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MotorTrend
  • 8 months ago
In Episode 122 of The InEVitable
Transcript
00:00:00Welcome to The Inevitable, a podcast by MotorTrend.
00:00:12Hi there! Welcome to The Inevitable. This is MotorTrend's podcast, our vodcast about the future of the car, the future of transportation.
00:00:20You can see the E and the V in the name of The Inevitable.
00:00:24And I think this episode, more than maybe any other in a long time, we really focus on that because we have a very smart guest today, Ed, don't we?
00:00:34Yes. Yeah, we'll get to him in a second. Hello there. My name is Ed Lowe.
00:00:39Hey, I'm Johnny. Yeah, hi.
00:00:40This is Johnny. The Inevitable Vodcast is currently brought to you by Nobody. We'd love a sponsor.
00:00:45Give me a shout if you think you want to come aboard.
00:00:48You know, maybe we should hit Ryan up.
00:00:49You might after this episode, because this dude we talked to is genius level.
00:00:55Send me a note at edward.loh.hurst.com or slide into our DMs on Instagram.
00:01:01Today's guest is the CEO of the American Battery Technology Company, a gentleman by the name of Ryan Melsert.
00:01:08I think we've had a lot of really smart people on this podcast.
00:01:12This is episode, I think, 122.
00:01:14He's top three.
00:01:16He's top three.
00:01:17He's really top two.
00:01:18Yeah, if not the smartest guy, as you will see, he makes me pretty certain I'm going to
00:01:25make my kid take mechanical engineering in school, given the breadth of knowledge this
00:01:31guy has and the different companies he's worked at and the different disciplines.
00:01:34It's crazy.
00:01:35He's everything from building factories to...
00:01:38Refineries?
00:01:39Refineries, different energy systems.
00:01:41With no experience.
00:01:42Fantastic conversation.
00:01:48Just super interesting guy.
00:01:49Here to tell you and make you a lot smarter about the state of battery technology, critical
00:01:56minerals, rare earth minerals, everything going on in this side of not just the automotive
00:02:02industry, but the sort of the energy industry sector writ large, inclusive of...
00:02:10Geopolitics.
00:02:11Yeah, we talk about politics, we talk about grid scale, electricity, we talk about just
00:02:17other sources of energy.
00:02:18Too much to talk about.
00:02:20We went way over time.
00:02:21So without further ado, let's bring him on.
00:02:24The CEO of American Battery Technology Company, Ryan Melsert.
00:02:28Ryan Melsert, CEO of American Battery Technology Company.
00:02:31Welcome.
00:02:31Thank you for flying in, day tripping during the first day of this insane, what's going
00:02:39on?
00:02:40Yes, 4% of flights, especially from smaller markets like Reno are being curtailed.
00:02:43Budget cuts, causing air traffic to be a nightmare, but apparently nobody should be
00:02:46getting in.
00:02:47I wouldn't say budget cuts, I'd say there's nothing else.
00:02:48Yeah, yeah.
00:02:49I hope it's just 4% of them.
00:02:50I've seen bigger numbers.
00:02:51Okay.
00:02:51Yeah.
00:02:52Well, it's going to get worse, but my wife had to fly out this morning and she was like,
00:02:55I don't know, you know, like it seems okay, but...
00:02:57Well, we're glad you're here.
00:02:58Um, I was doing some research on you and you are far and away in, in 120 something episodes,
00:03:05you are certainly the most qualified person we've ever had on to talk about batteries,
00:03:12EV batteries, batteries in general.
00:03:14I think, um, energy, energy solutions, given all of your, uh, fantastic work history.
00:03:23Um, so we're just going to dive right in and probably start, uh, at the beginning or
00:03:28as far, as far back as we can go and then sort of figure out where you're at now, what
00:03:32ABTC is doing.
00:03:34Those are my favorite topics.
00:03:35Great.
00:03:36So let's do it.
00:03:37Okay.
00:03:37So you've been at a ton of different companies.
00:03:40You've, you've interned at General Electric.
00:03:42You've worked at Lockheed Martin at a place called the Knowles Atomic Power Laboratory.
00:03:48Um, you've worked for the Department of Energy, Georgia Tech.
00:03:52Uh, you helped a founding member of something, little thing called the Tesla Gigafactory.
00:04:00Um, which is in Reno.
00:04:02Yes.
00:04:03And, and now you're doing batteries, but, uh, you know, where, for you, where does your
00:04:09career start?
00:04:12Where does this, where does this path you're on begin?
00:04:15Yeah.
00:04:15I mean, even very, very early on, young kid, I was always, I always knew I would work within
00:04:20energy systems, kind of a broader field, definitely within engineering, just always, you know, deep
00:04:26interest in how energy moves.
00:04:28The thermodynamics is probably my favorite subject to study.
00:04:31Okay.
00:04:32So early on, I just always heard of these very big corporations, these big names you hear
00:04:36of growing up.
00:04:37GE.
00:04:37GE and yeah, and the town I grew up in, upstate New York at, you know, near Schenectady is,
00:04:43you know, one of General Electric's headquarters.
00:04:45So I ended up working in General Electric more on, you know, very large commercial scale power
00:04:49generation systems, doing big steam turbine design.
00:04:53And like you mentioned, I'd worked with Lockheed Martin for a bit, was doing design of nuclear
00:04:57propulsion systems, mostly for nuclear submarines.
00:05:00And I've worked for Bechtel for a bit.
00:05:02So huge EPC construction company, helping a big, really large facilities.
00:05:06And just these huge corporations are great.
00:05:09They're very visible.
00:05:11But after working there a couple of years, you just realize you are just kind of a cog
00:05:14in the machine.
00:05:15So it's important work, but it's really hard to move the needle.
00:05:19You're kind of following somebody else's vision.
00:05:21So I went back to graduate school at Georgia Tech, did a lot of work with startups while I
00:05:26was in graduate school with an incubator right on campus and just, you know, saw how few
00:05:32people were really working within, you know, real core renewable energy systems, especially
00:05:38from a fundamental thermodynamics base and working your way up.
00:05:41And after being there working with the startups, I ended up getting an MBA at Georgia Tech as
00:05:46well, just because if you want to bring an idea to market, you have to understand the
00:05:51business case as well.
00:05:52So doing kind of my graduate engineering degrees and the MBA at the same time and working at
00:05:57the incubator was just...
00:05:59That sounds like an impossible amount of work.
00:06:03Didn't feel like work though.
00:06:04Like that's what I wanted to be doing.
00:06:05And looking back now, it's just hard to picture how somebody could try to start a technical
00:06:11business without having a really strong foundation in engineering, plus the business case, plus
00:06:17knowing how to build teams.
00:06:19You just, you can't have blind spots like that.
00:06:21What was your undergrad degree in?
00:06:23Mechanical engineering.
00:06:24Mechanical engineer.
00:06:25Because a lot of mechanical engineers end up doing all this.
00:06:27Yeah, cool stuff.
00:06:28Move the world, okay?
00:06:29Give them a lever, give them a lever, they're going to move the world.
00:06:31It's good broad base.
00:06:32Mechanicals, you cover a little bit, a lot of the disciplines there.
00:06:34Back to the atomic sub for a second, because I've always heard that when people say, oh,
00:06:38you know, why do we have batteries?
00:06:40I always hear like the Navy really loves batteries.
00:06:43Like that, like submarines love batteries.
00:06:45Is this...
00:06:46Electric subs.
00:06:46Is this something that you were working on?
00:06:50They do.
00:06:50And actually, there's diesel submarines and nuclear submarines.
00:06:53The diesel ones need very large batteries because the engines really only run it when
00:06:56you're near the surface.
00:06:57Right.
00:06:58And then when they're submerged, it's entirely on battery power.
00:07:01Nuclear subs, a little different.
00:07:02You can still make heat electricity from the nuclear fuel when you're submerged, but there's
00:07:06still batteries to buffer the energy.
00:07:08But yes, they're huge, massive ones.
00:07:10And obviously, for submarines, the acoustics are extremely important.
00:07:13Right.
00:07:14So when you can run it full electric mode, it's much quieter.
00:07:17Yeah, yeah.
00:07:17Than a diesel.
00:07:19Than diesel.
00:07:19Even when a nuclear sub is submerged, it's in many ways louder than a diesel sub submerged
00:07:24because it's only on electric power.
00:07:26Right.
00:07:26You don't really turn a reactor off ever.
00:07:28Is that, real quick, just again, Louise, for a second, on an atomic sub, nuclear sub,
00:07:33is the reactor driving, like boiling water to make steam?
00:07:38So it's just like a power plant?
00:07:40Exactly.
00:07:41Steam ranking cycle is the type of heat engine.
00:07:43So same thing.
00:07:44Nuclear fission makes the heat.
00:07:45Steam ranking converts it to shaft power.
00:07:48You can directly power the propeller or you can power a generator to make electricity.
00:07:52Sure.
00:07:52Okay.
00:07:53So you, I'm sorry, where did you do your undergrad?
00:07:57Georgia Tech.
00:07:58Oh, undergrad.
00:07:58Undergrad.
00:07:59Penn State undergrad, Georgia Tech grad school.
00:08:02Okay.
00:08:02And the graduate, you had an MBA and a master's in mechanical or?
00:08:07Master's in mechanical, did part of a PhD, mechanical, and then got out into the working
00:08:11world.
00:08:11Okay.
00:08:12Okay.
00:08:12So then that was all after the General Electric internship, Bechtel, or at the same time?
00:08:22After those ones, so I did kind of GE, Bechtel, Lockheed, Martin were undergrad and in between
00:08:27going to grad school.
00:08:28Then started working much more, again, with the incubators, specifically renewable energy.
00:08:33Those first three were more, you know, conventional energy and just, you know, really wanted to bring
00:08:38new ideas to market more than work as part of just a huge corporation.
00:08:42So that's how you got to, was it C2 Biofuels?
00:08:45That was during grad school.
00:08:47And then right after is when I went to work for the Southern Research Institute.
00:08:51So they were kind of a smaller renewable energy laboratory doing work.
00:08:55And graduate school is interesting.
00:08:56I was just going for the MS program, really just about two years, but, you know, really liked
00:09:03fundamental energy work, did a lot of work in undergrad and vehicle powertrain designs.
00:09:09At that time, there weren't many electric vehicles on the road.
00:09:13So it's 2004 and five.
00:09:15Okay.
00:09:16So just before it took off.
00:09:18Yeah.
00:09:18Some hybrids out, but not many.
00:09:20So I was about to graduate and the U.S.
00:09:23Department of Energy put out this big notice that they were going to host the competition.
00:09:28Was this the DARPA challenge?
00:09:31Similarly, that was for the self-driving.
00:09:32I mean, this is more about efficient powertrains.
00:09:34Okay.
00:09:34It was called the Echo Car Challenge.
00:09:36Right, right, right, right, right, right.
