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rc3-nowhere-talk-193 Latest text of pad rc3-nowhere-talk-193 Saved Feb 11, 2024 |
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this talk will be in English but you can also ask in German our speaker is there flexible so that's the organizational one all right now okay I can we go to the talk this talk will place in English but you can also hear a translation if you use media CCC then you can put the language in your browser in um I the next talk is why we are addicted to lithium and how to kick the habit our speaker is Frank wer and he gained our about our speaker he gained his first experience in journalism in Golem's science department in 2015 and yeah there he make his first journalism experience he studied industrial engineering and he is an old participant of this Congress his first stage experience he made on 32 C3 h on the F FR stage and on 34 C3 he also has a talk about accumulators and today he goes more special in with lithium and lithium e own battery and the history and from the history to the State ofthe art so be curious and I give over to Frank yeah hello um yeah I had a similar talk actually not similar um two years ago uh when we could still meet in person uh I was on the stage and I had to talk about batteries um since then I've learned a lot more especially about it I batteries and uh also alternatives to lithium ion batteries but that will be the topic of the second part of the talk um uh this is why we are addicted to lithium and how to kick the habit that's the next one that will be tomorrow evening um today uh let's talk about electric cars and why I mean you can see a couple of electric cars right here and uh why we need lithium to build them at least so far and uh you can see I mean you've seen this one um this is a bcop bucock electric Roadster um bucock is uh more famous for building steam steam engines and more recently nuclear power plants but they also built electric cars uh a bit over 100 years ago and uh this is one of them and uh as you can see um it wasn't very modern uh at least not in our terms uh back then it was uh among the best electric vehicles you
could get and around 1900 there was a bit of a craze of uh cars uh when they were completely new and everybody who had a lot of money wanted to have a car and electric cars were very popular with a lot of people in fact about half of all cars were electric and um at least around 1900 uh this one was uh 10 years later um at that time uh it was a luxury item uh very clearly and as I said half cars were electric um of the rest about one quarter was a steam engine powered and another quarter was by internal internal combustion engines and uh this changed um electric cars were of course quite comfortable at least as long as you could uh have somebody else maintain them uh you could just sit in there and uh start driving slowly um he 25 km per hour that this one reached were quite fast for electric car of car of the era um usually they were quite slow um electric cars uh were not a fast thing at all um uh the range uh of such a car uh with Le with Le acid batteries um was um Limited 160 km um I actually doubt if that was correct um there is a letter uh that was sent to the company and the company said yes we verify that was the case and uh we are very sure that nobody recharge the car along the way um but there were no independent tests of of any kind so um nobody quite knows um in any case uh at the speed of 25 km per hour it was an ordeal just to get from A to B um was very similar to the frer and at the same time uh of course other cars like the Ford Model T around uh 1910 uh were much more popular um and in later years uh more than 100 um more than 100 times as many uh for model T's were built than the most popular electric cars and at that time electric cars were pretty pretty much out um using an electric car at the time was very difficult much more difficult than it would be today because there was no such thing as modern Electronics so you could have your electric car and charge it overnight but you would wake up the next day and uh if you were unlucky and you ove
rcharge the battery the battery would be gone uh it would be destroyed um so charging the battery really required somebody to to watch over the car at all times and uh well that didn't make it very com very comfortable experience the way we would uh have it these days uh also took a long time and the energy capacity of the battery wasn't as good as it is today um also lifetime was very limited um these days uh let's say in the at the end of the 20th century you could expect about 5 00 charge cycles from lead acid battery um back then it was less uh nobody quite says how many but it was fewer than that um there were other uh Technologies available um uh yeah at the end of the 20th century you had cars like the ev1 the ev1 uh also used Le AET batteries and you see range was about 90 km um even though at the time they said it was 126 or later they used nickel metal hydride batteries and they had about 228 kilometers um as they said but um the standards testing testing regime changed uh uh in later years and it was by