9.15.20 MIT Academic Innovator: “Electrochemical Pathways Towards Sustainability” (Presentation and Q&A)

JIM GADO: Hello and welcome to today's program. I'm Jim Gade, senior director at MIT Corporate Relations and MIT Startup Exchange. It's my pleasure to kick off our first MIT Startup Exchange event of the new academic year at MIT, sustainable materials innovation.

MIT Startup Exchange was begun six years ago, largely based on input from our ILP corporate member database, as well as the broader MIT community. The purpose of which is to better connect our corporate partners with the MIT startup community. Today, there are more than 1,900 MIT-connected startups registered in our program. And we provide in excess of 600 facilitated introductions between this startup community and the ILP corporate membership each year.

Here are some of the success stories that we've had over the past several years of partnerships developed between our corporate members and the MIT startup community. These partnerships range from everything from pilot testing, early customer adoptions, to, in some cases, investment in the startups. The startup community reflects the research agenda at MIT itself. You can see the broad range of disciplines here, including what's relevant to today's webinar.

So how best for our corporate partners to connect with the startup community? There are several ways, including events such as today. And we hold many of these throughout the course of the year virtually during the pandemic period that we find ourselves in but, hopefully, soon, in person as that subsides. The heart of this are these customized, facilitated introduction meetings between our corporate partners and the MIT startup community. And we also have an opportunity posting platform, where corporate members can post challenges to the startup communities. And the startups themselves select and respond to those.

With that, let me begin today's program. Today, in sustainable materials innovation, we have segmented, roughly, the value chain of materials from raw material production and processing to material end uses and end of life and recycle with the focus on sustainable means for all of this. Our first group of five startups, which we'll hear from in a minute, attends to the front end of the value chain. And then the second part of the program will have an additional five startups on the latter stages of the value chain. As we go through this and you hear from the startups, we invite the audience to submit questions by the Q&A button at the bottom of your Zoom panel. And when we have the two panel sessions with the startups, we'll be able to have the question and answer then.

With that, it's my pleasure to introduce our first keynote speaker, Professor Don Sadoway. He is the John F. Elliot professor of materials chemistry in MIT's department of materials science and engineering. Professor Sadoway's research interests span broad application of electrochemistry including to metals extractions, metal production, as well as energy storage.

Relevant to today, Professor Sadoway has been a serial entrepreneur with several startups coming from the research in his lab, including such startups as Ambri, working in the space of energy storage, and two of today's featured startups, Boston Metal and Phoenix Tailings. Professor Sadoway's keynote is entitled electrochemical pathways towards sustainability. Don, over to you, please.

DONALD SADOWAY: Thank you. It's a pleasure to be here. And I'm going to switch on the share screen. We're going to do two vignettes, one about decarbonisation of manufacturing. And that's going to address steelmaking. And then the other one is treating the intermittency of renewables, which feeds into grid level storage.

And the premise in the work here is that electricity is tantamount to modernity. And if I want to make things better, I'm going to rely heavily on electricity. And I'm going to make a statement that, ultimately, I believe that almost all industrial chemistry will become industrial electrochemistry. And so that argues for sustainable electrification.

So let's look at steel first. In 2018, world steel production was almost 2 billion tons. And that would produce 3.3 gigatons of CO2. And that represents 9% of world CO2, not 9% of the CO2 that comes from manufacturing, 9% of CO2 total. I mean, if steel were a country, it would be the third largest CO2 emitter. Number one would be United States. Number two would be China. And number three would be republic of steel.

So when I started thinking about inventing beyond this, I looked at the basic chemistry. Iron is found in nature as a oxide. I know that the electron can be sustainably produced and act as a reducing agent. And from my many years of teaching freshman chemistry, I know that like dissolves like.

So if I've got an oxide as a feedstock, I'm making molten oxide as the electrolyte. And then the electron does the work. That means electrolysis. And so that gave me this extreme form of electrolysis, which is far more radical than electrolising water, where we make liquid metal and oxygen as the byproduct.

And this is the heart of the reactor. You can see the electrode at the top, the anode immersed into molten oxide electrolyte. And that's where we'd feed in the iron oxide. And by the production of electric current, we generate liquid iron, which pools at the bottom. And oxygen gas bubbles off the top.

