MIT professor: this new battery could change the world, these metals needed

[Applause] what is the future of energy usage and how will the metals and mining industry adapt joining me today is donald sadaway professor of materials chemistry at mit he has been named one of times 100 most influential people professor satterway welcome back to the show thank you for joining me today pleasure to be here i want to talk about first and foremost your work on renewable energy and battery technology you've talked about the problem with solar wind power and their inter intermittency and you've worked on solutions to this problem can you tell us a little bit more about your research in this area yeah so the research was focused on developing a new battery chemistry um you know people are obviously familiar with lithium ion and it's a fantastic battery does given us so much in the modern world with handheld devices and now is migrating into automotive applications but when it came to massive storage i reasoned we needed something different uh something that uh would operate at uh large scale uh safely uh without fear of fire and uh has to have long long service lifetime and um and it has to be cheap and so uh i set out to find a new chemistry and um and that led to the invention of the liquid metal battery and it doesn't use uh lithium or the various components that we find in the positive electrode like cobalt oxide nickel oxide and things like that and um so that was that was the effort that i made yeah so let's talk about that battery because when you uh when you invented that uh with your team at mit uh what were the industrial applications that you had in mind for this invention well i wanted something that was versatile and could go wherever you needed to have the gap bridged when there's uh sun isn't shining and the wind isn't blowing um and so it it could go anywhere where it's stationary applications this isn't for anything that's moving so it could be for a hospital manufacturing facility for a subdivision of say several hundred homes the people have asked me would it operate uh as small enough to be serviceable in a single family home and um i'm not so sure i think it's it's more for massive storage yeah looking more at the bigger picture now professor would you say the underlying problems that you're aiming to fix would be more climate change or is it more uh energy dependence from a geopolitical standpoint well i think the two are linked um from my perspective if if if we want to get uh get away from burning fossil fuel to generate electricity a big component of that is going to involve uh intermittent renewables like wind and solar and those things are not useful if uh if they're intermittent so i i chose to address that problem so in doing so in indirectly i'm i'm looking at the climate change question as well do you think our society is headed in the right direction when you look at uh still the dominance of fossil fuels in most most aspects of their lives but also the emergence of renewable technology particularly within the automotive sector are we headed in the right direction do you think well i think that uh what we want to do is to have a balance here i mean we're not ready to totally abandon the use of fossil fuels um but if we we start looking at moving forward if if we can get uh our automotive propulsion uh all electric uh that's competitive you know i for me it's it's all about giving people uh technology that enhances the quality of life and does so at a competitive price point i've been very very uh strict with my team about not inventing something that's super expensive but uh [Music] gets you into the journal but uh it's it's never going to get into customer hands so um i i say let's let's see where this goes professor do you think it's ever possible for america to achieve carbon neutrality sure it's possible um with renewables and with hydro and with nuclear it is it is possible um is it possible uh the question is uh at what at what price point and uh that that's something that you know if you pull people and you say would you prefer to have uh a green electricity or electricity that's generated by burning fossil fuel most of them will say oh it'd be better to have green but then when you say well um how much more are you willing to pay for the green electricity you're going to find that the number is pretty small so uh yeah it comes down to the economics exactly like you said where where is it where is the impetus and the funding going to come from primarily from the public sector or uh private institutions oh i think i think it has to come from the the private sector um you can do little things to to try to jump start an initiative but long-term stability is going to rely on uh the the new capacity i i'm not suggesting that people are going to take a wrecking ball to everything that consumes fossil fuels but in time when we need to build more capacity to to feed the growing demand for electricity and when certain fossil fuel plants are up for retirement then the economics are going to dictate does it make sense to build a brand new coal-fired power plant today or would it make sense to resort to some other form of electric power generation uh i'm not suggesting that all of a sudden there be some government prohibition on further use of any form of energy generation as long as as long as it's competitive and it's compliant with the the environmental uh regulations let the market decide what do you think of uh generally the popularization of electric vehicles like tesla and tesla's new gigafactory the one of the criticisms that's prominent in media today is the fact that yes electric vehicles do reduce carbon emissions in our environment but the base electricity is produced using non-renewable sources and so what you're actually doing is you're increasing the demand for carbon