Richard Chleboski, 24M and a Thousand-Mile Battery that Is Safer By Design

We unpack how 24M combines electrode-to-pack design, a fast, high-conductivity electrolyte, and a sensing separator to aim for thousand-mile range and safer batteries. The talk spans dendrites and thermal runaway, drone-ready shapes, long-duration storage, and real-world paths to scale and recycle.

• ETOP packaging for higher energy density and custom shapes
• Impervia separator that suppresses dendrites and senses faults
• Eternalite electrolyte enabling five-minute charge and late-cycle power
• Lithium metal safety strategy and thermal runaway prevention
• Drone and aviation use cases with conformable packs
• EV vs ESS market dynamics and policy uncertainty
• Manufacturing strategy and onshoring with lower risk
• Long-duration storage for the duck curve
• Binder-free electrodes and closed-loop recycling of LFP and graphite
• Tradeoffs, transition costs, and incremental adoption paths

Transcript

Meet 24M And The Big Promise

Roopinder 0:05

Welcome to ENGtechnica TV, where we bring technology into focus by talking to leaders with technology of interest to engineers. My guest today is Richard Chleboski, CFO and COO of 24M, a leader in the field of battery technology. Richard has a BS in electrical engineering from MIT, plus an MBA from Boston College. 24M claims to have reinvented battery design with their electro to pack technology, which they say streamlines the design of batteries and increases the overall energy density of batteries. And another plus we hear is that they're less likely to burst into flame. Welcome to the show. Tell me a little bit about what you're doing with 24M, a thousand mile battery.

From Better Electrodes To ETOP

The Dendrite Problem Explained

Richard Chleboski 0:48

The company was founded by a Professor Yet-Ming Chiang in 2010, actually. Originally, his concept was to develop a technology to improve how the electrode is manufactured. Here, for about the first 10 years of the company's existence, that's what it focused on and really developed that technology to the point where Kyocera is in production with it. Others are starting to ramp up the technology, been in production for five years, sells a product into the energy storage market in Japan. About four years ago, the company started to broaden its portfolio and integrated additional technologies, including a way to package any electrode more efficiently, which we call electrode-to-pack, an electrolyte technology that enables very fast charging and discharging capabilities, so about a five, six minute charge time. But that electrolyte also is very effective with a lithium metal cell. So it has the capabilities to facilitate very efficient charge-discharge of a lithium metal cell. And then we have a functionalized separator we call impervia, which prevents a lot of the dendrite formation that can lead to internal shorts and fires, but also can monitor the state of health of the cell to know exactly how your cell is performing. And if there's a problem, you can implement a fail-safe structure. So if you combine those technologies, the ETOP packaging, the eternalite electrolyte with a lithium metal anode, and then the imperbio separator, you have the ability to create this thousand-mile battery that's fundamentally safe and long-lived. And so that's kind of the process to get there. Our basic supposition is there's no single technology that can take us from where we are today to where full electrification occurs. And so it's that range of technologies that really we think distinguishes us.

Roopinder 2:35

The dendrite problem is an issue. I'm a mechanical engineer, so a lot of what you're saying might go over my head. But I'm aware of that dendrite problem. So that makes for a short-lived battery because the dendrite, just by constantly charging and recharging, it's growing these, what would you call them? I think of stalactites and salagmites.

