[APPLAUSE] Thank you so much it's
an enormous pleasure to be here tonight with
you and to give you a brief overview of some
lithium ion battery work and just a little bit of
a history of lithium ion batteries. And where best to start but
with the immortal words of Julie Andrews? We should start at
the very beginning, because it's a very
good place to start. The big bang. So this is the moment at
which the universe as we know it was born, and the
moment at which each one of us was connected to
each other atomically and to the rest of the
universe atomically. One of the fundamental
laws is the first law of thermodynamics, and
it really thinks big, that the amount of energy
needs to remain constant. It says that the energy
cannot be made or destroyed, but it can be converted
from one form to another. And it's this idea of
conversion of energy that brings us here tonight to
discuss devices like batteries that allow us to store
energy in a chemical form and then transform that chemical
energy into electrical energy as and when we need it. So before we delve into the
geography of battery cells, let's take just a
short history of how these batteries were developed. So the term battery was first
coined by Benjamin Franklin, and it was in the backdrop
of this US independence that there was an
experiment carried out that really shocked the world. Galvani, an Italian
scientist, had long thought that there was a
sort of link between movement and electricity. And in one of his
experiments, he connected a lightning rod to
a frog's leg and then waited. And when lightning struck
that rod, the leg moved. And this really shook
the scientific world, and it also influenced
Mary Shelley at the time, who was writing
her novel, Frankenstein. Now it was shortly
after this that Volta started thinking
about, OK, Galvani thinks that this electricity
is intrinsic to this frog. What about this electricity
being intrinsic to metals? And he started looking at
combining different metals together, connecting them,
metals like iron and zinc together to see if you could
elicit some electrical current. And sure enough, he did. And it was this discovery
of bi-metallic electricity that formed the basis for his
innovation, the Voltaic Cell. This is a picture
of a Voltaic pile, and this is housed here
at the Royal Institution. And this inspired
Michael Faraday, who looked at voltaic piles and
started to construct his own. And in his first experiment
that was noted here at the Royal Institution, he
constructed a voltaic pile from Halfpenny coins. And in 1814, Faraday
visited Volta in Italy, and Volta presented him
with a voltaic pile, which is the one that's housed
here at the Royal Institution. And it's such a
beautiful example of shared scientific
discovery and knowledge. Around about the
same time again at the Royal Institution
was the first isolation of metallic lithium. Lithium, this is the name that
gives itself to the lithium ion batteries that we use today. And at the same time in
history, electromagnetism was taking off. And inspired by this, Faraday
looked into electromagnetism in a bit more detail. Conducted a lot of experiments
to try and understand this in a bit more detail. And in one of his experiments
which I just show here, he had a long wire that
was sitting inside a glass vessel that had a little bit
of mercury metal in the bottom. And on the bottom of
that glass vessel, there was a magnetic bar. And by connecting this set
up to an external battery and charging the electricity
through that wire, that set up a magnetic
field along that wire. And that magnetic field
interacted with that bar magnet, and that
set up this wire to move in a cyclical motion. And that was the birth of
the first electric motor. Following on from that, there
were further discoveries in batteries from John Daniell,
a British scientist who had made the first Daniell
cell, and then following on from that was the discovery
of the first rechargeable led acid battery, and
this was by Plante, and this was used to
light lights and carriages at the time. And of course now in cars,
it's used for ignition as well. It was Faraday who
had really looked at this link between
chemistry and electricity. And looking at the work that he
did and the work from Coulomb, we can really start to
understand electricity and chemistry and start
to think about things in a quantitative way. Here, I've just shown an
image of Faraday's lab here at the Royal Institution,
and also a picture of Faraday giving his Christmas
lecture in this spot, because I thought that
was a really sweet picture to show tonight. So Faraday through his
laws of electrolysis had looked at how we can
think about electricity and think about the
mass of materials that are involved in these
sorts of transformations and electrolysis. And from that, we can work
out quantitative information about our batteries, for example
the capacity of the battery. We can think of that as
a measure of the charge that the battery can store. And this really depends
on the mass of what we call active materials. These active materials are
things like electrodes, and it was Faraday that gave
us those names, cathode, anode, ions, cations, anions,
and electrolytes. We can think of capacity as sort
of the maximum amount of energy that can be extracted
from a battery under certain
conditions, and we can measure this in a number
of different ways, and we're going to
hear about that later in some of the next talks. And in our own
labs today, we use Faraday's Law of
electrolysis to work out what the theoretical capacity
of the battery material may be, and we strive to work
