Ambri: A Battery that Could Change the World

well we're so fortunate today to have with us donald sadaway he is the co-founder and the chief scientific advisor for ambry which is a battery company thank you so much donald for being with us today my pleasure so i thought we'd just start real quickly with you're working on this battery technology we're kind of familiar on this channel with tesla batteries lithium-ion batteries uh yours are kind of big and kind of hot uh why do we need your batteries well uh you want different kinds of batteries for different applications so the lithium-ion battery is a it's a fantastic battery it's given us so much that we treasure in the modern world and it was invented for handheld devices it was originally something that came out of sony for their handheld cameras and then it migrated into mobile phones and laptop computers and more recently has found its way into uh electric vehicles but when we start thinking about grid level storage if you want to to pair batteries with solar or wind which are intermittent you need something a little more robust than uh the batter that was designed for your mobile phone and so that's that's what i turned my attention to and that's that's what gave birth to the the liquid metal battery so when we're talking about liquid metal you know i'm familiar with mercury it's uh you know it's liquid at room temperature but uh your batteries aren't made out of mercury so how are they liquid so they have to run an elevated temperature so an example is uh the first battery that we uh that i when i say we i mean uh i with uh my students and postdocs at mit uh the first battery we worked on was magnesium uh opposite animony and uh these metals melt uh around 630 650 degrees celsius so we had to go up to about 700 degrees celsius and you might say well gee that's that's very high temperature but imagine a battery say the size of a shipping container it would be insulated so that it'd be cool to the touch on the outside but inside it would be operating at this elevated temperature and so how do these batteries work like uh why elevate the temperature of metal and and do all this work when we have you know lithium-ion batteries that work at room temperature there's a push and a pull here so uh the pull is that these batteries operating at elevated temperature can cycle with very very high charging and discharging rates and they can also cycle deep discharge many times at thousands of cycles and without capacity fade in other words after we have data from from ambry after 5 000 cycles the batteries are still retaining 99 plus percent of their original uh charge so these are these are powerful advantages because if you if you put batteries on the grid you're not going to change them every two three years the way you do with your phone or your laptop computer you want to put them there for for 20 years and that means you have to have batteries that don't lose their capacity so so these are some of the advantages that you get from the liquid metal battery and also the price point is very very low but the other thing is the the disadvantages of lithium ion lithium ion works beautifully in in the small format but if you start putting hundreds of thousands of lithium-ion batteries in close proximity you're going to have to be very aggressive about thermal management because they're going to heat up and if they heat up they could go supercritical and burst into flame and so on there's an optimum application for uh these various battery chemistries and i think that when you go to grid level storage uh lithium-ion might not be the the best fit i mean we we see some evidence of lithium ion being deployed but um i think in terms of round trip efficiency and and safety and and long service lifetime i think liquid metal battery is a better fit that's a really interesting point because uh yeah we're thinking about like oh you got to keep these batteries warm but you're right we have to keep lithium ion batteries cooler that's correct so lithium lithium ion has a problem of thermal runaway um liquid metal we got to keep them from freezing so it's uh it's the the polar opposite but uh you know the worst thing happens if the lithium if the liquid metal freezes so what so we'll have to inject some heat and re-melt them and keep them moving if lithium ion gets too hot and bursts into flame there's no turning back on that one so i'd i'd rather be dealing with the cool down problem rather than the than the heat up problem so don let's talk about how your batteries actually work and we're lucky because you're a professor so you're good at explaining things so could you just kind of give us the broad overview of how your batteries work the way the liquid metal battery works is first of all you got to imagine what it looks like inside there's three layers there's a top layer which is a low density liquid metal and that's going to be the negative electrode and then underneath that is a molten salt which is the electrolyte and then beneath that is the high density liquid metal which is the positive electrode so you've got two electrodes separated by an electrolyte that's the workings of every battery and in this instance the metals are insoluble in the salt and the salt is insoluble in the metals so these three layers even though they're all liquid they don't mix they stratify sort of like salad oil and vinegar only in this case you have three layers not two the energy is stored in these uh liquid metal electrodes so when you go to discharge to discharge the battery you want to draw current you connect the electrodes across some load and some appliance what have you and the the way the current is generated the metal of the top electrode wants to alloy with the