Richard Chleboski 2:55

That's a really good way to think about it. What happens? There's two ways a dendrite can form. A dendrite is essentially endemic to a lithium ion battery. As you charge and discharge, obviously the ions are moving back and forth across the anode and cathode. The idea is that as the ions move into the anode, they efficiently integrate themselves into the graphite or to the silicon, or if it's a lithium metal, into the lithium metal. But what happens in reality is not all of them go exactly where you want. So you'll start to form little lithium plating. But in addition to that, is there's some amounts of other impurities that could be iron, it could be chromium, it could be nickel. And those other metals don't typically fit inside the graphite or the other ways. And so they'll start to plate. And so you form these little metal stalactites, stalagmites, or these needle-like structures that kind of work their way from typically the anode towards the cathode. And the separator, which is a very thin polymer membrane, that's what separates you from having a problem. And so if that dendrite pierces all the way through the separator, that's when you form an internal short. And that internal short leads to heating, which causes an overheated or thermal runaway situation in the battery, which is, of course, the fire ore. And so that's what you need to prevent. Now, for the vast majority of cells, nearly every cell we've taken apart cells after 100,000 miles for different manufacturers and so forth, and you typically will almost always see significant amounts of lithium plating or dendrites. The vast majority never pierce the separator, but some do in small percentage. But a small percentage of a very large number can be a lot. And so that's what we're starting to see.

Roopinder 4:37

Just the piercing that's a problem, or is there just an overall degradation?

Impervia Separator: Suppress And Sense

Richard Chleboski 4:41

Barring an accident or some damage to the cell for a moment. Number one is typically some form of plating or dendrite formation. It could be because you have a misalignment of the cathode and you get plating around the edge, or it could be because of impurities and you get this dendrite formation, or it could be other issues. There's also the possibility that you have some damage to the cell. So there's other ways to get there. But in normal operation, it's going to be this forming of plating or dendrites that leads to the internal short. In that instance, what we developed and what the team developed was what we call the impervio separator. Separator is typically just a polymer, polyethylene, very thin and getting thinner, so that you can have this thin human hair width kind of polymer that's separating plus and minus safe operation from a dangerous situation. So what we do is we insert in the middle of that polymer a conductive layer. And that conductive layer we apply a voltage to. And with that voltage, we're able to bend or suppress the dendrite. So as the dendrite is moving from the anode to the cathode, as it approaches that layer, it will bend away.

Roopinder 5:50

And from the electrical field.

Richard Chleboski 5:53

Yeah, exactly. Because it's searching for an electron to reduce it. It wants to go to the cathode. And so we interrupt that by giving a safer way to get that electron and get itself satisfied, if you would.

Roopinder 6:04

You're going to say, this is my mechanical brain working again. I'm sure you're going to say something like there's going to be a Kevlar shield in there that they use to prevent turbine failure in jets, but it's electric electric.

Richard Chleboski 6:15

So the tricky part is for a separator, separators are porous. They need to have enough space so that the lithium ion can move its way through, but that it doesn't enable the gross contact of plus and minus. So that's the challenge. So you can't just put a solid wall up. That obviously won't work. So you need to have some other mechanism. What the team came up with was this idea. Let's deposit this porous conductive layer. Let's provide that electrical field and let's suppress the dendrite from propagating any further. But the other thing we can do with it, which is really quite clever, is we can also monitor that layer and see whether or not there's a change in that voltage. We're applying a voltage. And if there's a change in that voltage, we can signal the battery management system to basically shut down that individual cell. So what it means in practice is that becomes a sensor.

Roopinder 7:12

Your film is actually a sensor after your activation. Okay.

Richard Chleboski 7:15

Some people would call it a reference electrode, but if you're right, it's a sensor. Fundamentally, what we're able to do is eliminate fires, but then monitor the state of health of a cell, both for hey, something's going wrong, let's shut it down, but also to give you a much more accurate picture of how much longer is your cell going to last in operation. And so that technology is a key enabler to A, avoiding the problems we're seeing today with these increasing numbers of battery fires, but B also gives you safety in terms of much higher energy density. So people talk a lot about lithium metal, the next generation of high energy density cells. Turns out lithium metal cell was actually invented and commercialized before the lithium ion cell. But the challenge has been that it's been hard to come up with a technology that solves the safety challenges associated. And we think the combination of our eternalite electrolyte, which works very well with a lithium metal cell, coupled with our impervio separator, which can monitor it and then suppress dendrite formation, which is much more common in lithium metal cells, can give you this safe operating regime.

Roopinder 8:24

So you have the long life and you have the high capacity. Correct. So tell me again, I may have missed this. Thousand mile battery? Can't you just do that by adding cells?

