Brought to you by chemistry

Episode transcript:

WHITE:
(GENTLE UPBEAT MUSIC)
(ANNOUNCER SPEAKS IN FOREIGN LANGUAGE)

ANNOUNCER:
Brought to you by chemistry.
(GENTLE UPBEAT MUSIC)

ALEX LATHBRIDGE:
Hi everyone and welcome to Brought to You by Chemistry. What's Brought to You by Chemistry? I hear you ask. Complicated reactions, complicated exams, even more complicated romances? You know, the ones that most people wouldn't understand, but it's OK, because you have blind faith, that it will work this time. I mean, yes, but in this case Brought to You by Chemistry is a podcast series from the Royal Society of Chemistry. So, you see the branding there. My name is Dr Alex Lathbridge and in this series, we are back and better than ever, because we're taking a look at batteries. Bringing together experts from inside and outside the world of chemistry, to help us understand the ins, the outs, the ups, the downs, the positives, and the negatives, of all things battery. Could I please get you to introduce yourself? I'm going to go with Serena. Could I please get you to introduce yourself?

SERENA CUSSEN:
Hello. My name is Professor Serena Cussen. I am the head of Department of Material Science and Engineering at the University of Sheffield, where I run a research team dedicated to investigating next generation of energy storage materials, specifically for batteries. So, it's really great to be with you today.

ALEX LATHBRIDGE:
Wonderful. I'm glad to have you here. And of course, second wonderful guest. Please introduce yourself.

ROBERT LLEWELLYN:
Yes, my name is Robert Llewellyn and I'm just coming up to the 50th anniversary of my expulsion from grammar school, which gives a slight distinction in the educational process that I went through from Serena's. I'm not a professor, but I was quite a clever kid. I'm going to defend myself, but very, very annoying, which is why I don't blame the school for expelling me. I deserved it. But so for the last 12 years, I've been making a YouTube series called The Fully Charged Show', about electric vehicles, battery technology, renewable energy, the energy transition we're going through. And for the previous 25 years to that, I was involved in various types of broadcast television. Most specifically relevant to what we're talking about today, a show called 'Scrapheap Challenge' only because many engineers now who I've met watched it when they were young, which was an engineering challenge show. Let's leave it there. And I've done some science fiction nonsense as well.

ALEX LATHBRIDGE:
Wonderful. Now that we've got the basic stuff out of the way, both of you are going to lead me into the world of things that I know very little about, which is batteries. And, you know, people are listening to this podcast, because they want to know about batteries. We're going to learn all about batteries and of course, my very first question to, I'm going to say, Professor Serena Cussen, what is a battery?

SERENA CUSSEN:
That's a great question. A battery is typically made up of a positive cathode. You have a negative anode, and then between those two, you have an electrolyte. And when that cathode and anode are hooked up to an external circuit, that permits the flow of electrons. So, what you have happening in your battery are a series of chemical reactions and they cause a buildup of electrons at that negative anode. Now, the electrolyte stops those electrons from simply just moving across the battery to the cathode side. And that means that those electrons can instead, move through that, an external wire, connecting the anode to the cathode and along the way, they can perform their function. So on top of that, there's other stuff happening too. So in a lithium iron battery, for example, we would have the movement of lithium ions, as well as electrons. So, you'll know, you'll have heard processes like your battery is charging, or discharging. Let's think about what that means.

ALEX LATHBRIDGE:
Yes, yes, please definitely, because we've jumped into anodes and cathodes…

SERENA CUSSEN:
Yeah.

ALEX LATHBRIDGE:
and electrolytes. Electrolytes are what is in, you know, sports drinks and whatnot, right? So…

SERENA CUSSEN:
Well, it's salts, yeah. So, it's similar in a battery. So, it allows that that movement of those lithium ions, those charged particles through that electrolyte. So, if we think about charge, you've got your positive electrode, or your cathode and what it does is, it gives up some of its lithium ions and those lithium ions then can move through the electrolyte to your negative anode. So, for example in current lithium ion batteries, that anode could be graphite and during that process, that's when the battery is taking in and storing energy. So, then when your battery is discharging, the lithium ions are moving back through the electrolyte, into the cathode and that is the energy then that's powering our battery. So, in both cases where you have a charge and discharge, you've got electrons flowing in the opposite direction to ions around that external circuit. So, if the ions like your lithium ions stop moving through that electrolyte, because for example, your battery's completely discharged then electrons can no longer move through that outer circuit so you lose your power. So that effectively is how your battery will work.

ALEX LATHBRIDGE:
I know that I should know those words and that I should understand most of those words. I'm going to say that I do, right? I do get it. And I sort of understand it, but I'm going to jump to Robert right now. I mean, for someone like you, who's done all of these things, tinkering, making, understanding, enjoying engineering and whatnot, getting expelled from school when you were younger. Why do you care so much about batteries? I mean, you've agreed to come on a podcast

ABOUT BATTERIES. ROBERT LLEWELLYN:
Yes.
(ROBERT LAUGHING)
I mean, I think what we're seeing now, and this certainly emerged about 15 years ago with the sort of first generation of electric vehicles that used lithium iron, rechargeable batteries. And the very early versions of those vehicles were extremely rare and not terribly efficient and they were very expensive and they didn't work very well. And there was all those things were there, but there was an emergence. And what I think is interesting, particularly in this case, is that that transformation came out of the computer industry, not the automotive industry. The automotive industry until really, I would say two, or three years ago, was 100% locked in granite jawed determined to keep on with combustion engines and no matter what anyone said, or what any government said. And I think finally, that granite jaw's got a crack in it and it's starting to change their mind, but that aside, the emergence of rechargeable lithium ion batteries was adopted by the computer industry and the small gadget industry, the cameras, recorders, cell phones, laptops, all those things. That's where it was initially adopted and I mean, I think the history of that is quite fascinating. And I mean, I know Serena will know this, but it was about the time I was expelled from school. You had a very clever man called Professor John Goodenough in Oxford, which is where I lived. I didn't know him. And I'm sure he wouldn't have encouraged me to carry on being expelled from school. But, he developed that, that's his team at Oxford University. He developed the first lithium ion rechargeable batteries, which nobody wanted, no one was interested in, except in about I think it was in early 1980s actually. Some people from Sony, the Sony Corporation in Japan came over and said, You know those batteries that no one's interested in? Can we have some? And the rest is kind of history. So, I think that's where it is. And the knock on effect that I definitely didn't see, for instance, at the moment I'm in my house, everything is running off batteries and solar panels. There's no, I haven't used mains electricity now for four days, not one electron has come from the mains system because it's been sunny. Not like that all year round.

ALEX LATHBRIDGE:
What a flex. That is the nichest flex. The listeners of this podcast will appreciate that, because that's a very niche... No single electron has come from outside my closed circuit. I am the 21st century off-grid man,
(SERENA LAUGHING)
all right?

ROBERT LLEWELLYN:
But I'm definitely not off grid, cause I like being on the grid. I definitely, I'm a very keen proponent of the grid.

ALEX LATHBRIDGE:
I'm pro grid. I'm pro grid.

ROBERT LLEWELLYN:
I'm pro, please don't tell, say, I'm anti grid. I'm very pro grid, 'cause I also sell electricity, back into the grid, but I haven't been, I've been using it all here recently, but yes. But then also, just to really highlight that, I can't do this in the winter when it's not sunny. So, we've been getting a lot of solar recently, so that's really helped.

ALEX LATHBRIDGE:
I mean, you know, that journey that you've come on, from being suspended at school, I feel is a really good jumping off point. I really think that everyone should have been, I think.

ROBERT LLEWELLYN:
No, they shouldn't.

SERENA CUSSEN:
Hang on, I should step in here.

ROBERT LLEWELLYN:
You should, Serena you got a proper education.
(OVERLAPPING TALK)

ALEX LATHBRIDGE:
I feel as though, at this point, you'd be an Emeritus professor, which I assume is the super professor, I don't know, I just learned the words off Wikipedia, if you'd been expelled. But you know, based on what Robert's saying and I guess for you more in general, like how important are batteries for like a sustainable future? How can I get to the point where Robert is, where for the last four days, I haven't used mains electricity? How can I be like that?

SERENA CUSSEN:
I mean, I think they're vitally important. We are in the midst of a climate emergency and I think staying the current course would be catastrophic. I think batteries are one of those energy storage technologies that could really enable a greener grid. It's a really huge, it's a hugely exciting time as we move towards a more electrified future. Cause the reality is that we are seeing effects and very real evidence of climate change. And I think unlocking the potential that battery technologies have, will have real impact in that particular example that Robert talked about, where you're thinking about that transition from fossil fuels to renewable energy sources. So, you've got energy storage technologies like batteries, which could play a key role in that decarbonizing of our energy system. If you imagine what Robert was talking about, the energy grid as being that careful balance, of matching supply with demand, you can definitely see the role that batteries have to play there, because when you add renewable energy production into our energy system, we really start to face that challenge that Robert mentioned about winter time, that the wind doesn't always blow, unfortunately in the UK, the sun does not always shine. So, there's going to be those inherent peaks and troughs in our energy supply, in our renewable supply. Now, but in 2020, our renewable energy generation in the UK actually met over 40% of our electricity demand. So, there is a really clear need for storing that energy and making sure that we have that necessary flexibility to be able to deliver that energy, where and when it's needed. So, I think that batteries have a huge opportunity here. There's lots of chemistries under that umbrella of batteries that could potentially play a role. And I think that one of the areas that I'm speaking now, as a material scientist, but I really think that in terms of delivering a more sustainable future, that you mentioned, that material science and chemistry has an enormous role to play here. I think if you look at the battery, we mentioned earlier about battery has, the negative end, positive end, you've got the electrolyte in the middle, then you've got the packaging it's within. Robert talked about the production of these things and how you package them together, any kind of technology like that, sits at an interface of multiple research areas. And so you really need a commitment to collaboratively work across those areas. And by doing that, I think you can and I think we are seeing more sustainable ways of making materials. We're making use of more earth abundant elements in our energy storage materials. And I think we're starting to think more deeply about the environmental impact that those materials might have. And I think as a researcher working in this field, I think it's an extremely important challenge for all researchers working on energy storage to make sure that we think about any new materials that power our batteries. We take into consideration those wider economic and social science implications of any technology developments. We have to make sure that everything that we do is sustainable. And I think that means you can recognise then even the wider benefits of what you do, that any movement to a more sustainable future promotes human welfare and it advances our society as a whole. And I think all of those activities can further contribute to decarbonization efforts and that role that batteries will play in that.

ALEX LATHBRIDGE:
So, I mean with that in mind, I mean, are - first from your perspective and then Serena's - are certain types of batteries better, or worse for the environment, would you say?

ROBERT LLEWELLYN:
Oh, I'm sure. I think anything that human beings make, particularly if they dig stuff up to make it, has an impact and you could argue that any of it is bad for society. And the one thing we've been doing for the last say 120, 125 years is extract oil and burn it. And I think we now understand that, out of all the extraction industries, that's really quite a negative thing to do, cause however hard we've tried, it's really difficult to burn something twice. It's very easy to burn it once. But you know, I've always asked people, who are very pro fossil fuels and combustion, and I say, "Show me a litre of recycled diesel and I'll buy a diesel car. If we could use that again and I think that's the critical difference and we have to make sure that that is built in, which is very much as Serena was saying, that that is built in from the get go, if you like, although I hate that phrase. But that we design the battery chemistry with and the materials that we use in it, to make it as easy as possible to then at the end of life, which I'm going to argue is 15 to 20 years, not five minutes. With the end of life, we can use those materials again. And I think a critical point I always want to make is that one of the key people behind the emergence of the Tesla motors company, was a guy called J. B. Straubel who I've met once. Who's an extraordinary, quiet man. He doesn't get in the news a lot and he left Tesla a few years ago. He was absolutely instrumental in the development of their software, their battery systems, their drive trains, which are still annoyingly, 'cause I'm not a Tesla fanboy, even though I drive one, annoyingly, they're 10 years ahead of anyone else. And it is annoying and other people really need to catch up, but he left and he started a battery recycling company, called Redwood Materials in I think it's in Utah, in America and at the moment there aren't car batteries to recycle 'cause they're lasting too long, but he's recycling billions of tonnes of old phones and laptops, which we've all thrown away without a second thought. And it's so critically important. He's extracting materials from those batteries and selling that material to Tesla, who make batteries from it. You cannot do that with fossil fuels. You can do it with an engine, a combustion engine. You can melt it down and reuse that metal, but you can't do it with the fuel and I think that's the critical difference. So yes, definitely there are, and I wouldn't want to name them. I think Serena will know, the good, the better and the worst environmental damaging and not only environmentally damaging, ethically damaging where the materials come from? Who extracts them? Are they paid? How is the environment affected by that? All those things are really vitally important, but they're also changeable. And often the general press is five, to 10 years out of date in their biases and bigotry, which can be frustrating but things have changed. And also I think one of the few things, that I feel confident he does, is one of the new battery technologies. And again, this would be Serena would know way more about it, but I've heard of so many different types of battery forms that are emerging. And I think 99% of them are completely, they're going to fail. They're not going to work, but one, one of them you're going to go in 10 years time. We can't tell now. In 10 years time they'll go, Oh it was that, God, I heard about that in 2007, I never knew that would actually happen. One of them is going to work and it's not impossible that we could have a transformative higher density, lower weight, smaller, longer lasting battery, which doesn't have a lot of those contentious materials. And currently, we cannot do anything with combustion engines. We've taken them to the absolute limit of their reliability, their efficiency. There's nowhere else for them to go, 150 years of development. There's an enormous distance that we can still go with battery technology and the materials that's in it. I'll shut up.