modern standards it's about 90 to 170 kilom um ev1 was very expensive car nobody quite says how expensive exactly it was uh but it seems to have been much more than $100,000 uhar per car um for the simple reason that um not a lot of them were built about 500 were built with the lead acid batteries and another 500 um with the Nic metal hydride batteries and uh when you build something in such small numbers it will always be extremely expensive um these days things change um I mean just compare these numbers uh you have like a bit more than 100 kilometers realistically and now you have 400 or 500 kilometers uh by the same standards um this is the the model of 2022 actually this is uh Tesla Model 3 um standard range Plus in the newest model uh I think you cannot quite buy this one yet but uh new models will be will be delivered with that kind of range um um so something changed uh very drastically and that was of course lithium and lithium ion batteries uh be
coming affordable um at least much less uh much less expensive than they used to be um that's not to say that the Tesla is a cheap car it's not at all uh it's like 45,000 US dollar or Euros uh whatever you want and uh it's it's still not cheap uh we still have a ways to go to get affordable cars of course they're cheaper cost than Tesla 3 but um yeah even getting here is a tremendous amount of progress and a lot of things had to be done um and one of the origins that I didn't I didn't even know that this was uh among the origins but uh two years ago uh John good enough enough got the uh got the Nobel Prize for uh his uh discovery of his help in building uh lithium iron batteries and he said that this was an important step it was inventing the sodium sulfur battery uh sodium sulfa was an important technology uh at the time even though it didn't really translate into uh building electric cars with uh new Battery Technology um it was the first time that uh new new battery used uh didn't use hydrogen ions to go back and forth but that the chemistry was was based in this case on sodium um the original patent said Alkali sulfur battery um because they hoped they could use lithium because lithium is uh has higher voltage and it's much lighter so and because it's much lighter um you can get much higher energy density um but it turns out that if you want to use this setup uh this exact setup for lithium uh you run into trouble because this this is a high temperature battery uh this runs with sodium at about 300 to 350 uh de Celsius it's very hot uh because you want to have uh liquid sodium and liquid sulfur um and in between you have a solid ceramic uh through which uh sodium ions can go um the electrons take the take the other way they go around the battery uh and that's how you get the energy out of the battery and uh that was invented in 1966 and people were um inspired by this um they were inspired that you could use um these ions uh you could use Alkali ions like lithiu
m or sodium to build batteries and uh yeah um just a little bit on on lithium and sodium uh sodium uh if you look at it is about three times as heavy as lithium um it's bigger it has one angrum diameter and uh the voltage directr chemical potential is minus 2.7 volts um for lithium essentially everything is better um it's smaller it's lighter uh and it has more potential so you get about3 volts more in a battery and that makes lithium um pretty much a perfect material except for one thing there is is not a lot of lithium on Earth um I mean there is a lot if you just count it in terms of tons but um if you look at lithium um lithium ores are about one have about 1,000 uh um have about .1% concentration of lithium and uh whereas sodium you can get like 40% or something like that um The Next Step step was to get it at room temperature and uh important invention here was by uh staning wittingham and staning Whittingham was actually actually working on uh super conduct electric superconductors and uh he was using tantalum sulfide uh and he found out that he could change the properties of tantalum sulfide by intercalating uh I mean it's a as you can see there are several layers here and you could just put some uh some other uh atoms in between to change the properties of the uh of the material to get um uh to get a different superconductor and maybe a better superconductor and at some point uh he had the idea hey we could build a we could use this to build a battery because uh the ions in these layers also chemically react with the atoms in the in the layer and um yeah that was the first step um it was not a perfect material at all um the batteries that he built were uh in terms of energy density not much better than uh lead acid batteries but at least they worked um kind of for about five Cycles so they were not too good um but there was a guy who was good enough to build batteries and that was John uh John bister good enough uh he has a brilliant name um and he was not