Lithium Metal Safety And Fast Charge

Richard Chleboski 8:34

Sure, in concept, but the challenge is that there are space and weight challenges that come with that.

Roopinder 8:39

Okay.

Richard Chleboski 8:39

You only have so much space in the car, and then you only have so much weight, and they kind of work against one another. So the goal and the reason why, and you've got a number of companies looking to develop approaches to this higher energy density, but the goal is to do it within the same space. And that's for e applications. For other applications, whether it's electric aviation, drones, space and weight become much more critical. These higher energy density approaches are enabling or required, if you would, for those applications.

Roopinder 9:10

You're focused on an automotive, but you're absolutely right. The aviation is just dying for something like this. It's what's this is what's keeping this whole new aviation scheme from taking off, is that there are energy densities.

Why Not Just Add More Cells

Richard Chleboski 9:23

So there's a number of challenges with aviation. So right now in the United States, there's a real focus on drones, much of that for military purposes. But if you look at e-tower drones, generally speaking, or electric aviation more broadly, number one is you need very high gravimetric energy density, sometimes called specific energy. Number two, if you look at the designs of most drones, what you really want is a shape that can be conformable to the wing structure where the propellers and the engines typically are. Conventional approaches don't lend themselves to end up winding a cell up into a cylinder or into a can or so forth. But with our electrode-to-pack technology, which you can see a large example on the wall behind me, we seal the electrode and we can seal that, and then we can package that electrode directly into the finished pack by doing so, connect in series parallel, build exactly the voltage current characteristics you want. But because we seal in an electrode, and this is a small version of it, that's a much bigger one, but we can do anything.

Roopinder 10:25

Actually, Richard, I'm glad you pointed that out. I was thinking that was modern art. I wasn't quite getting. But that's the actual path though.

Aviation And Drones: Shape And Power

Richard Chleboski 10:31

But we can put this in any size or shape that you want. And so we've actually we can actually design it in a trapezoid or conform to the wing shape. And by doing that, you eliminate weight, you better utilize the space available, and then you can eliminate a lot of the wiring. For a small drone, something that's a few meters, we're working with one drone manufacturer, and we've been able to double their flight time at half the weight. And so that changes the operating environment for it. And the other thing, it's a little bit subtle, but the other thing to remember is if you think about the flight pattern, what happens is there's a lot of power required to take off. And then as you're flying around, you need less power. Then when you go to land, you need a lot of power again. So power at the beginning of a battery charge is pretty straightforward. Power at the end of the battery cycle is harder. So that by itself can limit the flight time. But with our Eternalite electrolyte, because it has much higher ionic conductivity, i.e., it means we can charge and discharge much more efficiently. Even at the end of the cycle, we can be more efficient. So that can give you, even by itself, additional flight time. So we're pretty excited about that market opportunity. We think it's going to be a great opportunity for getting our technologies into the market, perhaps more quickly than the qualification cycles for some of the e applications, but really take a foothold with that. But the larger markets today, anyway, are with the EV and ESS. And so that's obviously a key objective for us as well.

Roopinder 12:07

How frustrating must it be your battery in terms of safety? Because gasoline engines never had to do that. Can you imagine having to qualify a gasoline engine right now?

Richard Chleboski 12:17

What's important to understand about safety just generally, there's two requirements. Number one is the product really does need to be safe. And number two, it needs to be perceived as safe, both. What I say to people when I have these conversations is look, safety is a threshold followed by a continual. And what I mean by that is if you don't meet the minimum, it could be a regulatory minimum, it could be a perception minimum, no one will buy your product. But once you meet the minimum, people will pay either a little bit more or a lot more for additional safety, depending on their risk profile and the nature of the application. And so what we try to tell companies that we work with, whether they're automotive OEMs or consumer products companies or the like, is we try to say, look, with our impervio separator, you can get like step change safety improvement. And it's not going to cost you much. We have an extra coating layer in there, so it adds a little bit of cost. Because of this ability to suppress dendrites, we can ultimately go to cheaper materials. We're not going to start there. We'll start with the standard material, polyethylene. But over time, we can move to cheaper materials because we don't need the polyethylene capabilities. We can work with polypropylene or other materials. Our view is you don't really have to sacrifice to get the safety. And we believe that with the technologies we're developing and others are working on different approaches. We're biased, we like ours, obviously, but that you can get the safety that people are demanding and that will meet the regulatory requirements. And you're not really sacrificing to do so the way we've been approaching it.