generated electricity co-generated electricity which also pollute the environment how would you respond to that well it's true that uh if if you drive an all-electric vehicle in in a sector of the country where the electricity is generated by burning coal um there there's no advantage in in doing so um so i think this is a you know it's it's an evolutionary uh process it's not as of midnight december 31st everybody's switching over to 100 renewable generation and 100 electrification of the of the fleet um but uh you know in time uh where we do have the combination of the uh carbon free generation of electricity when you're up in montreal you've got a super abundance of hydroelectric power um and that's a that's a fantastic place to be all electric um so i think that there will be a pecking order where there are places where it makes the most sense because the economics are most favorable and then it'll eventually spread what are your thoughts of an energy super grid that will connect different nodes of renewable energy production from one side of a continent to another through long distance power lines would that be a feasible solution in the future well you know people have talked about high voltage uh long distance power and uh there there certainly are improvements um but uh when you start talking about transcontinental um there there still are resistive losses over those long distances but uh you know if if you want that to happen i mean why stop a transcontinental why not go halfway around the world and the answer is you have to get rid of the resistive losses to which i say all right give me some research funding and we'll discover room temperature super conductivity and with that we can send electricity anywhere on the planet with zero losses so you think improved battery performance is still the priority right now on an industry level well it's it's a priority where you want to install intermittent renewables no question okay and uh in terms of the composition of these metals these batteries what are the metals that are required for let's say just your uh your invention of the um liquid metal battery and uh second part of the question would be what are some of the metals you see would have increased demand as a result of higher capacity of batteries in the future so uh first part of the question we've we've deployed a variety of chemistry so the liquid metal battery is uh uh not just a single battery but it's a battery platform and so we've got uh options uh for different choices for the for the electrodes uh and then that informs the choice for the electrolyte so we've worked with um uh various metals if you saw in my ted talk i talked about magnesium and antimony um and there have been some others we played with lithium and bismuth and so on but right now what uh what ambry is uh on the path to manufacture is a battery that has the negative electrode is made of calcium which is very uh earth abundant and so on and then the positive electrode is antimony and so if for the second part of your question if i understood it correctly it was about uh what uh what the pulls are going to be active on the mining industry as the electrification uh continues as we know it right now well uh as we know the the dominant battery by far is lithium ion there are variants of it but it's it's it's lithium ion and so in the in the negative electrode that's that's going to be uh a a carbon host graphite host we hear talk about silicon and so on but we're not seeing a lot of penetration on that one so there's graphite is definitely going to be uh needed for the foreseeable future and uh on the positive electrode uh there are various combinations of nickel oxide uh cobalt oxide uh manganese oxide aluminum oxide people want to get rid of the cobalt to get the cobalt down to as low as they can it seems they've got it down to about 10 percent but they don't have much luck getting below 10 because then the performance falls off but there's an increasing demand on nickel um and so that that's what i see in in the foreseeable future finally professor i want to get your take on whether or not america as a whole is ready to embrace the challenges of electrification do you think there's a lot of resistance from the government level um in terms of accepting this change that you're talking about no i don't i don't see i don't see resistance um i i see that the government doesn't want to be involved in uh refereeing what choices are made i i think that you know what we're reading quite a bit about these days is a number of startups here in the united states that are focused on trucks everything from delivery trucks to pickup trucks and so on and you know if you get adopters like amazon fedex ups if they start deploying uh electric trucks and they discover that uh it's profitable to do so then you will see people taking them freely it's it it all comes down to the economic incentive so so you don't think that the government should be providing an incentive because i know for for china for example they provided subsidies for electric vehicles should we be doing something similar to the united states i'm not comfortable with um uh incentives in the form of uh these subsidies or rebates and so on um i i think that the the change should take place by market forces where the the technology becomes superior and uh it becomes competitive to buy an all-electric vehicle versus a vehicle with an internal combustion engine so i i favor that professor stadway i want to thank you so much for coming on the show today and um giving us your insights thank you for your time my pleasure and thank you for watching keco news we'll have more coverage for you at the mines money online conference stay tuned you

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Id: BiPly5Ne4uU

Length: 14min 30sec (870 seconds)

Published: Sat Sep 05 2020