Transcripts For CSPAN3 Next Generation Battery Technology 20240622

Second, they may be inhibiting their ability to explore world markets. And i dont care what country you are, even if the Global Economy is bigger than you are. Dont cut yourself off from access to it. The same message needs to get to the european who is are struggling with a Single Market which at the same time may be accidentally preventing themselves from participating in a Global Market and letting the Global Market participate in the european one. So my message has always been economic. It is in your interests, mr. President , to invest in the internet, to keep it as open as possible and to allow your creative population to make use of it. No country has a corner on creativity and invention. Its uniformly distributed throughout the population of the world. Its just that the people with these ideas dont always have the wherewithall and support in order to explore those ideas. I will give you as a concrete example of that, how many folks come from india to the Silicon Valley or seattle or here and do spectacularly well . Their ideas were the same, its just they didnt have the investment infrastructure, the willingness to take risk that we have in the United States. And so we know that there are smart people out there with the possibility to improve their own gdp if the rules could be made similar to what they are here in the United States. We are almost out of time. But before i ask the last question, id like to remind everyone about some upcoming speakers. Lieutenant general michelle johnson, the first woman to lead the air force academy. Great. Will address a luncheon on friday. The ceos of american, delta and United Airlines will appear together at a luncheon on may 15th. What an opportunity and garrison keeler, author and host of prairie home companion, will address the press club on may 22nd. I would now like to present our guest with the greatest gift of all, the National Press club mug which you can treasure for decades. [ applause ] mugshot that is a mug shot. And now the final question, maybe we have time for two depending on how long your answer is. How long my answers are. Yeah. This question almost sounds like it could have come in over the internet. Im not sure whether it did. This questioner says, you have fewer than 5,000 followers on twitter, and youre not verified, whats up with that . So i dont tweet all that much. Just every once in a while. You know, i have Better Things to do. You know, and besides i have more than enough visibility as it is. I dont need anymore. I got stopped by two autograph guys, right, as they walked in today. So i dont know verification what do you have to do to get verified . Send your blood type or something . Well have to ask twitter. I remember asking the guy that started twitter, he says is your title chief twit, he didnt think that was very funny. Next question. Why isnt there a nobel prize in computing oh, i havent answered that. And should there be one . Youd have to ask mr. Nobel, but hes long passed. The story, which may not be true, is that mr. Nobels wife ran away with a really good m h mathematici mathematician. And in consequence mr. Nobel told his committee under no circumstance will any branch of mathematics be recognized by the nobel prize. And unfortunately Computer Sciences tended to be associated with mathematics, understandably. So we in that field are not eligible for the nobel prize. We might be eligible for the peace prize, but thats a real stretch because thats a very political kind of thing. There is, however, a prize thats offered by the association for computing machinery, which was founded in 1947 in the u. S. It is now gone global. There is the chinese and indian and European Council in addition to the one which oversees the whole global operation. I am former president of acm, im still serving in that role until the middle of 2016. And the prize is called the touring award, named after ellen touring. Many of you by this time will know from the movies that have been made. That prize is 1 million. Its funded by google. And were proud to offer that through acm every year. And i did get that prize along with bob khan in 2004. So i feel more than adequately compensated. It wasnt a Million Dollars back then and they arent doing it retro actively. I asked, but that didnt work. So it is a coveted and very high recognition of contribution to the Computer Science community. I think thats more than enough. How about of a round of applause for our speaker . [ applause ] thank you very much. [ applause ] id also like to thank National Press club staff including its Journalism Institute and Broadcast Center for organizing todays event. And remember if you would like a copy of todays program or to learn more about the National Press club, go to our website. Thats press. Org. Thank you very much. We are adjourned. [ applause ] tonight on American History tv, programs on the cold war. Starting at 8 00 p. M. , real america, exercise delawar, a u. S. Army big picture film highlighting a 1964 United Statesiran joint forces operations when the nations were allies. At 8 30 Nuclear Arms Race and lecture about the competition between the u. S. And ussr to build advanced Nuclear Weaponry during the cold war. And just before 9 30, korea and the cold war. And a book titled, cold war crucible. All of this tonight on American History tv on cspan 3. Republican president ial candidate donald trump will be in New Hampshire tonight. And well cover live a town hall that hes holding at 7 10 p. M. Eastern time in hampton. Courts washington correspondent steve levine and Jeffrey Chamberlain with the joint center for Energy Storage research, talk about the development of next generation Lithium Ion Battery Technology at a forum hosted by the Atlantic Council. Well, welcome everybody and good afternoon. Welcome to the Atlantic Council. Were pleased to have you all here today. I want to apologize in advance. Weve had some internet difficulties today. So were going to be sort of passing microphones back and forth if its not up and running by the time steve and jeff start. But im sure it will all work out. But i do want to emphasize that this is a very important event today. Its the inaugural event in our new Technology Speaker series. And one of the things that our new Global Energy center that we are emphasizing is the Critical Role that technology will play in helping us to meet clean energy challenges. And also the geopolitical and International Ramifications of those new technologies. And so for this reason were thrilled to have and host steve levine and Jeff Chamberlain this afternoon. You know, we could all stand here and identify the key Technological Breakthroughs in the past, but our guests today have taken on the challenging task of looking to the future. And more specifically the future of next generation lithium