00:09:37So they said, you know, we want to sponsor a handful of universities in the country, a
00:09:41multi-year program to fundamentally blank piece of paper.
00:09:46Like from idea in your head, how would you want a powertrain to look with no limitations
00:09:51to it?
00:09:52Spend a whole year working with sponsors, designing it, doing rigorous ground up modeling and software
00:09:57in the loop, harder in loop systems, build small scale prototypes.
00:10:00Then the end of the first year, they actually come and drop a vehicle off the lot at your
00:10:05school and say, great, you said you would do this.
00:10:08Now do it.
00:10:09You pull the whole powertrain out of the existing vehicle, combine everything you want to build
00:10:14it up and then do like a shakedown test in year two.
00:10:17And then the third, you really refine it.
00:10:19And year three, they bring you to an actual OEM proving ground.
00:10:24So up to Milford and Detroit, a whole week testing the vehicle on the exact same test
00:10:30for OEM vehicles, going through the skid pad and the water trust and the zero to 60 and
00:10:34the braking.
00:10:35So they announced this and I was about a half year away from graduating on my MS program.
00:10:41It's like, oh, this would be really cool.
00:10:42Like it's not theoretical.
00:10:43You actually build something that's meaningful.
00:10:46And they were trying to get universities to apply for it.
00:10:50So I went to some of my professors at Georgia Tech.
00:10:52I'm like, you know, the school should apply for this.
00:10:53That's really interesting.
00:10:55They're like, yeah, it sounds good, but we got other stuff going on.
00:10:58So I went to the chemE department and same thing.
00:11:01Like you guys should apply.
00:11:02And they're like, ah, and went to the double E department.
00:11:05It's like, it's nice.
00:11:06And then just nobody was applying.
00:11:07So you had to get so many sign offs to be part of this because there's, it's not really
00:11:14dollars, but there's facilities.
00:11:15The school has to say they'll provide and time and travel.
00:11:18And they give course credit to some of the students.
00:11:21They were getting close to the deadline and no one was going to apply to it.
00:11:25So I went to our, our provost of Georgia Tech and said, would you mind if I applied for
00:11:30it?
00:11:30And he said, go for it.
00:11:31So I wrote the application, a lot of the modeling, it was, you had to put a design of
00:11:37your proposed powertrain in there, run simulations about how it would perform, have a business
00:11:42case.
00:11:42What was your proposed powertrain?
00:11:44At the time it was for hybrid vehicles.
00:11:47There are different types of series and parallel hybrids.
00:11:50There are ways to actually combine them in more of a power split hybrid.
00:11:53Some of the early Priuses did that, but they use more of a continuously variable transmission.
00:11:58There are ways to combine that, but also having discrete gear ratios in it.
00:12:03So discrete gear ratios can have a much higher transmission efficiency, but the CVT mode,
00:12:08you can essentially keep the engine right in the sweet spot of that BSFC map.
00:12:13So combining the two had a lot of synergies to it.
00:12:16And then people always focus a lot on the energy in a battery.
00:12:19I wanted a very high power, low energy battery pack, really pushing and pulling quick in
00:12:24and out of turns off the line, but you don't need a huge amount of energy.
00:12:27That's what we do in race cars nowadays where it's with big capacitors and fast in, fast
00:12:32out.
00:12:33Yeah.
00:12:33Not a ton of batteries.
00:12:34Even lithium batteries, a lot of different chemistries, you can vary the power to energy
00:12:37ratio.
00:12:38So relatively small battery, high power.
00:12:40And then the combustion engine, I wanted a really high biofuel weighting.
00:12:44So again, very high octane fuel, high ethanol, E85, kind of it was one on the market at the
00:12:50time.
00:12:51Lower volumetric energy efficiency, but actually quite a bit higher thermal efficiency.
00:12:56Much higher percentage of Carnot with that high compression ratio engine.
00:13:00So kind of combine all that into a design.
00:13:03Applied, didn't hear it for three months.
00:13:06And then I was like two months away from graduating and I got the letter that we had won.
00:13:11So they picked, I think, 16 universities in the US and Canada.
00:13:15We got this big formal letter and they go, okay, great.
00:13:18You committed to all this stuff for a three-year competition.
00:13:21So then the provost came back.
00:13:23He's like, you said you would do this.
00:13:27So I'm like, I guess I'm not graduating.
00:13:29And that's when I decided to go into the PhD and into the MBA just because I had kind of
00:13:34committed to starting off a three-year project.
00:13:37Right.
00:13:38And then the funniest part was they were having this big, you know, acceptance ceremony.
00:13:42It was at DOE headquarters right in DC.
00:13:44A lot of politicians were there and dignitaries.
00:13:47And all of a sudden, every one of those ME, ChemE, W professors I went to beforehand, they
00:13:54all came back.
00:13:54I'm like, hey, can I be a part of this now?
00:13:56Yeah, yeah, yeah.
00:13:56Now that you ordered the work and won it, now I want to be a part of it.
00:13:59Right.
00:14:00That's awesome.
00:14:00And this is, so this is the part, again, I checked out your LinkedIn.
00:14:03This is the Georgia Tech DOE General Motors program.
00:14:08Yeah.
00:14:08So General Motors was the sponsor for all three years.
00:14:10Okay.
00:14:11And Department of Energy was one of the main sponsors.
00:14:13And there were two dozen other smaller ones.
00:14:15All the tier one, two, three suppliers, the OEM industry.
00:14:19So we got hundreds of thousands of dollars of components delivered to us.
00:14:24We got to mix and match and actually build powertrains up.
00:14:27And you were how old?
00:14:29Mid-20s.
00:14:31What were you doing mid-20s, Johnny?
00:14:33Drugs.
00:14:36Not that kind of podcast.
00:14:37He asked.
00:14:39So, and then, so how'd the project end up?
00:14:44It was great.
00:14:44I mean, for those you have, we had probably two dozen students that were kind of regular
00:14:49in it.
00:14:50And then a hundred kind of came in and out.
00:14:52Got to give a lot of course credit.
00:14:54Got to go to all these different events.
00:14:56We went to the GM Desert Proving Grounds in Yuma at the end of the second year.
00:15:00Yeah, that's fun.
00:15:01Yeah.
00:15:01That one's, you're in the middle of nowhere, except you're on a U.S. military, like artillery
00:15:07base.
00:15:07Yeah.
00:15:07And in the middle of it is the Proving Grounds.
00:15:09Right.
00:15:10So you're going around and there's military vehicles everywhere, but we had our cars all
00:15:14shipped out, went through, again, a whole week of testing there.
00:15:18I remember the first day, they're like, here's what to do if, you know, your car breaks down,
00:15:22here's how to test it.
00:15:23And then they're like, and here's your rattlesnake guide.
00:15:26Yeah.
00:15:26Yeah.
00:15:26You're like, you're going to see snakes.
00:15:27If you get bit, call this number.
00:15:29Right.
00:15:29Right.
00:15:29We've had those briefings.
00:15:31Yeah.
00:15:31I've been there.
00:15:32Yeah.
00:15:33Did you meet any cool auto execs during this program?
00:15:37Anybody like eventually became the, I don't know, CEO, president, something like that?
00:15:42I did.
00:15:44Back then they were kind of mid-level.
00:15:45Right.
00:15:46And then that was, I guess that was 20 years ago now.
00:15:48Right.
00:15:48Yeah.
00:15:49Right.
00:15:50It sucks.
00:15:51We're getting old.
00:15:51Yeah.
00:15:52But they, yeah, they went up.
00:15:53So one of the main contacts for GM at the time was Kent Helfrich.
00:15:58Okay.
00:15:59And he became the CTO of General Motors.
00:16:01He just retired a year or two ago.
00:16:02Okay.
00:16:03And then many other ones who stayed at GM, some went to the other OEMs.
00:16:07So it's been a great network to talk to with DOE.
00:16:11And then obviously since that at other companies, you know, been able to win many other DOE awards
00:16:17and kind of other projects.
00:16:18And then there's the same people at DOE HQ that I get to stay in contact with.
00:16:22And that student cycle is three years, but it runs continuously, kind of resets every
00:16:28three years with new cars, new sponsors, new teams.
00:16:31It's been running since I think the early nineties.
00:16:34Oh, wow.
00:16:35Cool.
00:16:36And it changes names every once in a while, but it still cycles through pretty much the
00:16:40same mission.
00:16:40The main mission is training students, not with theoretical systems, but the actual tools
00:16:47that OEM engineers use.
00:16:49Right.
00:16:50Remember at the end of it, they walked us through, that was when the Chevy, the vault
00:16:53was on the road, but kind of going through a lot of redesigns.
00:16:57They walked us into the design studio where the Chevy vault was being designed.
00:17:03And they just said, you know, everyone in the room who was part of Echo Car or other
00:17:09iterations beforehand, raise your hand.
00:17:11And it was like two thirds of the GM engineers in the room had come up through that type of
00:17:16competition.
00:17:17It's an amazing recruiting tool, it seems.
00:17:19Definitely.
00:17:20It's good for weeding people out too.
00:17:21Like it's not easy, especially if you're a student, you're not getting paid for it.
00:17:25People are there because they really care.
00:17:27Right.
00:17:27You put your blood and sweat in, and then it kind of weeds out other people.
00:17:31It's a genius move from the car company too, because they're getting all this research
00:17:34done with sort of low investment, right?
00:17:36It was.
00:17:37And then 2007 and 2008 was the middle of the financial crisis.
00:17:42And GM was the main sponsor.
00:17:44Then it was the DOE.
00:17:45So automaker is going through bankruptcy.
00:17:49The federal government is dealing with a lot of those issues as well.
00:17:54And there was a line at them on the budget and they had to say, you know, Congress had
00:17:57to say, are we cutting this?
00:17:59Are we keeping it?
00:18:00So we did a fair amount of work talking to our members of Congress from Georgia at the
00:18:04time, talking with the rest of the country saying, here's why it's important.
00:18:09Yeah.
00:18:09You know, if you really want to start making the next generation of cars in the U S there's
00:18:13all different types of investments to make.
00:18:15But an investment in the next generation of engineers currently in school is one of the
00:18:20best ones to make.
00:18:21And then continuing to fund it both from the government side and the OEM side all through
00:18:26that financial crisis.
00:18:28So did you, are you aware of any of these research projects that were making it into production?
00:18:35Is any part of what you did in a car on the road right now?
00:18:40I think some of it kind of maybe at a macro level, but the main point of those, again, is
00:18:44training the students.
00:18:45Got it.
00:18:46So I think it's people on our team went on to work for the OEMs and then they implemented
00:18:50their designs.
00:18:51Okay.
00:18:51And like I said, this cycle's on three years at a time.
00:18:54Right.
00:18:55So now at American battery technology, about two years ago, got a call from the organizers
00:19:01of the current version of the echo car competition.
00:19:04And they said, Hey, do you want to be a sponsor now?
