Unknown

all right hello uh first of all rick constantino from group 14 welcome to volts thank you so much for coming thank you very much and uh thanks to all of you for for coming um i'm excited for this so if you listen to volts at all or if you follow clean energy at all you probably know that batteries are everything everything is batteries if you have a problem throw a battery at it that is practically the slogan of my podcast and so we're going to talk about batteries today a battery innovation a very exciting battery innovation so i think the place to start is i think most people know batteries these days batteries typically are an anode and a cathode and an electrolyte in between them they're sending ions back and forth when you charge and discharge you're sending ions back and forth from the anode to the cathode you and i've been following battery chemistry innovations for a while now i've written about a bunch of them i've done podcasts on a bunch of them maybe you've heard you know they started like tesla is using nickel magnesium cobalt there's lithium ion there's lithium iron phosphate a lot of different chemistries you may have heard about flying around but what you may not know is that all of that innovation all of those varieties are going to be cathodes those are all cathode materials the anode basically since lithium ion batteries were invented back in the early 1990s have been made of graphite and that is that was true then it's true today so to start with rick why don't you just tell us what is the role of the anode and why has it been so resistant to change and innovation okay great that's a great setup and yes uh batteries are a lot of our joy and a lot of our frustrations and we're trying to improve them and so you said last 50 years uh lithium ion batteries have really been using that same uh you know anode that graphite anode and the bottom line is that it works it's what was started originally uh it's a very ubiquitous material and it works it works very very reliably and at the time it seemed like a very logical choice uh you know to pair and over the last you know about 50 years or so there's been lots and lots of advancements in in the battery except for that anode we've been using that same graphite chemistry you know for this whole time for this whole while though there's been an interest in developing you know new anode materials and particularly silicon which is which is basically the new the new material that group 14 and other companies are developing as this is as the anode um it's quite difficult uh those challenges have been been met recently with technology uh but until now it really hasn't been possible to commercialize those those types of batteries yeah so silicon has been people have been talking about silicon anodes for a decade now i've followed on and off there's been lots of attempts that have not really gone anywhere maybe start by talking about the challenges of making silicon work why it's been so hard to make it work sure one thing i should mention is that the cathode is what brings in your amount of energy brings lithium ions right and as you mentioned you're sort of bringing the cathodes bringing that that lithium from the cathode to the anode back and forth again and of course electrons are going to be going back and forth going the other way so your energy density of your battery depends on how much cathode you can bring and how much lithium in the cathode and so the reason people are interested in silicon as a new anode material is because you can store a lot more of the cathode so so basically you know in your battery your anode takes up a lot of the volume so if you can have a more powerful anode that has a much higher capacity for absorbing you know the lithium atoms you can shrink you know your anode so imagine shrinking your anode so now you can make your cathode bigger so you can bring lithium into the battery so people are interested in silicon and other you know anodes that have a higher energy density that can actually store more lithium than than the uh you know the graphite can 10 times as i as i understand it graphite's made of carbon i think it's like one atom of sodium can hold four lithium ions where it takes like six carbon atoms to hold a single lithium ion something like that you can hold a lot more lithium ions with a single atom of silicon that's right it's about 10 times the capacity on a mass-based battery that's right it's about 10 times the capacity on a mass basis and you know the way that graphite works if you kind of remember your old carbon structures you know you know graphite is carbon and it's a particular form of carbon where it's in layers and the way that graphite takes up lithium is that it can intercalate between those layers and so but there's only so much lithium that you can store it's it's very it's a very reliable way to store it but it's a very limited way that you can store it but with silicon it actually forms an alloy with the lithium so it's so not only is it stored more about 10 times on a also volumetric basis but it also can it can absorb and give up that lithium much much more rapidly now it's basically thermodynamic it wants to exist in that alloy state so it's not really a matter of kinetics and sort of pushing carbon layers out of the way it's it's about forming an alloy that nature naturally wants to form but when silicon absorbs lithium it swells this is as i understand it the big problem and if you have an anode that's swelling you're eventually cracking your battery you're you're ruining your electrolyte Etc this has been the challenge right that's right that's been the key challenge uh for silicon for for a long time it does uh expand quite a bit about 400 about four times it's you know volume when it absorbs lithium because it forms this new phase lithium it has to go somewhere it has to form this this form this lithium silicon alloy and so every time that it absorbs that lithium it decreases the volume the consequence of that is that it has a bigger interface uh and so you know there's something around that material called the solvent electrolyte interface or sci and you want that to be very stable and if that's constantly growing and shrinking it can actually you know crack over time and it can it can form separate kind of particles and that could absorb more and more lithium irreversibly