towards achieving that theoretical capacity. So tonight's talks
are really focused on lithium ion batteries and
lithium ion battery chemistry, so we should look back over some
of the key papers that brought about this wonderful
discovery that powers our electric
vehicles increasingly, our portable electronics. And one of the first
publications here that I'm showing is from
Lewis, a very famous chemist, who had looked at the potential
of the lithium electrode. And some work had been
started then in 1913 on lithium batteries, but the
first lithium ion batteries were not commercialised
until the 1970s. In the 1970s, there was
the first publication of electrointercalation,
so the movement of lithium ions into and out of a material. This is by Stanley
Whittingham, who looked at titanium
disulfide materials. This was very quickly followed
by the pioneering work of John Goodnough, who had
discovered lithium cobalt oxide, a material that's
still used in our batteries today which facilitates
the movement of lithium into and out of
these structures. He'd done this work at
the University of Oxford at the Inorganic
Chemistry Laboratory, which you can visit and see this
blue plaque dedicated to him. And in the 1990s, Sony
commercialised lithium cobalt oxide batteries. Very quickly followed reports
of spinel type materials, manganesium spinels
and iron based phospho-olivine materials,
and this research area remains extremely vibrant
and exciting even today. So let's look at a lithium ion
battery cell in a little bit more detail, and we can break it
down into its component parts. So this is a picture
of a typical coin cell, which you may have
seen in some of your devices. It's made up of a
cathode, which is our positive end of the
battery, an anode, which is the negative end,
and then there's a separator that
keeps the two apart. And between those,
there's something called an electrolyte. We can understand what
each of these components does if we start to hook this
up to an external circuit. So this is my imaginary battery
and my cathode, my anode, and my electrolyte. So I have my positive cathode
and my negative anode hooked up to an electrical
circuit, and that permits this flow of
electrons around the circuit. And because of the
chemical reactions that are going on
inside this battery, you end up getting a buildup
of electrons at that anode. The electrolyte plays a
hugely important role. It doesn't allow electrons
to move from that anode across to the cathode. So the electrons are
forced out of that cell around this external circus. And on that journey, they
can start to power things that they're hooked up
to, like for example this light bulb that we have. So the electrons move
around that external circuit and perform their function. What does the
electrolyte do, then? The electrolyte is what
permits the flow of lithium ions in a lithium ion battery. So it's ionically conducting
but electronically insulating. If we look in detail at this
kind of cathode material, this is called lithium
nickel manganese cobalt oxide, which is a
bit of a mouthful, so we call it NMC for short. And the little letters that
are after its name tell you a little bit about the
makeup of that material, so how much nickel there is,
how much manganese there is, and how much cobalt there is. And this is a material
that's currently used in electric vehicle batteries. Each one of those elements
plays a specific role in that battery. The nickel increases
the capacity. Remember, that's the charge
that a battery can store. But when you increase
that nickel content, there are some challenges
and complexities in the synthesis
of these materials. The manganese provides
structural stability, but it does so at the expense
of the capacity of the battery. Then finally, we've got
cobalt, which improves the rate performance, but as we're going
to hear later on, is costly and there are ethical
concerns with mining cobalt. So let's look in a
little bit of detail about how lithium ions move
in these battery materials. So this is my NMC material. I've just blown up the
structure a little bit more, so you can see these layers
of transition metal oxide. And these green dots
here are my lithium ions. So this is my cathode
material, and then on this side here, I've got my
anode material. And a very typical
anode material that's used in modern
batteries is graphite. Graphite, again because of
that lovely layered structure, it allows the movement
of lithium ions in between those layers. So during charge,
we start to see the movement of those lithium
ions from that cathode across to our anode. And they move through
that electrolyte. And then during discharge,
the lithium binds then can move from
the anode back across through the electrolyte,
and into our NMC structure again. And that movement
of lithium ions and the movement of electrons
in that external circuit, the electrons are moving
in the opposite direction, these two things
are interconnected. If you don't have one,
you can't have the other. So for example, if
your lithium ions stop moving because your
battery's discharged, no more electrons in
the external circuit. How do we know where
all these atoms are? I've shown this beautiful
picture of all these atoms perfectly arranged. It's hugely beneficial
in the UK that we have these wonderful resources
like the ISIS neutron and muon source and the
diamond light source. This is where we use
neutrons and high energy x-rays to interrogate the
structure of materials, and we can work out where
in space all of these atoms are lying. We can determine if atoms are
sitting in the right place, or sometimes they may
sit-in the wrong place. So over time,