a hero he was he was just a guy who worked and he worked a lot um he was a meteorologist in World War II uh in the 1950s uh he was a chemist he had become a chemist and uh he was supposed to invent an ceramic that is magnetic and could store information for the computers that were just coming up in the 50s and he invented the fite course that you might have heard of and uh at least the material for the fite course and then for next 10 years he was doing research in this lab on uh the properties of Ceramics especially the electrical and magnetic properties of Ceramics and uh that helped him later on uh though not at the time he was just doing fundamental research um in at the end at the beginning of the 70s uh he had to go get out of his lab uh his university wasn't funding him anymore and so he was forced to go into industry um and he said uh he was forced to do it but it was not a bad idea and uh he had the idea that uh instead of titanium di sulfide which is was Whittingham was using um he could use something else uh namely Cobalt oxide uh he was doing a lot of uh uh work with oxides and Cobalt oxide was one of them and uh you can see that um Titanium sulfide because of the sulfur is quite heavy actually and titanium is not a perfect material to react with lithium and so what you get is a voltage of about 1.8 Volts for the battery um and he said okay let's use Cobalt and he knew how to get the right structures out of material he knew uh the correct reaction conditions and everything because he had worked for 10 years on that sort of stuff and uh so he could he could create a Cobalt oxide that could that was built up in layers and you could build you could put the lithium into the layers where they could react with the Cobalt and uh that way he could build a lithium ion battery uh that was much better it had More Voltage uh I think 3.8 is a bit too low it's 3.9 um and the material has lower Mass and that way you could get a much uh much higher energy density from i
t you also needed a much smaller anode because the amount of energy you get out of one lithium atom depends on the on the voltage and when you have lower voltage when you when you have half the voltage that means you need twice as many lithium atoms to to get uh the same amount of energy and uh yeah so you need anodes um the problem with anodes is uh and wittingham didn't have a good an not that's why his batteries only lasted for five Cycles um that changed with ysami I hope I hope that name is correct uh he is from Morocco and I don't I don't speak the barber language I'm sorry um uh he thought hey we could use graphite and uh in graphite you could you can put lithium ions uh in between layers uh because I mean that was the top um that was the view from the top and you can see uh uh graphite is built up of layers just like Cobalt oxide and uh in between these layers you get the lithium ions uh and I'm sorry I didn't have enough time to animate it uh like here and just put them in between the layers but you can imagine how that works um the uh every lithium ion needs six carbon atoms uh to be stored and that is quite heavy uh the carbon weighs about 10 times as much as the lithium so that is kind of limiting but it's still very good and you can do it thousands of times without destroying the graphite um the important step here was actually to find an electrolyte where the ions could move in so the ions could move in it but the electrolyte wouldn't get between the layers and destroy the graphite and uh something similar uh was also needed for for all the other layout materials and eventually uh that was found and uh it worked out and uh yeah uh these days uh things have changed uh Cobalt uh lithium Cobalt oxide is no longer the main material for a long time it was and it was very important um the problem is though Cobalt is a very rare material and you have all heard about how it is mined um and so uh people want to get away from it but primary motivation was not um
getting away from uh uh uh Cobalt mines and Congo the primary motivation was to get better batteries and the batteries that they had was um you had uh you could uh exchange uh the cobal for nickel and nmc materials is nickel manganese Cobalt and the idea is to get as much nickel inside the battery as you can um without getting the nickel um I mean if you have nickel if you have only nickel the problem is that the nickel has about the same diameter as the lithium atoms and it gets into the layer where the where the LI where the lithium is supposed to be and you don't want that and uh so you need manganese and Cobalt to stabilize the entire structure um eventually that worked out uh it was a bit of a uh bit of a challenge to to make that work uh but it worked out and about 20 years ago people started to figure out how to how to make such materials and nmc111 was the first uh the numbers just uh say how much uh how much manganes and Cobalt there is so 111 means it's equal parts uh 811 means uh it's uh 8 Parts nickel one part manganese one part Cobalt and you see it's just making everything better uh the problem with Cobalt is that you cannot get all the lithium out and uh with nmc 811 there's essentially per gram of the material there's the same amount of lithium but you can get much more of the lithium out and that's why you have a higher uh higher energy density it really seems to make everything better you get more uh energy from a cheaper material uh and it's more compact it's it's just almost everything is better except um it has uh it's more sub um uh it's not as resistant to heat when you heat it up um it tends to release the oxygen I mean it's an oxide so so there's oxygen in there and it releases oxygen and unfortunately it's inside of an environment with an electrolyte that is a hydrocarbon and hydrocarbons burn and when you release oxygen into hydrocarbons they start to burn and they start to heat up the battery and now you have a hot battery uh in a confin
