Sponsored by SurfShark VPN. Click on the link in the description and enter
promo code UNDECIDED for 83% off and 3 extra months for FREE! From smartphones and laptops to the rapidly
growing EV market, we need an incredible amount of lithium ion batteries to make it all work. Which highlights a little problem. Are there enough materials to make them? Materials like lithium are difficult and time
consuming to extract and can have a major impact on the environment. Can nanotechnology solve our lithium extraction
and mining problem? And maybe even help with solid state batteries? I'm Matt Ferrell ... welcome to Undecided. For EV enthusiasts like myself, we can sometimes
get caught up in the benefits of going electric. You're no longer burning fossil fuels to operate
your car. Or you have solar on your home and are storing
excess energy in a home battery for later use. It's all great, right? Well, that's precisely the problem ... demand
is outstripping supply. Our need for energy storage is growing dramatically. Lithium-ion battery demand is expected to
increase more than 10 fold by 2029 and lithium supply is expected to triple by 2025. That increased demand puts pressure on the
entire supply chain for battery production, which is causing a new gold rush, but this
time for materials like lithium and nickel. I recently had a chance to talk to Teague
Eagan, the CEO of a small company that's looking to make a big difference by using some fascinating
nanotechnology. He put the scale of the demand between what
we've seen with consumer electronics to where it's going really well. "...To put that into perspective, it takes
10,000 iPhones to build one car battery, right?" "So if you're talking about producing a million
cars, which is essentially happening right now, we're producing more than that per year,
about 2 million, that's the equivalent of 10 billion iPhones, right?" "And this is the beginning. Mercedes, BMW, makes an electric car, but
GMC, Ford, Volkswagen, everybody is like, 'We're coming.' Now we're talking about a trillion iPhones
worth of batteries." -Teague Eagan That really puts in perspective where things
are going and the scale needed to supply our battery addiction. While mining for lithium, nickel and other
materials for batteries may feel like we're just trading drilling for oil with digging
for metals and salts, there's a big difference. Once you drill and then burn fossil fuels,
they're gone forever. Dig up lithium, nickel, or aluminum for a
battery and you can recharge it thousands of times ... and even recycle it for use in
new batteries. So it's already a big step in the right direction,
but there's still big improvements we can make on getting it out of the ground. Today there are two basic ways we get lithium. Mining from ore, which is known as spodumene,
or using brine salt pools for lithium extraction. "There's two ways to produce lithium. And one way actually is kind of lithium mining. What the average consumer would think of as
a big open pit kind of copper mining scenario. In Australia, that is the typical way that
they mine for lithium. The other way is extracting lithium from salt
brine. Ocean water is 3% salinity. The brines that we extract the lithium from
is 30% salinity." "They pump up this really salty water from
a subsurface, and they put it into these massive evaporation ponds that are literally tens
of square miles big, bigger than the City of Manhattan. And they let the sun evaporate the 70% H2O,
the water part. And then the salts precipitate out one by
one. And they have a series of these ponds because
once a salt precipitates, they move all of the brine to the next pond, and then scoop
out the salt from the first one. And then the second salt precipitates out. And it goes down the system to the end where
the lithium is concentrated up enough that they can crystallize it and have 99.9% pure
lithium." -Teague Eagan 8:55 Most of this is happening in a handful of
countries like Bolivia, Argentina, Chile, Australia, and China. And the brine extraction method makes up about
70% of the world's lithium. In Latin America you're talking about 750
tons of brine. But the craziest part of the brine method
is that it can take between 6 - 24 months to produce the final product and they only
recover about 30% of the lithium. Not to mention that it's a water intensive
process because you're pulling water from below the surface and using chemical processes. Not only can this lead to chemicals getting
back into the groundwater, but it can reduce the amount of water available for others in
the area. So what do we do? Nanotechnology to the rescue! Seriously though, I've talked a lot about
different forms of nanotechnology and how it's impacting solar and energy storage, and
this is another great example of how it's being applied to the mining industry. As a quick refresher, [nanotechnology](https://www.nano.gov/nanotech-101/what/definition)
refers to our ability to study and engineer technologies at a nanoscale, which is the
range from 1 to 100 nanometers. A nanometer is one billionth of a meter ... or
[one millionth of a millimeter](https://www.forbes.com/sites/jimhandy/2011/12/14/how-big-is-a-nanometer/#4c6c791e6fb0). For a sense of scale a human hair is around
75,000 nanometers wide. Within the realm of nanotech is something
called a Metal Organic Framework, or MOF. Teague's company, EnergyX, is specializing
in using MOFs for lithium extraction. "An MOF is a nanoparticle that we discovered
can achieve these incredible separations. They have very small pore sizes and what they
are is they're metal nodes like zirconium or aluminum. These are metals on the periodic table that
are connected by organic linkers, like a carbon linker that connects these metal nodes. And they have very high internal surface areas. And they have very small pore sizes where
a lithium can pass through, but a larger divalent ion like a magnesium or calcium is rejected
because it can't pass through and they work in two ways. One is through this size sieving effect that
I just described. The other is through kind of an electrochemical
affinity between the metal node and the passing ion. Like lithium wants to pass through, and has
a very good transport rate where some of the other ones don't want to pass through and
are flushed out to the side." -Teague Eagan 23:56 MOFs were pioneered in the late 1990's by
Prof. Omar Yaghi at UC Berkeley. Since then researchers have discovered more
than 90,000 different MOF structures and that number is continuing to grow. Teague built EnergyX from research at the
University of Texas, and in Australia, Monash University and CSRO. Dr. Huanting Wang's MOF research at Monash
University was combined with Dr. Bennie Freeman's membrane research at the University of Texas. So how does EnergyX's use of MOFs compare