lithium and nickel-- I didn't show this in the image,
but lithium and nickel ions are very similar in size. And you may have
noticed when you buy a new device that
your battery works really, really well. But a year or two
later, the performance isn't as good as it used to be. And that's because over
time, those electrodes start to degrade a little bit. Atoms start moving into
the wrong positions. Your electrode materials
start to crack. You start to just
get the breakdown of your material over time. So what can we do
to try and mitigate these degradation processes? Well, when we look towards the
next generation of lithium ion battery materials and when we
look at cathodes in particular, where are we moving to? We can increase the nickel
content of these battery materials to try and
up that capacity, try and reduce the cobalt, maybe
even completely eliminate it. We can try to discover
even new materials, and we can do that
by combining things like computational
insights from calculations with some synthetic
design procedures and try and come up with
a new family of materials. We can design
strategies and develop strategies that avoid
degradation and prolong battery life. And how do we do that? Well, sometimes we can
form a protective coating around our NMC
material, and that will protect it from
some harmful species that might erode it over time. Or we can start as crystal
chemistry engineers, we can start to mess around
with atoms that are present, take one or two out,
and replace them with an element that
might keep that framework structure nice and stable
over multiple cycles. We could also look at
making our batteries safer. These electrolytes that I've
talked about up to now are liquid based
electrolytes, and that's what's in your mobile
phones and your laptops. We could maybe move from
liquid electrolyte systems to solid electrolytes
and ceramics that provide greater
safety and allow you to operate at higher voltages. So as we're moving to these
next generation of lithium ion cathodes, we have
to start to think about where we're
going to source these raw materials from. And I think this
is the perfect time to start handing
over to Simon, who's going to discuss the source of
materials in a bit more detail. Thank you. [APPLAUSE] Thank you very much. [APPLAUSE] I'm going to talk about the rise
of the battery megafactories. It sounds grandiose,
but it's been a trend that has kind of
been unbelievable to watch the last four years
for benchmark. And that's where as
a publishing company, we spend all of our
time in the supply chain from the mine to
the battery cell, collecting data and
advising these companies. So big statement number one-- we are in the midst of a
global battery arms race. Again, sounds over the
top, but it doesn't even begin to start to scratch
the surface of what's been happening with the build
out of global lithium ion battery capacity in the wake
of what people call the energy storage revolution,
which really is pure electric vehicles and
energy storage systems, off grid energy storage systems. For this, I'll take you
back to 2012, actually. Show of hands, how many people
here know the name Elon Musk? Hands up. Five years ago, that
would be 10 people. I guarantee it. So Elon Musk, who is the
CEO of Tesla, back in 2012 got on a plane to
go to Japan to see the world's biggest lithium ion
battery producer, Panasonic. And he went to very conservative
Japan, very conservative battery company,
to ask them nicely to expand their capacity
by fourfold in three years just so he has enough batteries
to make electric vehicles that no one buys yet. What he wanted to do was sell. He tried to convince
them he would sell pure electric vehicles
in the hundreds of thousands a year when they were being
sold in single digit thousands back then. Really, it was only the
Nissan LEAF back in 2012. He came back, he wasn't
successful, surprise surprise, and he devised a plan called
the Tesla Gigafactory, which is essentially
building the world's entire supply of batteries
under one roof just for Tesla back in 2013, 2012. Well, in Q1, the
plan was underway, and that sparked what we
call this battery arms race, this race to build
out enough capacity for this next generation
of vehicles and storage. Well today, we've
got 72 mega factories in the pipeline, that's in
a three and 1/2 year period really, and that equates
to 1.59 gigawatt hours. I'll go into a bit
more detail on that. In a chart form, this
is what's happening now. You've got gigawatt
hours on the left. And gigawatt hours is a
way of quantifying really-- it's energy storage,
but it's a way of quantifying how many
batteries these plants can produce. It's important to
know of the 72, about 40 already
are in production at multi gigawatt hours scale. That is an order of magnitude
bigger than their predecessors. So these battery plants
are significantly bigger than what was being built just
for your mobile phones, which makes sense really
when you think a car is much bigger than a phone. This is where we're
going by 2023. This is where we're going by
2028, and more of these plants are being announced as we speak. One last week was
announced in India, which we haven't got on this chart. So that will intensify as the
world needs more batteries. How many electric cars,
pure electric vehicles does that equate to? It's about 22 to 24 million. So when you look at
these big announcements-- VW this morning
announced that they want to build 70 now
pure electric vehicle models by 2028-- you realise that that
isn't a lot of batteries. We're going to need a lot more. So this is the
Tesla Gigafactory. You've got on the right is
