Why Lead-Carbon Batteries Will Deflate the Li-ion Bubble 71 comments
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For over a year I've been cautioning readers that while lithium-ion batteries are glamorous, sleek, sexy and hot; they are about to face a formidable challenge from lead-carbon batteries that are a little bulkier and heavier, but offer competitive cycle-life and power for a tiny fraction of the cost.
To placate lithium fundamentalists and EV evangelists, I want to clearly state up front that lead-carbon batteries will probably not be the first choice for plug-in vehicles. Nevertheless, it is crystal clear that lead-carbon batteries will be the only sensible choice for micro, mild and full hybrid electric vehicles [HEVs] and many grid connected energy storage applications. A July 30th article from Earth2Tech titled, “Vinod Khosla On Why Lithium-Ion Batteries Are Overhyped” says it all, "The most important thing to remember is economic gravity – the cheapest thing ends up winning." What do you know; somebody far smarter than me who believes cheap beats cool.
As regular readers know, I recently participated in Infocast's Storage Week 2009 and served on three discussion panels. The core data for this article came from a slide-show that Patrick T. Moseley PhD, the president of the Advanced Lead-Acid Battery Consortium [ALABC], presented at the conference. While I've known about the surprising gains that come from the integration of advanced carbon materials into conventional lead-acid batteries for several years, the Moseley presentation is one of the first public documents to explore the details. A copy of Dr. Moseley's Storage Week presentation is available here. A complete archive of my articles on the energy storage sector is available here.
The media began paying attention to lead-carbon batteries in January 2008 when Autobloggreen reported the results of a road test that used a split-electrode lead-carbon "Ultrabattery" developed by Australia's Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation [CSIRO] to power a modified Honda Insight for 100,000 miles. The gist of the report was that in exchange for a weight penalty of 17 kg (37 pounds) and a fuel economy penalty of 2.8%, the Ultrabattery promised to shave up to $2,000 off the sticker price of a mild hybrid. Dr. Moseley's presentation took the Autobloggreen report a couple of steps further and provided the following graph of ALABC-sponsored cycle life testing that compared the Ultrabattery to a standard NiMH battery through 180,000 cycles at discharge rates of up to 5C and recharge rates of up to 4.5C using the European Council for Automotive R&D [EUCAR] Power Assist Profile (click on the graph for a larger image).
Similar cycle-life improvement was clear in another graph from the Moseley presentation that compared the performance of conventional lead-acid batteries with lead-carbon batteries that incorporated 2% carbon black and 2% graphite by weight (roughly 10% carbon by volume) in the sponge lead paste for the negative electrodes (click on the graph for a larger image). This particular series of tests compared the two battery strings at discharge rates of up to 4C and recharge rates of up to 3C using a duty cycle developed by BAE Systems for its hybrid transit bus program. Once again, the cycle-life gains were remarkable.
The real meat and potatoes of the Moseley presentation, however, was a slide that compared the performance and price of the Ultrabattery against (click on the graph for a larger image):
- The Power Assist HEV Battery Goals established by the US Advanced Battery Consortium [USABC];
- An Advanced Automotive Battery Conference [AABC] performance report on NiMH batteries; and
- An AABC forecast on future generations of lithium-ion batteries.
While I hate belaboring the obvious, a simple battery technology that surpasses USABC goals by a comfortable margin while reducing the sticker price of a mild hybrid by up to 10% is important in hard times because the majority of American and European consumers are carefully weighing car buying decisions and demanding real value. More importantly, lead-carbon batteries can be manufactured in existing plants without building a new manufacturing, supply chain and distribution infrastructure from the ground up. As a matter of simple capital efficiency, lead-carbon battery manufacturing will be an order of magnitude cheaper. It can also ramp up to required volumes in years rather than decades.
In a January 2009 article titled "Lead-Carbon: A Game Changer for Alternative Energy Storage" I reprinted a graph that showed the results of a series of partial state of charge [PSOC] cycle-life tests that Sandia National Laboratories performed in 2008 on five different batteries including a valve regulated lead-acid [VRLA] battery, two VRLA batteries with carbon enhanced pastes, an Ultrabattery, and an advanced lithium-ion (Li-FePO4) battery. I also reprinted Sandia's summary slide which concluded, "The new carbon enhanced negative electrodes in VRLA batteries have dramatically improved utility PSOC cycle-life up to a factor of 10."