And this would have a much lower capital cost than the existing technology. An electrolytic cell costs far less than a blast furnace. We don't need Coke ovens because we're not using carbon, no center plant, no basic oxygen furnace. And so this will scale at a much lower tonnage than makes a practical integrated steelworks today.

And so this is some work that was done here at MIT. It's all done in the laboratory small scale. And then here is even some work where we're actually passing current in this one.

So this was all done with idealized systems. But then around 2013, we made the discovery of a practical inert anode made out of ferrochromium alloy. And with that, we knew we had what we needed to start a company. And by the way, this was published in Nature. This isn't just cook and look. So I wanted to show that it's possible to have really good science backing up innovation as well.

And so we started a company, Boston Metal. And you'll hear about that in a few minutes. So I don't want to take too much thunder away from Adam. But the company is established and put molten oxide electrolysis, make it commercial. And the idea is to make better metal-- pardon me-- zero emissions, and lower cost, clearly disruptive.

And now I want to turn to the other piece, the other vignette, which is about electricity. And if we want sustainable electricity, we're going to rely heavily on the intermittent renewables like wind and solar. Pardon me. And so storage is the key enabler here. Without storage, we can't have these intermittent renewables integrated fully into baseload.

And so it's a very difficult task. It's not like building a battery for a handheld device. We need long service lifetime measured in decades. It has to be safe. It can't have fires. It has to be operationally flexible, some short-term auxiliary functions and some long-term bridging the gap, maybe over several days.

And ultimately, it has to be low cost. It has to be able to compete against things like diesel and natural gas. And it has to be all of them, not just the majority of them.

And so I reasoned that I had to turn the paradigm that we have in research, which is invent the coolest chemistry. And if something good happens, maybe we'll have a startup company. No. We have to think about cost on day one. Because if we don't hit the cost target, nothing else matters. And so we started with the cost as the first premise.

And it's battery versus combustion, not battery versus battery. So I said, we can find chemistry to earth-abundant elements. Now if you want to make it dirt cheap, make it out of dirt and preferably local there. Because that way, you've got a secure supply chain.

And make it easy to manufacture. So think about design at the discovery stage. Don't make something that is as complex as a lithium ion battery. And so for inspiration on the chemistry, I didn't go to the battery people. I ignored them. I went to electrometallurgy for inspiration.

Here's a modern aluminum smelter. It's about 75 feet left to right. Probably goes back about a mile and consumes vast quantities of electricity. So I looked at that. And I said, you know, I didn't even say I want a battery. I said a colossal cheap storage device. And I reasoned that, if you can traffic in large amounts of electricity and turn dirt into metal for $0.50 a pound, if I could teach that thing how to store electricity and not consume it, then I'd have something that's big and cheap.

And that gave rise to the liquid metal battery with three layers of low density liquid metal on top, molten salt in between, and a high density liquid metal on bottom. And on discharge, the magnesium wants to alloy with the antimony. And then on charge, we force current through and restore it.

And that was the first one. But there's a plurality of choices for the upper metal coming from the northwest part of the periodic table and a plurality of choices for the lower metal. And that comes from the southeast part of the periodic table. So we have something composed of earth-abundant elements, roundtrip efficiency comparable to that of pumped hydro. I'll show you a resistant capacity fade, self-heating at commercial scale, and immune to thermal runaway, which is a big threat in large format lithium ion, and safe to ship even by air.

So we've tested over 1,500 of these cells, different chemistries. And again, some applications in top tier journals. And so startup time, I didn't want to start up. But two of my students said, you want to have an impact on society. So let's have a startup.

And it's been 10 years, I'm embarrassed to say. But this is tough tech. It's not easy. It's a long journey to developed this technology at scale. And the liquid metal battery corporation was the original name. It was a terrible name. And eventually, we came up with Ambri because we invented it in Cambridge. Ambri.com was still available. Series A funding came from Bill Gates. And he'd been watching my chemistry lectures online. And then the French energy giant total.

And just to show you one example of this, this is the lithium lead antimony battery. 4 and 1/2 years, 5,000 cycles, and it retains 99% of initial capacity. And the current chemistry that we're working on is calcium antimony, the same performance. The battery truly is fade resistant.