ed space and if you have it an electric car the entire car can start to burn and sometimes that has happened uh and so you need uh you need to put a lot of effort into making sure that there's always enough coolant and that if one battery heats up it doesn't heat up other batteries uh that will start heating up themselves and so on and that is a major problem um regardless um what we have seen in the last 10 years is uh that we can build batteries much cheaper one of the main reasons uh was building much bigger factories um it's the same as with the early electric vehicles uh or the ev1 uh they were only built like in a few hundreds of them and uh the small number of uh batteries or the small number of cars means that each car or each battery was very expensive and if you go back uh if you go on YouTube and you look for uh videos from Battery factories in around 2010 or so or 2011 uh you will see a lot of hand manual labor being done I mean every battery in those factories got touched by people and manipulated multiple times and it gets it's very slow it's very expensive and uh that's why uh prices were extraordinarily High uh you paid over $1,000 for a kilowatt hour and now it's uh about $130 per kilowatt hour in battery pack um but you can get below that you can get below $100 if you use different materials because uh things have changed um the factories have become much more efficient much bigger much more efficient uh production is much cheaper and uh the cheaper production uh means that now these days materials start playing a role um it used to be the case for very long time that uh the price of lithium had no bearing on the cost of a battery or the cost of cobalt uh it didn't matter I mean when you pay $1,000 just to make the battery who cares if your if your Cobalt costs 10 $10 more or less nobody cares uh when your battery costs about $100 or so um you care a lot whether something inside the battery now suddenly costs $10 more or less or 20 or 30 and uh tha
t has changed and these days uh as you can see at the end of the graph uh at the end of the graph I I put uh lithium iron phosphate batteries uh for comparison and they were much cheaper you can get uh at least 10 kilowatt hours uh for $1,000 in a battery pack uh on sale level it's even cheaper and uh that is because there is no Nickel in there there's no manganese in there there is no Cobalt in there um the mining companies hate it they absolutely hate it um but um the battery companies of course they like it a lot because it's much it's much cheaper and you can you can offer a battery that can drive a car um for a much more reasonable price uh we can we can uh see this here on the on the graph um actually because uh lfp is much more resistant to heat uh you can build them much lighter you don't need as much uh weight and structures to keep the batteries cool and to keep them safe and that way even though the battery cells with nmc 811 have much higher energy density the battery pack uh can be almost the same uh the energy density of the battery pack can be almost the same uh simply because you can save so much weight um uh Chinese companies like byd and catl uh have built the blade batteries or cellto pack Technologies and uh those have resulted in uh a revolution uh this year is the first year that uh lfp batteries is more than 50% of the total production and it was really funny uh earlier this year I heard an analyst from Bloomberg talk about lfp and he said it's a mirage this will just disappear here and uh yeah uh in the industry there are a lot of people who uh essentially deny the existence of alternatives to rare materials um especially those who invest in those rare materials and stand to benefit a lot from uh from high prices especially from uh high prices and Mining um we will see that change and uh the same is true for lithium as well um you can uh avoid using lithium and batteries uh and I've talked about this two years ago uh that this is possible um