that you can't exchange back and forth each time and this can also you know cost shorts and in your battery so so silicon has been a great material to you know charge and discharge once but to have it in a recycled battery has been has been quite a challenge so let's talk about then how you solved this problem and this I think gets uh interestingly to your origin story you're not an electrochemistry guy you're not a battery guy originally you have been thinking about how to deliver silicon in a completely different context so talk about where you came from and sort of what transferred over yeah so uh you know despite being CTO and co-founder of a battery materials company I am not a battery guy so I hire really really good electric chemists that teach me you know about batteries every day um and often I find that not knowing what's supposed to work or not work has been really really helpful to invent new ways of looking at things but as long as you're careful so you know so my background as a chemical engineer actually worked in the pharma industry for for more than a decade and you know work in the heyday I work for a company called genentech which was one of the first you know biotechs on the planet and it was all exciting and and uh but in 2009 I ended up uh doing some consulting work my company at that time was was doing drug delivery and at that point because we didn't own the actual active pharmaceutical ingredients but a delivery technology when all those companies downsized their departments looking at sort of new ways to market their pharmaceuticals they decided they didn't want our delivery technology so I ended up consulting and when you say deliver you mean like getting the drug to where it needs to be in the body yeah actually I so the technology I invented was was a biodegradable microspheres where so instead of sort of injecting a solution of your let's see your peptide or protein once a day you can inject it inside a microparticle which you know in a way is not too December thinking about an energy storage particle and that particle in your body would degrade over say days or weeks or even months so we for example uh had a growth hormone product that instead of injecting it once or multiple times per day you could inject it once a week or for for indications like schizophrenia Risperdal instead of injecting you know every every day you can inject once even a month this is very very important for some of these kind of disease states so that was a very interesting technology we also were developing vaccine technologies and one of my expertise was freeze drying with the way to you know freeze and then uh you know remove that solvent uh by under vacuum and it's a great way to you know take a pharmaceutical preparation and make it stable like for example for third world storage and things like this so that was my expertise so I was consulting and one day I got a call from from Rick Luby who is the CEO of a company called energy 2 at the time and he said I heard that you know you're expert in freeze drying I saw that you're consulting I saw you wrote this book on freeze drying I'd like to hire you you know for your help and I said oh great what pharmaceutical you're working it's like oh no no no it's like I'm working on a battery material and I said that's a really dumb idea I'm like freeze trying is really expensive and really energy intensive it's got to be a better way to do what you're doing so kind of long story short um you know I helped them solve their their freeze drying problem but but I sort of quickly realized that there was a much better way to engineer that battery material using some of those same kind of principles and we kind of reinvented the way to make the carbon as a completely solvent-free uh kind of processing that we call dryol assistance actually the basis for making the carbon scaffold the carbon backbone that we now make our silicon carbon uh composite material so that's that's how I got into batteries and so you have this scaffold as you say a scaffold made of carbon and so the idea is I understand it this is I'm sure very simplified is that you absorb you put silicon inside the scaffold and so that when it swells when it absorbs the lithium ions it does that inside the scaffold rather than bumping up against other stuff is that roughly correct yeah that is correct and so we you know at the time had this carbon technology and we were developing this for a a different kind of battery called an ultra capacitor and so this is a very special batteries that are very important they're niche batteries at the time we thought they're all going to make us rich but we were wrong. But they're a very interesting technology where you have a lot of surface area, a lot of volume inside of that carbon material, so it can absorb different ions in this mechanism. So these ultracapacitors have a very, very fast charge and discharge, but they can't hold very much energy. So they're used for things like regenerative braking to kind of store energy on very, very short timeframes. So that was our technology. But we realized that that wasn't going to make us rich and famous, so we had to pivot to something else. And we got very interested in lithium ion. And we were using hard carbon as a kind of an alternative for replacing graphite. And of course, everybody wanted to work on silicon, like you said. And everybody had this challenge of this silicon expansion issue. And so at the time, there were many companies that were making different types of silicons. And they came to us and said, hey, can you take your carbon and coat it like around our silicon material? That was kind of gen one idea. It was, okay, let's just protect the, you know, silicon with a coating of carbon, a little magic shell like that. And that worked pretty well. It improved the silicon quite a bit. You know, it didn't really keep it from expanding completely, but it sort of helped, you know, keep it a little bit more stable. It improved a little bit, but it really didn't look like a game changer. And it really wasn't a great sort of business kind of opportunity for us, just, you know, improving other people's material. So we pivoted to, okay, how could we make it, how can we make that material better to kind of still use this equation of silicon plus carbon? So kind of our gen two approach, I'll get to the final gen three