In a follow-up article titled "Lead Carbon Batteries: A Game Changer for Alternative Energy Storage - Part II" I compared the relative strengths and weaknesses of the principal lead-carbon battery developers, both public and private. The four public companies that are actively developing lead-carbon battery technology are:
- MeadWestvaco (MWV), a packaging material and container manufacturing company that is developing carbon additives for the sponge lead pastes used in conventional lead-acid batteries;
- Furukawa Battery Company (Frankfurt - FBB.F), which licensed the Ultrabattery from CSIRO and built the batteries used in the 100,000-mile road test;
- Axion Power International (AXPW.OB) a manufacturer of lead-acid batteries that has built a formidable patent portfolio in lead-carbon battery technology and was recently awarded $380,000 in ALABC grants for lead-carbon research and development; and
- Exide Technologies, Inc. (XIDE), a leading global manufacturer of lead-acid batteries that recently teamed up with Axion for the manufacturing and distribution of products based on Axion's proprietary lead-carbon technologies.
A 10-fold improvement in the performance of any technology is highly disruptive. The fact that lead-carbon batteries can do the work using cheap and plentiful raw materials from domestic sources and provide a product that is easily recycled in existing facilities is a game changer; particularly when both lithium-ion and NiMH batteries are based on imported raw materials that are likely to face substantial short-term supply constraints and will require the development of new recycling techniques and the establishment of a new recycling infrastructure.
In America we get up in the morning, we go to work and we solve our problems. NiMH and lithium-ion batteries cannot help the auto industry meet accelerated EU tailpipe CO2 emission standards and US CAFE standards because factories to make the batteries do not exist and even if they did, the world's mines couldn't extract the needed raw materials fast enough to satisfy the demand. Over the next decade there's a fair chance that lithium-ion batteries will complete the development and testing path described in an unpublished "pre-decisional draft" of a DOE report titled, National Battery Collaborative [NBC] Roadmap, December 9, 2008, which discusses the merits, risks and expected costs of an aggressive eight-year initiative to foster the development and facilitate the commercialization of lithium-ion batteries. However those future advances will have no impact on our current problems.
It's time to quit talking about the distant future and focus on solving today's problems.
DISCLOSURE: Author is a former director of Axion Power International (AXPW.OB) and holds a large long position in its stock. He also holds a small long position in Exide (XIDE).
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a 100 yrs ago we had disparate views on best way to propel a vehicle; gasoline, electric, steam. it seems we might have another one of these knock down dragout fights on our hands. will take some years to settle down, possibly with more than one clear winner.
> jack
I agree with you that HEV is much more appealing than pure play EV as it addresses the range problem with EV's, so any efficiency gain on the combustion engine will help the overall efficiency. Unlike you, I think PHEV makes a lot of sense for a lot of people even though integrating them with the grid could present a nightmare for the utilities and the utilities I have talked to are not very interested in the whole V2G concept.
As to the safety of lithium ion batteries, as I have blown up my share of them, I am waiting on 1: independent laboratory testing on whole battery packs; and 2: enough batteries have been on road for extended time (except for Moli Energy's cell phone incidence it took a while before we saw some serious incidences with laptops and cell phones).
As for Axion, it might be a faster road to profitability to exploit the East Penn and Exide relationship and become a component / technology play rather than trying to market and brand yourself to the end customers (which, I know from personal experience) can be an uphill battle). As I stated in my comments to your article of Aug 3, I have all the respect for their technical expertise and their technology (both the PbC and the lead/carbon battery, even though the latter could render the first obsolete) , but their manufacturing and marketing could use some improvement. For me, the alliances positions Axion well for acquisition as well.
BatteryUser, the plan has always been to use the New Castle plant to make limited quantities of batteries for high value markets and then simply make electrodes for manufacturing partners like Exide and East Penn that already have manufacturing plants, global distribution and customer service networks, and a host of existing customers that are looking for a more robust solution. The nice thing about two alliances is that neither partner can force a marriage.
Sound familiar, John?