ALEX LATHBRIDGE:
I mean, I love the energy more than anything. So Professor Serena Cussen, could you tell us, I mean, what's your perspective on this from, the chemistry, the materials, the research perspective? Are some batteries better, or worse for the environment? I really hope it's not double A batteries. They're my favourite.

SERENA CUSSEN:
I think it is a great question. It's very broad, but really, really important. And if it's OK with you, I'll think about this from safety, recycling and ethical concerns. So quite similar to what Robert was saying. You will have heard about safety issues, around some batteries that have led in the past, to things like product recalls of consumer goods. And I think that really serves to highlight the need for us to really deeply consider our research into the safety of batteries. So for example, Robert mentioned there's lots of potential battery chemistries out there. One of them is the solid state battery. And so at the moment we cannot safely use lithium metal as an anode in a liquid electrolyte battery. Now, why does that matter? Well, it would be great to be able to do that, because Lithium's really light. So that would give us a lighter battery and it would be higher energy density. So, that's great for your battery car range, but we face huge safety issues there because the build up of lithium can cause the growth of something called lithium dendrites. These are like little whiskers. I don't know why I'm pointing at my face, but little whiskers of lithium.

ALEX LATHBRIDGE:
I mean yeah, this is an audio medium.
(SERENA LAUGHING)
I mean, this isn't video. So I'll...

ROBERT LLEWELLYN:
It helped me. It helped me understand what whiskers are.

ALEX LATHBRIDGE:
Yeah, yeah. So, for people listening, imagine sort of a Hercule Poirot, if anyone used to watch ITV2 it's you know, the little, she's doing the little mustachey whiskers, like a cat, to explain this. So please explain this feline concept.

SERENA CUSSEN:
So you could imagine these whisker-like buildups of lithium that can protrude through your battery cell and what happens there is it could cause huge safety risks and the potential for fires. So, there's a huge amount of ongoing research in that area of looking at safer alternatives. Looking at things like ceramics, which can replace those flammable liquid electrolytes, but still allow the movement of ions through those solids. So, that's really quite exciting. Another area that in terms of are some better than others in terms of being better or worse for the environment. You've got to think about how you're actually going to transport these things as well. So, we do face concerns when we think about transporting lithium ion batteries, because they can't be fully discharged and that can lead to considerable transport costs. So, in that case, we've got the advent of things like sodium ion batteries, which are really very exciting because sodium ion batteries can be fully discharged and that avoids a danger of thermal runaway, which can be caused to be short circuit. And so that makes transport much, much more efficient. So, there's that aspect as well of environmental concern. Robert's already touched on the recycling piece, which I completely agree with him. I think in terms of the environmental impact of end of life batteries, we have this huge predicted growth of electric vehicles in the UK and that represents a really significant challenge around waste management. And I think there's vital work to be done on recycling and reuse of batteries. There are teams in the UK working to establish, not just the technological framework, but also the legal and economic infrastructure that you need to have around that battery materials recycling piece. And I think there's huge value in developing those kinds of methods, where you harvest critical elements that are not earth abundant. So you might reuse them and reapply them. When you think about that, a question of earth abundance, there's three countries in the world account for 85% of global lithium production. And when you go to mine things like lithium, it's often done through brine extraction and that's really water intensive and existing methods typically rely on solar evaporation from these really large salt flats, to crystallise out other salts. And that process can take months, or even years. So, there's opportunities there for new filtration techniques that are at quite early stages now, but that could reduce those processing times. And I think we need to be implementing those kinds of recycling strategies and as Robert said, consider second life scenarios for batteries that have already delivered on their primary function. And then going back to that awareness of ethical concerns around child labour, around the mining of elements like cobalt in batteries, that's used very widely, as well as building more responsible cobalt supply chains I think this is another place where material science and engineering can play a huge role, in terms of designing new materials that limit our reliance on those kinds of elements, so that we can apply more sustainable, earth abundant alternatives.

ALEX LATHBRIDGE:
So like let me flip it and because you gave one most wonderful answer, I'm going to start with you, but Robert will probably have some opinions on this. I think everyone will have an opinion on this. What do you think like right now, what would a world without batteries look like?

SERENA CUSSEN:
Oh, wow OK, that's a really interesting question.

ALEX LATHBRIDGE:
Cause there might not be, Robert, I hear you have a YouTube series called Fully Charged. What happens if there's nothing to charge?

ROBERT LLEWELLYN:
Yeah OK.

ALEX LATHBRIDGE:
What would happen in a world without batteries?

SERENA CUSSEN:
I think, it's a great question. And I suppose I'd go back historically and think it's amazing to think that over 100 years ago, you had people like Tesla, people like Edison engaged in this huge contest, right? This fierce competition about distributed electricity grids and transmitting electricity over these really long distances. Could you imagine how they would find looking at today and how fascinating it would be to see that technology evolved beyond grid based systems? It's like things like batteries have revolutionised the portable electronics industry. You see huge benefits for off grid communities, that can now access crucial services like finance, like health, the internet. And I think very often if we look back to the discovery of things like lead acid batteries by Plante, that was the mid 19th century, you started to see batteries penetrate into transport and starting to power the lights and train carriages and now today you see that electric vehicle revolution. So I think I would struggle to imagine, what a world without batteries would look like. And I think, we have this huge opportunity where you think about the pioneering work of Nobel prize winners like John Goodenough, like Stan Whittingham, like Yoshino, who have revolutionised that portable industry just in my lifetime and how batteries are now contributing to electric vehicles. That huge critical role they're going to play in that movement away from fossil fuels is just really exciting.

ALEX LATHBRIDGE:
It feels you've taken, what is a not negative question, a quite difficult, maybe sad question and turned it into a huge positive, which I like. And speaking of turning negatives into positives, batteries. Robert, what do you think a world without batteries would look like?

ROBERT CUSSEN:
It is hard to imagine, because they have been around as long as combustion engines effectively, in one form or another. I mean, I think there was a very early battery on display at the Royal Institution isn't there? Was it at the Voltaire?

SERENA CUSSEN:
The Voltaic pile, yeah.

ROBERT LLEWELLYN:
The Voltaic pile. It's a load of bits of leather and zinc and so that was, I don't know, when that was, that was a long time ago, couple hundred years ago. So, it's hard to envisage it, but I mean, I think in fact, Nissan, did an advert for the Nissan Leaf when it first came out, where everything was powered by combustion engines. And so there was someone in a cafe and they wanted to pay their bills, so the person got the card reader but they had to start it and it has a little
(ROBERT IMITATING AN ENGINE)
and a bit of smoke coming out. And then there was a woman with a food mixer
(ROBERT MAKING REVVING NOISES)
and that had a petrol engine driving it, so it was joke. And I think there was a dispensing, putting a dollar in and getting a can of Coke out. One of those vending machine. There was a vending machine that had to start its engine to vend anything. So they were sort of describing a world without electricity effectively, only combustion. But, so I can't quite picture it. It's like, if we had never developed combustion engines and we'd never extracted oil and burnt it, the world would be very different. It might be worse, or it might be better. It's very hard to really imagine a world without batteries. We certainly couldn't do a lot of the things we do, we take for granted now. I mean, my laptop is running on a battery at the moment. So, you know, they're just a ubiquitous part of our lives and we don't even notice. Even these little things. That's what I think is more freakish, cause I grew up with wire, everything had to have a wire, when I was a lad and I've got two little things in my ears, I think I've got batteries in, cause they work and they're electronic. I don't even know. The batteries have got to be pretty small. So, it is hard to envisage that.

ALEX LATHBRIDGE:
So, we've gone, you've both talked there about, taking the past until to now. In terms of like what's happening now towards the future, Professor Serena Cussen, can you please give us like an overview of your research into batteries? What's on the horizon? What's coming next? What's the next thing that Robert can talk about on his YouTube channel, which is Fully Charged if you want to subscribe on YouTube?

SERENA CUSSEN:
Well I think very often, you'll hear battery researchers talking about things like, energy density and power density of batteries. So, I'm going to tell you what those things mean, before I tell you what we're doing about them. So, energy density tells you about how much energy your battery can store in a given mass, or a given volume. And then power density is telling us about how quickly that device can then deliver that energy. So, you can think about it like a race. If you were running a 100 metre race, you need to deliver that power very, very quickly to accelerate, like think Usain Bolt here. So, you're very high powered density. But if you want to run a marathon, you need to be able to maintain that energy over a really long time and have very high energy density. So, you want to be Paula Radcliffe. So, your energy density measures the ability that you have for how long you can store energy. Whereas your power density is how quickly you can release it. So, a lot of the research that we are doing at the moment is trying to optimise those characteristics in batteries. Making sure that we can deliver batteries that have that long lifetime that can deliver energy over a long period of time, or, if you want to accelerate, that can deliver that acceleration. So, we're also trying to do that in a way that, going back to an awful lot of conversation we've had up to now, that reduces our reliance on expensive elements and moves to more cheaper, more sustainable alternatives. And of course we want to pair that with smart engineering. So, we're trying to think about how we might significantly reduce the cost of our battery, without limiting its lifetime, or its energy density, or it's power density and do it in a safe way. So, in terms of what my research is doing, I have a huge privilege to lead a very large consortium of researchers through the UK's Faraday Institution. We're working on next generation cathode materials. So, remember the cathodes are the positive part of the battery, and we are a project called FutureCat, and it's a UK wide collaboration. It's absolutely, it's fantastic to get to work with so many people across so many different scientific and engineering fields. Led out of the University of Sheffield and we're working to deliver new roots to high performance cathodes. Cathodes represents the most expensive part of your battery at the moment. So there's a huge opportunity there, for material science and chemistry. We're also trying to develop ways in which you could prolong the performance and the lifetime of these battery cathodes, as well as discovering brand new cathode chemistries, where we apply much more earth abundant elements for more sustainable batteries.

ALEX LATHBRIDGE:
I'm very charged up about this. I'm sorry, the battery puns. You said Usain Bolt, so I thought we were trying to, we were stacking up battery puns. Sorry if we're not. I mean, Serena, what is stopping us from getting further ahead? What's stopping us from having like a super powerful battery in the palm of one's hand?

SERENA CUSSEN:
There's a lot of challenges in terms of delivering a brand new battery chemistry that can make that transformative step change. I think there are candidates on the horizon. So, I think that things like solid state batteries, for example. I mentioned earlier that at the moment, we can't use lithium metal. If we could, that would see a significant improvement in energy densities and also in safety and making smaller batteries as well. And I think that would see a significant step change. I think, when we look at you talk about the incremental changes in batteries to date. I think, when we look at some of these more earth abundant alternatives, so I mentioned manganese as an example, moving from nickel to manganese. These have really, really exciting potentials. So, let me explain why. At the moment, some of our battery chemistries, they rely on our metals giving up or receiving electrons during all of their work in the battery. So, if we could move to a situation where it's not just our transition metals, but also other elements present in the battery are involved in those electron transfer reactions as well it's increasing the capacity of our batteries, or improving potentially, significantly improving our energy densities. So, it's sort of thinking about things in a different way. Now, the challenge there of course is, we're trying to step change here in terms of performance, but it does require a huge amount of fundamental research to understand how these processes work. And if we can understand them properly, then we can take full advantage of them.