metal and the bottom electrode but i just told you they don't they're not soluble so the only way the metal from the top electrode can get to the bottom electrode is for the metal of the top electrode to become an ion so it becomes an ion and then the ion goes across the electrolyte and meets the positive electrode where the electrons that have been generated have gone through the external circuit and then they combine with the ion to make it into a neutral metal and now the top layer is getting thinner the bottom layer is getting thicker and that's how we generate the current and so then to do it in reverse i assume you instead of hooking it up to a load you hook it up to a power source and does everything just magically work backwards that's it exactly you force current through the system and when you force current through the system that prompts the bottom layer which is now the mixture of metals it prompts the metal that's normally in the top layer to jump back into the electrolyte swim to the top and recombine to regenerate the top layer and so this is tantamount to what we call in metallurgy electro refining and so you're going to purify the metal in the bottom layer and you're going to purify the electrolyte and you're going to reconstitute the top layer with high purity metal and so by charging the battery you essentially return it to its pristine initial state and maybe that accounts for why we can cycle these things for thousands of cycles without loss of capacity because there's no you know layers and rolls and uh you know all the complicated parts of a lithium-ion battery kind of just go away and you're left with a box with a bunch of molten metal in it that's correct the in the lithium-ion battery for example on discharge when the lithium ion enters the positive electrode there's something like lithium cobalt oxide lithium nickel oxide lithium manganese oxide and the lithium goes into that structure it causes a little bit of an expansion and then when we charge the battery uh the lithium leaves and then there's a little bit of a contraction and sort of like if you've ever taken a coat hanger and bent it back and forth a number of times you can do it and then after some point it snaps and that's exactly what happens inside the lithium-ion battery cycling leads to decrepitation of some of the particles in the positive electrode we don't have any of that because you know i like to say that liquids have no memory so all of this battery is working at elevated temperatures we're talking uh hundreds of degrees celsius so what happens if you don't keep heating it and it cools off is that bad uh yes and no uh if if it freezes then it won't be able to pass current but we've done many many tests that's part of the the testing routine is to see if it survives a freeze and thaw cycle and uh it will do so so so you might say well then you know how's this thing supposed to work then if if you got to keep it at temperature so imagine a duty cycle that involves say um four or five hours of discharge let's say it's paired to solar so the sun goes down and you still want to be able to draw electricity uh into the into the night and so you might want to have these things running for four or five hours and as the current is flowing through the external circuit there's also an ionic current flowing between the electrodes inside the cell and that ionic current generates heat desirably not like in lithium ion where you got to manage that heat in this case we want that heat and then the battery sits idle for say seven or eight hours and then sun comes up and you use some of the sunlight to recharge the battery and as you're recharging the battery ion flow again generates heat and so if we're clever about how we insulate the cells and by the way the battery has a plurality of cells there's hundreds of these cells in close proximity they will generate enough heat to heat their neighbors and then the ones on the periphery have insulation around them and with that kind of a duty cycle we can have these things run in perpetuity just heating themselves just through normal use discharge and charge so that's that's how the thing is right so this makes a lot of sense you had your first placement i think in a big uh scale use at a terrascale's data center in um is arizona or new mexico which is a hot state and that totally makes sense for your battery but what i'm wondering is why did they choose your battery over let's say the tesla battery like the one in hornsdale was it just because of the heat or is there some other reason well i think it's a combination uh the the fact that uh they're they're in the high desert um it means that just the the ambient temperature can already get up to 40 50 degrees celsius and for lithium ion if it gets if it gets above about 65 celsius you better start in a major intervention otherwise it could get too hot and then you could have thermal run away and fire so it really makes sense to to use a battery that that uh thrives in in the hot environment um and uh so i think that that was the the primary factor in their choice but also i mean it's it's the cost of ownership i mean you can say everything you want about the attributes of liquid metal battery but if it's priced uh way out of range then people are going to take deep gulp and and go with lithium-ion uh so it's it's a combination of performance requirements and uh and cost of ownership i i always like to talk about the price performance ratio and is this the kind of technology you like many that as you guys scale up the price so the battery is going to come down for sure for sure as you get beyond a certain output you really get to the economy of scale below that uh output uh you really have to struggle to amortize