two years ago I didn't know just how far the the technology had progressed I have read a lot about sodium ion batteries since then and U this will be a topic of the talk tomorrow um but for now uh we can we can have a look at the markets and we will see that uh in a matter of 12 months from uh November 20 to November 2021 uh the price of lithium has risen fivefold uh it went from the lowest price that we have ever seen for lithium or at least for a very long time uh to the highest price that we definitely have ever seen I mean lithium has never been more expensive than today and this is not going to stop uh because right now uh all manufacturers of uh cars especially cars building uh batteries or want to buy batteries some of them started building uh their own battery factories especially Tesla but also others and uh they didn't look where they would get their lithium from and they didn't invest in in lithium mining or anything and the big problem is uh you cannot just say uh you cannot snap your fingers and get lithium out of the ground it takes a long time to build the the mining equipment and build up the mines so you can start mining because I mean you're taking dirt from the ground and then you start to invent for each mine you have to essentially start inventing your own process how to get uh clean lithium out of the dirt you've gotten out of there because that dirt you get you're digging out is or stones or whatever um is mostly not lithium and you have to really get all the impurities out and this is a very difficult process and depending on where it is it takes five to 10 years to get it right and uh something similar I mean that's why that's why uh right now we really locked into to whatever Investments have been made five years ago so and uh nobody quite predicted how much more demand there would be for lithium ion batteries and uh yeah if you want to make many any more batteries than uh the investment allows for 5 years ago um then you have to go look fo
r something else something that is not there you um something similar happened with nickel but uh changing from nmc to lithium ion batteries uh to to lfp to um lithium ion phosphate uh really prevented uh that from happening I mean nickel is more expensive but just by by 26 % or so um so there will be no fast battery growth uh without further substitution um because you cannot build lithium ion batteries without lithium and yeah yeah uh thank you um if you want to know where the where the uh 16 color pictures came from originally uh where were converted from uh I can I can absolutely recommend Hawkins electrical guide uh you can find it on archive.org uh was published in uh 1914 so this should be a public domain everywhere and I can absolutely recommend reading this how electric car work back then um any question please uh and if you don't want to ask in in English that's fine just ask in German uh if you need an answer in German uh please please just say so okay so thank you very much for this interesting talk and first of all if you're are curious uh tomorrow there is part two of this talk and there you can you can see the part how we can get rid of that problem of our addiction to lithium I'm surely isn't there I'm very interested and now we have questions first question question is how big is the impact of lithium prices in the context of the general electronic shortage okay um the lithium price used to be on the order of about4 to5 us per kilowatt hour um that was last year this year it's uh more like $20 or something like that and uh when you look at the cheer end of the batteries uh which is um on the cell level that is uh when you have a battery you you first have to have the the actual battery cell and then you have to take your battery cell and build a big battery pack so you can put it into your car um those are more expensive but on the cell level uh the individual cells uh the cheapest cost something like 60 or 70 US doar per kilowatt hour something on
that order and when you have to add uh like 15 or 20 us to this kind of price uh that's quite a lot um it's not just lithium that got more expensive also some other components of the battery but this is certainly the most prominent and uh most of the price increases uh hasn't uh really gotten through yet um the price that is referred to there is really the spot market so if you just want to go and buy a thousand tons of lithium or whatever or lithium carbonate um that's one thing but uh most of the lithium is bought in contracts uh fixed contracts and uh the new contracts uh are not not yet negotiated so um these contracts will be made like in next few weeks or months and they will demand much higher prices than they used to and that's when the actual the actual price will will come through and uh everybody expecting something like 20 20% or something like that more uh than used to be and this is very strange because in the last 20 years batteries have essentially almost always gotten cheaper every single year and uh this is not the case right now um this the first time that uh battery prices are on trajectory to start getting more expensive again next question is what what can we as the end user do to make it a little better except for the regular things like recycling um recycling right now actually doesn't matter too much the problem here is that uh those batteries are too damn good um they last a really long time uh I mean thousands of Cycles um you can actually see that that the batteries will last longer than the cost themselves um so with electric cars recycling is actually for many years to come uh recycling will not be very important to um to alleviate any lithium or raw material shortage um this will this will take a lot more time until uh those batteries are actually finished um right now it's um don't buy SUVs um because SUVs need much bigger batteries because they're not aerodynamics I mean it's a giant brick that you have to move through through throug