Roopinder 13:54

That sounds ideal. Is it inertia that's making everybody buy the opening?

Richard Chleboski 13:58

Yeah, it's a combination. If you look at the US manufacturing approach, what has happened with many is they've said, look, I want to add manufacturing capacity right away. And I want to do it with a technology that's proven at scale, at gigascale. And if you're going to do that, you're going to basically replicate the approaches that the large Asian manufacturers have taken. You're going to try to replicate what CATL does or what Samsung does or what Panasonic does, et cetera.

Roopinder 14:29

Right.

Eternalite And End‑Of‑Cycle Power

Safety As Threshold And Continuum

Richard Chleboski 14:29

The challenge with that approach, so you can buy the tooling, you can build the factory, and then you start to ramp it up. And what you find is that the know-how necessary to truly ramp up the factory and achieve the yields and performance and tolerances and so forth that these large Asian manufacturers have just takes years and years and years. And some people aren't able to do it. And it's not that they're not capable, or it's just experience actually has real value. And so what you're left with is you're trying to replicate what a company with much more experience, much larger capacity, much better developed supply, often in lower cost locations, is already up that learning curve quite a bit. And you're trying to play catch up. So by the time you build startup and start operating your factory, they've moved on to the next level and the next level, and you're continually playing catch up. Our perspective and what we try to tell companies is look, we can take this sort of incremental approach. You could use our electrolyte tomorrow, put it into your conventional manufacturing and get an improvement in performance. That's good. But if you want to build out new manufacturing capacity, we would advise you to seriously evaluate taking some technical step forward, not just replicating what other people were doing. And do that in a risk-managed approach, which is what, again, we're biased, but why we like our electrode-to-pack technology. Battery manufacturing is really two very distinct operations. There's a chemistry operation, making the electrode. Lots of know-how, lots of physics, lots of chemistry and material science behind that. And then there's a second part of it, packaging that electrode into a cell. There's mechanical engineering, operational experience, know-how associated with that. And what we're saying is let's split those two. Let's take our electrode-to-pack technology, which is unique. You can use your current electrode, you can buy electrodes, you can outsource that piece of it. We'll take that electrode, laminate it to a polymer material, and we'll take that polymer material and we'll assemble it into a sealed electrode, applying electrolyte. By the way, it's eligible for the tax credits in the US if you want to leverage that. And you have this sealed electrode that you can directly package into your finished product, into the pack. So if you're an ESS manufacturer making 20-foot containers, instead of having a bunch of individual cells that you put into racks and then the racks into the container, you can make a much larger cell that you can then directly integrate into the container, and we can get 20% more energy out of the same 20-foot container with our approach or more. If you're an EV manufacturer, you can package it into a single wrapper instead of say hundreds. Because you need 300 to 600 volts in an EV. That means 100 to 200 individual cells. We can do that with one or a couple packs if that's what you want, because we seal the electrode and then we can do it directly into the system. That approach, we think, and then over time, if you want to back integrate into making the electrode, you can do that. You don't have to, but you can do it. You want to leverage our eternalite electrolyte, you can apply that. You want to utilize our impervio separator, you can do that. And that scheme, if you would, gives you the ability to incrementally move up the supply chain, but have a differentiated product, differentiated performance, and a relatively speaking, low investment, lower risk manufacturing process. So that's what we try to discuss with potential partners and customers of ours. Right now, the market's challenging. There's no doubt about it. There's a bit of an uptick, but generally speaking, it's challenging right now. People are cautious. You mean the demand for ES slowed down? That's a combination, right? They're cautious about demand, particularly on the EV side. Now, energy storage is a different world. So energy storage is growing very rapidly. People are very excited about that. And there's a demand for products for energy storage. They're different than for ESS, typically different chemistries, different approaches, but different requirements. The market's growing rapidly, people are excited about it. In the EV side, people are cautious. But then there's an overlay of the geopolitical. Yes. Can you utilize what products from which countries? What is the tariff regime going to be? Where's my supply chain? I've got to fully convert over to non-Chinese sources of materials, or do I and what time frame? All of that adds uncertainty in the marketplace. So there's, and then there's slowing, it's not stopping, but there's slowing E demand. And then with the expiration of the tax credits, I think at least us and the people we speak with, we're still very confident in the long-term opportunities around electric vehicles and electrification and energy storage. They're enabling for so many things. Big picture, we're very bullish in the long term, as are pretty much everyone we speak with. There's always an exception here or there, but generally speaking, everybody's bullish. But between now and the long term, as a famous economist said, in the long term, we're all dead. But between now and then, there's uncertainty. How do we step through it? When do we take the next step? What should that next step be? And that's causing people to be hesitant. And that's challenging for small companies like Gaz, and it's challenging for larger companies as well.