ALEX LATHBRIDGE:
OK. That's made me really hopeful for the future. And I think, like we've mentioned one of the big places you're going to see batteries being used, at least as a consumer, it's going to be consumer vehicles. And when people think about that, they think about electric cars, but Robert, you know, I've seen on your YouTube channel, I'm not going to name it. People should know it by now, but it's Fully Charged, if you want to subscribe. You don't just have electric cars, you have electric boats and there is something that I've been considering getting, an electric bike, they’re electric bikes.

ROBERT LLEWELLYN:
Yeah.

ALEX LATHBRIDGE:
So for you, just even looking at vehicles for now, is there, what would the perfect battery be? What would you like to see in that respect? Right now you're putting it forward, to Professor Serena Cussen. She might be able to make it happen. So, like what would the perfect battery look like?

ROBERT LLEWELLYN:
I think the answer is, there isn't a perfect battery, because there are many roles that a battery can fulfil and therefore you want different technologies, for different roles. So, for instance, one of the things that is often overlooked by people who aren't in the bubble of electric vehicles, on the technology surrounding that, is that, for instance, I had a very first generation Nissan Leaf. The very first production electric car, built in 2010 in Japan.
(ALEX LAUGHING)
And I've replaced the..

ALEX LATHBRIDGE:
Look at the flex here. Serena have you noticed this entire thing? We've been chatting chemistry. He's been like, "So I actually had, I've met this person who worked at Tesla and who now recycles at, one time, I had actually the first electric Leaf, Nissan Leaf when it first came out.

ROBERT LLEWELLYN:
It wasn't the first. It was one of the first.

ALEX LATHBRIDGE:
What kind of electric battery hipster are you? But yes.

SERENA CUSSEN:
Well, I did travel to this interview, on an electric bike.

ROBERT LLEWELLYN:
There you go.

SERENA CUSSEN:
There's my bit.

ROBERT LLEWELLYN:
Way ahead. Way ahead.

ALEX LATHBRIDGE:
OK, sorry Robert, continue.

ROBERT LLEWELLYN:
But sorry, what I was going to say is, I've replaced the battery in that car recently, which is not going to happen in all... This was a very, very early stage electric vehicle. It had multiple drawbacks. I mean, I usually use slightly worse language, but when it was brand new, the range wasn't impressive. And after 10 years of use, the range was slightly less impressive. So, it was never particularly amazing, but it's now had a much bigger battery put in, and that is a clue. So, it's had a much bigger capacity battery put in. Same weight, same size fitted in exactly the same slot. Took about 20 minutes to swap it very, very quick process, a lot of software problems. So now, because the software was fairly crude when it was made. So, now when you charge it up overnight and you look at it in the morning, it says 168 miles range, and you literally drive 10 metres and it says 110 miles range. So, it's adjusting in a very violent and aggressive way, but that said, the battery that was taken out is now running a small workshop and office. It's been repackaged into a little box. It's got a control system on top, very simple bit of electronics and software that runs it. And it operates as the batteries do in my house and that I've been to an apartment building in Paris, that has about 40 Renault ZOE batteries, old Renault ZOE batteries, that basically back up the electricity in that building. So it's multiple apartments, lifts, garages with electric car chargers, and they can maintain their electricity flow at the minimum cost for the recipients. And more impressive than that is, Antwerp football stadium that is powered partially by huge amount of solar panels on the roofs of the auditorium, I never know what's called, a football pitch. What's the thing that surrounds it? The stands. Sorry, on the roof of the stands, loads of solar panels. And I think it's hundreds, literally hundreds of Nissan Leaf batteries, repackaged, and that runs hugely off its own power source. It's kind of a mini power station. So, the second life of those batteries, which Serena did mention, is much longer than we thought. Cause if you make a battery and you put it in a car, you then accelerate that car as hard as you can, which people who drive electric cars want to do occasionally, the strain you're putting on those batteries is phenomenal. And you then put that battery in a house and you turn on your cooker. That's like you almost reversing at less than walking speed. That's the demand it's putting on that battery. It's a tiny proportion. Therefore, those batteries last for years and years in their second life role, much, the range of the car was reduced. But, the actual capacity of the battery that came out of my Nissan Leaf was about 18 kilowatt hours. Well, that'll run a house for pretty much a day. You know, that's a really good, it's not pointless. It's not worthless, it's worth a lot. So, there's that side of it. I think the other critical thing I wanted to say is that, if you are going to build a massive battery that backs up the grid, I think at the moment that is being done, for instance, Tesla's big battery in South Australia, is a lithium ion batteries in big boxes. I mean, it's megawatt hours it can store, there's hundreds of them. And it might be possible that there's more suitable technology and battery chemistry to do that sort of heavy... It doesn't need to be transportable. It can weigh hundreds of tonnes. It doesn't matter, 'cause it's not going anywhere. So, there's different types of batteries for different types of solution. That's the thing. And the other one that I've seen in Australia as well, is I think vanadium flow, I might have got the name wrong.

SERENA CUSSEN:
Yeah.

ROBERT LLEWELLYN:
But flow batteries. So, all the cell towers, the remote cell towers in Australia that distribute the mobile phone signal have a small solar panel, not much and a little flow battery in a box at the base of them. And that gives them 24 hours secure power so they can run without having to be connected to the grid, because some of these are really isolated. They used to have diesel generators, those needed constant maintenance. They've got rid of all those. They then had lithium ion batteries, which they found were struggling with the heat and vanadium flow batteries, the ones that I saw, they're made by a company called Redflow, in Brisbane. They actually benefit. They get better if they're drained to 0% and if they're charged to 0%, they prefer. Which a lithium ion battery you want to protect it from doing that. So, it really suits the environment it's in. Doesn't mind about hot and cold. It's not bothered about those things. It doesn't get affected by that. They last for decades, we don't even know how long they'll last. It lasts a hell of a long time, and it would be utterly unsuitable for a vehicle, or a ship, or a car, completely useless there, but brilliant for that sort of grid backup. And lastly, the one thing I want to say is, batteries have got hugely better since I had bought my Nissan Leaf as an earlier adopter in 2011, because the capacity and the energy density has improved enormously and up until very recently, the cost has dropped precipitously. Now, that is being affected by, as we were hearing, commodity prices now. So there may be a bit of a kick up in the other direction but I think long term they're going to get cheaper. They're going to last longer. And, the last thing I really want to say is, it's very important to remember 'cause cobalt, very, very contentious material. Cobalt has been used for the last 50 years to refine oil. And no one talks about that and large amounts of cobalt are needed, for us to remove sulphur from diesel and petrol. And it's not recycled that cobalt, you know? So I just think it's always worth mentioning, cause the cobalt was used as a stick by the fossil fuel industry to beat the battery, the development of battery technology and all the time, they kept very quiet about their large usage of cobalt. Which is I think a good example that there are some people who lobby for some companies that are less than scrupulous, or honest.

SERENA CUSSEN:
Do you mind if I pop in on that? I think, when you're thinking about a particular technology for a particular application, I think it's really crucial that you think about what you want, but what you can have. So you might like to have very large storage capacity, at low cost. You'd like to be able to deploy it very widely. You'd like to be able to have some flexibility in how you deliver that, that it would cover minutes to months. And so I think if you're going to think about how batteries sit within that space, you could see that for example, something like a lithium ion battery would be in a prime position to deliver at time scales up to a day, like you were talking about.

ROBERT LLEWELLYN:
Yeah.

SERENA CUSSEN:
Whereas things like flow batteries, are much more suitable for several days. So, it's thinking about which chemistry is right for the application that you want to use it for. And then just thinking about your point about second life. I think there's a big piece here about understanding second life and what's possible in that second life. And we see there's a really huge number of challenges that the scientists and engineers are facing at the moment around maximising the lifetime of current lithium ion batteries. So, if you take into account, for example, a current lithium ion battery technology, we call it NMCs. The N stands for nickel. The M stands for manganese and the C stands for cobalt. That cathode material, you can think of it like layers, like sheets of paper. And when we're charging a battery that has that kind of cathode, remember your lithium ions are moving through the electrolyte, into those layers back and forth, as you charge and discharge. So, the lithium ions move back through the electrolyte during that discharge into that positive cathode.

ALEX LATHBRIDGE:
Basically...

SERENA CUSSEN:
..hundreds of times.

ALEX LATHBRIDGE:
Just checking, so they're going up and down through these layers.

SERENA CUSSEN:
If you think...

ALEX LATHBRIDGE:
Like lasagna.

SERENA CUSSEN:
Like lasagna sheet, exactly.

ALEX LATHBRIDGE: Ok.
SERENA CUSSEN: So think of a lasagna sheet and that those lithium ions moving in between those sheets of pasta and back again. And if you imagine that happening hundreds of times and those layers could be, you could think of them like sheets of paper, or like sheets of pasta, they'll start to degrade over time. Like Robert was saying, if you're really driving that car, really accelerating, really pushing it to its limits. You could even imagine those sheets starting to collapse a little bit. And that of course has significant effects on the capacity of your battery with time. And so lots of people, especially here in the UK, are looking at how to mitigate those kinds of degradation processes. And again, if we can understand how those layers degrade or how battery capacity fades over time, that's where we start that pathway towards designing better batteries for the future. So, when I think about like batteries of the future and future, like the future, future, future, which is very far in the future. English, strange language. I don't think about just electric cars, electric bikes, I think about planes, electric planes. Robert, you've been flexing on us this entire conversation, from everything to going to Australia, to being kicked out of school so you could live your life fun and early. Electric planes. Do you reckon that they're going to be a thing?

ROBERT LLEWELLYN:
I'm very ashamed because I talked about my Nissan Leaf and I was rightly teased about that and about all the other things. A couple of weeks ago, I flew in an electric plane for the first time, so I didn't want to say that. (ALEX LAUGHING)
I didn't want to say that. This was a long time ago before he was a well known international figure, an actress that I knew from a distance. I didn't know her at all, but she came up to me at a party and she's... That doesn't happen to me often, an attractive young woman came up to me and said, Hello Robert, it's lovely to see you" da, da, da. And then she said, "Come and meet my husband." And I'm going to admit, there was a slight disappointment in me, that she was going to introduce me to her husband. Her husband was a man called Elon Musk and I went up to meet this man. And I shook his hand and this is our entire conversation. Nice to meet you. Nice to meet you too. That's it. That was the full length of our conversation, but he was very busy. There was a lot of people there. So, I did fly in an electric plane last, week before last. It was very windy. It was a very small plane. It's a Pipistrel two seater, a training plane, mass produced. It's not a one off prototype. It's made in Slovakia. Lightweight, two seater electric aircraft, with a 24 kilowatt hour battery. Can fly for about an hour, very safely with a big margin for emergencies, incredibly reliable, incredibly mechanically simple, in comparison with a combustion engined aircraft. And that's a thing I suppose, general people outside of aviation have no idea about. And I certainly wouldn't have done, without having it explained to me in depth. But you take an engine that is essentially the same as in a car and you take it up to 10,000, or 15,000 feet, it won't work cause there's no oxygen for it to burn in its carburetor. So, it has to have incredible, extra heavy, complex technology that forces air into the combustion chambers in order for it to actually operate. So, a car engine would only probably work safely up to about 10,000 feet, anything above that, and you're really in trouble with it. So, you have to do a lot of work to make a combustion engine operate at those temperatures. You can take an electric motor into outer space. It would still work. It can be in a vacuum. It doesn't matter. Not that I would suggest this Pipistrel can go as high as that, but, last week we went to see a vertical takeoff and landing electric aircraft, that's going into production now. In the next five years, I think you will be able to fly regularly, between sort of 100 and 250 miles in purely electric aircraft. So, and it may take a bit longer to do say London to Paris, but certainly city centres to airports is where a lot of focus is going, cause that's, I didn't even know, but that's a big... Previously, see, I'm doubting a lot of the sociological aspects of this, that in the past, a lot of business people needed to get from the business hub to the airport in the minimum time possible, because they're so important. And actually now fewer people are flying with business anyway. And also, the whole flying thing is questionable and also nobody works in offices anymore. So, I think there's some arguments around there, but certainly there are technologies developing and I think autonomous as well, very critically important, fully autonomous short haul flights. You two will definitely live long enough to see that, as a regular normal thing, won't even be unusual. You won't even comment on it. You'll just getting a little thing and it'll fly you somewhere. Not that far, not that fast, not that high, but it will do it certainly. So, it's definitely happening and that is 100% down to battery technology and improved battery technology. So vertical aerospace, you'll be able to see, have developed their own battery technology in house. I don't know what it is. It's secret. They're not telling anyone what it is, but they're predicting that within the next five years they'll be achieving 250 miles. There's also Electro Flight, now there's so many different companies that are doing it. I'm trying to remember the other one. There's another company, whose name will come back to me in a moment who are doing hydrogen fuel cells and batteries for longer haul flights. And they're experimenting with that, just down the road from me. It's so annoying when I can't remember the name of the company, but I will in moment.