h the air and uh you it requires a lot of energy to get the air away so um if you uh buy smaller more aerodynamic cars they will automatically need much less energy to move forward um so that helps um uh in general um smaller batteries uh the less the less battery the less lithium that's always the same and uh I mean it's it's not like it's not like we will have less lithium in the next couple of years uh that's not the problem uh we will always get more and more lithium in the next com in the coming years uh it's just the the demand the amount of lithium that is needed by the factories and by the companies that is rising much faster than the amount of of lithium that the mining companies can provide so there there's a gap that is growing okay and uh the only thing you can do is uh to push for alternatives to lithium uh because uh the mining companies physically cannot provide enough lithium uh for the next coming years we have two questions left one from northern Portugal I'm currently in Northern Portugal where one of potential European mining areas are located I sense a strong opposite with the locals how realistic is the hypothesis that there is no need to extract to extract lithium here um in general um it's it's a problem to I mean there is a not in my backyard problem here um because you can always say uh uh yeah we we need lithium but not from here and uh one of the reasons I I did this this talk in two parts uh was to say that uh lithium ion batteries are actually important um in some applications you absolutely need the maximum amount of energy density and lithium is the thing that that provides that so we we kind of do need lithium that is not the question um from where exactly is is indeed a good question um whether it's from Portugal or not uh I cannot really I cannot really say that um because I I haven't actually looked at the exact circumstances of the of the mining area in in Portugal um but you should definitely have a look at uh making impacts as
small as possible um uh in terms of uh what is population density uh what are local resources um uh what's the environment like and so on and uh you would really have to compare that but it has to get you have to get it from somewhere and uh you cannot just go around the world and say but not from here everywhere and uh uh there as I said I'm I'm not saying uh Portugal is definitely you definitely need to go mining in Portugal I I absolutely that's not what I mean I mean just like um have a look at the at this exact situation there and uh if you want to argue against it then uh you should uh you should provide an argument that uh there is uh there's a good reason not to mine here but uh maybe elsewhere um in the short in the short run we absolutely need it um and we need sodium in addition to that okay we have a new question and this is one of the two do you know of any alternatives to the 18,650 batteries that can handle 2A curent Tross um uh if I knew the capacity of if I need the typical capacity of a of an 1865 battery then uh I could answer that question more easily but I don't have it on top of my head so so um if you had given me a c rate then maybe um uh it really depends if you need high power uh like just if the amount of energy in the battery is uh not quite so important so if you could do with uh let's say half the amount of energy inside the cell and then of course there's if you just need high power for a short time um then of course there's an alternative um the combination of high power and high energy uh that's more that's a bit more difficult um yeah uh running short on time unfortunately I think there's time for one more question um otherwise uh I think there's an overflow room somewhere um maybe you can go ask the question there um yeah one question we have a short one at what price does Point mining from seawater will become an OP option um right now uh right now no price because um nobody has really developed a process that is economically feas
ible and also scalable um uh as soon as that happens uh you have to look at the price they offer and then you can do the maap I'm yeah I'm sorry but uh I I can only report on on what has already been done and uh anything else is uh speculation and I don't know enough about the field to do speculation based on any good data so um I cannot speculate intelligently so um I will spare you the dumb speculation short question short answer very very thank you and I I hope you have as much fun as I had and I'm very curious of of your part two and if your question couldn't ask today come in tomorrow look at the part two and um one more thing uh very very quickly um I know that def font is not very readable um I used p8 to uh to do this presentation and because I I just liked it I I like the Aesthetics of it um but I will use a more regular Presentation tomorrow because uh uh I've been told that it's not very readable so um if you find it not too readable then uh come back tomorrow will be easier oh then again thank you and see you tomor see you
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