Rethinking Manufacturing And ETOP

Roopinder 19:45

I always promise I will not discuss politics, but then we can't help it. This is such a time of turmoil in the beginning of this administration that it'd be great for onshore, reshoring or onshoring technologies, all the talk about what's Happening with the semiconductors is very close parallel to what's happening with the batteries. They need to bring that on shore just for many reasons, security being one of them, and just a general welfare of manufacturing, maybe is probably more important. I would have thought like what you're doing would have benefited from. Were you also surprised that it has a maybe an advertisement?

Richard Chleboski 20:21

I think what's happening is so the administration changed about a year ago. And so there has been uncertainty about what is the policies and how will they be implemented and so forth. So in general, both the financial markets and the real markets, or I should say the operational markets, were saying, hey, let's just see what's going to happen here. That's beginning to get clearer. I won't say it's totally clear, but it's beginning to get clearer. And now you're starting to see organizations react. I can't speak to who, but we're aware of new funds being formed and new things really focused on investing and reshoring US manufacturing. And many of those have said batteries and energy storage are a key central element. They usually talk about AI, they talk about power in general, and energy storage is a separate and core focus of those. And so I think you're starting to see more of that. The automotive manufacturers have another overlay. Hey, this subsidy just expired. And so what is demand going to be for products now that the $7,500 tax credit is gone? And so their belief is in the near term, there's going to be a pullback in their EVE demand. As that works its way out and starts to grow again, that's when they'll be more aggressive about adding new manufacturing capacity. So I think it's more of a timing issue. The approach, I don't want to talk about politics either, but what I would say in big picture is the previous administration, the Biden administration, had a focus on reshoring U.S. manufacturing. The Trump administration has a focus on reshoring U.S. manufacturing. They're going about it different ways. The Biden administration was a more subsidy-focused approach. The Trump administration is a more tariff and prohibition focused approach. But their goals are similar. They may have different focuses in terms of what they want to reshore with what priorities. But I think that was a consistent theme. I believe that will take hold, but it will take a little while for it to work its way through and build itself back up. Again, challenging for small companies like ours, probably challenging for bigger companies as well. But we're still very optimistic in the long term.

Roopinder 22:33

I'm in California. Where are you located?

Richard Chleboski 22:36

Well, we're located in Cambridge, just outside of Boston.

Roopinder 22:38

We have tons of solar energy. We have so much solar energy. It's raining solar, if I can be mixed my metaphors here. They have a storage problem, right? So special plea to you to make that storage battery worthwhile for them to get because they are so dragging their feet on accepting the solar energy, which as a community we provide in abundance, and yet they shun us.