ALEX LATHBRIDGE:
Yeah, when they're just down the road from you, you don't remember. I, down the road, I remember. I have a Nando's and I do quite like the idea that you're like, oh yeah, for the two of you, these sorts of things, flying in these battery powered vertical takeoff and landing things, it's going to be completely normal. Bro, I'm broke. Nothing is going to be normal for me like that. So Serena, the stuff that Robert's so enthusiastically talking about, do you reckon that time scale sort of, are you hopeful?

SERENA CUSSEN:
I think that there are certainly opportunities in the broader opportunities in transport, for batteries to penetrate into certainly. If we look at again, you're thinking about advancements in chemistry and material science and engineering, to look at things like lightweight batteries. So, things that are made up of elements like lithium and sulphur have great potential for applications in aerospace. Lithium sulphur batteries in particular present real opportunities in terms of high energy densities, lighter weight, lower cost batteries, which could potentially be very interesting for aviation. LG chem batteries power some unmanned aircraft that have been developed by the Korean Aerospace Research Institute. And there are adoption of lighter weight batteries in larger electric vehicles, such as buses and trucks. I'm with you Alex about, that if we can make this something that's affordable and looking to public transport opportunities where we can electrify all of that, that's a huge opportunity. But I think, again, we've got to think about how we solve some fundamental questions around the chemistry of some of these batteries to be able to unlock that potential market penetration for aviation, or sort of larger vehicles.

ALEX LATHBRIDGE:
Love it. I love the optimism. I love it. So, I love everything about this. I'm in love really with batteries and this is going to continue through the rest of the series, I guarantee. So, my final question, always the most difficult. So I'm going to start with Robert. Very briefly. "Very briefly." If you could have a listener take one thing away from this conversation, what would it be?

ROBERT LLEWELLYN:
Batteries in our lives will become normal and uninteresting. Which in a way is the best possible result. At the moment they're esoteric, so the fact that I have neighbours that literally come to my house to look at a box on the wall, is weird. I mean, it's a battery and it doesn't do anything. It hasn't got pistons or shiny bits of brass that do interesting things. Doesn't make any noise. It's just completely silent box on the wall of a house, but they come and see it, because they're intrigued by what it represents. And I think that's, once that stops being weird, in a sense like electric cars are becoming. I was in quite a bad mood the other day, cause for a long time, I was special in my village, 28 houses in my village. I had an electric car, no one else did. I was special, I stood out, I was an elitist, living in a bubble of elitist, something or other, I can't remember what I'm accused of on Twitter. And now, I'm common. I'm one of the commoners, there's now something like 19 electric cars in our village, which is insane how quickly that's happened. The increase in, and then here's a guy on the corner. I'm not going to mention him, his name, who's very wealthy, who lives in a lovely, old farmhouse. And he's got a Porsche Taycan, which is costs three times more than our house, when we bought our house so.

ALEX LATHBRIDGE:
Like this summary's just turning into a flex. Look at this posh little village I live in. I used to be special, then everyone else got one.

ROBERT LLEWELLYN:
Everyone else has joined in, but also I've lowered the average property prices, in our village by the state of our house and garden. So, you know, I'm proud of that.

ALEX LATHBRIDGE:
I'm going to go to Serena. What would be your one takeaway from, or what would you want people to take away from this episode?

SERENA CUSSEN:
I think, we talked a lot about sustainability earlier and so, I would love people to take away the fact that we are as scientists and engineers, committed to making sure that the new chemistries and materials that are emerging from our laboratories and that we're working with our industry partners with, we are taking that sustainability challenge really, really seriously, but even going further beyond that. The idea of sustainability is making sure that a future that we we look to is fair and equitable. And so, making sure that this adoption of electric vehicles, there has to be strategies for, how does on street parking work? Make sure it's a coordinated effort so that there's the right number of charge points available to everybody, all parts of our society. And I think that that kind of demand and that movement to an electrified future is going to take some huge joined up thinking across sectors. The scientific leadership is really important that we are committed to more sustainable chemistries for the future. But meeting all of those targets requires leadership from all parts of our society. And I think that's a challenge that we can all embrace.

ALEX LATHBRIDGE:
I'm not even going to say anything, cause that was a fantastic outro. Wonderful. Thank you both, so, so much. That was phenomenal.

SERENA CUSSEN:
Now I can stop sweating.
(SERENA LAUGHING)
(ROBERT LAUGHING)
(UPBEAT MUSIC)

ALEX LATHBRIDGE:
So of course, wonderful guest, could you please introduce yourself?

SAIFUL ISLAM:
Hello there I'm Saiful Islam. I'm Professor of Materials Science in the Department of Materials at the University of Oxford.

ALEX LATHBRIDGE:
We of course here on this podcast, we're interested in batteries. We love batteries. We're charged up for batteries. My puns are great and they're going to keep getting even better, Hiren's going to edit out the terrible ones. So I guess to begin with, could you very briefly tell me, why are you so interested in batteries?

SAIFUL ISLAM:
Well, I suppose we all know that one of the greatest challenges in this century is low-carbon, sustainable energy to help deal with the challenges of climate change and also increasingly pollution, urban pollution. So, why am I'm interested in batteries? Well, batteries are one of the technologies, not the only one, that can help to address low carbon energy. Batteries are used in portable electronics, but increasingly they've been used in electric vehicles and that's one way of reducing carbon emissions and help to deal with climate change.

ALEX LATHBRIDGE:
All right. So, I am often told about batteries. Like, people tell me that batteries are very interesting. Of course you love batteries. Now the battery that I always think about is my phone, right? And I'm told that it's a lithium ion battery. That's the battery that's in my phone. Can you please explain what a lithium ion battery is? Because people have said it too many times, and I'm sort of a bit scared at this point to ask.

SAIFUL ISLAM:
So we know that a battery is electrochemistry in action. I view a battery a bit like a sandwich. You've got two bread slices. The two bread slices are the electrodes. And in between those two bread slices, you'd need a good sandwich filling. So, the meat or cheese, if you're vegetarian, is the electrolyte. And in a lithium ion battery, what's moving between the two electrodes are lithium ions. One of the electrodes is a lithium transition metal oxide, and the other electrode is graphite. So, it's a lithium ion battery because the actual eyes that are moving are lithium.

ALEX LATHBRIDGE:
You know what? When you say it like that and you sum it up like that, it feels like a silly question, but I know full well that myself and many other listeners of this podcast perhaps didn't know that. So thank you. And you've also made me think about lunch, which is another thing. I'm hungry for knowledge, but also a sandwich at this point.

SAIFUL ISLAM:
A sandwich. Well, actually I should add also, people might say, "Well, why lithium?" Well, lithium is the third element in the periodic table. It's the lightest and smallest of metal ions. So, we don't have as yet, a hydrogen battery. That would be a fuel cell. We don't have a helium battery, but we do use them in balloons. But, a lithium is the lightest and smallest of metal ions out there. And that's why it's got what is called a very high energy density. So you can stuff that sandwich, that electrochemical sandwich with lots of lithium, which makes it, means it can store a lot of energy in a small mass and a small volume.

ALEX LATHBRIDGE:
So it's like the most dense sandwich possible. It’s like a plowman’s lunch.

SAIFUL ISLAM:
Exactly. Exactly. So that dense sandwich is in your, that's why it can go into your portable mobile phone as a nice, thin battery. And obviously we would love it to store even more, which comes onto my research, which we can talk about in a second.

ALEX LATHBRIDGE:
Well, well. I mean, you've teed it up very nicely. So, apart from lunch and other food-based analogies, what are you working on right now?

SAIFUL ISLAM:
Good question.

ALEX LATHBRIDGE:
Thank you. I thought it up myself.

SAIFUL ISLAM:
We know that we charge our mobile phone every night. Supposing we could develop a battery that you only have to charge maybe once every two weeks. Could we increase the energy density? How much that battery can store? So, one of the limitations of how much energy we could store is on the cathode side, the oxide side, which has a lower energy density than the graphite on the anode side. So, my research which has been funded by the Faraday Institution, is to develop new cathode materials that store more energy. And that's one of the big areas of research, not only in the UK, but around the world.

ALEX LATHBRIDGE:
OK, so, you got to tell me where are you right now? Am I going to have like a micro SD card sized battery, that can power my computer? Are we there yet?

SAIFUL ISLAM:
Currently, our conventional cathodes are layered oxides. The prototype was lithium cobalt oxide, which led to the Nobel prize for the founder, the pioneer, which is John Goodenough, which is long overdue. The oldest Nobel Laureate, 97. And he got the Nobel prize three years ago, with Stan Whittingham and Yoshino. That's the conventional one. The other conventional cathodes are lithium, nickel, manganese, cobalt oxide called NMC. So, that's currently in most electric vehicles that NMC. What we're working on, what is called lithium-rich oxide, trying to stuff more lithium into these layer oxides, but also very new structures, called disordered rock salts. We all know the rock salt structure, the stuff that we sprinkle on our...

ALEX LATHBRIDGE:
Yeah, yeah.

SAIFUL ISLAM:
Our chips.

ALEX LATHBRIDGE:
We all know that. Again the food based analogies, is this what this is about?

SAIFUL ISLAM:
Well, I'll bring in a drink as well. So you can sprinkle on your chips, on your rice, but in my case, I use salt just before a tequila shot. Then we could... This disordered rock salt show very high energy density as well, but they're not made of sodium and chloride. They're made of lithium manganese, oxygen and fluorine. So these oxyfluorides, and they're very exciting because they've got very high energy densities.

ALEX LATHBRIDGE:
You're obviously thinking about the future. You're really, really on it. Finger on the pulse there. What role do you think that batteries could play in like a truly renewable future? Cause you mentioned electric vehicles and that's one way we're going down with the sustainable future. But when it comes to like bringing renewable energies and really thinking about a green future, what role do batteries play?

SAIFUL ISLAM:
Yeah. That is another really good question. Because as well as, as you say, electrification of transport and portable electronics, we've got increasing renewables. There's a really exciting time for science and engineering in general, the growth of renewables - solar, wind. There could be more tidal, but when the wind isn't blowing and the sun isn't shining, we do need energy storage. Currently large scale energy storage doesn't tend to be batteries, but there's no reason why large scale energy storage could be batteries of some type. It's unlikely, although you never know, it's unlikely to be lithium ion. That's a bit costly, but there are big developments in sodium. So, sodium ion batteries. So, sodium is below lithium in the periodic table, has very similar chemistry to lithium, but has the advantage of being much more abundant than lithium, so it would be lower cost and more sustainable. And this thought that you could build these larger sodium ion batteries for renewable energy, for storing energy from there. So, if you haven't heard about sodium ion batteries, you have now, but that could be another area.

ALEX LATHBRIDGE:
I like that. I like the mic drop. If you haven't heard about it, well you have now, all right?
(ALEX LAUGHING)
So, my final question, of course, a doozy. In, let's say 64 years' time, it's a very specific number. Where do you think that we'll be? Where do you hope that we'll be, when it comes to battery technology?

SAIFUL ISLAM:
Why 64 years?

ALEX LATHBRIDGE:
I don't know. Just picked a number. I mean, you were talking about rock salt and sandwiches.

SAIFUL ISLAM:
All right.

ALEX LATHBRIDGE:
And all that earlier.

SAIFUL ISLAM:
Do you think 2084, like 1984?

ALEX LATHBRIDGE:
No, no. I picked the number. You get to do the answer.

SAIFUL ISLAM:
OK. Well, I won't be alive to know what the batteries will look like. I can tell you by then, hydrogen will be an increasing energy vector. Again, for the listeners. Hydrogen has the highest energy density per unit mass and volume. And there's always been talk of hydrogen fuel cells, but hydrogen has always been a problem for two main reasons. One, producing it costs energy. And if you're going to use energy to produce hydrogen, that could be carbon intensive. And the other challenge with hydrogen was storing it. How do you store it? There's always that worry of explosive tanks, but I think in 64 years' time, we'll see those two challenges being met and we'll see more and more hydrogen fuel cell cars, but married with new advances in battery technologies as well. So there'll be fast charging batteries, hydrogen fuel cell cars, but who knows what the cars will be like in the future? They could be levitating on superconducting magnets. There could be superconductors out there. Yeah.