ion, i guess, shows how technical i am, batteries. Next generation Battery Technologies have the potential to have a momentous impact on markets, International Politics and climate change, enriching some countries and governments while exacerbating the economic woes of others. But how close we are to seeing these developments play out in the real world and what the obstacles are, thats what were going to talk about today. And our speakers today seek to answer these questions and more. Steve levine, who ive known for many, many years and maybe the preeminent Energy Journalist anywhere, is the washington correspondent for quartz, thats quartz. In his long and distinguished career, hes covered geopolitics, energy and technology with extraordinarily keen eye. Inside the invention of a battery to save the world provided the inspiration for todays event. I might say that there are some copies that are available outside afterwards. Steve has also written the oil and the glory. And i think has just a tremendous ability to take very technical subjects and write about it in a way that ordinary nontechnological types like me can understand. And in the process of writing his book, steve has worked extensively with dr. Jeff chamberlain, who is the executive director of the joint Energy Storage Research Facility at the Argonne National laboratory. And in that role dr. Chamberlain has worked at the cutting edge of Energy Storage and next generation Battery Technology. So i couldnt be happier to kick off our new Technology Series with such a great pair of speakers on such a fascinating topic. And the way this will be handled as compared to some Atlantic Council events, it will be a conversation really between steve and jeff. Steve i guess will start off and introduce the subject. And they will talk back and forth. And then im sure well open it up to your questions a little bit later. So, again, thank you all for coming. And, steve and jeff, its all yours. Its actually jeff whos going to start out. Thanks for that introduction. Yes, ill start off. As wz just mentioned im Jeff Chamberlain, im a scientist from Argonne National laboratory. I appreciate everyone coming here on such a Beautiful Day like it is today and coming inside to listen to us talk. I happen to work at a National Laboratory, and what that is is a place where your tax dollars are invested to do things for the nation. It happens to be research. And mostly its very fundamental research aimed at enabling the development of technology that will change our lives. Not only our daytoday lives, but change our lives in terms of Gross Domestic Product in this country, and jobs, et cetera. Since were a little limited on time is to dive right into the conversation if youre all right with that, steve. Okay. And maybe to finish a little bit of an introduction, if you havent read the book yet, this is actually quite a surreal thing happening right now. And i hope you have read or will read the book and enjoy the surrealty, if thats a word, of what youre witnessing, because i am a character in the book that steve writes about. Glad to get some chuckles there because it is a very odd experience to be a character in a story that other people are reading in black and white. But it makes this conversation quite surreal. Youre going to see the evidence of several years of work that steve has done working with me and other people at Argonne National laboratory to write the story that i think is a very good story in the book. So enjoy that surreal nature of the book. Enjoy this surreal moment when you read the book. Ill start with a very obvious question. And i think we particularly the scientists in the lab are eager to have our story told, but also very suspicious as to whether it can be told in a compelling way when youre doing science in the laboratory. So my first question is, generally speaking, why write this book . Why batteries . Why science . Why technology . Thanks, jeff. First i wanted to thank ambassador morningstar for her having us today. And inviting us to be the guest for the inaugural session for the inaugural Technology Session for the new Energy Center here at Atlantic Council. So why batteries and why argonne, i get this all the time. You wrote a whole book about batteries . Are you talking about batteries . I mean, batteries in my tv . You know, in my radio and so on and whats the big thing about that. What i saw back in 2010 and 2011 when i decided to do this, this book, was the big geopolitics. And that was that first i noticed that there was a lot of people talking about batteries. And this is just a couple years after the financial crash. And this soul searching going on bringing down the idea that the United States Financial System and shenanigans going on in the United States had almost brought down the Global Economy. And it put us in trouble, the United States in trouble. And could we create an economy that had the foundation of Something Real that we were making and not, you know, and not a bubble, a real estate bubble, a dot com bubble, and so on. And in country after country, 20 countri countries grabbing onto batteries the next big thing. Real economies could be built on a superbattery, taking these batteries that we currently have and making them three, four, five times better. And then that being worth tens of billions of dollars by themselves. And then if you could get them into electric cars, build an electric car industry, then suddenly you had new hundredbilliondollarayear industries. The size of, back then, google, exxon. And that was a big thing especially if it empowered nations. If it undermined nations. If the United States, for example, if it won this race among nations created the super battery, created these industries, was using less oil and china was using less oil and countries whos power and influence in the world since the 70s had distorted global geopolitics because they had oil, opec, russia would suddenly by comparison have less power. All of that was very exciting. And the proof of that was before, right, and we can go into that later. Before i had actually got you guys to agree to let me in, i told my publisher that you had already agreed. And, you know yeah, i did that. And that was one of my shenanigans. But they bought into that whole thing that i just laid out was very exciting for them. So thats why. So ive heard you say lets put some numbers to this that in the last nine months theres been an additional excess of 3 million to 5 Million Barrels a day of oil put on the market through the shale gas or Shale Oil Revolution. Could you talk a little about that and what the implications are if a super battery not only can move us around in vehicles but can also be put on the grid, what is that equivalent to in terms of a demand reduction that would be comparable to an increase in supply that weve been seeing the last year . So couple of ways