the capital cost of building the plant and and so on and so forth but like we're seeing with lithium-ion batteries do we need to worry about getting to scale in terms of materials like uh you know people are worried about are we going to have enough nickel and enough cobalt enough graphite to go into lithium-ion batteries is this a major concern for your batteries no and one of the um one of the principles that i uh adopted when we first started the work at at mit back in in the early 2000s around 2008 2009 was that i i thought about um scale right at the beginning so i i coined this term cost informed discovery in other words you don't you know the university model is invent the coolest chemistry and make it fantastic don't worry about cost make something that's going to get you into the high impact journals and so on and maybe you flip it over the transom and and give it to the manufacturing guys and let them chase down the cost curve and i i reasoned that that in this application that wouldn't be good enough you have to think about cost on day one and so i i said you know you have to think about the elements that are going to go into this battery so that it will be uh cost effective and part and parcel of that is the supply chain and so uh if if you make the battery out of exotic uh elements that come from uh remote parts of the world and uh in some cases uh they're not ethically sourced in some cases you've got concerns about uh political stability and so on then you're really building a rickety technology i like to say if you want to make something dirt cheap make it out of dirt and preferably dirt that's locally sourced so if i take a a shovel full of dirt out of my own backyard and put it on the lab bench and tell my students you got to make a battery out of what's in that pile of dirt i know that when we make a battery it's going to be dirt cheap and i got a secure supply chain so we thought about that from the beginning and if you take a look at the kinds of uh metals that we're working with the stuff that ambry's uh pursuing right now involves calcium and antimony and the the salt is calcium chloride which is road salt that's what we're throwing on the on the road uh today because i can see it's snowing right now and we'll be using calcium chloride on the on the sidewalks and on the roadways so we've given uh considerable thought to making sure that the constituents the components are earth abundant ethically sourced and with a secure supply chain right so to add on to your question jesse um you know are the materials abundant but when you get to like a lithium-ion battery you have to have like almost near perfect materials so you can't just throw any old lithium that you picked up off the ground you've got to get it to you know 99.9999 is that true in your battery as well do the materials have to be perfect no that's another thing that's a redeeming feature of the liquid metal battery obviously we don't we don't go out of our way to use uh heavily contaminated components but it turns out that uh by cycling uh going through the discharge and charge cycle as i mentioned earlier the charge cycle is tantamount to electoral refining so after a dozen or so cycles the impurities that would have been present in some of the constituents are going to get refined out and then the battery just hums along so i have this dream of one day hopefully soon of a virtual power plant across the world where there's not just these you know gigantic uh coal burning power plants but that we have you know solar on the roof we have wind turbines and then we have batteries everywhere does the ambry battery fit into that do you have that same feeling about the future what are your thoughts about the future of renewables well i think that uh renewables have a big role to play in the future and of course renewables the wind and solar are intermittent and so if we can't treat their intermittency they can't be fully integrated in a base load which means we're going to have to have something else and where we can have uh hydro and and nuclear they can they can fill those gaps but otherwise we're going to still have to rely on uh combustion of fossil fuels so i think batteries are a critical component in widespread adoption of renewables to to make us fully sustainable on a grid the end of life for batteries is a big problem especially with lithium-ion not too many people that we've talked to yet have come up with a great solution it seems like it's being a little bit kicked down the road um what is it like for your battery at end of life i know it's 20 years away but uh is it recyclable absolutely that's you know i i've just told you that the uh that when we charge a battery uh we're essentially running an electric refinery so let's say it's the end of life and by the way the the battery doesn't fade so so what's the end of life look like well the battery's been running at uh say 500 degrees celsius for for 20 years it's in a steel container maybe at some point just to be prudent we might say that let's shut these down and and and put them into new steel containers the steel that was used that can go into a electric arc furnace and be recycled and then the contents the liquid metals well obviously the metal at room temperature will be solid but but the two metals and and the salt that can all be recycled so you know it's not as though there's this uh colossal problem of disposal uh in point of fact uh the very high level of uh utilization and it's not repurposing in other words if you look at some polymers for example if you start off with a high highly functional polymer it it can't be re-melted because of the covalent bonds and so on so maybe it'll be shredded and turned into some other application but it