ALEX LATHBRIDGE:
I feel as though I chose 64 years' time because you are ageless, from your skin right now. So I assumed 64 years was the point where you'd be dead, definitely.

SAIFUL ISLAM:
I'm hitting a big number next year. The big 6-O.

ALEX LATHBRIDGE:
Oh what? Wow. OK, well done. Wow. That skincare regime. Anyway, toodle-pip. I'm going to go eat Greggs. Bye-ee.

SAIFUL ISLAM:
Lovely. Thanks a lot, bye.
(UPBEAT MUSIC)

ALEX LATHBRIDGE:
Join us next time, where we'll be asking the important question, In this day and age, what actually is the point of batteries anyway? That's all for this episode of Brought to You by Chemistry. It was produced by Hiren Joshi and Elizabeth Ratcliffe and presented by me, Alex Lathbridge.
(UPBEAT MUSIC)

Episode transcript:

(UPBEAT BRIGHT MUSIC)

ANNOUNCER:
"Brought To You By Chemistry".
(UPBEAT MUSIC)

ALEX LATHBRIDGE:
Hi everyone, and welcome to Brought To You By Chemistry. What's "Brought To You By Chemistry" I hear you ask? Complicated reactions, complicated exams, even more complicated romances? You know, the ones that most people wouldn't understand, but it's OK because you have blind faith that it will work this time. I mean, yes, but in this case, Brought to you by Chemistry is a podcast series from the Royal Society of Chemistry. So you see the branding there. My name is Dr. Alex Lathbridge and in this series, we are back and better than ever because we are taking a look at batteries. Bringing together experts from inside and outside the world of chemistry to help us understand the ins, the outs, the ups, the downs, the positives, and the negatives of all things battery.

And I suppose the most difficult question is the one I'm going to start with which is, could I please get you to introduce yourself?

ALAN WHITEHEAD MP:
Well, good morning, I'm Alan Whitehead. I'm the member of parliament for Southampton, and I'm also the Shadow Energy Minister and Green New Deal Minister for Labour in the shadow team. I spend my time in parliament shadowing the real Energy Minister, and engaging in quite substantial and wide ranging debate about all aspects of energy both in terms of our encounters, but also being responsible for responding for labour on back bench debates, various things such as that. So that's largely my life in parliament, but I'm very happy about that because I've been very interested in energy, in particular green energy for many years, and I've spent a lot of time in parliament advocating for that over the years. And therefore, I'm in a job I like doing.

ALEX LATHBRIDGE:
Now, speaking of jobs that we like doing, can we please... I mean, I'm happy to be talking to you, but you made it sound like your job is quite, you know, this is the day to day, whatever. I told my little cousin that I'm going to be chatting to the Shadow Energy Minister. And he said, "Oh my God, there's someone who works on shadow energy." What is shadow energy? What is this? So I'm guessing there's no such thing as shadow energy, but the first question I am going to ask you is, what is up with energy here in the UK? I mean, how is the UK energy system changing? You know, it's 2022, there are changes afoot.

ALAN WHITEHEAD MP:
Well, it is changing very rapidly now, and it has changed very rapidly over the last 10, 15 years. So, I mean, if we look back say 20 years, the UK energy system was largely centralised. The vast majority of UK energy came from a relatively small number of sources, mainly gas fired power stations, some nuclear power stations, some coal. And you could run the whole system on the basis of inputs from those 80 or so power stations and associated facilities. Wind was in its infancy, and other forms of renewables were also very undeveloped. So you had a system whereby all power was produced in the centre, went down the grid, and eventually ended up in our homes, and our offices, and our factories. Now, all that has changed round completely now. So with the emergence of renewables, not just big renewables like offshore wind, but, you know, smaller household renewables such as solar and you could say between those and onshore wind, then we've got probably a million plus inputs to the energy system. And the system is no longer centralised, it's no longer entirely dependent on those big power stations for its supply, and indeed those big power stations are increasingly closing down because of the need to reduce the carbon content of our energy systems by very radical amounts. So coal fired power stations are going offline by 2025, gas fired power stations are increasingly beginning to close down or producing much lower levels of output, and the system is effectively becoming almost completely renewable. And indeed, that's a target that is in everyone's minds now because probably by 2035, we're going to have pretty much the complete energy system run by renewable inputs.

ALEX LATHBRIDGE:
OK, so it's becoming cleaner and, you know, more decentralised. Now with all of that, you know, you were talking about things like solar panels on people's roofs and stuff, where do batteries fit into this? Because, you know, this is a podcast series about batteries. People want what they're here for. They know what they're here for, it's battery chat. Where do batteries come into this?

ALAN WHITEHEAD MP:
Well, batteries are one of the big solutions to the increasingly complex system that we're faced with with all these different inputs to the system, and all the different ways now that energy is coming into the system because most but not all renewables are essentially variable. So which is not exactly a great insight to say that offshore wind, for example, will blow really strongly on some days, and you won't get very much offshore wind on some other days. Same goes for solar energy. What we get from wind and what we get from solar sometimes balance each other out because sometimes it's sunny and not windy, and other days it's not sunny and is windy. So we think of the system as a whole. You've got a whole lot of variable inputs going into the system, both at local level and at national level. Those will produce quite a headache for those people who are balancing the system because as I said previously, you knew what you were getting into the system. You could switch a power station on, and it would produce a certain amount of power and that would be the end of it. Whereas now, you have got in aggregate a reasonably reliable source of power overall, but that will change substantially day to day, place to place, area to area. If you can produce a form of energy storage, which can essentially gather that energy when it is as it were blowing so hard, the wind is blowing so hard that you've got to switch the power off from the energy in order to balance the system because there's so much coming on, then maybe you can harvest that energy and bring it onto the system at a different time when you've got a lower input into the system from that variable power.

So the holy grail of the system as it were, is can you gather the energy when there's a lot of it around, too much for the system, and hold it in reserve so that when there's less power is needed for the system, you can introduce that back to the system and that balances all the peaks and troughs out and the system works very well and very stably? And you can see that in our own households, for example. Well, and a lot of people have got solar panels on their roofs. We know that those solar panels will produce a lot of electricity when the sun's out. Probably getting on for too much for the household to use. But other times, they'll produce a tiny fraction of what we're using. So if you go and put a battery in your garage, which can actually take that solar output when it's not needed by the house, and then you can use that battery in the household when the solar energy is not providing you with how you can produce pretty much most of your household energy needs overall by putting that battery into play alongside that solar power. So the household solution is a microcosm of what we are going to have to do for the future, as far as balancing our energy systems as a whole, and batteries are at the forefront of that.

ALEX LATHBRIDGE:
So like what you're talking about, that's really interesting using the household as a microcosm for like the entire nation. But in terms of, you know, people like myself having more power in how we get our power. God, I just can't help myself. How can a government incentivise these sorts of changes? Because I had a leaflet in my door, you know, I had a leaflet saying, oh, if you put solar panels in, you know, we can potentially get X, Y, and Z sort of deal. I mean, is it this sort of method? Is that how it works?

ALAN WHITEHEAD MP:
Well, it works in a number of ways which involve, among other things, looking at, in some depth, about how energy systems actually do work, because as far as the, should we say the renewable kitty is concerned, that is the wind farms, the solar panels, the biomass power stations, all the range of low carbon energy that we are bringing forward, most of that has been brought on the system by underwriting by the government in terms of part of the cost of those systems in the form of contracts for different renewable obligation, various other things, which essentially makes that power coming forward marketable because renewable systems have got an entirely different profile from those big old power stations that we've just been talking about. That they are capital intensive upfront, and the power that you get from them subsequently is virtually free. So what has happened is that that kit has come onto the system by that method. Now, once they're there, the power actually is very low cost. That impacts the system in interesting ways during periods of relatively low demand. That very cheap energy effectively pushes the remaining gas and coal inputs off the system because they can't compete with that cheap power. Whereas in periods of very high energy demand, those systems come back into place in order to supply the peaking energy that we need. And they get quite well rewarded for that by the system. But you've fundamentally got two quite incompatible ways of producing energy running alongside each other, and then you're trying to integrate that in the system as a whole. Now batteries, therefore, don't need a subsidy to put them into place. What they do need is a system whereby they get rewarded for putting that additional energy into the system when it is needed, and that pays for the capital cost of the battery over the period.

ALEX LATHBRIDGE:
I'm going to break it down as someone who's not, you know, I'm not the Shadow Energy Minister. I may not understand all of it, but we have an entire system, we've got sort of a grid, a network, and the idea of phasing in these sorts of new greener models. So your solar, your hydroelectric, your sort of whatnot, and phasing out things like coal and, you know, other things that aren't necessarily good for us as we move forward, the idea is like very, very slowly you'd only need to bring in those, you know, previous methods, your coal and what have you, when times are tough. So when we don't have as much power available on the grid. But then the possibility is there that you can use more and more batteries, and having those batteries means that we don't have to rely on sort of coal and other things so much. It's that when we have, you know, when Britain does get our one day of sun and our occasional windiness, we can store some of that green energy in the batteries and use it when times are tough. Does that make sense? Is that roughly it?

ALAN WHITEHEAD MP:
That is. That's right. The existence of these older fossil forms of energy on the system is something that we also, we're going to have to remove in due course if we're to get to our net zero targets, as far as climate change is concerned. And we need to envisage an energy system which doesn't have any of these sort of large fossil fuel arrangements even as a backup in the system in the future. So yes, it is certainly true that gas fired power stations, for example, will actually only exist in the future to supply energy on the margins, and may be held in strategic reserve for when times are really tough as far as power supply is concerned. But in the end, even those won't be able to function. And by the way, of course, if they are sitting on the sidelines just producing power for a few hours a year, then they're not economically viable to run anymore. So not only will new gas fired power stations not get built, a number will close down anyway because of that particular circumstance. So we have to envisage an energy system which is using all the technology at its disposal to give us that firm, reliable energy system for the future.

ALEX LATHBRIDGE:
I always get this way because Hiren always hooks me up with really interesting guests and I'm like, wow, this is really fascinating stuff. It's really in depth and really fascinating. So, I mean, you've talked about all these processes that we're slowly bringing in or sort of want to bring in and are sort of thinking about and considering. I mean, what are the main challenges for sort of the UK government, or really any government in bringing this in, bringing in sort of a greener energy, bringing in, like you say, batteries to store power when times are tough and reuse it? What are the challenges that might slow down our progression to sort of net zero in 2035?

ALAN WHITEHEAD MP:
Well, one of the key challenges for the power system is electrification itself. What we are looking at in terms of how our society overall runs is a very substantial change from, for example, where we get our heat for our homes from, how we power our vehicles. A substantial change from fossil fuels being the basis of those things we just take for granted on an everyday process. The idea that when we come home, our homes are going to be, temperature's going to be 18 degrees C in our central heating and so on. If we are going to complete the decarbonisation of our system as a whole, that means we very substantially got to electrify or at least use non fossil fuel gases, such as hydrogen and biogas for heating our homes. And of course, we will have pretty much universal electric vehicles by next decade and a half or so.

ALEX LATHBRIDGE:
Me as a human being, and, you know, me as someone here in the UK, I've seen my energy bills go up like massively. And I mean, it's scary, and it's frustrating, and it's annoying, and I mean, there are so many other adjectives I'm not going to use because this is a universal podcast for lots of people who might not want to hear watershed. (CHUCKLES)
That's the podcast people saying, No, you aren't allowed to swear, Alex. So with this idea that we're moving towards, you know, more greener energy and less reliance on fossil fuels and a volatile external market, how can we actually do this in record time? How can we actually move forward in such a way that people like me have our, you know, electricity prices reduced? How can this happen? How? How, Alan? How?

ALAN WHITEHEAD MP:
I mean, frankly, quite a lot of the developments that are going to come forward in the next very few years will essentially have to be driven by government. We can't simply say we hope there's going to be a big array of new energy sources, and somehow the market will sort this all out and we can wait while the market does sort itself out and these things come on stream. We've got to have a programme essentially, where the government is investing in these new energy sources, and that will come back on, I have to say, on general taxation. But I think the point that we need to keep hold of is that once those new energy sources are in place, energy supply essentially will be far cheaper than is the case of the present. And so, yes, there's an investment cycle that will have to be undertaken, but energy itself will not be that expensive. And not only will it not be that expensive, it will be green. And that is a key objective that we've got to keep in mind. So getting the system as a whole balanced between getting enough new supply into the system, getting that system to use that new supply in a very mean way and distributing across the hours of the day so that you get the maximum power at all time, which is where batteries come back in again, and then further, I'm afraid a bit of complexity.