in a second. Okay. The gen two approach was we took an existing alloy of silicon aluminum alloy and etched away that aluminum to create a porous silicon. And then we put that inside of carbon. And that worked really, really well because now we had this sort of nano-sized kind of silicon features and encased in carbon. The problem was we created this enormous amount of by-product, so aluminum alloy and aluminum salt. And we said we had to help create a whole nother business to sell that. We said, that doesn't make any sense either. So then we came up, we literally. We went through a period where we went kind of the drawing board and said, let's kind of rethink this whole thing. And it's kind of hard to convince your CEO to go in a new direction after you've invested all this time and money. But we went in a new direction and we thought the problem of a different angle and said, look, we know how to make carbon. We're going to engineer it. Instead of thinking about like adding carbon to the silicon, let's figure out a way to make a silicon scaffold, a place to grow the silicon inside. And that was kind of our aha moment where we said, okay, let's create a porous carbon. So think of kind of a sponge of, we created a carbon and we're growing the silicon inside of that, of that carbon material. So we have kind of a, think of a micron size, you know, porous carbon particle sponge. And inside of that, we're growing nano-sized amorphous domains of silicon. So now the silicon has the freedom of kind of being inside of that carbon scaffold. So you can think of the group 14 material, it's by weight, it's about half and half carbon and silicon, but by volume, it's about one-third silicon carbon and one-third void. So everything's going to be carbon. And we're going to have to make sure that every time that particle kind of absorbs the lithium, you know, can sort of help, you know, maintain that expansion within the particle. So we can get the best of both worlds. We can get the high capacity of the silicon, but get the good stability and surface features of the carbon itself. And so this, this material you've made, it's called SCC55. If you haven't thought to think of a cleverer name for your material. That's also kind of a funny story. I mean, when you're only five employees, you know, you only have so many big marketing teams. So, so, you know, marketing team came up and it's like, okay, we got to figure out what to call the material. And I said, well, I said, we call it SCC55. That's silicon carbon composite 55. And they're like, that's a great name. I'm going to use that one. I'm like, okay. You know, but, but, you know, it does speak to kind of the, the, the simplicity and the novelty of it. It literally took us like 55 iterations. And, and, you know, some of our competitors, you know, advertised it in thousands of combinatorial things. And, you know, while I think that's great, I'm also quite proud that, you know, we just only took you 55. We got to figure out the next one. I want to call it, you know, do we go 55 BCD or do we do 56, 57, but, you know, so I got to figure out what the next generation is. As I, again, as I understand it, you, it's not a, it's not a set ratio of silicon to carbon. You can vary that ratio. You can use more silicon relative to carbon. And as I understand it, the more silicon you use relative to carbon, the better your energy density, et cetera, the more performance you get out of it. But presumably there are trade-offs, sort of what's the trade-off when you increase the percentage of silicon relative to carbon? Great question. So, so the core technology is, as you said, it's, it's flexible. So we can sort of modulate, for example, the ratio of silicon to carbon. We can modulate how much the volume, we can modulate the particle size to some extent, the shape, et cetera. Now we've, we've sort of have one particular flagship product that seemed to work pretty well across, you know, for different customers. So we kind of fixed that one design, but our, our manufacturing platform is, is quite flexible. And we actually, we're already working on designing kind of multiple next, you know, iteration products out of our, our pilot plant in Woodville, Washington, which we've, we've finally transitioned from, you know, commercial production back to what I wanted to use it for as our sandbox. So you can, you know, create different, you know, materials using the same core technology and there will be trade-offs, you know, the higher, if you want higher capacity, you have to have more silicon. So there might, you know, might be maybe a bit, you know, more expensive to produce silicon versus the carbon, for example. And silicon, you know, has less conductivity generally than carbon because it's a semiconductor, whereas carbon is more conductive. But you can, you can compensate for that with other, you know, kind of tricks on the, the particle design as well. So there are some trade-offs, but there's also ways to, to mitigate those trade-offs, but different customers want different things. So we'll, you know, we'll kind of tailor different products as kind of the market demands them. So let's get to the meat of the issue, which is if you replace a graphite anode with an anode made of SCC55, what do you gain and how much? Okay. You know, great, great question. And, you know, the, the, the key benefit that you get is the increase in energy density, you know, which is whatever it was in the Holy Grail for the, for the silicon material. Now we're not getting the 10 times the density because our materials half silicon, half carbon. So we're about five times of the capacity. So one way that my CEO likes to describe it is every five tons of, of Chinese graphite you import, you produce, one ton of domestically group 14 material. So, so we're kind of that equation. Five, five times the capacity is not a, that's not a small thing. Still pretty good. That was kind of the big benefit that, that you get is the energy density, but the other benefit that you get, and, and we didn't really fully honestly appreciate this as we were kind of forming the company and exploring the technology was the increased rate capability that you get with silicon. And, and you know, this was something where again, because the way silicon interacts with the lithium ions fundamentally differently than how, graphite interacts with