to the mining industry's normal approach? "They only recover about 30 to 50% of the
available lithium because it's an inexact science, you're moving millions of tons of
brine from pond to pond letting the sun evaporate, letting the salt precipitate, and lithium
ends up co-precipitating with magnesium. And this is a huge problem because you need
the lithium to be 99.9% pure. You can't have any magnesium." "They need to concentrate it up to a pretty
high level in order to final process it into the lithium. And they lose all this lithium during the
pond system, during the 18 months." "70% loss is unfathomable in any other industry. That was the main problem that we wanted to
address." -Teague Eagan So how does a 90% recovery rate sound in comparison? It's not just more efficient at extraction,
but it's very flexible in how you can integrate it into existing mining infrastructure. "The way that our generation one works is
that we go right before that lithium magnesium coprecipitation, which is about three ponds
into the sequence, put our membranes that separate the lithium from the magnesium so
we don't lose any lithium." "You need to provide value to your customer. Totally replacing the ponds does not provide
value at this point. Our generation one provides value that they
want and need. And once we have maximized the capacity of
the ponds and they can't produce any more lithium out of the ponds and demand is still
growing and they want to bring on new capacity, then we can introduce our generation two,
which is a full, complete system that doesn't need the ponds." -Teague Eagan Taking the approach of layering in this technology
into existing processes reduces the capital expense of setting it up, and it doesn't disrupt
the costly infrastructure that's already there. Companies will get a huge uptick in efficiency
now and still scale down the road without having to build out more brine pools ... eventually
... hopefully without any. One thing that's always fascinated me about
technologies and breakthroughs like graphene, MOFs, you name it, is how long it seems to
take for these breakthroughs to come to market. I didn't used to understand the difficulty
going from lab to product, but the more of these videos I make and the more people I
talk to, it's become very clear to me that's it's crazy difficult to make that jump. I no longer ask, "where's my flying car?" Teague's been experiencing that first hand. "Oh man, when you say I'm experiencing it
first hand, you are spot on. When I read that first paper, this is my first
rodeo, I like doing this kind of stuff. I read that first paper. I said, "This is ready to go, let's sign up
the biggest customers, we'll be commercial at one year." "It's a painful process, discovering that
small thing on an academic level that is 1 millionth the ... when we first discovered
that metal organic frameworks could do these separations with one metal organic framework. We literally etched a pore into a solid membrane
that had no other holes and grew one metal-organic framework in one pore and witnessed that it
was allowing lithium through and not magnesium." "And then the paper comes out and it's metal-organic
frameworks, the next miracle material. And they're really talking about one, which
is ... I think a human hair is 200 microns or something. These are a thousandth the size of a human
hair. And so to scale that up into something where
you have millions of metal-organic frameworks and millions of square meters of membrane,
it's a hard process, right?" -Teague Eagan But EnergyX is doing it. They're pushing to make this technology a
reality, which has so much potential for future variations ... it goes way beyond lithium. But before I get to that, I’d like to thank
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supporting the channel. So where else can MOFs go? How about improving health and saving lives. "The other kind of cool thing about this is
that, although lithium is our first targeted material that we kind of tune and customize
these MOF for, they're infinitely customizable. So you can add little pendant groups or different
types of linkers that shrink the hole, or create different affinities and do different
types of separations. One separation that we saw other than lithium
was the separation fluorine and chlorine. And this happens to be a very important separation
in the country of India, their water infrastructure. They have really high amounts of fluoride
and fluorine, and that is detrimental for the bones. And people are drinking these and getting
all sorts of bone disease and bone decay. And if you can have a filter, a filtration
system except that lets the water and chloride pass through and stop the fluorine, that's
important." -Teague Eagan "So basically this could be evolved into any
number of other technologies like desalination plants, water purification." -Matt Ferrell "Exactly." -Teague Eagan "There's a lot of potential for taking this
technology and scaling it beyond just lithium extraction." -Matt Ferrell "Huge potential. We're focused on lithium, but you can think
about the agricultural industry, pharmaceutical industry, water infrastructure industry." -Teague Eagan And one of the additional uses for MOFs is
something that Teague brought up in our conversation, and one that I'm pretty passionate about ... solid
state batteries. "...if we have this solid membrane that is
separating and transporting lithium through it with such high efficiency, I wonder how
using that same membrane in a battery would work because in a battery architecture, you
have your anode and you have your cathode, and then you have a separator, which is right
now, a liquid state electrolyte." "And it just so happens that at the University
of Texas, Dr. John Goodenough is in the lab right next door to Bennie Freeman. So I said what better person to try this hypothesis
than one of the top battery researchers in the world. We were able to partner with his lab and we
work with some of his PhD students. We're going through iterations of tweaking
it and figuring out some things that could make our membrane into a very high quality,
solid state electrolyte." -Teague Eagan Clearly, it's very early days in the research
aspect of that, but it's another great example of where this technology could go. We're still in the early days of nanotechnologies
like graphene and MOFs, but they are shaping up to have a big impact on EVs, renewable
energy, energy storage, and mining. So what do you think of MOFs and this type
of tech? Jump into the comments and let me know. If you liked this video be sure to check out
one of the ones I have linked right here. Be sure to subscribe and hit the notification
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and to all of you for watching. I’ll see you in the next one.