of looking at that is, one, we have an experiment in motion. We are watching shale oil change j geopolitics, and will continue to to the degree it has longevity and traction. It is 4 Million Barrels a day, going on five, thats come on the market, that did not exist three years ago four years ago 2011. And has put opec into chaos, has undermined Vladimir Putin and put the u. S. In a much stronger position internationally. Thats the same volume. Now, when citibank came out with a report three or four months ago talking only about stationery batteries shifting into our utilitieutilities, our companies, being adopted by countries like saudi arabia and japan that currently burn a lot of oil to shave the peak periods of the burning oil to create electrici electricity. If just stationary batteries moved in and that had a forecast, how many, how much penetration stationary batteries would penetrate. And by the year 2020, 4 Million Barrels a day of oil current oil consumption, would be removed from the market. Its the mirror image of adding the 4 Million Barrels a day. So what you would have if shale oil theres a debate going on right now how real this Shale Oil Revolution is. The bears say this is it, youre watching it, its going to be over next year. And the bulls say, well, actually not. This is going to be going on through the 2020s and onto 2030 or so. If the bears are wrong, then around 2020 and citi is right, you would have the same impact same Geopolitical Impact as youre watching with the shale oil. If the bulls are right, you have this compound impact. Its a tremendous momentous impact that changes our presumptions. And presumptions around the world about what happens next. What our Foreign Policy should be around the world because the underpinnings of it are being pulled out look like theyre being pulled out before our eyes. Thanks for that. And maybe to drive home the point of why i think we think its so important to develop what steve calls the super battery is the way some of us tend to think of it is were aiming at, and you heard elements of this in steves words the last few minutes, to solving a first world problem. That what i just heard and i realize knowing steve the last few years is volatility itself is a problem. Costs of fossil fuels go up and down pretty dramatically when these big shifts happen. And if we could develop Something Like a super battery where you can rely more on electricity and move to the age of electricity 2. 0, where transportation is electric and maybe even storage on the grid enables us to be more reliant or less reliant on fossil fuels, more reliant on Renewable Energy. The way we like to think of it is is in essence trying to solve a first world problem. Anyone in the room if you havent driven a tesla, trust me you want to own a tesla. However its about roughly 100,000. Not all of us can afford a tesla, those working in government lab, cant afford that. But we also want a solar ray on our roof and want to be free from the man, get off the grid and have freedom to create electricity and use it at our will. And as im phrasing this, or have a phone thats really powerful only need to charge it every week or so, we all want that. Those are first world thoughts. And the beauty of this project, and if we could talk about this a little bit, is by aiming at that first world problem in a Free Market Society like the one we live in the United States, we actually have an enormous opportunity to solve a third world problem. There are places in the world and india and rural china where the grid doesnt exist. Where they dont have electricity. Their version of Energy Storage, and i have pictures i could show you this are children studying at night by burning a plank of wood. Which is Energy Storage, energy release. But thats because they dont have electricity. So just to drive home the point of how important this problem is, yes, we can solve the potentially, solve the variation problem and the cost of fossil fuels. We can help create 100 billion industry. But at the same time, we can improve the quality of life of humanity across the world. Turn the tables on you. So we laid out the stakes, big stakes, geopolitically. Here in the United States, we would like our iphone to last a week instead of a day. And we would like just on another level, for those 1. 4 billion people around the world who dont have electricity to have electricity. But why arent we there . Whats the what is the problem . Is well, two questions. Whats the problem . Why arent we there yet . And the second thing, the answers that we see out there both on vehicles and on stationary storage. Whats real . I was going to ask him that question. Ill start by framing the problem. Maybe in a way we havent yet for this audience. And that is that electricity is an ondemand product. And its the only one i really know of that im aware of thats truly on demand. That somewhere theres a knob that turns up and down in a coalfired power plant or Nuclear Power plant every time you turn on the light switch. Electrons flow through and get to your house. Its truly on demand. Imagine if you went to buy Running Shoes at the store and they came off the factory line just as you went there with your hand to grab the shoes you want to wear. That kind of consumption doesnt exist outside of electricity. So the problem is, when you move to wind or sun to create electricity, its not its no longer on demand. We cannot, at this point. Maybe well get there as a human race. We cant control the wind and the sun to move the power up and down to our needs. So the idea is to create a super battery thats inexpensive and competitive with plants that exist today. We need to be cost competitive and performance competitive and life competitive. Safety competitive. By having a battery to serve as a buffer zone. Kind of like a dvr or tivo. We record programs we want to watch later. We want to do the same thing with electricity. We want to democratize in much way the media has in the last 10 to 15 years. And steve and i talked about this a little bit. Im not geopolitical expert, but i have read that egypt wouldnt have fallen if social media didnt exist. This is how much the media has shifted in the course of my life. I think were on the cusp of that happening if the super battery existed with electricity. If we could create and use electricity at our own will. Now, getting to what steves asking. What is the problem . One problem is hes asking a physical chemist that question. For us, we translate that down to molecules. And steve does this in his book. Dont let that scare you off the book, by the way. To be able to store energy in a cheap and reliable fashion, it happens with fossil fuels. For us, Renewable Energy is not that different from fossil fuels for chemists by us, what i mean. A chemist looks at it this way. You burn coal or burn oil or gasoline, youre breaking chemical