the lithium ion, you can get much, much faster charge and discharge. So whereas your, you know, normal battery based on graphite might take tens of minutes or hours even to charge, you can charge in less than 20 minutes, less than 10 minutes. We've got customers that are creating batteries. You can even charge in just a few minutes, even less than one minute, which is mind boggling. So, so, you know, once you can start charging that rapidly, then, then maybe this sort of range anxiety, certainly charge time anxiety goes away and maybe even range anxiety with, you can truly go that fast. Now to, to reap the benefit of that, you have to kind of rethink other parts of the battery because the batteries haven't been designed for 50 years to do that. So you're going to have to think about how to maintain, you know, how do you generate a lot of heat when you charge and discharge that quickly, for example. But once you understand, and that's what you want to do, we have customers who are making some pretty phenomenal batteries across different, different industries. So if I take a set battery with a set amount of cathode, the same sized anode, but made of SCC 55, I get, I can store five times as much energy and I can charge in minutes rather than hours. Yes, exactly. And some of our customers are quite aggressive and want to completely dispense with graphite and use armature, you know, silicon based energy instead. And for those customers, they're able to get maybe up to 40 or even 50% higher energy density for that same, that same physical battery, that same, that same dimension of battery. Or you can make your battery smaller for the same energy. Or you can make it lighter depending on what, you know, whether it's even tall or whatever. So, so those are kind of the gains you can get. Now, other customers are choosing, instead of going all the way into the, the silicon material to start with, they decided they want to sort of have incremental improvements. So, for example, you see this more in the cell phone arena where there's been a series of cell phones and we are now in over 20 million cell phones in Asia, in material that we actually made in our, our, our plant in Woodinville, Washington. So it's kind of fun. And just to, and just to be clear, because I'm not sure we've actually said this out loud yet, but you're, you're making them material, selling it to battery makers, and then the battery makers are designing batteries and building batteries around the material. You're just in the material business. That's right. So I like to use the analogy of we're the Intel inside. So we don't make the computer, you know, we make the chip. So we don't make the battery, we make the material to make all the batteries better. And we've early on, you know, decided that making batteries is really, really hard and lots of folks do really, really well. So, so I aspire, you know, let's, let's make the world's best materials and let's let everyone else, you know, figure out how to make the best batteries out of it and let those end up and users make the best devices, the better, the better cell phones, the better cars, the better computers, the better drones, the better whatever. And this gets to the scaling issue too, because one of the things that has brought down, I think a lot of previous efforts to make silicon anodes is they often are entirely novel technologies that would require entirely novel factories. And no, it takes a lot to talk a battery maker into scrapping factories and building entirely new factories, Your material works in extant lithium-ion manufacturing facilities. Is that categorically true? That is categorically true. So we design the material as a drawfin, so it's a black powder. It looks kind of like graphite. It processes very similar to graphite. Now, if you're completely displacing your graphite with our black powder, you may have to do things a little bit differently, but you're using the same equipment. But you may have to change your recipe a little bit, your stir rate and so forth. This was the analogy I thought of. It's like a bakery. You don't need new machinery in your bakery, but you do have to tweak the recipe of your bread if you're using a new kind of flour, for instance. That's a good way to think about it. Yeah, exactly. And so when you're talking about scaling, currently you've got a factory. Your Woodinville factory has now returned to being your sandbox and your little innovation box. You've got a factory built now in South Korea. You've got a factory built in South Korea, producing the material, selling into battery makers. It's going into batteries. The batteries are going into phones. Where else are the batteries going? Hey there, everybody. Don't worry. I'm not going to tell you about a new mattress or push a credit card on you. This isn't an ad. There are no ads on Volts. It is supported entirely by listeners like you. If you'll indulge me for a second, I'd like to ask for your support. 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If you don't like subscriptions, you can make a one-time contribution, leave a review on Apple or Spotify, or just tell a friend about Volts. I am grateful for any and all support. If you're already a paid subscriber, thank you. And now back to the show. Yeah. So I can't talk too much about specific customers, unfortunately. Um, you know, but we've been, been engaged with most of the world's battery production. I think now we've got something like 150 customers, I think is the latest number. Battery makers. Battery makers. Who want your material. Who want the material. We're engaged with something like 95% of the world's battery making capacity. Has is looking at our material at some stage or another, either commercialized already or about to commercialize. Um, and that was, you know, by, by our early design. So we, we took a very different strategy to commercializing our material. Like from our very start, we were very interested in, in commercial partnerships and supply chain partners. Our, our very first investors were VSF and we spun out of the, the energy two company I mentioned. And of course the US department of energy was one of our early investors. Our first project, our first, uh, series, uh, B was with, with ATL and our. Our first series C is with SK materials in Korea, which is a company we're now partnered in the plant we