If you drop it, there are no explosions or runaway heating events, so unlike lithium ion, which is quite dangerous to drop. And the cost of the liquid metal battery is one-third that of lithium ion with no capacity fade over time. And antimony is not a rare earth, so you're not going to be digging up the whole plant trying to find some. Uh, there are other batteries under development as well, some using organic materials, uh, such as um quinone, uh, which is a uh a part of wood. Um it's a natural organic material that can be extracted from wood or made. Um, and uh requires no mining and no negative environmental costs. Um the field of battery technology is growing rapidly, and this holds great promise toward achieving our goal for survival, which is to spend, in order to survive, we have to spend between now and 2050, we humans, that is all of the planet, have to spend$131 trillion by 2050 to complete the transition out of fossil fuels in order to reach net zero and save our collective tushes, otherwise, we are toast. Uh besides ridding the planet of nuclear weapons, that's a tall order. Uh but the only real barrier to achieving net zero is the human spirit for both global warming and nuclear. So that's it for this podcast. Just a few more words about Project Hope and Fairness. Uh this Saturday uh I will be selling Project Hope and Fairness chocolates in the market downtown. Uh that includes uh several bars, uh five different bars, and uh and then uh 15 different truffles. Uh then next Wednesday I will begin selling chocolate truffles made uh with the African chocolate at Cordoba, which is a store uh downtown uh that sells local food and beverage products, uh including some wonderful liqueurs. Um and then April 14th, uh Laurent Gazot, who is a well-known local distiller of brandies and eau de vie, he and I are driving to Gayac to meet with a chocolatier who may be interested in buying chocolate from David in Depa. I'll keep you posted on future events. As you know, my goal is to build many chocolate factories so that cocoa farmers can earn 40% rather than six percent of the retail dollar. If you want to be part of our exciting adventure, please go to www.projecthopeandfairness.org. Um and then there's a place to donate. Okay, well, next podcast will be on hydrogen's role in the fifth industrial revolution. We continue now with Chopin's Ballad Number One.