00:19:08Oh, nice.
00:19:09So we at ABTC actually are now a sponsor of these competitions.
00:19:14And they said, if you want to be a sponsor, some people donate, you know, hardware or software
00:19:18or kind of what their company does.
00:19:20And the student teams are all judged on, you know, again, acceleration, braking, performance
00:19:26of the vehicles.
00:19:27So I said, I want to start a new metric that all the teams are judged by.
00:19:33Efficient.
00:19:33More applicable for us is, again, our first factory built is a battery recycling plant.
00:19:41And just the reason we designed that company is myself, most of the people in ABTC, we spent
00:19:48years designing processes to make batteries, the refined powders, the slurries, electrode
00:19:54cells, modules, packs.
00:19:56And then when we see how other companies are thinking of recycling them, there's just not
00:20:01a lot of critical thought in it.
00:20:03It's let's take a battery and just throw it in a oven and just burn it.
00:20:07Right.
00:20:07Let's throw it in a shredder and just mix everything together and then try to separate
00:20:10it later.
00:20:11Really non-strategic.
00:20:13So at ABTC, we said, you know, we've all just spent years designing this first battery
00:20:18gigafactor in the world, going through every single unit operation of how we build these
00:20:22components together.
00:20:24And along that time, we found a lot of techniques that don't work.
00:20:29A lot of failure modes at every single stage.
00:20:33So we said, why don't we intentionally exploit the failure modes we know of and the packs
00:20:39and modules and cells, make the components fall apart from each other, make them separate
00:20:45in an intentional fashion.
00:20:46Right.
00:20:47And then you're just mixing things together.
00:20:49You actually separate them more strategically.
00:20:51Much lower costs.
00:20:53You make higher purity products.
00:20:54So when I got asked to sponsor this new version of the competition, I said, I want it to be
00:21:00a design for recyclability event.
00:21:03So students are designing their battery packs and their vehicles.
00:21:07Even most OEM engineers I talked to, they're like, yeah, it would be great if this could
00:21:11be recycled end of life.
00:21:12Like, I hope someone can, but like, there are real specific designs that could be put
00:21:18in to make something easier to recycle at the end of its life.
00:21:22You know, don't just take a whole battery and fill it with epoxy at the end.
00:21:25You know, don't use this unique element and mix it with other non-unique elements.
00:21:29So they agreed.
00:21:32So we, we developed this event where now our students are designing their battery packs
00:21:36and actually building them.
00:21:37We say, write me your recommended SOP for how you think it could best be recycled end
00:21:44of life.
00:21:45Standard operating procedure.
00:21:46Yes.
00:21:47Yeah.
00:21:47What would you separate?
00:21:49What would you do?
00:21:50How would you handle it?
00:21:51And now they're judged on that.
00:21:53So in theory, now, as this next generation goes in the field to be OEM engineers, there's
00:21:59a little thought in their head about when I design this battery, someone's have to recycle
00:22:02end of life.
00:22:03Right.
00:22:03And eventually as it comes back to us, hopefully it's a little more strategic at that point.
00:22:08That's amazing.
00:22:08Think about the end at the beginning, basically.
00:22:11Yeah.
00:22:11Like plan for that at the, at the outset.
00:22:13DFR.
00:22:14That's what's that?
00:22:15Design for recyclability.
00:22:17Got it.
00:22:17Okay.
00:22:17Okay.
00:22:18All right.
00:22:19You said a lot.
00:22:20That was incredible.
00:22:22And I, and it's great because we're going to get to ABTC, but in there, I mean, you've done,
00:22:27solar driven chemical heat engine, you did something grid scale, energy storage, all
00:22:35of this leading up to this big thing I want to talk about before we get to ABTC, which
00:22:38is you're one of the founding engineers, founders of the Tesla Gigafactory set up.
00:22:45You want to talk about, can you talk about that a little bit?
00:22:47Yeah.
00:22:47How did that happen?
00:22:50Yeah.
00:22:50So after grad school was working at that renewable engine state with some of those projects you
00:22:54just mentioned, and it was, that was kind of real small lab scale, build pilots, pretty
00:22:59big systems.
00:23:01And it was almost like a, you know, eat what you kill type of program where like, if you
00:23:07want to build this design, go find your own business plan, go find your own funding.
00:23:11So there at SRI ended up designing a lot of techniques for new ways to make biofuels to
00:23:17displace gasoline and diesel fuel, new ways to make electricity from low temp geothermal
00:23:23energy, a lot of work in hydrogen combustion combination for large scale power plants.
00:23:29But one of them was a way to design sorbents to recover lithium from non-conventional resources.
00:23:34So it was a lot of work on how to recover base lithium, how to purify and to convert into
00:23:39final product.
00:23:40And somehow it got the attention of the Tesla team.
00:23:43And back in 2014, you know, the time Tesla was trying to scale up the Model S at the
00:23:50time, trying to buy very large amounts of batteries.
00:23:53And every time they would go to a battery company, they would try to put this order in
00:23:57and they would kind of get laughed out of the room.
00:23:59Right.
00:24:00They'd say there's not that many batteries in the world made total.
00:24:03Like there's, there aren't enough factories.
00:24:05So the whole idea of building the Tesla Gigafactory in Reno was, they said, let's just take every
00:24:12battery factory in the world and add up the capacity.
00:24:16And it ended up being about 35 gigawatt hours per year of batteries is what the whole world
00:24:21can make.
00:24:21So they said, let's double it.
00:24:24Let's design one building that can make 35.
00:24:27So the Reno Gigafactory in his first implementation was as big as every battery factor in the world
00:24:33combined.
00:24:34And that was all the thought that went into it.
00:24:37And you got involved.
00:24:39Because they said, let's build it.
00:24:40And then they said, we don't know how to build a factory.
00:24:43Like we, that team within Tesla time, they were vehicle engineers.
00:24:48Like we don't know how to build a factory.
00:24:49We don't know how to do.
00:24:50But you knew how to build a factory?
00:24:51Well, I'd worked at Bechtel for a while.
00:24:54Again, I'm more of the larger companies and EPC side.
00:24:56You worked at GE.
00:24:57And it worked.
00:24:58And also on the energy system design.
00:25:01So some of the nice parts is they intentionally handicapped themselves.
00:25:07So one of the biggest factories in the world designed to be about 15 million square feet.
00:25:13And they said, we're intentionally not going to run a natural gas pipeline to the building.
00:25:17Because?
00:25:18Because they didn't want it to be reliant on fossil fuel.
00:25:21Okay.
00:25:21So as an engineer, it would always be a crutch to say, oh, let's just use natural gas for
00:25:26heat, for power.
00:25:27So it wasn't an option there.
00:25:29So the only energy input was the grid to high electricity.
00:25:33And then the idea was to have all on-site generation as well.
00:25:36Different types of rooftop PV, different types of battery backup.
00:25:40But the best way to be energy efficient.
00:25:42It is photovoltaic.
00:25:43I'm just trying to translate for the audience.
00:25:44So this guy's moving a thousand miles a minute, which I love.
00:25:46This is great.
00:25:47Yeah.
00:25:47So wait, so who called you?
00:25:49Who recruited you to join this project?
00:25:52It was a generic recruiter.
00:25:54Really?
00:25:54But I think the point was the company had never built a factory.
00:25:57So when the recruiter called, they're like, I got told to find someone who can build the
00:26:02biggest factory in the world and to do it without using energy.
00:26:06And we don't really know what we're looking for.
00:26:08But does this sound interesting to you?
00:26:09And you're like, hell yeah.
00:26:11I asked a few dozen follow-ups and they're like, we just don't know.
00:26:14Right.
00:26:15So they ended up flying me out.
00:26:17I interviewed down at the headquarters in Palo Alto and then went up to the site in Reno.
00:26:22And it's, it was a patch of dirt with one trailer.
00:26:27And they said, this is the site.
00:26:29And there were a handful of people there.
00:26:32So there were a group of maybe 15 of us that came out at the beginning.
00:26:36And all of our initial discussions were like, you know, what do you actually want us to do?
00:26:41Like, we all just joined this company.
00:26:43We all just moved to Reno.
00:26:44No one had been there before.
00:26:46And there's a little bit of recency bias.
00:26:48People think Tesla's always been this successful company.
00:26:51At that time, like if you Google Tesla, the first thing that come up would be a countdown clock.
00:26:57All these people said this many days until Tesla goes bankrupt.
00:26:59I remember very well.
00:27:01I don't know if you know, but we gave the Model S car of the year.
00:27:07And I remember in the room when we did that, we had some very seasoned automotive veterans
00:27:13that we bring in as like third-party judges to kind of like bolster our credibility.
00:27:17And they're just sitting around like this.
00:27:18I mean, it's a great car, but like.
00:27:20Who's going to buy it?
00:27:21No, no, no, no.
00:27:22Like there's no way these numbers make sense.
00:27:24The business plan.
00:27:24Like I remember we kept saying, hey, it's car of the year, not business plan of the year.
00:27:28And so, you know, we, you know.
00:27:32I thought they were going to make it because it was such a good product.
00:27:35But there's a lot of, you know, everyone thought they were going to fail.
00:27:38We were against Tesla before it was popular.
00:27:40Yes.
00:27:41In fact, I've told this story before, but like we, we vote, you know, it was the first
00:27:46that anyone can remember unanimous vote for car of the year.
00:27:49And I, then I, you know, so we'd made the vote and we're like, wow, we picked an EV.
00:27:53This is crazy.
00:27:54And I said, by the way, in the room that just voted, who has said either personally or professionally
00:28:00that Tesla's vaporware?
00:28:02There's 11 judges, 10 hands went up, his didn't.
00:28:05And then he says, eh, my mom said, you have nothing nice to say.
00:28:08Don't say anything at all.
00:28:09So we were really doubting, you know, Peter's or whatever, doubting Thomas's, what's the
00:28:13expression?
00:28:15So yeah, I remember that.
00:28:17But that's why you guys have instruments and you collect data and you actually measure things.
00:28:20It's not about feelings.
00:28:22No, it wasn't about feelings.
00:28:24So, so, so you get, so you end up saying, yeah, I'm on board.
00:28:28Let's do it.
00:28:29I mean, as an engineer, you must love like that.
00:28:31Ooh, you want to build a factory without like, that's kind of the challenge, right?
00:28:34Like give me some constraints.
00:28:35It's a factory.
00:28:35And then you enable, you know, one of the most, you know, advanced vehicles to scale
00:28:39up.
00:28:39Okay.
00:28:40Right.
00:28:40Okay.
00:28:41And so what were the challenges of building the largest battery factory in the history
00:28:45of the world?
00:28:47Lack of definition can be a pro and a con.
00:28:50I think it was mostly a positive.
00:28:52And at that time they were just extremely risk tolerant.
00:28:56So it was, if you wanted to build a part of the factory, everything was, if it's been
00:29:02done that way in the past, the answer is going to be no, unless you can give me a really good
00:29:06reason why.