sort of cascades down in utility the the liquid metal batteries will be reused as batteries so that once they enter the the uh the market they will come back as storage devices essentially in perpetuity i want to go back to the heat for a second i know it seems really obvious now that we should use these batteries in places where they already are hot environments like the high desert but in the future could we use these batteries in a place where we could use the heat so could we use them let's say in a you know in finland or alaska and then use the heat to help heat a building yeah in principle there there is heat that's being generated and we're trying to keep the heat from from escaping because we want to keep the batteries at temperature but if if you wanted to have a heat exchanger in with inside the the container that's a candidate for conversation i've also been approached by some people who have said well what about thermoelectrics you could take the heat and and use it to generate even more electricity and all of these things are up for discussion so one of the things that really fascinates me is the future and it sounds like your batteries are going to help be a part of that future and as we go forward i'm excited about you know people traveling to mars and establishing you know mars civilizations do you think that your battery would work on mars a little bit better than it would say a lithium-ion battery just because the materials might be a little bit easier to access and and refine uh it's it's funny you ask that question i've actually been thinking about batteries uh on extraterrestrial bodies and and using the same principles uh as a as i used here in other words uh uh if here i say this should be earth abundant and and uh ethically sourced and so on well then you know if i were required to build a battery that would function on mars uh would i do something similar in other words use resources that are available on mars that would give me a a battery and i've also been doing some some work recently thinking about battery design that would operate on the moon and uh and i'm not making this up i was approached by some nasa people last year they want to send a mission to venus it'll be geophysical they're going to land a device on venus and it's going to take geophysical data and they want to send information back to to earth and they need a power supply and the the surface of venus is 460 degrees celsius and uh it's super critical carbon dioxide so i mean it's it's co2 to be sure a supercritical co2 and they said what about liquid metal battery i said no problem so uh yeah the the whole idea of liquid metal battery is uh it's quite appealing to me when you developed your battery we were in the midst of i guess switching from nickel metal hydride to lithium ion batteries but your chemistry your idea is so far different than that where did you get your idea to do it this way this is probably around 2005 and uh you know lithium ion has uh starting to take hold uh in in applications for mobile devices cell phones and computers and people are starting to ask questions about massive storage and at the time at mit i had two major uh threads in uh applied electrochemistry one of them was batteries i'd done some work on early lithium polymer battery and then in the 2000s decided i was going to turn my attention to massive storage the other area that i worked in is in electrometallurgy in electrolytic extraction of metals aluminum magnesium titanium uh the alkali metals and all of this is high temperature liquid metals molten salts and so i i looked at an aluminum smelter and this is something that operates 24 7. it consumes huge amounts of electricity and in doing so turns uh aluminum oxide into liquid aluminum and uh it's got a molten salt as a solvent and i looked at that i said man if if i could figure out how to take that thing and not have it consume electricity but store electricity and then release that electricity on demand i know at the end of the day i'd have something that's massive and traffic's in large amounts of electricity and by the way you can turn dirt into metal for aluminum at less than 50 cents a pound so i know it'd be big and it would be cheap and so that was where i i got my inspiration from i didn't consult with the battery experts if i'd consulted with battery experts i would have ended up at the end of this uh same dead end as everybody else so i i looked outside the the field for inspiration and look for something that's that's massive and and traffic's in large amounts of electricity as opposed to everybody else who is looking at you know a double a cell and trying to figure out how to make it the size of a of a 40-foot shipping container you're in a really interesting position as a professor at mit i mean you're in an enviable position because you're around so many smart people you yourself but also your students who i imagine must be a huge source of inspiration for you and then talking about your company ambry you've got students who are now part of the company tell me what what's that like to go from being a professor to then a head of a company and running starting a company well it's it's very gratifying to uh first of all to work with young people you're absolutely correct these people are are bright and they also are highly motivated i mean the reason they the reason they joined my research group is that quite simply they just want to change the world that's all and so they're they're inspired they really want to do something significant it's not just a matter of getting another journal article published and so on so it's it's it's really fun and by the way i um when when i really expanded the effort around 2010 and my group swelled to i had