mentioned. And so we've been always interested in partnering with either cathode makers or other carbon makers or electrolyte or other companies or folks that produce the silane gas that is also used to make our, our silicon material. So we've always wanted to be part of that supply chain to make sure that we knew what the market, how the material use it and make sure that we were kind of in lockstep with where the industry is going, because so many things have changed about our assumptions from we started producing this material. Um, but we've been able to kind of stay ahead. Of, of the technology and stay with the market. And you have some kind of deal with Porsche, but as I understand it, there's not a car with a battery with this stuff in it that a customer can buy yet. Uh, not yet. Yeah. Porsche was Porsche was one of our investors and we were going to say Porsche, it was reminding me to say that. So, um, otherwise I get trouble. We're in America here. Yeah, exactly. Um, but, uh, yeah, so they're one of our investors and they've been, they've been with us and yeah, we, I can't comment on any specific timelines, but. Certainly, uh, you know, they have a lot of long tradition and interest, uh, you know, in, in high performance vehicles and, you know, they made the realization that, you know, electric is, you can have some pretty darn high performing electric vehicles. So, but in theory, we are talking on some time horizon about EV batteries that hold lots more energy, get lots more range and charge lots faster. That's kind of the, that's the scale. That's the scale market. Presumably that's the, that's the big. Fish. I don't know what the analogy is. That's that's the big market you're going to go after eventually, presumably. Yeah, that, that is the big market. And that was sort of our, our founding market, you know, for, for the company, although I've heard some predictions that, you know, kind of either, you know, AI or other data storage could be a bigger market for silicon batteries. And, and again, and the performance, by the way, is so different from a lithium ion standard battery that there people are not calling these batteries, silicon batteries, and that, that terminology is really, really caught on. So the market could even be bigger. Non-EV applications could be bigger. Uh, for silicon batteries. And are you in drones now? Oh yes. Yeah. We're definitely in drones. Um, and again, we're in batteries that we, we are, uh, and, you know, if you think about your ability to carry payload and, and, you know, a lot of payload and, and to go long distances is very, very important for drone application. So, yeah, so drones is a big, is a big application for, for silicon batteries. Well, let's talk about cost. Cause I think that's what everybody's interested in. And I think, you know, one way to ask about cost is how much is a pound of your material? Versus a pound of graphite. And then another way of thinking about it is the per energy output cost. So talk about both those, presumably the material itself on a volumetric basis is more expensive than graphite, just because it's a custom manufactured as opposed to, and graphite has a very long history of scaling. Yeah, folks have been, been, been optimizing graphite for, for quite a long time. You know, it's definitely spending more, but you know, you're paying for output. You're paying for a high, high performance material. And, you know, part of that is, as you said, is the sort of, you think about the cost and, you know, you know, what do you charge per kilogram or per mass, right? But, you know, we, we keep trying to convince the procurement folks or our customers, you know, you should be thinking about is that how much you're paying per, per energy storage unit, right? So how much you're paying per, per milliamp hour, right? So when you're buying gas, you know, you're not, you're not thinking about how much you're paying per gallon. Well, that nowadays is so high, maybe we're all numb, but you know, you think about like what, you know, you're going to pay more for higher octane gas, right? Cause, and you're going to get more miles for the dollar. So if you think about batteries on a sort of kilowatt hour per dollar basis, you can actually have less, you can actually have a savings. Even though you're paying more money per mass for the anode material, you can make batteries that have lower costs. And I can, I can go through this spreadsheet. I can't do it in the room right now, but I can go in the spreadsheet and we've spent many hours with the procurement people and they, they understand it. And finally they say, well, we still want you to charge us less money. So any new technology is going to have a premium and then there'll be a market for that. And so any, you know, companies that want to be at the forefront, we'll pay that premium. And over time, you know, as we get to larger scales and our. As our supply chain gets more and more sure those costs will come down, but, you know, right now, uh, you know, I think it's a pretty good, uh, kind of value proposition. And I think the really savvy players in the market are seeing that, and we're already seeing pretty, pretty good traction. Uh, what about cycle life? This is always a question that faces any new, any new battery. There are lots of fancy new types of battery chemistries that I've read about over the years that sort of crash on the shore of you can only charge and discharge them. A limited number of times for they burn out and, and everybody wants resilience in their batteries. So how does this replacing graphite with this material affects cycle life? It's a very good question. And, you know, we've, we've designed, uh, you know, the material to keep that silicon in its best possible form that we can think of again, which is that nano sized amorphous form. It's been academically studied that that's the best form of silicon. It's just really hard to create that a commercializable form. And again, we do it by putting it inside the carbon scaffold. And so, you know, we. We have customers that can achieve the same cycle life as a graphite battery, and it's may not be easy. The first time you can't expect to use exactly the same recipe. Just if you're changing your flour, you can't expect it. You know, if you're going to use, uh, you know, potato flour or whatever, instead of, you know, wheat based