00:29:07Yeah.
00:29:07And right before they actually did this, when they decided to build the first gigafactory,
00:29:12Tesla went out and hired a big name EPC firm.
00:29:15EPC is engineering procurement construction, big construction firm.
00:29:19So they essentially outsourced it and they said, you come in, build the biggest factory
00:29:23in the world, double global capacity.
00:29:25We're hiring you.
00:29:27And they hired them.
00:29:28They came up with designs and they came back and Tesla leadership absolutely hated it.
00:29:33They said, it's, it's generic.
00:29:36It's boring.
00:29:37It's not advanced.
00:29:38And because of that, they fired the EPC company.
00:29:42And that's when they brought this team on internal.
00:29:44Oh, wow.
00:29:44That's wild.
00:29:45So EPC, you actually get licensed, you know, as a construction company.
00:29:48We had Tesla actually applied.
00:29:50We were in Nevada licensed construction company, our internal team, as we went to build this
00:29:55up.
00:29:55So when we started to like, here's the drawing set, this external firm gave, and it was
00:30:00functional.
00:30:01It would have worked, but it was non creative, kind of non innovative, just a standard building.
00:30:09And so whenever you're going to review meetings, they'd be like, just don't say this is industry
00:30:13standard because you immediately get rejected.
00:30:15So you have to say, this is a ground up approach.
00:30:18This is why I do it.
00:30:19This is first principles thinking.
00:30:20But was this just Elon doing the rejecting or you had a whole team of Tesla people that
00:30:25also were trained in rejecting optimal normal?
00:30:30No, the leadership.
00:30:31I mean, a lot going on those days.
00:30:34Elon wasn't super involved in that factory early on.
00:30:37You know, JB was there a couple of days a week for the first two years.
00:30:41He was kind of the main person we rolled up to.
00:30:42And then after we got into commissioning, Elon was there a lot, but during the construction
00:30:47phase, not too much.
00:30:49But it was the same mindset of, we're not going to do this because it's always been done that
00:30:54way.
00:30:55Right.
00:30:55So we'd have these review meetings and it was literally a trailer in the desert.
00:30:59Right.
00:30:59I just remember like we would be presenting, you know, JB's in there, we're kind of giving
00:31:04these talks and like, it's one trailer.
00:31:06So it's like a bathroom in the room, like someone's in the bathroom.
00:31:09Well, it's noise, what you're trying to present and this.
00:31:13So is this your first brush with first principles thinking, or is this something you had, you
00:31:20had like utilized before or?
00:31:24No, definitely not first brush, but it was the first time a large corporation, I think
00:31:28I was at actually embraced it.
00:31:30Right.
00:31:30Because it is risky, because if you want something safe, just do what someone else has already
00:31:35done.
00:31:36Yeah.
00:31:37It's kind of low risk, low reward.
00:31:39Can you, can you, sorry, can you explain first, for those who don't know what first
00:31:42principles is, this is a big thing for the Tesla fans, the Tesla bros who follow like
00:31:46Elon, like their Lord and savior.
00:31:48They're called stans.
00:31:49But what, yeah, what is from in your, with your engineering mind, how do you, how do you
00:31:53define first principles?
00:31:54It's having a strong foundation.
00:31:58It's starting off with a law of physics, a law of thermodynamics, something that can't
00:32:04be argued against.
00:32:06That is, is true because you can prove it to be true.
00:32:09So you're working with the axioms.
00:32:10And then you build layers on top of it.
00:32:13So if you want to build, you know, an engineering model, you can say, well, I know first law of
00:32:17thermodynamics says this, second law says this, and you only take one step at a time and
00:32:21always refer back to something that concrete.
00:32:23You don't do, well, I feel like it could be this, or it's been done that way before.
00:32:30So I'm going to do it.
00:32:31That's how you kind of get trapped in complacency.
00:32:35So some of the early things we were designing were every part of the factory, you know, it's
00:32:39all different types of material processing, all the utilities.
00:32:44It was, you know, a 300 megawatt system.
00:32:47We're designing to how to cool the plant, how to heat different operations, all different
00:32:51types of water treatment as well.
00:32:52One of my first projects was designing, there are different types of solvents that are used
00:32:58to essentially disperse powders before they're coated onto electrodes.
00:33:02So you get this homogenous mixture and then the solvents evaporated out.
00:33:06It has a lot of contaminants.
00:33:08It degrades.
00:33:09In pretty much every battery factory in the world, you would just take that solvent, you
00:33:12evaporate out, you condense it, and you truck it off to some refinery somewhere.
00:33:17And we had some initial discussions and everyone was like, this is the biggest factor in the
00:33:22world.
00:33:22Like you're going to have dozens of trucks a day.
00:33:25It doesn't make sense.
00:33:26They would say, we'll come build a refinery at your plant instead.
00:33:29And Tesla leadership hated that.
00:33:32They're like, we're not having someone else come build a refinery at our factory.
00:33:35We're going to build our own refinery.
00:33:38So my first project was designing and building a refinery on site to treat and regenerate a lot
00:33:44of the solvent that we used and then turn it back in a closed loop and reuse it, write it back again
00:33:49on site.
00:33:50So again, that was building a lot of chemical processing models, a lot of thermodynamics
00:33:55about how we actually, it was a vacuum distillation system, had recovered different fractions of
00:34:01it, and then actually designing the full system, you know, bidding out who's going to build it
00:34:06for us, ended up being a company in South Korea that kind of came up with the construction
00:34:11design.
00:34:12So my third month in presenting this design to the whole Nevada team, which is 15 people,
00:34:20and J.B.
00:34:20Zane, we go through the whole thing.
00:34:22At the end, he says, he says, you can't talk about this to anybody yet.
00:34:27He says, we have to patent this.
00:34:30So we came to this whole in-house design.
00:34:32So I talked to the Tesla IP lawyers, we write a patent protection, we filed for it.
00:34:38And then half a year later, we got approved for it.
00:34:42And I remember the lawyers came back and they told me, they said, this is the first patent
00:34:47Tesla's ever gotten for battery manufacturing.
00:34:50You know, Ed, this guy's a lot smarter than we are.
00:34:52Yes, I told him that before we started.
00:34:54Yeah, yeah.
00:34:55So I'm just like, what?
00:34:57Yes, this is insane.
00:34:58But I mean, it's like, it's not theoretical.
00:35:00Hang on, though.
00:35:01Like, okay, yeah, yeah, you're a good engineer.
00:35:03But like, refinery?
00:35:05That seems like a crazy thing.
00:35:06Yeah, like, how does this...
00:35:07Go invent a new refining process at scale.
00:35:09Look, my takeaway is every kid needs to be a mechanical engineer.
00:35:12Right.
00:35:12Because if you're a mechanical engineer, you can do like stuff, you can do anything.
00:35:16And work for big companies and work for small ones, maybe get your business degree.
00:35:20But right after, they were saying the South Korean companies who won the bid to actually
00:35:24build it, it was, you know, three 70 foot tall systems that we decided.
00:35:30So they said, okay, these guys are going to build it.
00:35:32And they said, go check it out and make sure it meets your spec.
00:35:35Like, so I'm like, okay, so I bought a flight to South Korea and was going down and inspecting
00:35:41this massive system, the other side of the world.
00:35:43I'd never been to Korea before.
00:35:45And signing off, like, okay, it meets all the specs, now ship it to Reno.
00:35:49Oh, wow.
00:35:50And there were all these different aesthetic designs for the factory, too.
00:35:54The way it's laid out, if you look at the actual axis of the building, it exactly points
00:36:00to magnetic north of the earth.
00:36:02There's a lot of different requirements we had in there.
00:36:04And one of them was when you drive up to the building, the utility systems are mostly
00:36:10behind it, the other side of the road.
00:36:12And they said, you know, leadership doesn't want to see the utility systems from the front
00:36:18of the building.
00:36:18So nothing can be taller than the building.
00:36:21And the building was, you know, 71 feet tall.
00:36:24So the tower, the system was supposed to be 130 feet tall to actually hit the separation
00:36:29efficiency we needed.
00:36:30So I had to order two of them and put them in series, kind of two 70 foot tall systems
00:36:35that would be below the height of the building, just so you wouldn't be able to see it from
00:36:38the front.
00:36:38I've been to the factory.
00:36:41I went there for when model, when model three came out.
00:36:46And from the front, you couldn't see anything.
00:36:47Yeah.
00:36:47I remember just the scale of it.
00:36:49I remember we were supposed to walk, we walked, we were able to walk through the building,
00:36:52but we couldn't talk about anything we saw because it wasn't done yet.
00:36:55This is, this is totally wild.
00:36:57I mean, we could talk about Gigafactory all day long.
00:37:00Um, but we, I want to talk about what you're doing now.
00:37:03Yeah.
00:37:03We're shooting the battery.
00:37:04What was, so, but, so what was your now, but just on Gigafactory, Tesla, Tesla built
00:37:11the battery production system though with a partner in, uh, this Panasonic, right?
00:37:17Yeah.
00:37:17So it wasn't, it wasn't fully done by Tesla, the, the production of the batteries in inside
00:37:23this building.
00:37:24Right.
00:37:24And a lot of people think it was a joint venture between them, but it wasn't actually
00:37:28Tesla built and owned the whole site and then leased a portion of the building to Panasonic.
00:37:35Okay.
00:37:35So as we were more the landlord.
00:37:37So again, we built all the utility systems, all the building, all the facilities, they rented
00:37:43space.
00:37:43They had the Southern portion of the building.
00:37:46So essentially they installed their cell manufacturing equipment there.
00:37:49And then as it went through a door to the North, it, Tesla purchased it.
00:37:55Right.
00:37:56And then the North part of the building, Tesla had, they, then they built it.
00:37:58They built it into modules and packs and our drive motors and enclosures, the whole system
00:38:02there.
00:38:02So the, so the cylindrical cells were produced on a Panasonic line in the Southern end of
00:38:09this building from raw material coming in to cylindrical cells that would then go this
00:38:15other direction and become modules and packs that ended up in the cars.
00:38:18Exactly.
00:38:18And that type of battery was the first time Panasonic had ever built it either.
00:38:22So they were used to building smaller ones, you know, cells that were 18 millimeter diameter,
00:38:2665 tall, we decided to build a 21 by 70 and that factory little lower costs, little higher
00:38:34economy of scale, but they'd never done it before.
00:38:37Stayed some prototype lines.
00:38:38And again, the first year or two there, they said, you know, Panasonic, we're building this
00:38:43off of their baselines, but we're looking for ways to improve it, different ways to use
00:38:48first principles thinking to improve upon these legacy lines.
00:38:52So they would say, go, well, they said, they say, go to Osaka and go, you know, spend a week
00:38:58or two in these Panasonic factories.