a picture-- we were there last week, actually. So the picture on the
right is actually Casper. I don't know where he is. He's here today somewhere. Here is Casper. For scale, Casper is
about seven foot tall. So you can see it's a
big plant, effectively. But the Gigafactory right
now, and it's only a third of its design
capacity, is bigger than the world's entire
battery industry in 2014. On the left is you can get
scale from the size of one floor on the left, which is that
little computer monitor at the bottom. So that's the size of a floor. There's three floors. On the right is some nice
pictures of Tesla Model three. This is a little video, and
it actually goes further back, so it goes in an L shape, so you
don't see the full amount here. This is in the middle
of the Nevada desert. Not very far from Reno actually,
so actually a great location. But nearly all of that, 75%
of that is battery making. Only 25% is car and
battery pack making. So really, the challenge
here for all gigafactories, mega factories going
forward is getting as much of the supply chain on
one site as possible, reducing the logistics
between all the components from raw materials
to battery cell. So as you can see, this is
the ultimate plan for Tesla is to bring all the raw
materials for the cathode and anode as Serena
explained, and then going into cell
manufacturing on site, then literally making
the battery packs, making the chassis, the
motor, putting all of that together in one complete
unit, and then you've just got to bolt the
metal doors on and seats and wheels and stuff like that. So 80% of the cars are
going to be built on site, and this is the blueprint for
all electric vehicles going forward. So this is what the
UK must do, has to do. It's what Europe
has to do, and it's what China are pushing towards. So why are lithium ion
batteries so important? Well, if you think of a pure
electric vehicle-- this is not plug-ins, it's not hybrids
in talking about these. We don't have many on the road,
but a pure electric vehicle where the whole chassis of
the car is a battery pack. It's a lot of batteries
that go into it. In fact, there's 4,000
of these 2170 cells which Tesla produces
at the Gigafactory go into a Tesla Model three. Why are raw materials
so important? Well, 79% of the cost of that
cell are minerals and metals. So a smaller proportion
are the cathode and anode raw materials, which
are actually not commodities, they are chemically
engineered input materials. A lot tougher to get
into the supply chain, so that's something we
can talk about later. But they're essentially
what the industry call a jelly roll, which is
like a Swiss roll I guess cake of minerals and metals. Then you inject it
with electrolyte, and then you put
it in a canister, and that's effectively
the modern day cylindrical cell
lithium ion battery. I probably didn't do the
science justice there. And as you can see in
the Tesla Model three, 25% of the cost of that
car is the battery. So statement at the top,
the cost of batteries are the decisive factor for the
success or failure of the EVs. Tesla, by the way, is
now producing those at under $100 per
kilowatt hour this year, so that's another
barrier broken. The bottom statement, the
price of raw materials are the decisive factor
for the cost of batteries. So this is why the raw
materials are so important. Scale, quality, and cost. So big statement number two. The lithium ion
battery supply chain are the oil pipelines
of tomorrow. What are the raw
materials to watch? We like to call them the four
horsemen of the ICE apocalypse, so that's the Internal
Combustion Engine, ICE, which is the cars on your
road for those who don't know. We've got lithium
leading the charge. We've got the dark
horse, graphite, which doesn't get much
kudos and coverage, but it's the anode
material of choice. So it is so important
that graphite keeps pace with the rest of this industry. Cobalt doesn't have a
very good reputation, and nickel there
trying to kill cobalt, because there's as a trade
off with increasing nickel, reducing cobalt. We can talk
about that a bit later as well. You can see coal and oil are
dying there at the bottom, and the house of ice
built being knocked down. But the four horsemen of the ICE
apocalypse are quite like that. So the final few slides. Lithium supply-- I use
lithium as an example. We can talk about
cobalt, graphite, nickel later on in the Q&A. Most of it,
actually a decent chunk of it is coming from Chile. This is the Salar de Atacama. It's actually brine mining. So low impact, where you're
pumping brine out of the water, evaporating the liquid
away, and extracting the lithium and other
minerals, and then you put it through
a processing plant. Actually, the majority
of feed source now comes from traditional
hard rock mining in Australia. That's your traditional
mining, where you can get a rock concentrate. That gets shipped to
China, and that then is processed into battery
lithium within China. And again, the key
thing to understand is lithium is a
very small industry. Last year, 300,000 tonnes
give or take produced. LCEs is Lithium
Carbonate Equivalent, but all the commodities
you're used to hearing about, coal, copper, oil,
they're in the millions or tens of millions of tonnes. So lithium needs to get to
well above a million tonnes by mid 2020s to keep
pace with the demand. Don't think it's
going to do that, but the point is that it
has to go from the niche to the mainstream, and
it's not a commodity, it's a speciality
chemical, which complicates the supply
chain a little bit more. So this is lithium demand. This is a big boy Andy Miller. I put this in because