Market Caution, Policy, And Reshoring

Richard Chleboski 23:02

It's the famous duck curve. So I started my career in the solar energy industry. So just to give you a little bit of my age, when I started in solar, the worldwide solar market was less than 30 megawatts. Now 30 megawatts is a tiny pilot manufacturing line at one company. It's remarkable how big and how impressive the growth has been. The challenge for the utilities is very straightforward, which is solar peaks at noon and energy demand typically, it varies with each locale, but typically peaks around six or seven in the evening. Time shifting of when solar is peaking with when your demand is peaking, you need some storage capacity. And California has been, I'd say, at the forefront of demanding for certain and for a while large installations that they couple it with about four hours of storage to basically enable this transfer, if you would, from noon to later in the afternoon. And that's been mostly done with batteries as the storage vehicle. We think, and one of our technologies with the electro-to-pack technology, we have this live forever electrode, which is a simpler, lower cost way, but it's also well tuned for longer duration storage. Most standard lithium-ion batteries have about a C, they call it a C rate, but a storage rate of one hour. It takes one hour to charge, one hour to discharge. We can build batteries that have much longer duration, three hours, four hours, six hours, eight hours. And by doing that, we actually make the battery cheap because we use less inactive material. It's just more active material. Has to do with some of the properties of our electrode that allow us to make a thick electrode where conventional can't, and that gives you the ability to have longer duration. That approach we think is very well suited for energy storage and particularly as storage to four, six, and probably eight hours. And so we think there's a really good opportunity, particularly if you couple it with our electrode to pack, where we can build 20-foot containers with 20, 30% more energy than what you can get with a conventional battery system.

Roopinder 25:13

We are the US is ahead in technology. But all the time I hear about how China is ruling the industry. Is that just because of their manufacturing, or are they getting are they catching up technology?

Richard Chleboski 25:34

Don't underestimate their capabilities. I think in general, what China excels at is manufacturing and supply chain optimization and cost reduction. I saw it in the solar industry, we're seeing it in the battery industry. It's a formidable competitor. No one will tell you anything differently. They are retail flight. They are also no slouches in technology. We believe, or biased, but we believe that our technology is superior and offers certain capabilities, particularly on the material side, that aren't available at CATL or really anywhere else in the world, but not available anywhere else in China. We think they're focused on it's really Naoki Ota, who's sort of crafted the strategy, our CEO to solve. Naoki's been in the industry since its inception. His mentor is Dr. Yoshino, who's the Nobel laureate or co-Nobel laureate for the lithium-ion battery. So he's been knowledgeable on this technology and these markets and this business strategy for a very long time. So he's crafted our overall strategy. And what he implemented was the idea: let's go forward with technologies that can solve these core lithium ion problems. And if we can come up with technologies to solve those, that will give us a distinctive advantage as we work with partners or develop it and commercialize it on our. That's where we think we've excelled. We have the electrolyte that enables five-minute charge. That's been a desire and an objective for so many years. We have a separator that can prevent fires and monitor the cell's performance. Again, another objective. We figured out how to package. Today, people spend all this time, energy, and money and investment on coming up with higher energy density chemistries, but then they package it the same old way and they throw away so much of the benefit that they gained from the energy density. And what Naoki said was let's seal the electrode and let's package that electrode directly to the current voltage characteristics you want, saving tons of space and weight and cost reduction too. So not only do you get more energy out of it, you get the cost reduction. Those kinds of approaches, looking at the problem a little bit differently, coming up with fundamental solutions for it, and then bringing that to market. And then Ming Cheng, the co-founder of the company conceived of with the Live Forever electrode, is an approach that 90% of the materials can get recycled. I didn't speak about this, but the conventional way to make a lithium ion bath, very few of the materials can be efficiently recycled. We can do over 90%. We can recycle low-cost chemistries, which are typically just thrown away because it's too expensive to even try. And it's because we don't have a binder in our electrode. So again, another kind of fundamental change that provides a fundamental advantage.

The Duck Curve And Long Duration Storage

Roopinder 28:13

Glad you mentioned that. The recycling is a big problem that nobody considers in batteries.