00:39:00So it's been a lot of time in Japan, the first year or two touring their different lines, not
00:39:05just seeing how they were doing it, but you know, why do you do it that way?
00:39:08What could be done differently?
00:39:10And then trying to implement them in the Reno factory.
00:39:12And at the time, these were still lithium ion batteries and it was, didn't go to LFP at
00:39:20the point.
00:39:22Yeah.
00:39:22Lithium ion is a pretty broad category.
00:39:24They're all in the lithium ion family.
00:39:26The form factor changed and the chemistry within a battery, I think changes a lot more than people
00:39:31understand.
00:39:32There's many, many incremental changes.
00:39:35Yeah.
00:39:35I should understand what I'm saying, but I just, there's, there's broad families.
00:39:39And then the chemistry is dynamic over time.
00:39:43Sure.
00:39:43Okay.
00:39:44And what were you doing?
00:39:45So when you left, uh, tells you what, like three years, three years or four years?
00:39:50About four.
00:39:50About four years.
00:39:51What were you doing from the beginning to the end?
00:39:54Like, how did that change?
00:39:56What I described so far, that was already the first two years.
00:39:59That was the early part of factory design, everything ramped, getting the first line running.
00:40:04Remember it was April of 2017 was the first time we made a battery cell that actually passed
00:40:09quality tests.
00:40:10So just over two years.
00:40:12And that's when it got more into the high volume manufacturing side.
00:40:16And the story I told about how earlier when you, if you could build an EV, the limiting
00:40:22factor is how many batteries you could buy that kind of held back your EV production.
00:40:26After that factory got ramped up, the amount of batteries that could make was extremely
00:40:32fast.
00:40:33Remember the, the number always said was each line can make about four batteries per second.
00:40:38And there were, you know, 17 lines towards the end.
00:40:41So huge amounts of batteries being spit out.
00:40:44But then right after that, globally, there wasn't the supply chain.
00:40:48Like there were enough companies who can make the raw metals, the refined metals, the active
00:40:53materials that go into a battery.
00:40:55Anderson, that became the limiting factor.
00:40:57Interesting.
00:40:58So my third year, I went to leadership and kind of talk through that problem and said,
00:41:04same thing.
00:41:04We can get our suppliers to ramp up or we can start designing some of these raw materials
00:41:10in house.
00:41:12So they let me build my own team.
00:41:14I call it the battery material processing group.
00:41:17So built my own wet chemistry laboratory, hired a lot of, you know, PhD material scientists and
00:41:23chemies, and we designed new ways to recover elements from all different types of material
00:41:28to then purify, to make into new types of active cathode material, different types of
00:41:34anode material, and the best ways to assemble those up into batteries.
00:41:38So my third and fourth year there was really in the R&D side, doing that material processing
00:41:43type work.
00:41:44So this, and this is what, 2015, 2016?
00:41:48No.
00:41:4817 at this point.
00:41:50Yeah, 2017 is kind of when the factory got up, and then 2018 and 19 was the R&D side.
00:41:56When did JV start Redwood?
00:41:58Is it around that time?
00:42:00Yeah, he started well before that.
00:42:02Okay.
00:42:03Redwood Materials.
00:42:05It was a battery recycling company.
00:42:07Yeah, more of an interesting initial story.
00:42:10Yeah.
00:42:11Well, that's the thing.
00:42:11He started in parallel while working at Tesla, and I think so that there wasn't a conflict,
00:42:17they didn't recycle batteries on purpose.
00:42:19I see.
00:42:20They started off only recycling consumer electronics.
00:42:23Right.
00:42:23You know, kind of e-scraps, circuit boards.
00:42:25Yeah.
00:42:26And then it wasn't until after he eventually left Tesla, then they kind of added batteries
00:42:30into it.
00:42:31Okay.
00:42:31So what was the exit from Tesla like, or for what reason?
00:42:39I think it just got really mature.
00:42:41Like that environment I mentioned of 15 of you in a trailer, really risk-tolerant, really
00:42:46exciting times.
00:42:47We always joked the factory was like a casino, like casinos in Reno.
00:42:52But the factory, again, per the rules, there were no windows anywhere, and there were no
00:42:58skylights, and they really weren't clocks anywhere.
00:43:02So just like a casino, we'd all be there, and all of a sudden, it's 1 a.m., and we're
00:43:06still working.
00:43:06We're like, you can't tell what time of day it is.
00:43:08We don't know what time it is.
00:43:09Why no windows?
00:43:10Just a design aesthetic?
00:43:11Yeah.
00:43:14Planning for Optimus is ultimate arrival.
00:43:16Yeah, right, right, right.
00:43:18Okay.
00:43:18All right.
00:43:18So just that environment really changed.
00:43:20So you're saying work, a little bit personal, workaholic, kind of like you were getting a
00:43:24little...
00:43:24It's really fun work.
00:43:25I mean, but that's what it was like early on.
00:43:28And then later on, I mean, I think I saw there were 13,000 people in that factory, and all
00:43:34early on, the decisions were all made by the engineers, and later on, they were kind of
00:43:37all made by accountants.
00:43:39You know, what's the kind of incremental improvement?
00:43:41So it was a really different type of environment then.
00:43:44Okay.
00:43:44So we just, we enjoyed so much that S-curve of growth for a startup.
00:43:50A lot of the people I had hired there, and I said, let's do this again.
00:43:54So let's start from the beginning at the bottom of that S-curve with what we think is a void
00:43:58in the market, which is that factory made huge amounts of waste, and not just batteries
00:44:06at the end of line that failed some type of quality test, but there were dozens of steps,
00:44:11and everyone has at least some yield loss to it.
00:44:14So some are powder, some are slurry, some are metal cuttings, some are partially built
00:44:18modules, all these different types of intermediately made material.
00:44:25And other risk-like was a lot of time processing.
00:44:28No one had ever seen a 2170 cell.
00:44:30No one had ever seen the Tesla-style module before.
00:44:32And we said, we just spent years designing these, we're in the best position to do the
00:44:38reverse of that.
00:44:39And that's when you founded, just started ABTC?
00:44:42Yeah, that was end of 2019.
00:44:44Okay.
00:44:44And, you know, right away, we won a couple of pretty big awards, and I just brought more
00:44:51and more of my former team over.
00:44:53And now we're almost 200 people, and well over half are people I brought over from the
00:44:59Gigafactory.
00:45:00Is that with, is that with, is Tesla happy about that?
00:45:06Are they like annoyed that you're taking folks?
00:45:08Do you have a good relationship with Tesla?
00:45:11We do.
00:45:12I mean, again, we're right next door to them.
00:45:14It's still a good relationship.
00:45:16I think the way people work there just kind of leads towards burnout.
00:45:21So it's a very high turnover just because either people go in and can't really cut it and leave
00:45:27early, or people go in and just work extremely hard and a few years later move on.
00:45:32Right.
00:45:33So they're just used to turnover.
00:45:34All right.
00:45:35Enough with Tesla.
00:45:36Teach us about battery recycling.
00:45:38Right.
00:45:39So you founded, well, yeah, you did ABDC.
00:45:41You're the founder?
00:45:46It was already there, but kind of we pivoted when I joined.
00:45:49Okay.
00:45:50And you guys, just for us lay people, just in the simplest way possible, what problem
00:46:00are you solving?
00:46:01Yeah.
00:46:02It's kind of what I explained about all different types of waste made and making batteries and
00:46:07end of life vehicles that come back from the field.
00:46:09There just wasn't anyone in North America that could receive those.
00:46:12So when I was at Gigafactory, they had me go tour a couple perspective recycling plants
00:46:17and they said, we got awful at this material.
00:46:19Can these guys take it?
00:46:21And you go and look at the plant and most of them were just general metal recyclers.
00:46:24They're used to recycling scrap and they don't, to them, a battery is just a black box.
00:46:30They didn't really know what's inside it or how it works.
00:46:32So they were just doing really unsafe things, unsafe and inefficient.
00:46:37Like the modules Tesla uses, they're 1.88 meters long, they're 90 kilograms, kind of
00:46:46hard to handle.
00:46:48Some kind of was like, hey, we can process these, watch this.
00:46:51And they just took two forklifts with the forks out and pinched it from either side and
00:46:56then twisted the forks opposite directions.
00:46:59And the thousands of cells just shot out in the air everywhere.
00:47:02And they said, look how quickly we disassembled that module.
00:47:05Like, yeah, you disassembled it.
00:47:09And that's bad because?
00:47:11Well, very unsafe, very hard to then recover the cells and not scalable.
00:47:16Right.
00:47:17So just, there was a much more strategic way to do it.
00:47:20Okay.
00:47:21So again, that was end of 2019.
00:47:24We started, had this really systematic method about how while batteries are still fully
00:47:31electrically charged while they're still in pack and module form ways to handle them, then
00:47:37selectively break them down, not just burn or shred everything, but separate out pack
00:47:42material from module material, from cell casing, from sub cell material, get all different types
00:47:47of byproducts.
00:47:48And then your main battery grade metals, you can sell back into the field.
00:47:53So right when we were starting, you know, huge global chemical company, BSF, was hosting
00:48:00a global competition.
00:48:02They did, they actually make some of the cathode material that goes into batteries.
00:48:06And they said, we see there's this gap.
00:48:09We want to find out who can design a battery recycling system, kind of more crowdsourcing.
00:48:15So as anyone who has an idea, apply to this competition.
00:48:18If you win, we'll partner with you and help you scale up.
00:48:20This is like your eco car competition all over again.
00:48:22Kind of.
00:48:23Yeah.
00:48:23Private company, but I ended up applying for that.
00:48:27They said they received about a hundred applications that they received, all different types of designs
00:48:33of how to recycle batteries.
00:48:35And they ended up choosing us as the only winner of that competition.
00:48:39So we want it within weeks, you know, starting the company.
00:48:42And that was, they gave us laboratory space.
00:48:45They flew, I went out to Germany to their headquarters pretty quickly, talked to their leadership
00:48:50about how they wanted to scale up.
00:48:52And the biggest thing is their factories are the biggest customers of recycling plants.
00:48:59Recycling plants make the metals at high purity to then go into plants like theirs.
00:49:04So they said, we want to enable you to scale up so you can start making low cost.
00:49:09High efficiency metals for us.
00:49:11So we've now worked with them for many years and they had initially said they were going
00:49:16to build their own big commercial scale battery recycling plant.
00:49:21They went and bought land.
00:49:22They put out press releases.
00:49:23They had this whole story they were doing.
00:49:25So we started working with them for a couple of years and all of a sudden they said, you
00:49:31know, we don't want to do this ourselves anymore.
00:49:33So they actually publicly canceled plans to build a battery recycling facility in North
00:49:39America.
00:49:39And instead they signed a strategic partnership agreement with us.
00:49:43So they essentially designate us as their battery recycler for North America.
00:49:48So we receive a lot of waste from the field.
00:49:51We make these refined metals.