his mum's here tonight. Andy Miller isn't with us. He's over in the
US, but I thought Katherine would like that. Again from a demand perspective,
look at the right hand portion of this pie chart. Lithium ion battery, 51%. It's important to note that
now with these raw materials, it's the same for cobalt,
it's similar for graphite, the battery end use is now
taking over the majority of the supply chain. So once you go
past that 50% mark of this mineral being used in
batteries, then the industry, the producers, the supply chain
recalibrate everything they do towards lithium ion batteries. That wasn't the case
before, so that's something to bear in mind. Then, they take the chemical
out the ground on the left. They turn it into a white
powder, effectively. That's what lithium
carbonate looks like. On the right they
bag it, and then they will send it to the
Tesla Gigafactory, for example, in this
form where they mix it with the other cathodes,
the NCM or the NCA material, and then it goes into a battery. Final two slides. The reason it's
complex and difficult is there are five stages. More important,
there are 15 steps to get lithium out of the ground
and into an electric vehicle. So that's 15 steps
for it to go wrong, 15 ways to qualify that
material against hurdles it has to go over, so
it's not straightforward. As a result, price
volatility is now the norm. Lithium's price has
increased four x. It's come off since, but
it still remains high. And that's the same for
cobolt and other raw materials going into the battery. There's a lot to talk about. Thank you for your time. [APPLAUSE] So really picking up from where
Serena left off is then all of that wonderful
electrochemistry that drives the storage and the release of
energy takes place in the form of a rather dull looking
particle about five microns across that's kind
of black or grey. I've got some examples here. It's really nothing
special to look at if you're not looking
at it through a microscope. And if you wanted to try and
get some power out of that, attaching leads and crocodile
clips to those tiny particles is a bit tricky. So what we need to do
is turn it into a format that we can actually get
electricity in and out. And what we do is we coat
those powders onto foils. We call the foils
current collectors, because that's what they do. And inside that coating
that we put onto the foil, you can see on the
micrograph behind me, lots of tiny little particles. Those particles are about
five microns across. That's about a hundredth of
the width of a human hair. And they're packed into a
matrix of bits of carbon and some adhesives
and some solvents that we use to be
able to deposit them. And the purpose
of those additives is to connect all of those
little electrochemically active particles together
and to connect them to the metal foil
that sits at the back, because that metal foil is
something that we can connect a wire or a light to in order to
take some performance from it. And that structure is
incredibly carefully engineered. If you think about the journey
that Serena talked about, where the lithium ion has to
travel across the separator, it then has to combine with
some of those anode or cathode materials, it's a little
bit analogous to trying to park cars in a car park. If you think of those particles,
those electrochemically active material particles as being
a little bit like car park spaces, I can have
a battery which stores lots and lots
of energy by having lots and lots of spaces, so
I can pack as much material into it as I possibly can. But the challenge
is to do that, I'm sacrificing all of the
roads and the channels through which the
lithium particles are going to have to travel to
find their parking spot. And so what I need to do
is engineer this electrode to get just the right
balance of accessibility of those particles
with the total density and availability of them. And there's some
really great technology that goes into preparing
the what we call inks and printing those
inks to do that. So what we do first
is we take our powder, and we mix it into an ink. And we mix it with carbon
black typically, which is nice conductive additive. That links the electrical
current all the way from the particle to the foil. And we'll mix in some
binders, and that's basically an adhesive that makes the
carbon stick to the foil. And then we use a solvent,
which makes it liquid so that we can start to
print it, and we're going to dry off that solvent. And as we dry the
solvent off, it's going to leave
porosity behind it, and that gives us that
beautiful micro structure that you saw earlier. So we coat, and I'll
show you a video of that in a moment on
a reel to reel coater. To make the kinds of volumes
that we're talking about, this is something that has
to happen at very high speed. I'll show you some more
details in a minute. But this is something that has
to run on a continuous process line. It's about 120
metres a minute to be able to make the quantities
of batteries that we need. And then we have to
dry off the solvent, and that actually takes a
tremendously large amount of energy. The solvents that
we use for our anode are typically things like water. They're quite benign,
but at the moment we don't really have any
good solvents for cathodes that aren't fairly unpleasant. We use a substance called
N-Methyl-pyrrolidone. Brilliant solvent, really
horrible for health. So we have to be very
careful how we control that in an industrial environment. And then, we do something
called calendaring. We run that very carefully
coated micro structure through the world's