And so on the path to a fully commercial, this is one of the cells that we built. This is 18 cubic meters, one megawatt hour, about 67 watt hours per kilogram, which is about half that of lithium ion. But it's dollars per kilowatt hour, which is your real metric, and this is priced less than lithium ion.

So I think that gives you a sense of what's going on in this sector. And I want to end by just drawing attention to this article that appeared literally yesterday in Nature Energy, a study ARPA-E-supported innovation. And the messages here are that the federal R&D funding for clean-tech startups. This is not federal R&D funding for clean-tech basic research. They're talking about startups. Because overall, the timelines are long. And the amount of investment is so great that it may not be the best match for venture capital.

And finally, that ARPA-E alone cannot fully bridge the valley of death. And maybe with demonstration and procurement programs, we can accelerate the rate of progress. And with that, I'm going to pause. Thank you for your attention.

JIM GADO: Thank you, Don, for that.

DONALD SADOWAY: My pleasure.

JIM GADO: We have a few questions for you. Let me start it off. Yourself, as a teacher first, you've had many startups now come from your lab, from your research. What are some of the critical learnings you've had over the years and that you've passed along to the students launching startups from the lab? And has this evolved with your experience after multiple startups?

DONALD SADOWAY: Oh, yeah. There's no question that what I had to know is something that I was learning by doing. And I think it's what I said in the talk. It's about identifying what I want to tackle and to pose the right question and then encourage the students to be bold and imaginative.

And in many instances, I hired students who didn't have a deep knowledge of the instant field. On the battery team, I would say that 90% of them were not electrochemists on day one. And I taught them the electrochemistry and taught them how to think about the problem. And initially, they were terrible. But after several years, they came up with remarkable solutions, innovations that people steeped in battery technology would have dismissed as pointless. So I think be prepared for the unprepared.

JIM GADO: Yeah. Great. Good advice. The field of electrochemistry itself, it's become hot again. Certainly, we see it in academia and not just in your department but other departments across the Institute and across universities.

But from what we see in the industry, we're seeing the uptake isn't quite so fast. Any thoughts from yourself as an academentian working on the cutting edge of this field, what further might be done to accelerate transition from more traditional thermochemical processing to electrochemical processing? Any thoughts on that?

DONALD SADOWAY: Well, the acceleration in the industrial sector, I think, will come on the heels of some major successes. I think this is tough tech. It takes a long time to get from lab bench to market with these technologies. And people are impatient.

But with some successes, I mean, we saw Nobel Prize go to lithium ion battery scientists last year. That was that was very heartening to me. Because for so long, this had been dismissed as it's not science. It's applied science and so unworthy of a Nobel Prize.

But I think success will breed success. There's no other way. But somebody has to-- you know, everybody wants to be first to be second in this field. Nobody wants to be first because they might risk failure. And I never think about failure. I think about what would be the impact if successful. And so that's what guides me.

JIM GADO: Right. We have a few questions from the audience related to energy storage. One asks something about solid state battery. How do you think of the technology?

DONALD SADOWAY: Well, people are legitimately looking at solid state batteries because they want to get rid of the volatile flammable electrolyte that is used in the lithium ion. So if they go 100% solid state, it'd be safe. And I wish them luck. I myself worked on solid polymer electrolytes and solid energy systems. This is spin out from MIT that is pursuing that.

So I think for portable devices, there may be success there. When it comes to massive scale, I think, axiomatically, solid state conduction is slower than liquid state conduction. So there might be some limitations there. But I encourage the people that are working on this. And I'm cheering for them.

JIM GADO: Great. One final question we have time for, sticking with storage. Today's theme of sustainability, with regards to Ambri, what do you think is the most sustainable feature of what they're doing?

DONALD SADOWAY: Well, I think the most sustainable feature is that end of life. All of the componentry can be repurposed into a battery. Again, because if I wanted to, say, get rid of the calcium and the antimony, and I wanted to do recycle, I would electrorefine them, which is exactly what we do every time we charge the battery. And the steel casing, that would go to an electric arc furnace for remelting. So I think when it comes to sustainability, the whole business of end of life is critical. And we don't have any such issues.

JIM GADO: Great. Excellent. Well, Don, this has been a great discussion. Thank you, not only for kicking off the program today, but for the inspiring work you continue to do in this field. Thank you.

DONALD SADOWAY: My pleasure.