00:49:52We've sent huge amounts to them to actually make in a new cathode material, made a lot of
00:49:57new cells from them and have had those evaluated by Department of Energy, by big OEMs about how we
00:50:06can close the loop domestically.
00:50:08This is BASO?
00:50:09Yes.
00:50:09Okay.
00:50:10This is incredible.
00:50:13Because you mentioned DOE and I do want to talk about this portion because I think you
00:50:19have a lot to say on a lot of the misconceptions around batteries.
00:50:23But tell me about this DOE Critical Materials Institute.
00:50:28Is this also something?
00:50:29Is you working on this?
00:50:30Do you work with these guys in conjunction with ABTC or at the same time?
00:50:35I do, yeah.
00:50:36So the CMI is out of Ames, Iowa, Ames Lab.
00:50:40But there's an initiative, the Critical Mineral Initiative, where essentially they're trying
00:50:44to tie different critical mineral development techniques from across the country together.
00:50:50So private companies, research groups at universities, other DOE laboratories.
00:50:55This is the central location where people come to share ideas and help to scale up new
00:50:59designs, how to recover critical minerals and rare earths, and how to go through lab scale
00:51:05design and piloting and commercialization.
00:51:08So we worked with them for a long time.
00:51:10A couple of years ago, they asked me to join their board and kind of help to coordinate
00:51:13how we scale up.
00:51:15And now the past year, year and a half is even more public about the need we have to do this
00:51:22domestically.
00:51:23And we're saying it's critical materials, because this is what we're talking about, fundamentally
00:51:27U.S. supply chain for these materials that go into everything, our electronics, our batteries,
00:51:33except this is like, China's got it all, we're behind the eight ball here.
00:51:39Is this accurate?
00:51:41Yes.
00:51:41And again, sometimes people are confused.
00:51:43They think it means we don't have the minerals.
00:51:45What China actually has is the processing facilities.
00:51:48Right, right, right.
00:51:49It's not...
00:51:49If I could, there's enough lithium in America for every EV that could ever be made, if you
00:51:56had a way to get it out of the ground.
00:51:58And for many critical minerals.
00:51:59So a lot of the rare earths that go in for magnets and semiconductors, same thing.
00:52:04There's all different types of deposits throughout the world, but it's the processing techniques
00:52:09and how to scale them that is really concentrated within China right now.
00:52:12And we walked away from it.
00:52:13We had like, what was it?
00:52:16We trained all those guys, apparently.
00:52:17It was A123.
00:52:19We had the know-how, and then we kind of just, for whatever reason, went to China.
00:52:23It's more like a 30, 40-year problem, right?
00:52:25Critical minerals, even battery techniques back in the 1960s, like the mine battery was
00:52:31invented, the cathode material.
00:52:34Well, ExxonMobil Research Lab actually invented a lot of the cathode technology.
00:52:39That was where Dr. Stan Whittingham was.
00:52:41He just won the Nobel Prize a couple of years ago for inventing that.
00:52:45So it was in the US, and then the battery itself really started getting scaled up in the
00:52:48early 90s.
00:52:50Okay.
00:52:51So we haven't even talked about, we've talked a lot about the recycling, but the other part
00:52:56of ABTC is this lithium, the Tonopah Flats, right?
00:53:01Can you talk about that?
00:53:02Yeah, definitely.
00:53:03So recycling is really important.
00:53:06So essentially, if the amount of batteries in the market was fixed, they would go live
00:53:11their life, they would come back, they'd be recycled, recover the elements, close loop,
00:53:14it would all be fine.
00:53:15But the amount of batteries in the market is growing extremely quickly.
00:53:18So recycling alone isn't enough to really solve that problem.
00:53:22So we always say you have to close the loop, but you've got to fill that loop the first
00:53:26time too.
00:53:27So because the industry needs both, many years ago, we scouted throughout a lot of the US,
00:53:34all these different types of resources that contain the minerals needed to make a battery.
00:53:38And there's conventional resources.
00:53:42So for lithium, about half in the world is mined from West Australia, and these big hard
00:53:48rocks, these aluminum silicates, and then they're refined in China.
00:53:52Another half is really dissolved in these aquifers in South America, and then refined in China
00:53:58into final product.
00:54:00In the US, we don't have a lot of those hard rock materials or those brines.
00:54:05The brine, we salt and seize the brine though, right?
00:54:07So geothermal is a bit different.
00:54:09The ones in South America are mostly low temperature, very high temperature brine in salt and sea.
00:54:14But just in general, you can't really just take existing techniques and apply them because
00:54:19you don't really have the same resources.
00:54:21Got it.
00:54:21So you've got to look elsewhere.
00:54:23So yes, geothermal brines is one place to look.
00:54:25What we found is there's a sedimentary material like a sand in a lot of Nevada that holds a lot
00:54:33of lithium in it.
00:54:34It tends to be lower starting lithium concentration, but it's held in a very different type of lattice
00:54:40structure than a hard rock material.
00:54:42So a lot of people discounted it because if you just look superficially, you're like,
00:54:48hey, starting concentration is lower.
00:54:49We're not going to use it.
00:54:51But for the hard rocks, you have to use a huge amount of energy and acid to really liberate
00:54:56the lithium from it.
00:54:58When we looked at these clay stones, we found a way to essentially liberate the lithium from
00:55:04the sand through more of a solid state mechanism that can be done at very low cost.
00:55:10And again, most of the hard rock, you mine it somewhere and then you ship that rock to
00:55:17another continent, to China to be refined.
00:55:19We said, we're going to access the lithium in this clay stone and we're going to build a
00:55:23refiner right on top of it too.
00:55:25So you don't have to ship it anywhere.
00:55:27And this is Tonopah Flats.
00:55:28Yeah.
00:55:28This is central Nevada, right in between Reno and Vegas.
00:55:31So we spent a couple of years doing a lot of exploration, a lot of drill programs about
00:55:36what's really there.
00:55:37We're DOE, Department of Energy.
00:55:40We work really closely.
00:55:41We said, hey, look, we have this idea of much lower cost application to recover it from this
00:55:47unconventional resource.
00:55:48They had a program looking for that funding.
00:55:51We applied for, ended up winning back in early 2021 to build a demonstration facility.
00:55:59So we said, we did laboratory skill work.
00:56:02Now we want to do multiple tons per day.
00:56:05We want to extract from this mine, put through this real big pilot plant and go through every
00:56:10single step and make this lithium hydroxide product at the end.
00:56:15And we ended up winning that grant about two and a half million dollars to go and build that.
00:56:20And we finished that two years ago.
00:56:21So we've now had this big pilot plant running, taking our actual material, going through the
00:56:27steps, making the product.
00:56:28We've had over 30 automakers and battery companies come tour this pilot plant.
00:56:34We're sending this battery grade product to all of them for evaluation.
00:56:38So really showing how this can scale up within the U.S.
00:56:42And right now we make close to zero lithium products in the U.S.
00:56:47So it goes from zero to, you know, substantial amount just for this one facility.
00:56:52And in terms of like, you know, I don't know how you want to say in kilowatt hours or vehicles,
00:56:56like how much lithium in this flat is there?
00:56:59More than the country needs.
00:57:03Right.
00:57:03So there's a huge amount.
00:57:05We published, it's over 21 million tons of lithium on our hydroxide basis that's in there.
00:57:13Last year, the world used about one and a half.
00:57:17Right.
00:57:17Are there environmental concerns to the method of pulling this out of the...
00:57:21Dramatically lower, because again, we're not using huge amounts of acid like usually do.
00:57:27We don't make all the types of mining waste other projects do.
00:57:30Water? Is there a big water usage?
00:57:31No.
00:57:32Much lower.
00:57:32And you're not putting them on like tankers or cargo ships burning bunker oil to get to China to burn coal.
00:57:38Exactly.
00:57:39Because the refiner is right on top of it.
00:57:40Right.
00:57:41So that claystone, the sedimentary material right on site is refined to a battery grade product.
00:57:45We sell it to domestic companies.
00:57:49Right.
00:57:49And you don't have to move that material very far.
00:57:51So we've gone through the scale up through different types of permitting efforts,
00:57:54different types of technical studies over the past couple of years.
00:57:59We've hired now a big EPC, big construction firm, to come in and help to build that facility.
00:58:05You're not going to build it yourself with the first principles and do something with windows this time?
00:58:08No?
00:58:09We actually kind of...
00:58:10The EPC we hired is called Black & Veatch.
00:58:13We interviewed a lot of EPCs early on.
00:58:15And they said, we don't follow any rules.
00:58:17And we kind of warned them.
00:58:19We're like, this is not going to be a, you know, we throw this over the fence kind of thing.
00:58:22You're not building a warehouse.
00:58:23We're still going to own the design.
00:58:25So we're still intimately involved.
00:58:27But this is a, you know, $2 billion project to build out this scale refinery.
00:58:32Wow.
00:58:32And if you're playing along at home, so if you're listening, you're like, what is this guy talking about?
00:58:34The extraction of this lithium, as you mentioned, will then go to battery makers that a lot of car companies are helping set up in the US so that they can build these batteries and then put them in the cars.
00:58:50Maybe not in Georgia anymore.
00:58:51But because there are now all of these rules regarding percentage of US manufacturing all the way into the battery that helps these cars be sold in this country without a massive, like, tariff on them, right?
00:59:08So would these be, would it be like for GM, like, you would be selling the lithium to, like, SK, or I think that's one of their partners, to build at their factory in Detroit?
00:59:18And it would eventually end up in an Escalade or a Hummer?
00:59:22Is that accurate?
00:59:23Yeah.
00:59:23Most lithium goes into the cathode material during manufacturing.
00:59:26So the immediate cost would be someone like a BSF or LG Chem or Posco or Echo Pro.
00:59:31They make the active cathode.
00:59:33And then that's sold to a battery manufacturer like a Panasonic or an SK.
00:59:39And then the batteries are sold to a GM or Tesla.
00:59:42Okay.
00:59:42And then that ends up on the window sticker in the parts, domestic part production per vehicle.
00:59:49And right now, if an OEM wants to buy lithium from a domestic source, they just don't have any options.
00:59:53Right.
00:59:53Right.
00:59:53It's not that they don't want to.
00:59:54They just can't.
00:59:55Right.
00:59:56Right.
00:59:56Right.
00:59:57So that's lithium, which is not a rare earth.
01:00:00It's a critical mineral, but not a rare earth.
01:00:03And could you, real quick, could you define rare earth?
01:00:05Because I think a lot of people don't understand it's a column on the periodic table, not that it's rare.
01:00:11It's just like, it's just the name of these elements.
01:00:14Yeah.
01:00:14It's, there are two rows on the periodic table.
01:00:16So, I mean, they are a bit rare.
01:00:18That's why they're called rare earths, but there's going to, the headline is critical minerals.
01:00:22There's a couple of different definitions, but there's kind of mid thirties number of elements that the U.S. calls critical.