biggest mangle. And what that does is
it compacts it all down, and it gets a bit more
density in there to give us a bit more energy storage
before finally, we chop it into pieces, and once
it's chopped into pieces we can assemble it into cells. And we can assemble those cells
in one of two typical formats. We can cut those cells into
big sheets, rectangular sheets, typically about the size of
maybe an A5 or an A4 book. And we stack them
like a lasagna. And what we're doing is trying
to get as much contact area as possible between the
anode and cathode sheets with those separator
layers in between. And if I cut them as rectangles
and stack them lasagna style, I get something I
call a pouch cell. The other way that
we can do this is we can print it onto very
long, thin strips, and we can roll those
strips together. And that makes me a cylindrical
cell of the 21700 sort that you saw in
Simon's presentation. Now, I brought a couple of
those along with me tonight. So the battery industry
is not very imaginative, so this is called an 18650 cell. That means it's about
18 millimetres diameter, and it's about 65 millimetre,
long and it's about circular. All of those are actually
about for to an engineer. A 21700 is 21 millimetres
by 70 millimetres. You get the idea. It's not complex. But what we've got inside this
cell if I were to open it up is our roll of materials
all tightly packed. Don't do this at
home, by the way. At home, this is full
of caustic electrolytes, and it will do you
no end of harm. Do do it when you make
these in the lab for fun, and you don't put
the electrolyte in. But what you see
in here is a roll. And in that roll, we've got
the layers of anode and cathode materials separated by this
white separator material, polymer separator material. And that simply gets
dropped into the cell can. We weld the electrode
to the bottom, we weld an electrode to the cap,
as Simon so eloquently put it, we squirt in some electrolytes,
typically under vacuum, and then we seal
the whole thing up and we take it off and charge
it for the very first time. And if you were to see what
those foils look like inside, we can put about a metre
of foil, a metre of anode and about a metre
of cathode foil inside each of those cells. This is actually
an anode material, so it's just made of graphite,
which means I can handle it and it's safe. If I was to bring that
the cathode material which has nickel particles
in it, I'd have to wear some gloves and people
would get annoyed from a health and safety perspective. So to see what that looks like
in a lab type environment, I have a short video here. Ollie, if you could
just hit play for me, that would be brilliant. Thank you very much. So what you can see here, starts
off with the mixing process. This is done in a
lab environment. This is not what a
factory looks like. So we're mixing
up that ink, which is a bit like a kind of
molasses type consistency. We then pour it into
a reel to reel coater, where we lay that coating
down onto a roller. We draw the foil up against
it, and that draws off the coating to give
us the coated foil that we're looking for. The drying actually takes
place in a closed cupboard that you can't see, and
then we stamp the materials. We use a robot to assemble
them, because the alignment of those anode and
cathode foils is absolutely critical to the
quality of the battery. It's one of the
things that can cause it to fail early in its life. We then seal it into a
material, which is actually very similar to a coffee bag. Coffee bags resist moisture
for about three months. That material resists
moisture for about 15 years. And having done that
with the electrolyte, we then take the thing
off ready to form. Now in our laboratory, we
can make about 20 cells a day using researchers. If you were to walk
into a Gigafactory, you'd see individual
lines producing something more like 20 cells
per second, and that's one of our challenges. And we don't just put those
cells directly into the car. We first of all have to put
them into sub assemblies which are manageable. So we take our cell,
whether it's a pouch or whether it's a cylinder,
and we assemble them into things called modules. These are really
just sub assemblies. And what we're trying
to do at this point is to keep the voltage of
each of those sub assemblies below about 60 volts, so it's
relatively safe to handle. And we're trying to
keep the mass down to about 50 kilogrammes or
so so that it can be handled in a factory environment. And ideally, we want
that module to be reusable across many
different electric vehicle types, so we can get
some economies of scale out of its manufacture. And then, we'll join
those modules together to make the battery pack. And the battery pack, you
can see the Nissan LEAF one on the slide behind
me, typically covers the whole of the
floor of the vehicle, typically weighs somewhere
between 300 and 900 kilogrammes. So it's a fairly substantial
piece of equipment. And then that gets bolted
underneath the vehicle typically on the production
line for the car. And the fact that
that pack is large, is heavy, it's
hazardous goods, means that there's a lot of benefit
to doing the assembly of that very close to where you do
the assembly of the car, and that's important
for us for reasons I'll come back to in a moment. So as Simon said,
our Tesla Model three has about 4,400 of those little
cylindrical cells inside it. And Tesla has finally
reached its magic number of about 1,000 cars
per day in manufacture. If you want to
multiply that up, that means that just to
produce one model of car, that factory has to produce
50 cells every second. And given that as well