Richard Chleboski 28:18

It's a becoming problem, particularly because particularly with EV manufacturers, they had been using a nickel, cobalt-based chemistry that those two materials you could recycle cost effectively. Now transitioning over to LFP, lithium iron phosphate, it's a cheaper material, it's lower energy, but it's also safer. But they have no way to recycle those modules at cost effectively today. We already have shown we can recycle LFP, get virgin material performance out of it at about half the cost of new material. So you can truly create a closed loop system. If you're worried about supply chain security because of geopolitical issues and availability of materials coming out of Asia, we can solve that problem by being able to reuse the materials in the supply chain.

Roopinder 29:06

Tell me why that isn't.

China’s Scale vs. Tech Differentiation

Richard Chleboski 29:07

What happens is as you cycle the cell, some of the lithium gets depleted. When you hit typically 80%, sometimes 70%, 60% of the initial capacity, you say, okay, now the cell is no longer really functional. For a conventional manufacturer, they basically glue or bind those active materials to the foils. They have to, it's inherent in their process. Once you do that, you're left with either using pyrometallurgical or hydrometallurgical processes to separate those things off and get the materials off to recycle. Those material, that process damages all the materials and is expensive. You have to go back to the base metals. If iron is your base metal in lithium iron phosphate, iron is very cheap. So it's very difficult to recycle that. But what we do is very different. We don't have a binder. So we separate the anode and cathode streams, which are etop per per hip per permits, and then we simply mechanically remove the LFP or NMC, whichever, but the LFP material and the graphite or whatever the anode material is. We can recycle the foils, which are typically not recycled. We can recycle the lithium salts, which are typically not recycled. But with the LFP specifically, we basically just remove it, clean it, and then we do something called relithiate it. We add some lithium back into it so it gets back up to its original capability. We've actually shown that you can get higher with this relithiated material than you can with virgin material. But anyway, equivalent performance, let's just say, and at roughly half the cost. Again, because we're not going back to the base metal, we're keeping it in its LFP design. The same thing is true on the graphite. We have to remove something called an SEI layer. We basically condition it, and then we can reuse the graphite as well. So that's the process. So if you look at lead acid batteries, and there's lots of challenges with lead acid batteries from an environmental human health perspective. But one of the things that they can do well is recycle the lead. Ever knows you have to pay a deposit when you buy the lead acid battery, you have to return it to get that deposit back. That's because they're worried about the environmental, but the actual cost of your battery is lower because of that recycling process. We're going to be able to do something very similar with our live forever electrode with that technology.

Roopinder 31:21

You mentioned that it works with lithium ion, works with the conventional materials. You just don't need to change your sourcing too much if you're going to use your technology. Is there any gains to be made from your technology and less of that social cost?

Richard Chleboski 31:40

Sort of three ways. Number one is our process, and our technology is chemistry agnostic. So you mentioned early in the discussion about sodium ion technology. We've made sodium ion cells with our process, we've made sodium metal cells with our process. So we can explore chemistries outside lithium-based chemistries. And those typically use more common materials that don't go into the Congo and other locations. Number two, because we can recycle the materials efficiently, your need to continue to extract new materials from some of these difficult sources goes down. And then thirdly, we think because we can package the technology more effectively, you can get high energy density even with lower energy density chemistries that are based on iron or more common materials because of that electrode-to-pack technology. So we've got sort of multiple paths to try to reduce the impact or the social impact. And quite frankly, the environmental footprint associated with producing a lithium ion or any type of storage battery.

Roopinder 32:41

This has been quite informative. I wanted to ask though, and you're probably the wrong person to ask, but what are the disadvantages? You mentioned it could be a little bit more expensive. And I understand there's huge startup costs than any of the battery technology manufacturing. But what else are there?