01:00:30Just that there is a shortage of supply that we have a big need for, and that we don't make a lot of domestically.
01:00:35And then the subcategory, some of them are rare earths, which are mostly used for magnets and semiconductors.
01:00:41And then there's battery minerals in there as well.
01:00:44So, lithium, nickel, cobalt, manganese, copper, those are all critical minerals.
01:00:50Right.
01:00:50Okay.
01:00:50So, rare earth isn't used in battery.
01:00:52Rare earth would be used in motors.
01:00:53Yeah, drive motors, power electronics.
01:00:56So, they are used in EVs, just not the battery portion.
01:00:58No, I meant not in the batteries.
01:01:00Right.
01:01:00Yeah.
01:01:00The rest of the powertrain, though.
01:01:01Yeah.
01:01:02Now, then, what are the biggest misconceptions you hear?
01:01:04Because we hear all the time, ooh, it's like, these are bad.
01:01:09EVs are bad for the environment.
01:01:11Like, are EVs bad for the environment?
01:01:12It's a pretty blanket statement, but I would say no.
01:01:17And there's the operation side and there's the manufacturing side.
01:01:21Obviously, for fossil fuels, you know, gasoline, diesel tends to be more of a once-through system.
01:01:26Once you burn it, you really aren't recovering the products to remake fuel again.
01:01:31But for batteries, you really can.
01:01:34Right.
01:01:34You know, in a recycling plant, we break them down to the elemental level.
01:01:37So, when you have an element, it never degrades over time.
01:01:41It's exactly the same.
01:01:42So, you break down elementally, and we can build it back up into new compounds again.
01:01:47So, they can be used indefinitely.
01:01:50Right.
01:01:51There's the recycling side and there's the mining side.
01:01:54And again, there are ways to mine elements with very high impact, and there are ways with very low impact.
01:01:58Right.
01:01:58It runs the whole spectrum.
01:02:00Okay.
01:02:01It can be made greener, whereas when you're burning oil, you're kind of just burning oil.
01:02:06It's a one-way process.
01:02:07Yeah.
01:02:07One-way process.
01:02:08I had this question a while back, and it finally came back to me.
01:02:13When do you recycle, like, a car battery, right?
01:02:15Because we keep hearing, you know, Nissan just put in their Nashville headquarters, they put the second life leaf battery solar system in their parking lot.
01:02:25Meaning, they're taking batteries that no longer need automotive spec, putting them in the ground as storage batteries for the solar panels above the parking structure.
01:02:33Like, where will you get your car batteries?
01:02:37At what stage of life do you receive them and take them apart?
01:02:41You can definitely use end-of-life batteries for a second life, like for stationary storage.
01:02:46I think especially older ones, because even back Gigafactor days, we made one battery type, and even all the internals were exactly the same.
01:02:55Some went for vehicles, and some went for stationary storage.
01:02:58Powerwall.
01:02:59Powerwalls, power packs.
01:03:00But that was many years ago.
01:03:02Now, if you want to make a battery for an EV or a battery for stationary storage, they're extremely different.
01:03:09And not just form factor, the actual chemistry.
01:03:12Right.
01:03:12There are different types of power-to-energy ratios different one needs.
01:03:16There's different types of thermal management.
01:03:18You can have essentially much thicker electrode coatings per current collector for stationary systems.
01:03:24So it's really just that as they get more and more specialized, it's just less attractive to take a battery that was designed for a vehicle and, at the end of life, try to make it work for stationary.
01:03:36A battery actually designed for stationary application is usually cheaper than even end-of-life vehicle battery.
01:03:42So it's not that you can't do it.
01:03:44I think just the business case is becoming less attractive.
01:03:47And especially the more efficient the recycling system gets.
01:03:51Because when an end-of-life vehicle battery goes for recycling, it's not that it's lost.
01:03:55You get those elements right back again.
01:03:57So you can do it.
01:03:59I don't think it's the way the market's going to go in the long run.
01:04:03And then we, as a battery recycling company right now, we actually get a lot of our incoming material for recycling from the stationary market.
01:04:11So we get home battery systems.
01:04:14Well, there's dramatic amounts of grid-scale batteries being built right now.
01:04:18Huge plants everywhere.
01:04:19And as those come back from the market, there's incremental replacements.
01:04:24There's big ones coming back at the end.
01:04:26And this is for, like, wind and solar and geothermal or whatever to store our energy.
01:04:31And just the grid itself.
01:04:32Even without renewables, batteries provide a lot of value.
01:04:36They don't have to cycle conventional plants off and on all the time.
01:04:39So load balancing with the guy we had on.
01:04:41Yeah, yeah.
01:04:42There's peak shaving.
01:04:43There's trough film.
01:04:43But even grid maintenance.
01:04:44And so when you have long, you know, distances that you transmit electricity, you can have voltage drops.
01:04:49You can have frequency regulation.
01:04:51And the batteries can really help to regulate the grid.
01:04:53And they make the existing infrastructure much higher capacity.
01:04:58We actually just announced.
01:05:00So there's these very big grid-scale systems.
01:05:02One of them had a big failure back in January, just in Northern California.
01:05:07The big Moss Landing project.
01:05:09So huge amount of batteries.
01:05:11You know, they say about 100,000 battery modules.
01:05:14These rack-level systems all need to be replaced and recycled.
01:05:19But because they were damaged, there's not really a set way of how they're processed.
01:05:25All these different types of regulators are saying, here's how you have to remove them from the system.
01:05:30Here's how you package them.
01:05:31Here's how you transport them.
01:05:33That site itself actually got classified to the EPA as more of a Superfund-type site.
01:05:38Because of all the heavy metals, that could get into the air, could get into the ground.
01:05:43So EPA did a lot of work trying to vet how those batteries could be recycled and where they should be sent.
01:05:50And they announced just a few weeks ago that we were selected for that project.
01:05:54So to receive, it's thousands of tons of batteries that are now coming up to our recycling plant near Reno
01:06:01to recycle all those batteries from that project.
01:06:04And to, again, recover those elements and sell them back into the market.
01:06:08So we get a lot of feed from vehicles, but also from the stationary market.
01:06:12Let me ask a really, possibly a really dumb question.
01:06:14In that situation with the Moss Landing and you getting the contract to take these batteries,
01:06:19who pays who?
01:06:21Like, do you normally, let's say they were going to recycle with you.
01:06:26Would you pay to get those batteries to recycle?
01:06:28Or they pay you to take them off their hands?
01:06:30It all depends on metal prices.
01:06:32So the metals within the batteries, they're traded on these big global exchanges.
01:06:36So the value of the lithium, nickel, cobalt, there are times we pay to get material and there's sometimes we get paid to take it.
01:06:43Okay.
01:06:44So not a dumb question.
01:06:45That's great.
01:06:46No, and especially a site like that, there's all different types.
01:06:48There's some that are kind of mostly intact still.
01:06:51We're in good shape.
01:06:52And there's some that are just, you know, mush.
01:06:54Okay.
01:06:55So with cars, like you said, you're getting, you know, some of your batteries to recycle from vehicles.
01:07:01Like, which vehicles?
01:07:02Like, how old are they?
01:07:05It's really across the board.
01:07:07Are you getting, like, crashed?
01:07:10That's some of them.
01:07:11So some are in accidents.
01:07:12Some have recalls.
01:07:15You know, some are kind of early failures.
01:07:16And some are out there that last for decades.
01:07:18Right.
01:07:19So the end-of-life vehicles, you mostly get from OEM service centers.
01:07:25So those are distributed throughout the whole country.
01:07:27You bring your car in.
01:07:28They drop the pack.
01:07:29They put a new one up.
01:07:30They need someone to take that pack.
01:07:31Okay, so you're getting the pack.
01:07:32You're getting, yeah.
01:07:33Yeah, and then the material we get as waste, that's more centralized to these big gigafactories where all their scrap material is also generated.
01:07:40And a lot of times, those are handled separately.
01:07:43You know, different groups within a big OEM.
01:07:45Okay.
01:07:45Gotcha, gotcha.
01:07:46We're going to wrap up here.
01:07:47No, did we do that?
01:07:48I know, I know.
01:07:49So we can talk to you for like three more hours.
01:07:51I mean, well.
01:07:52So Ryan, no, hang on.
01:07:53Ryan, we first profiled him.
01:07:55Our man, Miguel Cortina, did some hunting around.
01:07:58And you appeared near the end of our documentary about EVs and why they're not gaining traction in America.
01:08:07It was a great segment.
01:08:08And it was funny because at the end of the documentary, it ends with Lindsey Graham, your favorite.
01:08:16I mean, one of many favorites.
01:08:18Saying EVs are inevitable, which I just mentioned to you.
01:08:24So you said you just talked, you just were in Lindsey Graham's office.
01:08:27I hope that wasn't confidential.
01:08:29But what are the politics involved?
01:08:32You seem like, A, and not to be overly flattering, like a national treasure.
01:08:38Like, protect this man at all costs for what this guy knows about critical materials and helping move America, get us more on par with whatever China's doing.
01:08:48Like, what are the politics behind what you're doing?
01:08:51Why were you in Lindsey Graham's office, basically?
01:08:53It's one of the few areas where pretty much everyone supports it in the U.S., all different types of political backgrounds.
01:08:59They want more critical minerals made in the U.S.
01:09:01No one likes being reliant on foreign countries, especially with intense negotiations with them.
01:09:07I think different political parties have different methods of doing it, though.
01:09:11I always think about it more as the carrot and the stick.
01:09:13I mean, the last administration had a lot of funding to help build new facilities.
01:09:18A lot of subsidies encouraged people to buy them.
01:09:21The current administration is more punishing imports with tariffs.
01:09:25More stick.
01:09:26They both have a similar effect, though, of trying to have market forces push to have more of these minerals made domestically.
01:09:33So it's one of the rare things where both parties really do support.
01:09:37They want more manufacturing.
01:09:38They want jobs.
01:09:39They want to be less dependent on their companies.
01:09:41So we have our first recycling plant.
01:09:44We've had it running near Reno for a couple of years.
01:09:47We are receiving much more material than we can process there.
01:09:50So we are looking at other locations to build additional recycling plants.
01:09:54And would you do one, like, and I'm making this up, but North Carolina, since it's, like, pretty far away from Reno?
01:09:59It'll be geographically distributed.
01:10:01So the southeast makes sense.
01:10:03And then, again, you want to be co-located with some of your partners just to minimize transportation distances.
01:10:07Southeast, all the...
01:10:09Well, southeast, but also, like, you know, Michigan be a spot.
01:10:13Yeah.
01:10:14Okay.
01:10:15Yeah, a handful.
01:10:16Yeah.
01:10:16And then, again, there's a couple of cathode plants announced.
01:10:19So more the customers of a recycling facility.
01:10:22There's some of those locations announced as well.