as the Model three they're also making the Model S,
the Model X, and a whole bunch of other stuff besides, so
actually the Gigafactory that's now doing about
20 gigawatt hours today is doing about
125 cells per second. The fastest mini guns that
get connected to helicopters by the RF are shooting at
targets, the very fastest that they've ever made
and gone to production are about 125 cells per second. That just gives you
a bit of an idea of the rate that these factories
have got to be operating at. And that's how you get to the
things like the Gigafactory. So it takes about $4
billion of investment just to get to the point we are
today to do 20 gigawatt hours. And as Simon said, this
is only about a third of what Tesla wants to be
doing in the long term. And that's already a 200,000
square metre facility with about 3,000 staff. So it's a fairly significant
industrial endeavour. It's also a massive
commercial opportunity, whichever way you look at it. So the reason that the UK
is interested in all of this is the UK at the moment has
a very good industry in cars and particularly
in making engines. So we make about 1.7 million
vehicles and about 2.5 million engines every year. And the engine is
about one third of the value of the car,
bill of materials cost. But when we move to
an electric vehicle, we replace the engine with an
electric motor and some power electronics, and that costs
about the same as the engine. Then we put a battery in
place, and that costs typically three to five times the
cost of that engine, and then we put the rest
of the car on top of that. So there's two things
that you'll notice. The first thing is the
total cost of our vehicle has gone up significantly. The second thing
is that nearly 50% of the bill of materials
cost for a long range electric vehicle is
embedded in that battery. If we see that as a
bought in component, that's outsourcing an enormous
amount of the value creation that happens in the car
industry in the UK today. So economically as
well as technically, it's important for that
to be a component that we have an ability to deliver. If we look at the
kind of volumes that Simon's slide
showed around what we've got to get
to by 2028, 2030, across the EU we're going to
need the equivalent of about 12 of those Gigafactories at
the size they are today. And to support the UK industry
if we supply it domestically, that's space for about
two to four gigafactories of that size, actually there
are some very good arguments that say that the
economies of scale suggest you want smaller
factories, probably about 10 at about half of that size. So that's a big
opportunity for the UK. And in response to that,
the Faraday Challenge and the Faraday
Institution, which has sponsored today's
event, has been set up to accelerate the UK's research
efforts, our innovation, and our industrialization
of batteries going from the achievements of
Good Earth in the 1980s as the inventor of the
lithium ion battery to try to place in the position
where we've got large scale manufacturing and exploitation
of that technology coming from the UK. And that journey takes
place over an enormous range of length scales. So the kinds of
technology development or scientific development
that Serena's talking about typically happen at the scale
of milligrammes or grammes in a laboratory. As we look to see whether they
work in the context of a cell, we work in laboratories like
ours at the kilogramme scale, building 20 odd cells a day. And by the time we get to the
scale of the far right hand side which is our
Gigafactory, that's a kiloton per year of materials
that we're processing. And to make that
jump from laboratory into full scale
factory, what you need is the ability to trial those
manufacturing processes. If you're going to be
making 50 cells a second, you want to make sure
you're making them right, because if you're losing money
off them then making more is a really bad idea. So what we need
here in the UK is a facility that lets us look
at that manufacturing journey as well as the
scientific journey. And part of the
Faraday Challenge is the construction of
something called the UK Battery Industrialization Centre, and
that's being built in Coventry. It's not very far away from
my own institution at Warwick. That's a 20,000
square metre facility. It's about 1/10 of the
size of a Gigafactory, so it's still a pretty
significant endeavour. And that will have the ability
to do about one gigawatt hour per year
manufacturing capacity. And that allows
material suppliers, manufacturing
companies, car companies to start designing cells,
designing new manufacturing processes, and bringing new
materials forward to market. And what we hope is
that that's going to give us a springboard
in the UK for a large scale manufacturer to set up
to link into the R&D and the development
efforts here and start to supply some of the major OEMs
that we've got based in the UK. And that, I hope, is
a good opportunity to hand over to one
of the major OEMs that we have here in the UK. [APPLAUSE] Thank you very much. And thank you to the
previous speakers. In my view, it's perhaps one
of the most exciting bits of the presentation
this evening is really how the battery comes to life. So we've seen the
raw materials, we've seen what a battery is,
we've seen how it's made, we've seen, then, what it
will take for Gigafactory to come to the UK. My job at Jaguar Land Rover,
I'm Global Purchase Director for Electrification. So my role is very much
linked to what they've just been talking about there,
buying the batteries from these Gigafactories