flour, you're going to make a very different cake. So you got to change your, your recipe accordingly. Um, and, but you can get a really good result. We've, we've published a white paper, uh, fairly recently. If anyone's interested, I can come approach might give you the link to it where we had over 15 customers using our material across different chemistries, cathode. And different chemistries that were able to achieve 1500, even 2000, even 3000 cycles. So that's, we're back to the, so we say that 1500 cycles or 2000 cycles is now the new normal versus a thousand cycles. So you can get, you can get a good result, but you may have to work at it. And like I said, if you are, uh, using kind of small amounts of our material, you know, changing for graphite, it's easier to get a good result right away. But if you're more aggressive, it may take more work. And, and one of the things that we learned is that, you know, you have to, you have to also get, you know, pretty good at making cakes. Uh, making batteries yourself to show your customers sometimes. And so we, we've developed in Woodinville, we have a, a pouch line to make pouch batteries, the same kind of batteries in your phone. Um, and we could make those there and we've gotten pretty good at it. It's taken us a while, but you know, once you can make a battery, that's pretty good and show your customer, I got a good result. You guys must be much better than we are at it. You've been doing it for this long time. So if you can show the material works firsthand and show that first data and then present them a data package, say, look, here's the recipe, how we did it. You guys can certainly get a better result than we did. It really helps to kind of speed the conversation. I read that paper about cycle life, and it says you can— Some customers have matched lithium ion cycle life, but it doesn't say much about temperature or depth of discharge or the conditions in which that works. Is it more sensitive to heat or cold? Does the depth of discharge matter? Do any of those conditions under which it's cycling and recycling affect this material differently than graphite? Yeah, all those things can matter and all those things were kind of different in the different studies. And in that example, it was whatever data we had to beg the customer to let us present anything. So we're, I think, on our own developing a more robust data set that when we kind of publish, get ready to publish our own white paper, we can go more in depth these things. But generally, you know, as you go to higher or lower temperatures, it gets more challenging for the battery. So higher temperatures, you have to worry a lot more about the kind of thermal runaway. And as you get to colder temperatures, you have to worry about the viscosity of electrolytes. But that's any battery. Is it different for your material than graphite in this condition? In principle, no. But you do have to keep in mind that, you know, if you have more energy to deal with, I'll give you an anecdote. So the first time one of our customers came back to me, he went, oh, my God, we did our first nail test where they kind of literally shoot a nail through the battery. Right, right, right. And he said, man, we shot this nail through and had this huge, you know, flame. And he's like, man, it released, you know, 50% more energy than we've ever seen before. And I'm like, well, how much more energy was in the battery, you know, before you shot the nail through? And he's like, oh, 50%. Well, what do you expect, you know? And the customer solved that issue, right? Right. So. So. So now they've realized that they had to redesign the electrolyte to store the energy. So safety and preventing thermal runaway will be a bigger deal if you've got more energy packed in it. Right. But yes, yes, exactly. What about calendar life? Briefly, calendar life is the other. There's cycle life and then there's calendar life, which is just if you sit it on a shelf, how long does it take for it to sort of begin to degrade? This has also been a problem for silicon traditionally. That's a good question. So far, we haven't heard any sort of commercial barriers. Barriers to commercialization regarding calendar life. So our customers don't necessarily tell us how they've solved the problem or whether they see it or not. And believe me, our customers, if they have a problem, they come to me as first person. And so that has not that has not stopped them. And I suspect there may be more challenges there, again, because you're storing more energy. It's a little different. I mean, the rest of your chemistry may have to redesign things a little bit. But, you know, when you talk about, you know, this calendar life question, you know, if you think about buying a lead acid battery off the shelf of your car or whatever in the old days, you know, that thing might be in the shelf for five or 10 years. So is a lithium ion battery going to really sit on the shelf for 10 years before somebody goes to grab and use it? It's going to be outdated by no one can even know how to plug it into their device anymore. So I don't know if the jury's out on how long do we really need a calendar life and how important it is. But but I think in principle, you know, there's no no reason why solar should be that different. So I think, again, so far has not been a barrier to commercialization. Let's talk about supply chain, which is a big advantage that you are promoting here. I don't know if we mentioned this earlier, but. China produces, what is it, 90, 95 percent of the world's graphite and has started putting export duties on it is not just theoretically is using it as a kind of industrial tool, weapon, pressure, whatever counter to tariffs, whatever you want to call. So you, um, silicon is everywhere, pretty easy to get. But you are using a particular. Form of gas, saline gas to create this material. So tell us a little bit about what that looks like and where you get the saline gas and who makes the saline gas. What tell us about the supply chain for that? Sure. And this sort of this general question of supply chain, even from our very first inventing the material, we were very keen on understanding the complexity of the supply chain. And we we realized, you know, very early that U.S. energy dependence is not just about just this energy. You know, generation of energy storage and