But making sure that we can price the system properly against renewables will actually give us in the end a pretty affordable energy system. A few bumps in the road as we go along, but hey, I mean, I've just looked at my new energy bill with the fact that gas is coming into the system at international prices, and is hiking people's energy bills up I think by £600. Six, £700 come this April from the previous level, and probably a further seven, £800 or so in the autumn. We can't say at the moment energy is remotely cheap or affordable. So getting our system into a position where energy is affordable because we've completely turned it around from its present arrangements is a pretty good goal to seek for, I think.

ALEX LATHBRIDGE:
Yeah, I mean, these are good goals to sort of achieve. I feel as I'm going full Paxman right now, and I'm not trying to. (CHUCKLES) Alan, you're in the hot seat. No, but I think these are good goals to try and achieve. But like one thing I was thinking even while you were speaking there is like, I want to live in a world where, you know, I want to live in a world where I can buy like an electric car and so I don't have to continually be, you know, pumping diesel into my 2008 Nissan Micra. But because of like energy bills and how things are, I don't have enough money to buy an electric vehicle. So there are all of these, like you say, sort of these balances going forward, and it becomes really tricky and like really, really tough. And so like going forward, looking forward, like we've sort of said this idea of a sustainable future, how do you see Britain in 2040, 2050? What are your hopes and dreams, Alan? Tell me, tell me all your hopes and dreams.

ALAN WHITEHEAD MP:
Well, my hopes and dreams are that we will have most of our transport fleet either electrically run, or perhaps in the case of transport logistics, that's, you know, trucks and large vehicles, hydrogen fuel cell arrangements for those trucks. So the net benefit of that is firstly going to be that the price of fuel for those vehicles is then in direct relation to the price of energy generally, and it's not subject to international energy prices such as gas and petroleum. And of course, it's not only green in terms of carbon emissions. Actually, it's pretty good for the air quality and so on. We have at the moment. So a clean transport system and home energy systems, which are run on an equally clean basis because we are smart enough to balance the whole thing properly. A reliable energy system that runs pretty much solely on renewable sources. As we know, electric vehicles, and now in terms of their life cycles approaching the same sort of cost fossil fuel vehicles will have. Of course, as they get more and more into the system, second-hand vehicles become available. Then the cost of actually owning and running an electric vehicle is not going to be very high. If we put that principle across the rest of the system, as we've seen, for example, from the extent to which the cost of offshore wind has come down very radically over the last 15, 20 years from those what looked like impossibly expensive systems that were first set up, now to systems that actually produce the cheapest electricity around. Then just the fact that those are in mass production, that they are in the system, that the system is working well with them, will reduce costs as well for the future. So I see a pretty good future for low carbon energy. That it will be reliable, it will be green, it will be clean, and it will allow us to live our lives pretty much as we live at the moment, only on that low carbon basis. I think, unfortunately, that will be a vision which will come to pass, and which I will have to observe from a rocking chair somewhere in my retirement home. It's a vision that's with us now. It's not something that's in the minds of a few seers. All the elements are there now. We don't need a new technology to do this. We've just actually got to get on with it, and make sure the system works.

ALEX LATHBRIDGE:
So, I mean, you didn't mention there was that you in your retirement home in your rocking chair, that rocking chair will be connected up to a battery which will be powering the grid. So with every movement of yourself going back and forth, you'll be charging up that battery, and you'll be able to sell that back to the grid, OK?

ALAN WHITEHEAD MP:
Well, that's, yeah, my electric rocking chair sounds like a pretty good prospect.

ALEX LATHBRIDGE:
There you go. That's it. That is it. In the future, sort of old people's homes, they will be self-sufficient, all right? No public funding at all. That's how it's going to work.

ALAN WHITEHEAD MP:
Well, they certainly, should have solar panels across the whole of their roofs.

ALEX LATHBRIDGE:
There you go.

ALAN WHITEHEAD MP:
They should have batteries associated with those solar panels. So that the, as it were, the retirement home becomes a self-generating centre. And I mean, if we've got ground source heat pumps associated with that as well, then you've got a pretty good prospect of a warm, cosy retirement home that's making some money as well.

ALEX LATHBRIDGE:
Whichever retirement home that perhaps you end up in is going to be so annoyed at you. It's like, oh God, we failed. We had a yearly meeting and Alan is not happy. Saying, don't give him any pudding then. Just don't give him any. That's what he gets for trying to give us an audit. With that, we always like to do one final question, which is if you could have our listeners take one thing away from this conversation, what would you want it to be?

ALAN WHITEHEAD MP:
My takeaway is green energy is going to save us all, and it is not going to be a burden on us. And the quicker we get there and the smarter we manage our way forward using all the techniques at our disposal including batteries and various other things, then the better off we'll be for the future. And so there is no time to lose now. We've just got to do it.

ALEX LATHBRIDGE:
Wonderful. I mean, that is brilliant. That was a wonderful ending. That's like, I think in the top three we've had.
(UPBEAT BRIGHT MUSIC)

JACQUELINE EDGE:
Hi, my name is Jacqueline Edge, and I work at Imperial College looking at batteries. I'm a physicist by training.

ALEX LATHBRIDGE:
For someone who knows, I'd say a few things at least about batteries, maybe you can answer this question. What important role do you think that batteries might play in energy storage? Like, I of course know that batteries store things, like that's the basics, all right? Everyone knows batteries store energy. Otherwise, why are we here? But what's the super cool, like the super cool role they'll play in like the future now? Like, tell me about them. Tell me about batteries.

JACQUELINE EDGE:
So batteries are very useful technology. They've been around for quite a while. They were first discovered in the '70s, and one of the things that makes them special from all the energy storage technologies is that they respond very quickly, and they're very highly efficient. They store the energy, they take electrical energy and they store it as part electrical part chemical, and then they release it again as electricity. And because they respond very quickly, that means that they are very good for many grid services that require sort of millisecond response.

ALEX LATHBRIDGE:
OK, something really interesting there. What do you mean by they respond really quickly? Cause I've never heard that when it comes to batteries. I've never had a battery talk to me. So what's it mean when you say they respond really quickly?

JACQUELINE EDGE:
So if you need to start charging the battery, it's a millisecond before it starts charging. And if you need to get the energy back out, it's milliseconds before the energy comes back out as well.

ALEX LATHBRIDGE:
Are there other storage things that do it worse?

JACQUELINE EDGE:
Yes, there are other energy storage technologies which are slower. So for example, pumped hydro is not milliseconds. It's more like minutes before you might start running the turbines and get the water powering the turbines to make the electricity work. And compressed air is another example where it can take perhaps a few minutes for the system to effectively boot up.

ALEX LATHBRIDGE:
I mean, we're not going to talk about this. This is battery land, but I didn't realise you can use compressed air with energy storage. That's really cool.

JACQUELINE EDGE:
Yeah, there are many different types of energy storage technologies. Batteries are only one. They just happen to be the current winner.

ALEX LATHBRIDGE:
Batteries are the most important ones, all right. This is battery town. We don't talk about any other energy storage devices. Now we've bigged up batteries, but are there any like negatives to batteries? Ah, you see that? Positive, negative, battery jokes. That's what we're here for. But seriously…

JACQUELINE EDGE:
That's good.

ALEX LATHBRIDGE:
Are there any... Thank you, but are there any real downsides to batteries?

JACQUELINE EDGE:
Yes, from my point of view, so the reason we're doing batteries is to try and introduce more renewables into the system. And so generally, they're a good thing because they're helping us to displace fossil fuels, which means less carbon. But from my point of view, the focus has mainly been on carbon footprint, and there are other environmental impacts that we need to consider as well. So the biggest problem that we're facing is where do we get the minerals that we make the batteries from? And so most of those are in deposits, which we have to dig up the earth to retrieve. And often those deposits tend to be in areas of high biodiversity. So that means more habitat destruction and less biodiversity. And so that to me is a big problem. You know, we're focusing on a carbon footprint, but we need to focus on habitat destruction as well.

ALEX LATHBRIDGE:
So in terms of batteries, I mean, you talked about, you know, all these mineral deposits and whatnot. I mean, are there a huge variety of different materials, elements, minerals, that go into batteries, the most common batteries that we see? I mean, you don't have to go into it super in depth because we have other episodes looking at it, but I'm just interested from your perspective.

JACQUELINE EDGE:
Yes, so batteries are by nature, quite complicated structures and so they already need quite a lot of different high value minerals in order to work properly. But the other complication is that there's a huge range of different battery chemistries, and so if we're talking about the whole portfolio of batteries that need to be constructed, that means a very big range of different types of materials.

ALEX LATHBRIDGE:
You know, we're talking about all the different requirements that batteries have in terms of like materials and whatnot. I mean, so how do you do things like life cycle assessments? I've been told life cycle assessments are a big thing when it comes to batteries. So how do you make sure that the life cycle of a battery is like good?

JACQUELINE EDGE:
So you have to break it down first and look across the entire battery life cycle, and consider what all the different stages are. So it's generally considered that there's materials extraction. So that's raw materials extraction, mining of the minerals, et cetera. And then there's a certain amount of refinement, so there's certain chemical processes that you put those materials through to get them up to battery grade materials, and then there's all the processes in which you construct the battery itself. So all the manufacturing processes. And then there's installation of the battery into electric vehicles or stationary storage devices, then there's using the battery. So that's, you know, using it for 10 to 15 years in an electric vehicle. There may be second life applications. So sometimes electric vehicle battery can be retired to be used in stationary storage. And then eventually, we want to then recover the batteries and recycle those materials. Ideally, that would be the best way to have a circular economy, and to prevent a mountain of batteries building up at the end. So then you break it down to all those stages and you consider how do we account for all the impacts that happen at each stage? So every material and every process needs to be looked at in terms of how much energy does it use? How much water does it use? How much of each material does it use? How much waste is there? Does some of the material, you know, ends up in scrap? And so you've got to factor all those things in including other gaseous emissions. And once you tot all that up, you can then have a look across the whole life cycle and say, well, this is better than some previous technology, for example.

ALEX LATHBRIDGE:
OK, and so very briefly, could you explain, like, just in general terms, like what is a life cycle assessment?

JACQUELINE EDGE:
I must admit the literature is a little bit inconsistent in this, but generally what it means is that you do all this sort of accountancy of all the inputs and outputs of every step and every process, and then you could then measure, for example, carbon footprint is a very common measurement. You tot up the entire carbon footprint across the whole life cycle, including crediting batteries, because they obviously save carbon emissions by replacing a fossil fuel car. And then that would give you a net carbon footprint, which you can then compare with lifecycle assessments of other technologies. But the lifecycle assessment studies are a little bit inconsistent because they don't always start from the very beginning, and they don't always include recycling. So a full lifecycle assessment should really consider everything from the very start where you extract the materials, right to the point where you recycle it and put it back into making new batteries. And so that would be a complete cradle to cradle life cycle assessment.

ALEX LATHBRIDGE:
So it's not just about looking at the entire, like again, the entire lifespan of a battery. It's about breaking down each stage, like the extraction, the minerals, the manufacturing, the use, like the pros and cons, the benefits, and the opposite of the benefits, disadvantages of each stage, and then sort of doing an assessment on that.

JACQUELINE EDGE:
Yes, that's correct.

ALEX LATHBRIDGE:
OK, OK, I mean, that's a lot of work. I mean, when I think of a AA battery, I don't realise that all this effort and time has gone into it.

JACQUELINE EDGE:
Yeah, exactly, and what that would then tell you, so for example, you could then say, well, the carbon footprint or the air miles or whichever metric you're using comes with that product, and the idea is then you could say, well, this battery is so many air miles as opposed to this other one. And so then the consumer can make a choice about which one they prefer.

ALEX LATHBRIDGE:
Well, like how do you think that governments around the world, or at least the UK government, can make batteries better in terms of like our infrastructure when it comes to like getting rid of batteries or recycling batteries? Cause I know like if I have some batteries now, I can take it to like Tesco and there'll be like a little like box or a little like thing you can put your... Like a little see through bin that you can put your batteries in there. But I imagine that there's actually a more formal way of doing it. How can that process be made better?