bonds and releasing energy. Youre releasing a lot of gas, youre releasing energy. And you drive pistons in a vehicle. It goes straight down to the chemistry of the molecules that you store that energy. For Renewable Energy in the case of batteries, its the same thing, its just bond creation and bond breaking. And when you break bonds, you release energy. Theres two big differences. One is in the case of batteries instead of getting heat and gas evolution like when you burn gasoline or wood or coal, you get a release of a cascade of billions of electrons that forms a current that can drive an electric motor. Think of it as a chemist, its just another reaction. Its just that the product of that reaction is different. Its electrons instead of heat and gas. The other real important difference is you can reverse that reaction. Every time you plug in the phone or computer or electric car if you drive one, you are reversing a Chemical Reaction right there on your Kitchen Table or desk. We cant do that with fossil fuels, at least not today. We cant capture the and reverse that reaction and make a hydrocarbon. The scientific question, why arent we there yet . Which is what i just described when i distilled it. Its a very complicated question of physics and chemistry. Can we Design Systems that are reversible in the case of batteries . And everyone in the room knows how long a lithium ion battery lasts typically in your device. 2 to 4 years. Thats when you start noticing this laptop doesnt last 6 hours every time i charge it now, its two. Well, the reason is, youre moving matter around. Youre moving lithium ions inside that battery from one side to the other side, from anode to the cathode. And back and forth. And youre distorting and changing the physical nature of the material that the ions are moving around in. So the big challenge for us scientists is can we develop an architecture down to the atomic level that doesnt change every time you move an ion in and out. I like to liken it to bowling. Everybody bowls in the midwest. Its as if the object of bowling were to throw the ball down the alley and slide through the pins and not knock over a single one. And those pins in this analogy represent the atoms in a structure inside of a battery. And the bowling ball is a lithium ion. You want that ball to go through those pins and then come back out to the user when you recharge it without knocking them over. And thats a difficult question of thermodynamics. Were at somewhere between a tenth and a fifth of the Energy Density of gasoline when you put energy into a battery and use it. We are down at 10 to 20 of where we are with gasoline. Or coal, if youre talking about the grid. So digging dirt out of the ground and burning it is still a very effective and efficient way to do things. Thats the physicist answer. Then as a whole series of cascade of political and Business Answers as well as how do you make the shift to the electric age 2. 0 . So i know that just with the stuff, the material that argonneargonne invented that is at the cutting edge, this is the stuff that if a super battery, at this time, right, if the super battery is going to be invented, its thought by people like jeff to have the greatest chance to do that. But the trouble is when youre going from this stuff is called nmc, by the way, and when youre trying to shift from nmc to the next generation, this happens what jeff just described. The bowling pins. Fall. And when you do that, when those bowling pins fall, the whole architecture that youve set up, the house that youve built, so to speak, turns into some other shape and house. Its as if you drive home here. And the front door is in the back door and the living room is in the bathroom. And this really happens in that battery. And so i know that, and youre trying to get the atoms to stay in one place. But thats a very, very hard thing to do. And the stakes putting the two pieces together. Those stakes being so very, very high. And then it being so very, very hard to do, you get exaggerators and hucksters and liars basically. Claiming that theyve got ive got the answer, and give me 50 million so i can develop that. So i wanted to roll back to that second question. This happens. One of the things i suffered personally. One of the sources on whom i had relied for a very big part of the book and was at the closing section of writing the book turned out to be a liar. Turned to be deceiving me and the department of energy and General Motors the whole time. And so, well, a lot of people had to recover. But what youve told me is that this is a this is a symptom is a big symptom of whats going on and one problem with batteries. So i wanted to roll back. And also, again, what is real . What can we trust thats out there . For example, when wall street forecasts that in the year 2020, the Utility Industries our Power Companies are going to be in upheaval. That stationary batteries will be adopted widely adopted in the United States, is that true . That is a good question. This is where we get into the realm of my opinion. All that other stuff i would consider fact. What was not said in the introduction i left graduate school, georgia tech n 1993 and went into industry and worked for Big Companies and Small Companies for most of 14 years, including a couple startups before moving into the national lab in 2008. And what youre hearing steve imply here is one of the great things about working the national lab is the basis of our careers, the scientists careers that grew up in the National System is very different from the basis of the careers of the product developers, which is the world that came from in industry. And the basis of the careers of the National Labs and universities is to be the truth sayers. You do research, you publish your science in a juried fashion where other scientists review your science before its even allowed to be published. Theres a system in place where the truth matters. If i skip to the other side of the spectrum. When i was working in the business developing products, the same thing is true there. Big businesses that have lasted for, i would argue, 30, 50, 100 years have a certain reputation that they cannot allow to be diminished. And so when youre developing a product for a customer, even with the product in hand, that truth matters. Now, again, in my own opinion, in between in the middle of that spectrum where the startup world lives, where the Venture Capital world lives. Its not so much quite the case. Theres a particularly bad problem when you look at the history of batteries that last 40 years in terms of exaggeration. But i would broaden that argument to say its much beyond batteries because of the reward mechanisms, the way that Venture Capital works. Vcs want a 3 to 5year turn around at 5 to 10 x their investment. Thats what theyre going for. And you have to live, i know this from personal experience, you