Hybrids are overhyped.
Stop-start hybrids are extremely cost effective because the system is cheap and it cuts gas consumption by 10%. Every time you move up a notch on the fuel economy scale the cost of the technology required to achieve the improvement escalates. By the time you get to a PHEV or EV the economics only work in fairy land. To get a clear view of the landscape, you need to review the following articles and the associated source documents:
seekingalpha.com/artic...
seekingalpha.com/artic...
seekingalpha.com/artic...
seekingalpha.com/artic...
seekingalpha.com/artic...
I know it seems like a lot of reading, but the only way to eat this elephant is one bite at a time.
What I don't trust nearly as much is someone on the factory line assembling the pack (which is still mostly a manual job) or the ultimate end user to integrate the pack correctly. That is where most failure will occur.
Also, while LiFePO4 as a material is highly stable and unlikely to go into thermal runaway, the electrolyte is not nearly that stable and will catch fire long before anything else happens.
On Aug 02 10:40 PM Don Harmon wrote:
> So sorry to disappoint you battman, but LiFeP04 does not explode
> or catch fire as proven by Sandia National Laboratrories which is
> the U.S. Defense Dept. approved laboratory! Read up here if you don't
> believe me: www.lifebatt.com/sandi...
>
> On Aug 02 08:04 PM battman wrote:
There is a place for everything and every technology and sooner or later the market will figure out what those places are. In the meantime all we can do is try to minimize the irrational expectations and recognize both the strengths and weaknesses of all contenders.
Don't you sometimes wish that some clever guy in a garage could come up with a cheap one size fits all solution?
On Aug 02 09:28 PM i'mwithher wrote:
> Battman, don't you have anything to contribute besides name calling?
> Why would Don be desperate ( you can't even spell it correctly) to
> prove something to a bunch of investors/bloggers/com... hiding in
> anonymity?
> Everyone is entitled to state an opinion, even if you don't approve.
> It's time for you to find your manners. Taking a cheap shot is what
> you did. Denying it is also what you did. You took an intelligent
> article with intelligent comments and questions, and dumbed it down.
Darn. You mean I could've saved $2000 by buying the lead carbon equipped Prius instead? I'm going to have to go back and have a talk with someone. The salesman never even mentioned that option.
I can be optimistic that the boys have nailed down the details of their automated electrode manufacturing solutions but until we see product rolling off the line with consistent volume and quantity, it's still a late stage industrial engineering project. Once that bridge is crossed, it will be an entirely different ball game because ramping up electrode production will only require 10% of the capital a new battery manufacturing plant would need.
seekingalpha.com/artic...
seekingalpha.com/artic...
seekingalpha.com/artic...
seekingalpha.com/artic...
www.treehugger.com/fil...
www.greencarcongress.c...
Also an article on a DOE $9.5 million grant to Toxco, a company in California, that plans to build America's first recycling facility for lithium-ion vehicle batteries lithium recycling. Lithium battery recycling has going on in Toxco's Trail B.C. facility since 1992, although it appears that it was not always for the lithium.
"The lithium part is a really negligible cost when you compare it to other metals; nickel, cobalt, those are going to be the biggest drivers [of recycling]," says Kelty, adding that Tesla actually makes money by recycling just the nonlithium recycled components of its batteries. "So while we've been reading plenty of articles about the industry running out of lithium, it's totally missing the mark. There's plenty of lithium out there."
www.technologyreview.c.../
seekingalpha.com/artic...
While I am no longer worried about resource availability, I am very worried about supply constraints because the world's existing mines do not appear ready to meet short-term demand increases and 30 years experience in natural resource development tells me that it costs 100s of millions and takes up to a decade to turn a known mineral deposit into a producing mineral deposit. While increasing production from an existing mine can be a bit cheaper and a bit less time consuming because changing old permits can be easier than getting new ones, all of the other work is essentially the same. Since mine expansions take years if not decades and there are no large-scale expansions presently underway, there will be a bottleneck of indeterminate duration while new facilities are permitted, designed, built and brought online.
there are almost no pure plays
Most established name is SQM but I have run some numbers and the stock seems somewhat pricey -- it's like the market is already pricing in massive earnings increase. So I'm not a buyer.