all over the world on behalf of JLR. The picture you can see behind
me is the base of an I-pace. If you were to
take off the body, take off the seats,
the doors, that is what you would see left over. So the main bit in the
middle is the frame, which contains 36 modules. For those who were
listening earlier in terms of this
style of battery, they then contain
12 pouches, which is then what's driving the
90 kilowatt overall battery that you can see in there. So just to start
with a question. How many of you in here this
evening have ever driven or travelled in an
electric vehicle? OK, that's not fair. And just anybody want to shout
out what was your experience? What did it feel
like to be in an EV compared to a normal
petrol or diesel? Silent, quiet, fast. Yep, exactly. Those were all the words
that I would certainly associate with driving an EV. The silence is something
that is really noticeable, and that sense of peace
that you can have in an EV. There's certainly none
of that stop start that you get particularly in
city driving at the moment. And that sense of response. They are incredibly
responsive due to the nature of the design of the vehicles. It is quite hard, as they
say, to describe that. But I have got a
video, which hopefully will give you a sense of
what it's like to have an EV. [PROPELLOR AND ENGINE SOUNDS] [DRAMATIC MUSIC PLAYING
& ENGINE REVVING] There you go. A very fast I-pace. And we were delighted
last week when the I-pace won the European
Car of the Year Award at the Geneva Motor
Show, and it's now being put forward
to become voted for the world car
of the year, which we're very high hopes for. But how did we
get there and what performance is in that vehicle
that you could see there? As I mentioned before,
it's a 90 kilowatt battery. It can do zero to
60 in 4.5 seconds. These are not tuned vehicles. This is the I-pace that
you could go and get. That comes as a result of the
90 kilowatt battery packet. It has a range of 234
miles on the EPA range, which is the US Environmental
Protection Agency range, or 470 kilometres on WLTP, which
is the European Union range. It has a top speed
as you could see in that video of 200
kilometres an hour, which is over 120 miles an hour. And it has all wheel
drive, and it's also significant in terms of
the amount of roominess that we were able to
drive into that vehicle. And the way that
we were able to do that, how did we
get to this point? Really, it demanded a
significant change in the way that we engineered this
vehicle within JLR. We're used to
developing vehicles that integrate internal
combustion engines, be they petrol or
diesel, which then drive in effect a passive drive line. When it comes to an EV, we had
to change the entire way that we engineered the vehicle, so
it meant that we had to have an awful lot more interaction
between each of the centres of excellence across
the organisation. It meant that we had to
integrate the powertrain into the whole vehicle. It's no longer an engine
and individual drive trains. We've got the battery pack that
then drives the electric drive units that are integrated
into the front and rear axle to be able to deliver the
performance that you could see there. The high voltage
batteries, again, they are integral into
the vehicle dynamics. And they are scalable, as
has been mentioned by some of the earlier presentations. And having those
standardised modules is really going to be key
for us as we move forward looking to how to optimise
the cost of these vehicles in the future. In addition, we have to be
very careful with the energy management of these
vehicles and to make sure that we can
optimise those and have a fully integrated
system so the vehicle can be primed before starting
use or dynamically managing the battery output
throughout the entire use of the day. On a battery, we've
spoken earlier about what happens to the
batteries, we've seen that some of the materials
included in the battery pack are particularly
challenging for us. The battery has a standard
life that we can see here. The first use will
be in the vehicle, and that will last for a
particular amount of time. In the I-Pace, we warrant them
for eight years, 100,000 miles, whichever one comes first. At the end of that
time, it doesn't mean that it then has to
automatically go and be recycled. There is a second use
for those batteries, whether that's in
stationary storage such as in an x-storage
system from Tesla or from some of the other
automotive manufacturers that are going to wool
box systems at the moment, or it may be reused. We have a project
going on in rural India at the moment with
I-Pace batteries that are being set up for
a micro grid system in some of the areas of the world. And then, it gets
to the point where there is then a
challenge in terms of do we go for recycling? Taking those materials with
nickel, cobalt, lithium, the copper, the aluminium
from the buzz bars, those materials will have
a value and the important is to take those back in,
working with our partner suppliers and feed them
back into the supply chain so that we're not having to
go and get virgin materials and we can then develop
a closed loop system. And that is ultimately
what we're aiming to do. So just in terms of
future opportunities, I believe that this is the
first in a series of Faraday Lectures at the
Royal Institution, apologies There is a further
series of lectures which will go on in terms of what
EVs mean in terms of driving and challenging the way that
we are an infrastructure for charging those vehicles
and for developing cities and what it means for
urbanisation going forward. So thank you very
much for listening. [APPLAUSE]