can read it in books like the innovators. You live quarter to quarter, year to year based on whether you can get the next series of investment. And i say this in the book. Im quoted something in the book saying that Something Like what steve is saying. It encourages the exaggeration. Because its either that or you cant feed your children. And it really does come down to that. When you work in a large organization, it doesnt, its not quite that way. The reliability, that you, the customer has on you as a supplier of technology is so high, its not worth the risk of exaggerating to the customer. Im not sure if thats exactly what youre looking for, but maybe we can continue this part of the conversation. Im going to go at it again. What do you expect . What do you expect to happen . Second half of the question. Yeah. Come out with it, chamberlain. Sorry, i forgot the second half of his question. What do we expect and i was just saying kind of in the green room before we came out here. Its the oddest thing thats been happening. Ive been in the lab for eight years and batteries have really begun to take off. In case you dont know, here are some numbers. The lithium ion battery total available market share is about 15 billion a year right now. Well over 90 of those manufactured in japan, china and korea. That is almost all for portable electronics. The Vehicle Market is just now taking off. And the prognostications are that will be an additional tens of billions of dollars of Gross Domestic Product for some country. Or multiple countries. So will that happen . Thats a great question. And then you throw in the grid. The grid prognosticators is its an even larger market on the grid. Significantly. Hundreds of billions of dollars of total available market on the grid. Now, one thing that weve noticed and i was just saying this in the green room, Jpmorgan Chase and other banks have come to talk to us recently in the last few months asking a series of questions that really in my mind boil down to one question. At what point do they take their investors dollars, big dollars and put it into batteries . Now, ill tell you as a side note, its fascinating theyre asking scientists that question. And i think its the same reason steves bringing up here. They dont know who to trust. When its companies that have a vested interest in the success of their company, theres a bit of a conflict there in how that question should be answered. Now, that said, im beating around the bush and not answering your question. Its already here. Is it coming . Yes. In the last eight years, the markets gone from about 1 billion total available market to a 15 billion total available market. And it looks like a traditional scurve when you look at the Adoption Rate. Ill give you another data plan. Id love to show you a graph on this. I personally was shocked when we asked ourselves the question, why arent plugin vehicles being adopted . We realized the question was wrong. If you plot the number of 2004 versus anything you put a plug into, the Adoption Rate from 2010 to 2015 is twice the Adoption Rate of the pri yus an like vehicles. Now, im in that world and i was shocked by those numbers because i believe marketing works. I believe the media. I believe guys like steve. The media was pretty harping on the negativity. But guess what, it is the ill show you the data later. Its twice the Adoption Rate. More importantly, batteries alone for batteries has cracked 1 billion a year in total sales. Thats starting to get the attention of the Big Companies. When will it happen . Ill rephrase the question. Is it too early to invest . Is it too late to invest . Or is it just beginning to be the right time to invest if youre an investor . I think the answers right there in the middle. It is not too late and it is also not too early. And the number of Big Companies from around the world that are coming into the national lab to ask questions not only about investment, but could we perform private research for them . Are all indicators to us that Tipping Point is arriving soon. If not have already arrived. And id like to get on to the next topic before i hand the phone, the microphone back to you. But that is what i just described touches on another part of the answer to steves first question, which is why is this so hard . Why hasnt it been done yet . And i gave you the physicist answer. Because we have to design atoms or molecules and crystal structures using atoms as the building block. The other problem is a business problem. And that is, what i mean is, how do we solve the problem of transitioning from the physics to a full blown pack device . And for those of you that have not been in Technology Product development, i cant overstate how difficult that problem is. As hard as it is to build a perfect set of bowling pins inside of a battery, atoms, that dont move, it is significantly harder to take that innovation and turn it into a highquality, highperforming, profitable product. It is, it is almost an impossibility. The investment is at least 10x higher to perform the commercialization. And right now in this country, were relying on startups, which is not a bad thing because startups can and ultimately get gobbled up through merger and acquisition by a larger company. But were competing with the asian world where they operate more socialistically or communist where their companys risk is lowered almost down to zero by Public Investment. And im not saying we should copy that, but im saying that is the challenge we face if we want to own a big chunk of this market. So i wanted to say that i want to close out that one part and move out to the closing and then lets shift over and see if anyone wants to ask anything. But i think we the Tipping Point is within sight. And its concrete, and its indisputable. And that, and that is that you have gm and tesla. Both saying and one of them, gm, already having unveiled a car that will go 200 miles on a charge. And both of them aim tesla aims to have its model three go 200 miles. And both of them want to get in that sweet spot 30,000 to 40,000. A big jump down from that 100,000 car. And my wife and i just bought a honda odyssey. That was about 35,000. Thats what people will pay, right . Its not in the mass market. But since thats in 2018, thats three years away, its very, very close. Tesla. Im sorry, apple is rumored to be working on a car. Richard branson, bmw, audi, all of them aiming more or less in the same space. They see this age the new age is coming in the short period of time. But there are two pillars to winning in the electric age. To winning in the super battery age. One of them is discovery. Its your guys or guys like you making the super battery. The other pillar is manufacturing them. And, you know. You mentioned the innovators. And steve jobs did not invent the smartphone. Hes ingenious designer, ingenious manufacturer, and