Packaging Gains And System Design

Richard Chleboski 32:56

I think number one is you have to be prepared to go through the process of making a change. So that is always an inertial problem, but that's real energy, real effort, and some risk associated with just transitioning to a new, whether it's the material or it's the technology for manufacturing. So that's probably the biggest challenge. If you look very specifically at the live forever technology, one of the disadvantages is that it's hard to get as active material into the same volume. So, therefore, for applications that require the very highest volume energy density, then that technology may not be the best suited. For energy storage, for most e-applications, particularly if you couple it with our electro-to-pack approach, it's a very viable technique. And it's a different manufacturing process, right? So you just can't go out working with equipment vendors and so forth. But today, if you want to build a conventional manufacturing line, you can go to outside equipment vendors, buy the materials, bring it in, start it up. There's an infrastructure being able to do that. We're out trying to create that infrastructure with our partners. And we have some excellent partners with us that are helping in that process by pooling and demanding these kinds of materials, but you have to go out and do that as well. So those are probably the biggest challenges associated with it. But again, you can step your way into it. You can start with electrode to pack and use a conventional electrode if that works better for you. Integrate in some of our high performance materials. And then over time, as you want to expand to new electrode manufacturing or build out your own electrode manufacturing, leverage our live forever electrode. So we think we've found ways to mitigate the challenges associated with the technology. But of course, it's always a process and there's always challenges. When you really get into operations, there's always challenges to work through.

Roopinder 34:49

It reminds me of a cartoon. I'm sure you've seen it where somebody's presenting a wheel to people who are too busy to consider it because they're rolling stuff on logs. We don't want to consider this invention. For sure.

Richard Chleboski 35:01

There's definitely some of that, and it's natural. We all have that inclination. And it takes somebody to poke their head up and sort of look around. And that's what we're trying to encourage. We think that, again, if you're building out new manufacturing capacity, we talked about how they're going to onshore battery manufacturing in the United States. One path is to take the conventional approach and try to replicate it here and get really good at that. That's a very difficult problem, in our opinion, to be competitive with a CATL or a Panasonic or an SK. An alternative approach to take a different technical path. We think ours is really the right one, but to take that different technical path and build up your expertise in manufacturing around that because you're on a better learning curve, you've got different product performance, better product performance. We think that's a better path, and that's what we're trying to convince partners of.

Recycling 90% With Live Forever

Roopinder 35:51

I am convinced electrification is the way of the future. We probably both have to survive this little blip in our country's history where automotive seems to be going in reverse for some reason. We were going down a nice path towards we were everyone was going to have a Tesla or a Prius soon, and then look what happened. But like you said, there's a big big need in energy storage, there's aviation that's everybody needs it. All products that need it. I my personal very personal example, all my tools used to be corded, and now they're all on batteries, every one of them. I don't have to take a cord out of it.

Richard Chleboski 36:24

Our technology is very well suited for power tools. Right. Because power tools are very high power, right? The name implies, right? So when you press the little button on the drill, you want a lot of power right away. It's ideally suited for our Tronalite Electrolyte.

Roopinder 36:37

So is there anything you're not involved with? Any industry toys?

Richard Chleboski 36:41

Maybe we've done pretty much everything because we have this broad suite of technologies, some of them are applicable to almost any application. All right.

Roopinder 36:52

I'll make this my last question, I promise.

Richard Chleboski 36:54

But are you in full production or is this the So we mostly are licensor of technology, or we have contract for the materials, we have contract manufacturers make it for us. We tend to license. So Kia Serves in full-scale commercial production. And we have piloting capabilities internally, and we're looking to build out some initial a few hundred megawatt hours of capacity focused on electric aviation. So we won't build out gigawatt scale manufacturing, but up to a few hundred megawatt hours for a bespoke product for electric aviation and so forth. We think that's a more efficient way to get that market started than try and find a partner to do it directly.

Roopinder 37:38

Richard, thank you so much. Thanks for being willing to entertain my questions, and I will be happy to inform our audience of this technology.

Richard Chleboski 37:46

We appreciate it. Thank you, Roopinder.

Roopinder 37:47

You're welcome. Thanks for listening to ENTtechnica TV. If you'd like to tell your story on this podcast, contact me at Roopinder at ENGtechnica.com or message me on LinkedIn.