vast majority of this animal materials, vast majority battery production, et cetera, in China and Asia. And so building that infrastructure is really, really important. And the sort of the silicon kind of carbon revolution, you know, the kind of invention in the U.S. and protecting that's been very important. And so the you know, so the material that we produce, we produce both the carbon and the silicon and we produce the carbon itself. We produce from essentially commodity chemicals that you could really get anywhere in the world that are not not very super exotic. And the precursor that we use for the for the silicon is saline gas, S-I-H-4. It's kind of the most sort of elemental, you know, kind of most simple form of that of saline, of silicon in the form of the gas. And so there's not much production in the U.S. except for a company called REC Silicon that is now kind of owned by Hanmon. It's a long story that I don't even know what the latest in the soap opera is. But basically, we kind of realized early on that we were going to have to control our destiny. So we acquired a technology from a German company to create silencers. And so we have that technology, we have a plant to do that in Germany, and so we're ready to deploy that technology anywhere in the world for future plants. So right now we're we're kind of sourcing silane that's already commercially made in the U.S., for example, out of Rally Silicon in Butte, Montana, or in Korea through SK, which is which is our partner and the Korea company. But we have the ability to actually produce our own plant from scratch and build in the silane plant in it. And really, the vision is not. And not just building the silane, but putting the whole supply chain. So, for example, our battery customer would be great to be next door to them and maybe the automaker next door to them. So you have the whole kind of the whole supply chain kind of in the same geographical region. So we have a technology that we can meet the needs locally, whether we want to build just just our standalone plant or whether we want to be part of a larger chain built just for that for that region. We're looking at both kind of options, depending on where in the world. So just to clarify, the manufacturing of the silane gas is somewhat of a choke point currently. That you're working on overcoming. But the materials, there are no materials choke points. You just got to build enough production capacity. So the material to make silane gas is metallurgical grade silicon, which is a commodity you can buy anywhere in the world. And that's made basically from quartz, from SiO2. So. So in theory, you just said this, but I want to run through it again. In theory, someone making EV batteries could. In the same compound on the same site. Create. Manufacture the gas, make the anode, make the cathode, make the battery vertically integrate the whole supply chain in a single location. Right. And that and certainly that vision makes makes a lot of sense for for some areas. Yes, exactly. And another thing I forgot to mention earlier, which is one of the things that I thought was really exciting about this. And maybe people had intuited this, but this anode works with any cathode, any lithium based. Yes, it does. It works with any type of cathode chemistry, LFP, NMC, if everybody knows all the acronyms and also solid state batteries. What's your relation to the solid state world right now? Good question. So I guess solid state as kind of the more formal definition of like, you know, not like being a solid. You know, we there are solid state anode architectures that that actually prefer to use silicon and some companies that have advertised silicon works really, really well with that. And we have some customers that are that have solid state architectures that look at our batteries. And we have some customers that have advertised silicon works really, really well with that. Anode architectures that look at our material as their anode active material. Now, some folks may call solid state as a kind of a pure metallic, you know, lithium anode. That's different. That's that's not really a solid state. That's really a very, very different battery. But I guess solid state is defined as being a solid phase. You know, silicon is or or silicon carbon composites is a very suitable material for that kind of anode. And just I'll editorialize briefly here. Like if people are familiar with LFP batteries, lithium iron phosphate. They are cheaper to make and they use much more common materials. Tesla uses them in some of their cars and overseas, but mostly they're used for grid scale storage because they're cheaper to make and the materials are cheaper, but they lack the energy density of your NMC batteries for your high end performance. So if you could pair this anode, which increases energy density by five times with the cheapness. And materials advantages of LFP. That kind of seems like the magic. The magic battery right there. I want to take you when I talk to procurement guys or customers. It's the way you describe this. Makes sense to me. Yeah. And so, so, you know, LFP, you know, it's cheaper type of batteries basically. And pairing it with a premium anode material makes a lot of sense in terms of getting improvement per dollar. It can make a lot of sense. Is someone making LFP batteries with these anodes yet? Yes. Again, I can't talk to any specific customer, but if you look at our, for example, some of the papers, our white paper and some other things, we've presented some examples of LFP chemistry that works really, really well with SCC55. You were getting a bunch of money from the DOE back when the DOE was different. Now it's different. Are you still getting that money from the DOE? What's your current relationship with Department of Energy? Good, good question. It's certainly been a pretty wild ride for us. You're not alone, my friend. But we've really weathered it all, right? So we've sort of ascended on kind of Trump one. We've raised a bunch of funds under Obama. And Trump two, we're still have multiple awards. We have two big awards in Moses Lake, one for our commercial manufacturing plant, our 2,000 ton per year plant. We're building two of those modules in Moses Lake. And we'll have those by middle of next year, both of those running. The Moses Lake plant got moved. We're going to move back by a year