right now the steve jobs of the Battery World are in asia. And you could invent your guys could invent the super battery. You already may have gotten while we were sitting here, the phone call, we got the super battery. Jeff, come home right now. But, will you, can you guarantee that super battery will be manufactured in the United States . And so this this is the next challenge that the that the United States really has to grapple with. And i think it is grappling with it. What do you think about that . Yeah, thanks, steve. So that is the question i was beginning to touch on. Its my own belief that the manufacturing problem is more difficult and more significant and more costly than the physics problem. As hard as the physics and chemistry problem is, the commercialization of that physics and chemistry is significantly harder. Ill give a couple minutes of History Lesson about bell labs. I came out of grad school in 3d when bell labs was in the last throes. So the era im representative of is beyond bell labs. But i went straight into the microchip world and developed chemistries and new materials for the development of bell labs invented almost everything that changed our lives. The microchip, certainly, but glass fiber came out of bell labs. Satellite technology, cell phone technology. The idea, the philosophy of using binary code, open up the idea of using switches, which is what a transistor is to advance computing. Using binary code, that came out of bell labs. Most people know that, that the innovation that came out of bell labs was significant and changed life on this planet. But what you might not know is that the Venture Capital world came out of bell labs. William shockley who is one of the key inventors went to stanford and brought with him the invention because bell labs was licensing the semiconductor at 1 per license. Silicon valley exists because of bell labs. The Venture Capital model exists because of bell labs because vcs could come in after 10 to 20 years of development at a place like bell labs that was a monopoly, partly government funded. And if, if they didnt take 10 to 20 years of patient money being a very, very rich monopoly, there wouldnt be a Silicon Valley. In fact, it would have been a germane jermanium valley. They probably still wouldve been barking up the tree. The question for groups like this one in the room is, how do we recreate that innovation eco system . I personally dont think we go back and create monopolies that are partly government funded. Were kind of competing against that in asia. The question is, what do we do . Is there a way to bridge the gap between the core basic research, these are the questions being asked and washington and out in the national lab systems and the universities and businesses today, can we envision a Public Private partnership that exists outside the fence of the federally run, federally run Properties Like Argonne National laboratory, federally owned properties, where we pull patient money in and bridge the gap between our doing science and handing it off relatively blindly to startups that will try to raise funds to develop a product. Can we participate and then liven the Product Development process outside the sphere that is led by private industry as opposed to the research led by the public industry . Thats the question we need to debate. Much like semitech banded together to collaborate on new Manufacturing Processes to make the chip ubiquitous in every device we use today. Can we do that for batteries . Can we do that for high Band Gap Semiconductors . I think the answer is yes. But we need the help of think tanks like the Atlantic Council. I dont think scientists can imagine these things on their own without the help of the think tanks, the businessmen and women and the investors. Okay. So i think we should open up to questions. Could you please have a question . And the other thing is, identify yourself. And then well, since we have this problem with the system, are we up again . Were not . You want okay. Thanks for the discussion. You mentioned asia im wondering, what is the balance between cooperation, bilateral cooperation and sort of innovation and competition . I know we have some bilateral programs with china, also with the japanese, south korea, Asia Pacific Economic council, the geopolitics, whats the tension between cooperation and competition in the Battery Technology space . That question. And and argan is one of the leaders of a collaboration happening with china today in batteries and another one being led by the university of michigan in batteries. And the essence of the answer to your question is that if you do if we focus on doing the basic fundamental science that is precompetitive, than collaboration is a good thing. And that is the way scientists operate. The whole aim is to publish. Find and publish a discovery. And we should encourage that, the more brains and physicists that try to solve this and i myself have been in china talking about this very problem, it is not just an american phenomenon that scientists want to collaborate and publish and compete to be the first to publish. But the question gets back to the monologue i was giving before the q a session opened up. That if the desire is to have profit as opposed to do the research that enables the technology to develop the products that results in profit, then we can carefully draw a line between the two things. And if we collaborate with scientists in europe and asia and africa, that will speed things along. And we have to dry the line and where the competition begins for developing product out of that research. And there are ways to do that. I dont want to say it is easy to do. It is difficult to do. So i witnessed the first time that i went to argon, jeff was hosting the chinese ministers of technology and trying to actively, in a conspiracy way hide from him the stuff that they presumed he was really after. He wasnt after coming into collaborate like he said, but to take something from us. And what i have observed is that there is from president obama down, right, this very highminded statesmanlike notion that hey, were all trying to change the world and save the world and cant we all do it together. And the formation of committees and groups that meet, right, that meet every year. But any own experience, and jeff may bitterly dispute this, but its paper. It is on paper. So they are sitting there and they are exchanging their favorite i mean Something Like favorite coffee flavor in starbucks and not delving deeply into the batteries because the competition is so stiff. And and here in the d. O. E. , there is a pair a ania almost about paranoia about we are developing this, are the chinese going to get it. So this this race, this competition between nations is uppermost. It is almost a sub text to every decision, every competition, the whole vision has that as a