JACQUELINE EDGE:
So there are regulations which are sort of helping to guide industry into how to. The fact that they have to recycle their batteries, and so that means that they should start thinking when they design the battery and put it together how might it be recycled in an economic way. So the UK government needs to strengthen those regulations and make sure that they are... That they will achieve the desired result, and that is that we do recover the batteries, we do take them apart, and we do recover as many of the materials as possible. But there's also an element of improving the design to make them easier to take apart. At the moment, they're very difficult to take apart. You have many sort of fastening methods and weldings, but if we had a different design where you could basically just unplug the modules and the batteries, then that would be much more economical to recycle.

ALEX LATHBRIDGE:
So modularly designed batteries, you think that would be like a cool future?

JACQUELINE EDGE:
Absolutely. It also means you could then plug out cells that aren't working, and put a new one so then that saves the whole pack.

ALEX LATHBRIDGE:
OK, so if you have, like, say it was a big battery like an electric vehicle battery, you could open up that electric vehicle's battery and just replace the small bits in there, the ones that aren't great. Like, when you have remote control and the battery's gone, you don't throw all the batteries in case it's just one that is messed up.

JACQUELINE EDGE:
Exactly.

ALEX LATHBRIDGE:
Wow, the electric cars are sort of like my television remote. This is great. I love batteries. So for listeners, if you had one key takeaway for this entire episode, what would you say it is? What would you want people to take away from this?

JACQUELINE EDGE:
So we should never forget that batteries are very important, and that we do need them to help us decarbonise not only our transport systems, but also our energy grids. But at the same time, we just need to be very cautious that we're using the right materials, that we're using... That we're trying to mitigate as many of the other environmental impacts as possible. And I think mining needs a complete overhaul. They need to make their process much more sustainable and less destructive on habitat. But we need to take into account all the factors, and I think we need that strategic analysis before we start really making mass amounts of batteries.

ALEX LATHBRIDGE:
OK, so, I mean, I said that was my last question, but are you optimistic for the future?

JACQUELINE EDGE:
I am, actually. Yes. I'm encouraged by how much energy is going into the decarbonisation process. It may not be enough, it's possible, but at least people seem enthusiastic and they are trying.

ALEX LATHBRIDGE:
Yeah, and so in 20 years' time, like where do you think we'll be with batteries? I mean, I ask people this all the time. They're like, well, I won't be around to find out. I'm like, well, OK, let me make it shorter, 20 years. Where do you think we'll be?

JACQUELINE EDGE:
Well, I'm encouraged that I think we will have a good recycling process, and that batteries will not end up in massive mountains in landfills. And so I think if we get it right, in 20 years' time, batteries can really have helped us to resolve climate change without creating new problems along the way.

ALEX LATHBRIDGE:
Ah, I like that. I feel really optimistic now. And so, I mean, thank you so much of course.
(UPBEAT UPLIFTING MUSIC)

That's all for this episode of "Brought To You By Chemistry." Join us next time where we'll be exploring the impact of mining, and whether or not ethical batteries can ever exist. It was produced by Hiren Joshi and Elisabeth Ratcliffe, and presented by me, Alex Lathbridge.
(UPBEAT UPLIFTING MUSIC)

Episode transcript:

(UPBEAT MUSIC)

ANNOUNCER:
Brought to You by Chemistry.
(UPBEAT MUSIC)

ALEX LATHBRIDGE:
Hi everyone and welcome to Brought to You by Chemistry. What's Brought to You by Chemistry?" I hear you ask. Complicated reactions, complicated exams, even more complicated romances? The ones that most people wouldn't understand but it's OK because you have blind faith that it will work this time. I mean, yes, but in this case Brought to You by Chemistry is a podcast series from the Royal Society of Chemistry. So, you see the branding there. My name is Dr Alex Lathbridge and in this series, we are back and better than ever because we're taking a look at batteries. Bringing together experts from inside and outside the world of chemistry to help us understand the ins, the outs, the ups, the downs, the positives and the negatives of all things battery.

(GENTLE MUSIC)

Wonderful guests, could you please introduce yourself?

DR SARAH GORDON:
Yeah, sure. My name is Dr Sarah Gordon. I am a geoscientist but I also work a lot for sustainability and environment, social and governance, both through my consultancy that I run called Satarla and also through a not-for-profit called Responsible Raw Materials.

ALEX LATHBRIDGE:
Second wonderful guest, could you please introduce yourself?

FRANCES WALL:
Hello, my name is Frances Wall and I'm Professor of Applied Mineralogy at Camborne School of Mines in the University of Exeter. I have a geochemistry degree. That's where I started at Queen Mary College in London then I worked at the Natural History Museum. And I'm now moving from geology and minerality type things to talk to all kinds of other scientists about circular economy.

ALEX LATHBRIDGE:
Wonderful. My name's Alex and I know neither of these things but by the end of it, I will know perhaps a little bit more about it. Today, we are chatting about mining when it comes to batteries. So, I guess my first question for both of you is what materials do we actually need to make a battery? Sarah, start with you.

DR SARAH GORDON:
Excellent. So, to go into a battery, we need all kinds of lovely materials. Depending what the battery is made of, we might need some lithium. We might need some graphite. We might need some cobalt. We might need some nickel. Frances, what else do we need?

FRANCES WALL:
Yes, of course, there are major metals that we call them as well. There's aluminium and iron and lots of other main materials in batteries. But I want to stick with those more exotic names that you just said, Sarah, like the lithium, the cobalt, the nickel, the graphite because they're what we call technology metals and some of them are also critical. So, they're in restricted supply but really economically important. And for batteries, we need so much more of these, don't we Sarah, than we've ever used before? So, more than 10 times as lithium in the next 20, 30 years to make the number of batteries that people calculate we need for electric vehicles and energy storage. So, these are exciting times for geologists to learn all about these new elements and their geochemistry, how they get concentrated into ore deposits.

ALEX LATHBRIDGE:
OK, OK. So, with that, just looking at the technical process here, what actually is the process of mining when it comes to these elements? How does it work?

DR SARAH GORDON:
So, when you want to say, go and find some cobalt or some graphite or some copper or some iron ore, it all starts with looking at a geological map of the world, really. So, you say, "OK, where do we think we might actually find these materials?" Because, of course, those materials have been concentrated through natural earth processes in different parts of the earth's crust. So, as a geologist, we look at a map of the world and we say, "Right, I am looking for some cobalts. Where do I generally know from my geological and geochemistry experience, where in the world might I find that?"

So, we look at things from a technical perspective first and then we very quickly layer on top of that, all of the political, the social, the environmental, the infrastructure layers of data because it's not just about finding those minerals and metals in the ground, it's also saying, "Well, if we can extract them, can we do it in a way that doesn't negatively impact on the community and perhaps provide some development? What about the environment? Is it in a place that might be incredibly special with regards to the biodiversity?" All of those different aspects layer in on top of it. And once we have all that data, we then say, "OK, now do we go and take something like a drill rig," for example, and go and say, "Well, let's take a look at the rock and the ground."

So, what happens in exploration is a huge amount of remote work first where we say, Where in the earth might we go to go and find that rock?" Once we think we maybe got a bit of a location, we then go in and we do a whole load of different sampling and that might be geochemistry sampling where we might take water samples, rock samples. We might take cuttings of plants, for example, they can all give us an indication of what might be in the ground. We also use a lot of geophysics techniques. So, we might use different types of seismic, for example, and using quality and the properties of those different elements to say what might be in the ground.

And once we've built up that model with more and more data, we get to the point where we say, "OK, do we now go and raise some money to begin to design, really, what the mine could look like?" This process can take a long period of time. So, going from actually discovering some rock in the ground, that happens obviously after you've gone and looked for it but going from discovering to opening a mine on average takes 30 years

In short, the process or the value chain for mining is often referred to as initially you have exploration where you go and find the rock. You then have a development and a building phase where you design the mine and you actually build it. You then have an operational phase and all the way through these different phases, you are rehabilitating that land. You're getting it ready for what happens after you've extracted those materials and those commodities from underneath the earth surface.

ALEX LATHBRIDGE:
OK, obviously there's a lot happening there and you mentioned it very briefly but I want to touch on it, first with you Frances. In terms of the environment, talking about mining as it's done now, what are the impacts there? What are the impacts of this process on the environment?

FRANCES WALL:
So, there're a variety of environmental impacts that we think about and take into account. So, let me start off with a chemical one, I guess, and that's an important point that we're quite lazy as geologists. We talk about a cobalt mine or a lithium mine but the first thing to say, of course, there's no lithium metal sitting in the earth and there's no cobalt metal. You can't just go along and pick up cobalt metal. So, what you get is actually some often very beautiful minerals like carrollite or heterogenite, names that we don't bandy around for maybe obvious reasons there. So, the metals are held within minerals in the earth and they sit in the rocks.

And so, we have to work out how to get those out and along with those metals come other elements, for example, sulphur. And that's why I've picked on this topic under your environmental question is because when you have minerals with sulphur, they can make rather acid waters and you get this phenomenon called acid mine drainage if you're not very careful. And that's a really important environmental factor around most of the sulphides, which would be for batteries. Nickel deposits and many of the cobalt deposits, we'd have to be very careful about that. So, you have to work out what the composition of your ore is. So, that's number one.

Are there any potentially harmful elements sitting there that you need to make sure you look after on that mine site and keep within the mine site and make sure they lock up and don't pollute. Then other really obvious ones is the mine, it may be an open hole. So, a quarry, an open hole in the ground or it may be deep underground but you will likely have some surface impact. So, you have to work out what's on the surface now, is it fields? Is it forests? How are you going to account for taking that away? Is it something that's easy to put back afterwards or is it something very precious?

I always like the example of one of the bauxite mines in Western Australia, that's employed three geologists to look after the ore deposit and 30, 10 times as many biologists, to look after the environmental effects of their very precious Jarrah Forest and make sure it went back on again after they've finished mining. And then of course, you look at other environmental effects round and about what happens with rivers and things, where will they go to, will you move anything? What are the longer term and wider environmental impacts? And you probably have people looking at that over a year or so because you'd want to go through all the seasons to check what's going to happen. What's the biodiversity there? Is it on a migration route?

Is it special for some kind of other environmental reasons? So, lots of different factors and that's some examples of them.

ALEX LATHBRIDGE:
Obviously, there is a lot going on there. And I guess when it comes to mining itself, we talk about it in sort of a more detached way, who is actually doing this mining as it stands now? Because I don't see lithium, nickel, bauxite, I don't see those mining jobs when I look on LinkedIn or Gumtree. So, who is actually doing this work?

DR SARAH GORDON:
So, I think with that, so there are a number of large scale mining companies in the world and the places that you will generally see their jobs being advertised are in the countries where they're actually mining. So, for example, some of the world's largest mining companies are based out of Australia or Canada, for example. And that's because there's lots of mining activity that goes on there but then similarly in Africa, Latin America, all the way through Asia as well. We don't tend to do much physical mining here in the UK, which is why you, perhaps, don't see those jobs advertised all of the time.

So, you get in the large scale mining sector, these are the companies that you see listed on the London Stock Exchange. These are the ones that you hear people talking about but the vast majority of people who work in mining are undertaking artisanal and small scale mining. And this might be as small as a mother and son type activity, maybe with some sort of digger, maybe not. And they might be looking for gems or something like this. And then, of course, that can be happening anywhere in the world. And what we see is that I think at the moment, I'm not sure exactly the numbers but there are probably what 2.5 million people employed in large scale mining but then there's at least 30, 40 million, maybe many more than that, engaged in artisanal and small scale mining activities. And as I mentioned, they could look like anything.

It could look like a small quarry here in the UK, all the way through to precious metals or diamonds, for example, in different parts of the world where you might find them.

FRANCES WALL:
Yes and don't forget too, although the big mines may not be here in the UK, there are certainly some. We have some very special potassium for fertiliser mines. We're digging up basic things like rock salt, some good chemistry for you, fluorite. We're doing here gypsum. We do, some of the world class china clay mines are here. So, these are all employing people. They're good jobs for the local people. And then there's specialists as well, like the geologists and chemists and mining engineers. And there are companies, there are big, well-known companies who work in the UK, who carry out consultancy work and perhaps especially, the kind of environmental impact assessment that we're discussing here as well.