over 20 people working for a number of years on the liquid metal battery and the vast majority of them were not electrochemists they had no prior experience with electrochemistry or liquid metals or molten salts they came to me they're bright i mean they're at mit but they were they were not the experts they were the anti-experts and these people they brought fresh perspective and and it was a joy to work with them and then several of my uh former students who were working on this project came to me and said we have to start a company and we want to get the technology into the hands of the public we want science and service to society and we have to have a company so okay i was persuaded we started the company but i very quickly uh empowered the people at the company to to run with it i'm not there on a regular basis micromanaging and so on i i believe in in fostering the young people and fostering the technology so there are two outcomes from the research you get the the technology product and you get the new people so i talk about uh inventing inventors and and so with that is the backdrop uh at ambry you know i i make uh i make appearances infrequently these people are in charge so you have this battery it's it sounds pretty simple i take a bunch of stuff put it into a box heat up the box get myself some electricity sounds pretty easy what's stopping anyone from doing this this is i mean you can start a battery company now you just put some uh wait what do you put some you know calcium antimony in the thing get some you know some salt but a bing but a boom i got myself a battery yeah i thought the same thing but that was 10 years ago and uh so it's a long let's just say it's a long road from the lab bench to the marketplace and so we were able to demonstrate the technology at the at the size of a of a coffee cup at mit but now to be able to build these things reliably you know to six sigma reliability we had to invent not only the battery but also the battery manufacturing and there was nobody to turn to we could take the smartest people in the world who make the best lithium-ion batteries most efficiently and they would look at what we have to do and say i can't help you because the lithium-ion battery is so different from what we have and so we in in 2010 were where lithium-ion was in 1990 and look at lithium-ion 1990 2000 2010 2020. 30 years hence for the first time we see lithium-ion batteries that are coming down to the price of and the vicinity of a hundred dollars per kilowatt hour well i started in 2010 i've only been at this for 10 years it it shows you just how difficult it is to break into this area we call this tough tech this is tough tech this is not like writing code writing code is just time on task you'll get there this we have to invent the manufacturing process the manufacturing machinery and on and on and on and that's why it's such a long journey so donna what is the road map going forward for ambry um i know we have a lot of investors watching the show right now who are probably pretty excited if they could get in on investing are you planning on an ipo at some point uh what what are what are the plans at the moment uh there's a fundraise in in progress uh i don't i don't believe that any anybody is talking about ipo uh but uh there's uh a fundraise to take us to the next stage hopefully this this will be the last major fundraise which will allow us to uh produce uh product and get it into uh first customer hands um and so uh if if people want uh they should contact ambry and hopefully we'll finish this job it's a big journey and i would like to see us across the finish line soon that's really exciting i mean it's exciting to hear that customers can now start reaching out to you and i mean just like you know terrascale did maybe start getting ambry batteries into their you know prod into their you know grid storage or into their data servers because i mean what a great way to get ourselves off of fossil fuels i agree i agree uh the battery is the uh is the missing piece and uh without storage uh all of the other efforts at uh intermittent uh carbon-free renewables uh will come to a grinding halt so um i see a a need and i want to to meet that need all right so don we're just uh up the road from you uh because you're down in marlborough mass uh maybe when coverts all over we could uh come take a visit jesse basically wants to steal one of your batteries and put it on the set i think is what he's driving at yeah that's that's pretty much what i want i want to have a battery it doesn't have to be a temperature or anything but i definitely want to have one it would just be so cool well i think you have an open invitation once once we get this covered business behind us uh by all means uh come to come to ambry and uh we'll show you how the how the sausage is made that's exciting thank you so much i can't wait you're welcome [Music] you

Channel: Disruptive Investing

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Keywords: disruptive, investing, stock market, stocks, stock exchange, new york, usa, companies, startup, invest, what to invest in, future, technologies, tech, company, disruptive investing, club, top, investments, money, save, bank, growth, exponential, science, sustainability, ambri, Co-Founder, Chief Scientific Advisor, liquid metal battery, Donald Sadoway, MIT, professor of Materials Science, sustainable

Id: ZRyo0Nr7CrY

Length: 32min 33sec (1953 seconds)

Published: Fri Mar 19 2021

Reddit Comments

[u/What_year_is-it]

This video is amazing. It's great that someone can explain all the aspects of their company and their product even in terms of the supply chain in a way where you really know that they know what they're doing. I love this video.