or two. It's still on track. It's been delayed a little bit. We had to open up our Korea one first. material or for silane gas too that's for making the material we also have a an award for silane gas production and that that one will be deployed after that and you're still getting those awards they are not again we haven't talked specific timelines at this point but those those programs are so moving they're just not they're a little too late also i forgot to ask because everybody loves their phones um are the batteries that they're putting in phones with this stuff are the batteries lasting are you getting substantial increases in battery performance in phones because everybody loves that yes uh the the main batteries that we're in that we've that have been advertised has been the honor of the magic phone is which is basically which is more the ai enablement so it's not so much about higher energy density but about higher sort of computational uh capability and about higher sort of uh charging and discharging rate capability frequency switching for those batteries and and you know again i don't really understand why frequency and this is one of those things where like we had no idea how important so you know you talk about rate capability like being able to charge and discharge rapidly but being able to change the rate at which you're charging and discharging very rapidly it has been huge and i don't understand why that's so important but apparently it is and i'll tell you another anecdote one of our customers he had a test where they were they were basically charging a battery you know discharging it and and every every second uh they were kind of stopping and waiting and then and then trying to charge again and they could they could only they couldn't do this with graphite at all and they could do it with silicon and then and then he said wow and i did i could do it at a millisecond so i said well actually why don't you do it at a microsecond and he said like i can't do that my equipment can't do that so we'll then change your equipment and he he eventually figured out how to do it and it worked at milliseconds so now i've challenged him to do nanosecond but he hasn't figured out how to get the equipment to to do that yet uh but apparently this is very very important for for ai this this frequency switching capability and again it's because it's an alloy because it's a different mechanism okay i got i'm running out of time i got two questions left one is just about cost curves uh i always i always ask of any technology what is the cost of a battery and what pieces of this puzzle are can you work on that will bring down costs over time presumably scaling up the manufacturing of siling gas will be a big piece what else is going to bring down the cost of this material over time yeah i think uh bringing down the you know getting the siling gas is going to be key piece to it and just just getting at scale right so of course our our first plan is the most uh is the hardest one to get up and running um and i think as we get more of the plants we'll get more of that economy of scale so understanding how to get more efficient understanding how to increase the throughput through the same equipment and you know we're already working on designs to increase the throughput of our plant maybe another two or even tenfold more uh with the same kind of technology so we're constantly kind of challenging ourselves to get more efficient at how we can produce the material so that's scale that's mostly scale the material itself are you going to get is the goal over time to increase the amount of carbon because that's kind of what you're getting your performance out of it is is the goal over time is there such a thing as in the future a 100 silicon anode or are you always going to need the carbon for the lattice what's the what's the theoretical maximum amount of silicon you could get in there yeah it's a good question so at some point there'll be uh diminishing returns where your your material inside the sponge is more than the sponge itself um sort of a 50 50 mixture seems to be kind of a nice nice sweet spot we've certainly i think we're going to be able to do that and we're looking at some other technologies as well um but but this seems to right now be a nice a nice sweet spot for for the technology and are you worried at all about competitors on your heels is anybody else doing this thing and you anticipate other people doing it or are you worried about other people doing it or are you worried about other people doing it um so i'm curious to hear what you guys think about that i think that's a great question i think it's a good question it's a good question i think it's a good question i think it's a good question i think it's a good question i think it's a good question i think it's a good question i think it's a good question this thing do you anticipate the inevitability of china stealing this and doing this thing like who how worried are you about competitors we we are very aggressive in defending our ip uh you know you kind of mentioned china that that clearly isn't that is an issue it's it's been been quite quite in the news right now um uh one of our competitors uh has filed against a chinese company actually and we've we've published our own uh opinion on that um and so i will let you guys read our opinion rather than me kind of espouse it here but we feel quite strongly about our specific position uh the strength of our position we feel quite strongly about the u.s needing to keep the dominance are there other u.s companies trying to put silicon in a carbon lattice specifically there are other there are other distinct technologies where folks are looking at silicon nanomaterials okay really final question um asking you to speculate in five years what percentage of lithium-ion batteries will have this material in their anode i would say 80 maybe 100 all right all right ambitious awesome well rick constantino thank you so much this is absolutely fascinating uh thanks everybody for coming thanks everybody you've been listening to volts founded and hosted by me david roberts by nate peavey and supported entirely through the generosity of listeners like you if you enjoyed this conversation please consider telling a friend about volts that's how this show grows and survives through word of mouth see you next time