subtext. So do i get a chance to bitterly dispute it . Surely. I wont bitterly dispute it but i will add flavor to what steve is saying and answer your question more directly than i did initially. It is kind of paper. The reason it is on paper is the first thing we do is we patent innovations. So yes, steve is kind of right. When we are talk, it is written down somewhere, in a publication or a patent or both before we talk to them. But that still triggers, i guess this is my dispute, this still triggers the spirit of collaboration, and but to protect the taxpayers investment we do have policy in place where we file the patents before we discuss the science. Hi. Thank you very much. David kroitser from the heritage foundation. I have a question, how different is a lithium ion battery now than ten years ago. When f we look at the tesla battery in nevada, is there anything producing cheaper or something fundamentally chemically and physically improved about it . Thank you for that question. It is a very important question that was just asked. Because when you go to walgreens to buy an al caw line battery or pep boys to buy a battery for your car, you may not know the name of the battery is dictating a set of chemistry in that battery that lead asity has a certain amount of sulfuric acid and that is not the case with lithium ion. It was oxide and a particular material that allowed the lithium to move back and forth. But lithium ion, when you say the words lithium ion battery, the only thing you are dictating is the counter ion that goes back and forth. You can completely change every material in that battery and still call it a lithium ion battery. And this is a source of much confusion in the government and with the public, that you can massively advance lithium ion battery but it is still called the lithium ion battery. So the batteries in tesla has nickel cobalt aluminum instead of oxide. Does that matter to the average person . No. It holds more energy and cheaper to make and holds more energy. The nmc 2. 0, what steve calls it in the book, is less expensive than nickel cobalt aluminum. But again that is still called a lithium ion battery. So down at the materials and physics level there has been a series of innovations that has occurred. Right now what everybody is trying to do is move from carbon to silicon because it holds seven times as much lithium as carbon does. But as the industry moves to that, it is still called a lithium ion battery. But folded on top of that are other innovations. Ellon musk and tesla is completely relying on the manufacturing side and not the innovations in materials. He doesnt want to count on that. That is too risky. So there are innovations to happen and this is worth mentioning, and i know there is a mixture of ages in the room, i used to record little cassette tapes voices or my favorite songs from the read radio, th doesnt happen any more. And it is the same way the tapes were made. A sheet of plastic with eye on particles put on the plastic so you can magnetically store information on that tape. As that industry was dying in the late 80s and early 90s and the lithium ion was coming to life, the japanese manufacturers said lets use what we are moth bawling over here. Which is different from the microchip world. What is the best way to deposit these materials, what is the least expensive, least time consuming, highest quality way and those innovations are happening now. That is why i was giving you the numbers. Once it cracks the billion dollars, the big players get involved. They are trying to improve it themselves and connect that to the materials. And beyond that we are working on filling the front end of the innovation pipeline. Can we move to magnesium or aluminum where you release two or three electrons per atom for every reaction and that is really far afield. That is frontier science. But there are still enormous innovations that will occur that will improve lithium ion battery, 2 or 3 x and decrease the cost in a half or a third that involve Material Manufacturing and processing. That is a very important question, thank you. I wanted to get very specific on this and it will just take 60 seconds and that is that the question is has lithium ion advanced over the last ten years. So i already told the group that that a Silicon Valley startup had deceived gm, that was gms 200 mile car. When dan acre son was going around saying were going to have a 200 mile car, that was the startup but the start yuf didnt have what it said that it had. But gm a month ago in detroit unveiled its concept car, the bolt, a 200 mile car. It pivoted what what happened is lg, which supplies gm, took the nmc, the arg gone material that it had in the volt, the plugin, and this is an its partly stable. To stabilize it so it can be used in a battery, they have to mix it with another chemistry but when they do that, they make the battery weaker. All they could do is serve the volt, the plugin. Lg did enough work that it stabilized the nmc. The battery going into the bolt is almost pure nmc. They made enough stabilizing this lithium ion battery that it goes instead of going 38 miles with the volt, it goes 200 miles with the bolt for the same price. Thanks, my name is hart swartz. In the late 19th century, early 20th century there were invasions that didnt rely on government funding, the light bulb, the telegraph, telephone and others and i think they were invented and commercialized without large government funding. What is the difference between now and then and is there something that can can be emulated so we can do what you talk about today and do major inventions without government funding . So i dont i dont know the history of that particular type of technology as you do. I know the history of things like the microchip and that was heavily invested in by the government, particularly the military. What makes it different, and if i look at history and like i said, you know this better than i do. That edison and ford used their own money or private money money to get money to get where they needed to go to develop the business and the technology. But then 3050 years later or 60 years later that was not so much the case. And i want to reiterate, most think bell is private money but they got a lot of money from the military to develop their technology. Rather than projecting forward, lets look at the past. Why the difference. I think it goes back to the bowling ball analogy. To build a light bulb, he hired an army of engineers and tried every material, and this is why they call it the edisony an approach, where you take every type of material you can man and pass a current through it and see if you can pass a light and you can pull up old notebooks and he tried human hair and horse hair and we ended up with tungsten in our light bulbs. And the same thing with ford. They continued to tweak on how to make a combustible