01:10:25And then these politicians, they love the story.
01:10:27They want to get involved.
01:10:28Well, plus if you're building something.
01:10:29It's jobs, it's a factory, it's supply chain.
01:10:32Good jobs, yeah.
01:10:33Like, whenever it's election season, I mean, it's, like, this, it's a popular topic to say we're less dependent in foreign countries.
01:10:40Sure.
01:10:40We have more jobs, you know, higher technology in the country.
01:10:43Sure.
01:10:43And it's something both parties can get behind.
01:10:46So how many American flag ties do you have?
01:10:48More lapel pins.
01:10:49Pins.
01:10:50Yeah, Vind.
01:10:51Okay.
01:10:51Right, right, right.
01:10:52Do you have any?
01:10:52Look, I get it.
01:10:53I could go, I would love to just go through dumb things people say to me on a daily basis and have them, like, you know, scientifically refute them.
01:11:00But maybe we can help come back.
01:11:02Yes, well, we're going to go visit or something.
01:11:04Yeah, yeah, yeah.
01:11:04So, okay.
01:11:05Because that's, I mean, I just spent so much of my time, like, no, like, you know, you know, lithium is not worse for the planet than oil, you know, like, just.
01:11:14Well, I have to ask.
01:11:15Here's my last question.
01:11:17The podcast is called The Inevitable.
01:11:18The E and the V are, you know, bolded.
01:11:21And are, given where we are with this, this administration, you know, this sort of pivot away from EVs, more to hybrids.
01:11:31Unless it's Tesla's being sold in the White House alone.
01:11:33Yeah, go ahead.
01:11:34Right.
01:11:35Do you think EVs are inevitable?
01:11:37Do you think it's going to be, this is the way of the future, only cars will be in 50 years or whatever, it's just dominant is going to be electric vehicles?
01:11:46Dominant, yes.
01:11:47And there will always be a variety.
01:11:49And even what we're in now, I wouldn't even call it a slowdown.
01:11:52I think maybe it's a deceleration.
01:11:54This year, we're going to sell more EVs globally than ever before.
01:11:57More EVs in the U.S. than ever before.
01:11:59Yeah.
01:11:59So, I think there was maybe a little bit of a boom-bust cycle beforehand.
01:12:03The growth curve went down, but it's still a growth curve.
01:12:05Exactly.
01:12:06So, it's maybe a little bit of overhype beforehand about how quickly things would happen, but I think it's still the same trajectory.
01:12:12And we didn't talk that much about kind of next-generation batteries or chemistries.
01:12:17Literally, my last question would say, like, you know, in 25 years, what's a battery in a car going to look like?
01:12:21How about two years?
01:12:22In two years, what's a solid state you're talking about?
01:12:24Oh, great.
01:12:24Let's do that.
01:12:25Just the...
01:12:25We can go over.
01:12:27Yeah, yeah, yeah.
01:12:27Okay.
01:12:27Yes, tell us.
01:12:29Next-generation batteries.
01:12:31Well, I just think there's a dramatic amount of resources being applied to battery R&D just because of how much an incremental gain can be spread over all this volume.
01:12:41And again, people think, you know, it's lithium-ion battery.
01:12:44That's a thing.
01:12:45You know, from working from a battery manufacturer, it was every three months we would change almost every component inside a battery.
01:12:52Changes to the cathode, the way the anode manufactured, especially the electrolyte, all different types of additives and different compositions to essentially increase the cycle life during different niche cases, but also improve it as well.
01:13:06So it's the kind of thing where, again, it's like an S-curve where you have this rapid growth and then it's more incremental improvement.
01:13:13And that's where a lot of current lithium-ion tech is.
01:13:15But then you jump to the next S-curve, which starts lower and goes up higher again.
01:13:19So, yeah, a lot of people mentioned solid state.
01:13:21That's a category for the electrolyte itself.
01:13:25And the big thing there is what it enables.
01:13:27So there are already cathode chemistry and cathode anochemistry techniques that are far beyond what we have in batteries today, but they can't be employed because the current electrolyte, liquid solvent, holds them back.
01:13:43So once we do replace that with a solid electrolyte, those other materials are already ready to go.
01:13:48So it's just a thing where it's been at lab scale for decades.
01:13:54And it's hard to manufacture, I think our current understanding of a solid state battery is, it's just, you can do it in a lab.
01:14:01It's hard to do it at scale.
01:14:02Is that the problem?
01:14:03The joke people make in the battery industry is that if you want to design a battery to do one thing, I can do it tomorrow.
01:14:12You know, that's easy.
01:14:12If you just want high energy or you just want high power or you just want long life or you do want high temp operability, low temp operability or low cost or safety.
01:14:22So a car battery is the worst case scenario.
01:14:24If you want any one of those, it's done immediately.
01:14:27Gotcha.
01:14:27The challenge is getting something that can do all of those because customers are not tolerant of, oh, it does most things, but it doesn't work well in cold weather.
01:14:36They just won't buy it.
01:14:37Right.
01:14:37It does well, but maybe isn't low cost enough.
01:14:40Right.
01:14:40That's the real challenge is if you're around so many different attributes for it and in the laboratory, you can make it work for 99% of those conditions, but if you don't get the last 1%, it's not going to work at scale.
01:14:54That's crazy.
01:14:55So what are we going to see in two years?
01:14:57But the magnitude is, it's tenfold.
01:15:02Tenfold meaning?
01:15:03Same size battery can have 10 times the energy with technologies that are in the lab scale now.
01:15:09Right.
01:15:09So it's not like a couple of percentage points.
01:15:11That's what the S curve is.
01:15:13It's a huge jump that works in the lab right now.
01:15:17And you think this is coming in two years?
01:15:19Maybe not two.
01:15:20Okay.
01:15:21How many years?
01:15:21How many years?
01:15:23It's like most tech.
01:15:24It'll start off in kind of beachhead markets.
01:15:26So there's some now that are in smart watches, some that are in drones.
01:15:31It starts there and then it kind of ramps up.
01:15:33So I think a big application will be, I think grid scale batteries would probably happen before EVs.
01:15:40Why would that be?
01:15:41Because grid scale just has a much more controlled environment.
01:15:43Got it.
01:15:44Oh, I see.
01:15:45A grid scale battery never turns off.
01:15:46Right.
01:15:47So a lot of the ones now have trouble working at low temperatures.
01:15:51They want to be hot, very hot, over 100 C.
01:15:55So if you're in a vehicle-
01:15:57A grid scale?
01:15:58Solid state.
01:15:59Solid, okay.
01:15:59So if you're in a vehicle, your vehicle's off at least some time.
01:16:03Most of the time.
01:16:04You don't want to have it cool off and heat back up again.
01:16:06But a stationary battery, you can just keep it that temperature all the time.
01:16:09Right.
01:16:09So-
01:16:10And car batteries run a lot cooler than 100 C.
01:16:13Right.
01:16:13You want them to.
01:16:14Well, they do because of the liquid electrolyte.
01:16:17Right.
01:16:17Once it is in liquid, you would want to run it hot.
01:16:19Oh.
01:16:20But how do you keep it hot?
01:16:21That's what I'm saying.
01:16:22So a stationary battery can just stay hot.
01:16:24Right.
01:16:25Some of the inefficiency makes, you know, just jewel heat stays hot on its own.
01:16:29Okay.
01:16:29Because it never turns off.
01:16:30Vehicle's kind of on and off.
01:16:31So there will be materials developed that can run at low temperature as well.
01:16:36But until then, there are other applications.
01:16:38So 10X is like really revolutionary because then you could take like tons out of vehicles.
01:16:44Yes.
01:16:44Tons of weight.
01:16:46Right?
01:16:46Like what did a Model 3, Model Y battery pack weigh?
01:16:521,500 pounds?
01:16:541,200 pounds?
01:16:55A little less, but yes.
01:16:57Okay.
01:16:57So it was 1,000 pounds and you make it 100 pounds.
01:16:59That's massive.
01:17:00Yeah.
01:17:01It works on paper now.
01:17:02And it works in laboratories now.
01:17:04Okay.
01:17:05And now it's now about rounding the whole spider chart.
01:17:07You got to do it all at once.
01:17:08So that's the big step.
01:17:12I was at a GM thing a couple of weeks ago and they're announcing that their big push is the
01:17:16LMR, the lithium manganese rich battery.
01:17:19They're baking with SK.
01:17:22They claim to have the big improvement.
01:17:24That is what you're talking about.
01:17:26Like this is just a sort of a minor change in chemistry on the lithium side.
01:17:30Like everybody's LMR has been kind of known.
01:17:32It's the next step after LFP.
01:17:34Is that kind of the right way to say it?
01:17:36So it's still, it's more in the NMC family.
01:17:39It's still an oxide.
01:17:40Okay.
01:17:40So different ratios of nickel, cobalt, manganese in an oxide form is what most of high energy
01:17:47density battery cathodes are today.
01:17:49This essentially changes the ratio of those three.
01:17:51So higher manganese, much lower nickel and cobalt.
01:17:55But it's still the same.
01:17:55It brings the cost down, right?
01:17:56Because the nickel, it's like a 90%, like a 30%, I think is what they said.
01:18:00Is that right?
01:18:01Something like that.
01:18:02Right.
01:18:03And then the cobalt is not zero, but a small amount.
01:18:05Okay.
01:18:06So it's changing the ratio of those three.
01:18:08And essentially most cathodes since the 60s, you know, it's been cobalt oxides, nickel
01:18:15oxides, a lot of different families of how you make that unit structure with those different
01:18:19transition metals.
01:18:20So it's important.
01:18:21It can bring costs down.
01:18:22It can have a bit of an increase in performance, but it's still the same general family.
01:18:26Got it.
01:18:27Okay.
01:18:27Well, this is, look, Ryan, I told you we'd ask you some really dumb questions.
01:18:35I apologize for that we were true to our word, but thank you so much for coming on and blowing
01:18:42our minds about, first of all, what you do, the current state of battery recycling, the
01:18:48future of where this is going.
01:18:50Uh, like I said, like this is, I'm, I'm happy you exist and you're on our side, uh, because
01:18:59it's, it sounds incredible, uh, what you're doing with, uh, American battery technology
01:19:03company.
01:19:04So good luck.
01:19:05Definitely.
01:19:05Thank you for having me here.
01:19:06I've been a big fan of motor trend forever.
01:19:08Oh, thank you.
01:19:09I, it was the first magazine I ever subscribed to as a kid.
01:19:13Wow.
01:19:13And I remember I being really an elementary school age, I would get it delivered every
01:19:17month and it was just like to get something in the mail.
01:19:20My parents like, there's something for you in the mail.
01:19:22Yep.
01:19:23I would read it every month.
01:19:24I still read all the digital versions.
01:19:26So it's trippy being here, but it's, uh, awesome to talk to you guys.
01:19:31Thanks.
01:19:32Thanks for coming on.
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