engine and it was the way they built the vehicles. But when you get down to trying to control and move at oms around, and we have something called the advanced photon source where electronic spin around a big massive ring at the speed of light and they create really intense xrays so you can watch atoms move around in situ, and examen protein and what happens in dna. To do that kind of research there is yet to be a company in the world to fund the building and operation of Something Like an advanced photon source. One at berkeley called the advanced light source. The supercomputers at oakridge and arga gone National Laboratory and berkeley, would argue require the Public Investment to get down to study how do we design better systems at the atomic level so that once that understanding occurs a product can be developed from it. That is the transition i was talking about. Can we ease the transition so a product can be developed on the backs of the basic research were doing. Just in one sentence, the answer to that is those inventions in those days, there were five, six industrial labs in the United States where private industry took it upon itself to spend the money to have an army of individuals trying every little thing and they almost dont exist any more. So the private industry is relying now on the National Things like the National Labs to do the same thing that they used to do by themselves. This gentleman. Thanks. Tim wolsy, foundation for defensive democracy. About halfway through your book it is first rate. I want to ask a question that has mainly geopolitical implications but it has to do with leveraging battery performance by in plugin hybrids especially by using Natural Gas Based fuels. Dan cohen chaired an m. I. T. Study three or four years ago on how to use national gas in transportation and basically it said for the family car you want to use meth an ole with an m. And make it out of natural gas and which is cheaper compared to oil and the numbers all look very good. If you have a plugin hybrid so you can go 40 miles, say a volt, you can go 40 miles on your overnight charge of electricity, and then it becomes a regular hybrid, essentially, and you are driving on the way a hybrid does, but if you were using methanol 85, m85, 15 gasoline for cold weather starting and using methanol from natural gas, the way i calculate it, you would be getting, if what you care about is oil dependence, and price, you would be getting a slightly better price and you would be getting about 400 miles per gallon of gasoline because the only gasoline youre using, the only thing Perfect Petroleum is those that 5 for for 15 for coldweather starting. So im curious as to why or whether you think we need to stay, for innovation and moving away from oil for vehicles, whether we need to stay in the all Battery World or why isnt somebody working more resolutely to use both electricity from great batteries and methanol from natural gas to get the consumption of oil way down . Thanks, jim. Thanks for that question. Short answer is that the there are inventors and companies and argon, and chef will take about this, im sure, who are trying all of these. So im a believer in natural car natural gas car future. And it is for this reason that in economics, it does supply create demand, does demand create supply, it goes both ways. But one of the most interesting formulas is supply creating demand. And it goes back to the way i try to picture it, is the cocaine model. So did americans become hooked on crack cocaine because we started out being hooked on crack cocaine and then the cartel responded to that, or did the Medellin Cartel pump cocaine into the United States and the market developed from that. So just transferring that over to natural gas, here we are in a world of where we are utterly awash in natural gas. I checked yesterday, natural gas is 2. 86 per 1,000 cubic feet right now. It is incredible. And the horizon for it, for this this supply is from here to eternity. And so there are bigthinkers and they include ed morris at city group but hes ascribing to the cocaine version of natural gas and that is that this surplus pushes itself into the Vehicle Market. That over the next pick your number of years, and you do end up, because it is so cheap, that natural gas vehicles, whether it is lng, cng, ends up pushing itself into the market. But when i hand this over, i want to broadenyour question a little bit because it is not just natural gas, its super capacitors, fuel cells. The first time when i rode the bus with david sandalo attar gone, won gong was telling the chinese minister of technology, was asking what do you think about twinning batteries with fuel cells in order to get there. So this is another good question, jim, thanks for that. And also as a technologyist, im high on hybrids. I view the volt to be a Platform Technology that the gasoline engine is just a generator, that is all it is. And if you can move to natural gas it makes sense and we at the lab are doing research in this. So to me and we would have been in the lab. We had hallway conversations. We would have bet years ago that Pure Electrics were way, way off. The odd thing is i learned this enough in my life i should stop saying it is new to me. You cant predict the consumer. It is double that for the previous but another analysis that showed in the last six to eight months Pure Electric vehicle have outsold the hybrid plugins and that makes zero sense to me. Why you would buy a car that has 80 miles per charge like the leaf and takes many, many hours to refill it with energy, over to buy a tesla, which is an amazing vehicle, but costs 100,000 grand and neither appeal to me. What appeals to me is i live 18. 5 miles from work and i can rely on inexpensive electricity in illinois at 5 cents a kilowatt an hour at night and when i need gasoline to drive my son down to a baseball game, i can do it. And there is a lot of talk about range anxiety. Can i get a battery for 200 miles per charge andelon musk has figured this out but it is not out yet. But the reason they design the tank to go 300 miles is that is about as long as we can drive before we need to take a break, get some coffee, go to the bathroom and get some food. We dont want the breaks to be longer than five to ten minutes. There is no system in place. Regardless of how many miles you can put in juice in your battery to recharge it. So in short, jim, agree with what you are implying in your question that the hybrids are the way to go. It will still have the same global and geopolitical implications and in terms of the amount of energy in our soil and elsewhere and the United States. As a technology gist, we are working on it but when you look at the option, the consumer is doing something different. And this is out of freak onomics, that the early nom inners will convert and then well revert back to the inexpensive hybrids