They do that all over the world because we have some really good expertise here in Britain. And they also often take that expertise and move away from the field or the laboratory into the centre of London and advise in the Centre of Mine Finance that is in the capital of the UK here. So, this is a real world centre of mining in London.

And so, there's lots of people that translate their skills out of the practical ones, maybe they did in their degrees and then they go and advise on mine finance and insurance and maybe they do HR. And Women in Mining, how many members are in Women in Mining at the moment, Sarah? I'm not quite sure but it's over 1,000 people in Women in Mining based in London, maybe 2,000, is it?

DR SARAH GORDON:
Yeah, definitely. And I think with that as well, so you have lots of specialists here in the UK. So, at the moment, lots of people are working with the financing companies and also the mining companies, especially on climate change because with regards to mining, not only are you extracting the materials out of the ground that we need for the wind turbines, the photovoltaics, the batteries but we're basically being stewards of assets that are incredibly long time horizon assets. You're looking after this mine potentially for hundreds of years.

So, all of that needs to be considered but also with regards to groups like Women in Mining UK, Women in Mining International. In the UK, we have some fantastic experts on the social side of mining. So, it's not just the environmental, it's the social side. So, that includes aspects of human rights, different labour rights, bribery and corruption, fraud, et cetera. So, all of those aspects of corporate governance, for example, that are really important to make sure we get right. And that's because with regards to the energy transition, mining perhaps unlike many other sectors has the potential to unlock the ability to distribute wealth around the world in a way that other sectors might not necessarily have the opportunity to do so.

So, if you're mining cobalt in the DRC, if you can do that in a way that's responsible, that is huge with regards to ensuring a just energy transition with regards to the people side of it as well.

ALEX LATHBRIDGE:
So, with that, it's all well and good talking about more equity or looking at it from the protective here in the UK but talking about the fact that you've got companies, mining companies that are been traded on the London Stock Exchange or internationally and stuff but then you look at the actual people who are doing it on the ground and they don't really see that money. I found it quite interesting that you described this artisanal, like one would make bread or something, (LAUGHTER)
when there are real human rights abuses there. So, how can mining companies and it might sound a lot harsher, I say sounds a lot harsher but how when it affects people in Latin America, it affects people in Africa, people who might look like me, how can we say mining can be done ethically? How can we spin that into an ethical way?

FRANCES WALL:
Yeah, I want to jump in and unpick what you've said there a little bit. Cause that's really interesting statements. First of all, let's pick up about the 100 million people in the world that rely on artisanal mining. So, maybe the figure Sarah said, I think is about right, isn't it about 30, 40 million people actually doing it. But remember mining is as fundamental as farming. It is the fundamental thing that humans do. We use the earth. We grow stuff and we pick up stuff and we have been doing since the Stone Age. And so, I think a view of artisanal mining is something that's inherently bad, first of all, is just categorically wrong. So, there are many people that do it.

Some people do it and would continue to do it and they do very well out of it and maybe they're selling gemstones and things. Some people only do it because they're utterly desperate, they've got no other way of making their living and they're right on the edges of society. And that needs looking after if you like, some people are exploited into doing it but all of those things are true and there's no one picture of artisanal mining. There are some fantastic fair trade gold schemes, for example, and gemstone schemes where you can actually buy materials, just like fair trade with coffee or something. You can buy things that you know is helping people, in livelihoods, in small scale mining around the world.

And that's where most of the miners are but that's only a very much a minority of where the metals are coming from. So, looking at the computers in front of us, the majority of the metals or mineral goods that made those computers, they were mined by industrial scale mining. So, most of the stuff is industrial scale mining and there is a whole 'nother world, hey Sarah, of people doing brilliantly well for the people who work for them. It's one of the main ways you can get sustainable development all around the world, often into countries that have very little other industrial infrastructure. If you can make your mining work, then you can really make it help locally and nationally.

And if it's the other way, it can be a complete disaster and everything exists from the very good examples, hey Sarah, to the really bad. And we could spend another workshop's worth (CHUCKLES)
trying to talk some more about that. So, everything's there, high stakes, certainly for the energy transition. People want a part of it, whether it's copper or lithium and it's really important that there's, I think, excellent choice by the manufacturers who are buying these metals to make sure they're responsibly sourced and they're doing things around the world for people that are positive and ensuring they're sustainable developments.

ALEX LATHBRIDGE:
You're talking about these large companies who are doing a lot and you're talking about corporate responsibility but obviously, for these companies that are working internationally, in some places around the world, they might be getting better. They might be having better responsibility, trying to do it more ethically, really trying to give back to a community. But in other areas and other parts of the world that could be if not directly, then indirectly through other companies or people who manage things on the ground, it can be not so ethical. So, how can the two sort of be balanced? Do you know what I'm trying to say? Do you get what I mean?

DR SARAH GORDON:
Yeah, exactly, Alex. And I think this is the case exactly as Frances mentioned there, there have been some absolutely horrific things that have happened in mining in the past. There are some terrible incidents that have occurred. There is some incredible social injustice that has been created in part because there is immense wealth in the grounds and as is in human nature, often what happens is some people strive to keep that wealth and other people lose that wealth. And this is not in line with the ambitions of the just energy transition. And so, what you're seeing at the moment is increased focus with regards to how do we ensure that mining as a sector is carried out in a responsible way and that is being really addressed through accountability.

So, accountability on the mining companies themselves to ensure that they operate in an ethical manner that's in line with the values that they all state. So, do they actually deliver on what they say that they're supposed to be doing? But then also as well, scrutiny that is applied to that by the investors. So, the investors, of course, now increasingly we're asking those investors to invest in sustainably aligned manners and ESG aligned manners. And those investors that are investing in mining are requested through the stewardship laws really, to make sure they understand where that money is going. But then also as well from the customers of mining. So, this comes into the responsible procurement aspects as Frances was saying just now.

So, if you are Elon Musk with Tesla, for example, there's a huge assurance mechanism that goes on to say, Well, where does that cobalt or lithium or whatever come from?" That then ultimately ends up in a Tesla vehicle or whatever we might be looking at. And those are just three of those different avenues where people have got something to gain from ensuring that the materials are extracted in a responsible way. You've also got immense change going on, say at government levels. So, at the moment, the UK government is ascertaining what is our mineral strategy in the UK so that we can make sure we can build those wind turbines, et cetera.

So, what can governments do with regards to this? So, it's a multifaceted solution, really, to a problem that we cannot hide from because mining has done a lot of damage in different parts of the world but we have to make sure that we mine responsibly in the future because we need huge volumes of rock to be extracted from the ground and processed. And some of those processing techniques are really, really difficult with regards to the chemistry that needs to go on in there. How do we do that in a way that optimises the impact that we can have on the environment? So, it looks for the good stuff rather than causing bad stuff to happen.

FRANCES WALL:
Let me, can I jump in with some chemistry? So, we often talk about supply chain assurance. (CHUCKLES) And, of course, that might be an obvious thing is to say, Well, can you use some chemical signature, some chemical device of some kind to actually track from the mine, through the processing?" And the challenge chemists out there, is it's not easy because as we said, things start off in minerals and that's really easy. Well, it's easy if you have the right kit. And they managed to do it by columbo-tantalite, which was coming out of the conflict zone in the Eastern DRC. If you do enough chemistry on that, you can pretty much track back to the mine it came from.

But the problem is that then normally the mineral will go into either a smelter or an intense chemical process to extract the metal from the mineral. And then, how on earth you track it from there? So, that smelter or processor is an absolute key stage. Talk about white smelters sometimes knowing that they are checking what's coming into them because there are ways and means of doing that. And if they're carefully enough, then the customers that buy to make the metal products and go on into making the batteries, they can be sure that if they're buying from that smelter, it's OK.

ALEX LATHBRIDGE:
I think that one's a really fascinating point. And the two bits you've mentioned about the chemistry and this. Because again, I go back to it. I think about how you've got neocolonialism in Africa, around lots of various other countries in the world who are taking advantage of the continent.

Going forward, can we make a mine that is more sustainable and a mine that will allow companies to more easily say, I can definitely be sure that this has come from a mine that is sustainable because it has this specific market, which means it was set up in 2022 onwards?" Do you know what I mean? Something like that, where you can say...

DR SARAH GORDON:
Yeah.

ALEX LATHBRIDGE:
"At this key point, I know we've made a transition."

DR SARAH GORDON:
Yeah, so I think with regards to this and I'm acutely aware that we're speaking to lots of lovely chemists who understand the periodic table to a much greater level of depth than I do perhaps. And this is something where the processing of every commodity is different. So, some commodities will go through smelters, others won't. And so, depending on what the commodity is and what you're trying to do with it, so what products effectively you're trying to create, some of them will have a chemical signature that will then stay with that particular commodity.

And so, you therefore you can track it. Others as Frances has just mentioned, there will be points in that value chain. So, if you have lots of different material coming into a central smelter, the chemical process there effectively means that any unique signature from where on earth that got mined will get lost at that point in time, just through the chemical process that it's going through. So, that's something there where the actual chemical signature may be lost to some degree. You may be able to tell which smelter it's coming from but that's where the paperwork comes in.

That's where something like blockchain begins to help us. And it goes into that ledger and it tracks that particular commodity through. The next exciting thing then is when we begin to bring in recycling into this process because for example, rare earth elements and I know that Frances is probably one of the world's experts with regards for this but I'm going to tiptoe into this area and then hand across to Frances. There are rare earth elements come from many different parts of earth. So, the main thing is that they're not rare but as we know, they are incredibly difficult to process. There's a reason why most of them fit into the same box (CHUCKLES) effectively on the periodic table.

ALEX LATHBRIDGE:
You keep calling them rare earth elements and now you keep saying, they're not actually rare. What are you doing? I feel as though both of you have come into here and just turned this podcast into a place of lies. Why are you doing this?

DR SARAH GORDON:
Why are we doing this? Well then...

FRANCES WALL:
Do you want me just to...

DR SARAH GORDON:
On you go Frances, I will relinquish the floor.

FRANCES WALL:
It's my pet topic, Sarah. (CHUCKLES)
There we are, it's the chemists' fault about rare earths, they called the rare earths rare (CHUCKLES)
cause they're extremely difficult to separate from each other and that was the word they chose. So, don't blame the geologists. (LAUGHTER)

ALEX LATHBRIDGE:
I like that you've come onto a podcast by the Royal Society of Chemistry and gone, "You know what, chemists? You're to blame. You're the problem." (LAUGHTER) We've turned it from, Hey consumers, if you cared so much about this, then you would actually ask where things came from," to now, "You know what? Chemists, they're the problem."

DR SARAH GORDON:
Yeah, so with that as well, in terms of, OK, so let's do some myth busting shall we. So, rare earth elements are not rare in terms of their occurrence on earth. You get them in loads of different places. So, from a geology perspective, it's actually quite easy for us to go and find them. The bit that's difficult is where we hand over to the chemists and the engineers is to actually separate them out. So, that's perhaps why they are rare.

FRANCES WALL:
That's it. That's exactly it, Sarah.

DR SARAH GORDON:
Cause it's rare to be able to separate them into the different component parts. Another thing where there's a bit of a myth busting here is in terms of, are we running out of these critical resources, et cetera, in earth? Well, there's lots of them. Again, it's just difficult to process them and so therefore, be able to get them into circulation. So, at the moment, when we start talking about things like recycling and the circular economy, it would be amazing if we could build all of the batteries and wind turbines and everything from material that was already in circulation and was already available.

But at the moment, we are millions and millions of tonnes worth away with regards to the amount of lithium or cobalt or rare earth elements that are in circulation at the moment to be able to build the wind turbines that we need for the future. So, we need to be able to responsibly extract this material from the ground for many, many years to come to actually ensure that we've got enough stock in circulation and available. Ie, a wind turbine that's at the end of its life because then we can now start to recycle it, to then bring it into that full circular economy.

ALEX LATHBRIDGE:
OK, so this is actually really fascinating. I think this is one for you Frances cause when you've been talking about it, I've just been... My brain's been percolating this. We've got these minerals and they are being processed. I'd like to first know how the processing happens but I guess for me and the listeners to this podcast, how can chemistry make this process greener? Can it be made greener? Can it be made more...better? More better is the phrase I'm going with. (LAUGHTER) More better. Please, Professor Frances Wall.

FRANCES WALL:
Yes, OK.

ALEX LATHBRIDGE:
Get my brain... The words I say...

FRANCES WALL:
Let me give you some information and then a chemistry challenge as well. So, first of all, how do you separate the minerals from each other? So, on a mine, you'll get minerals and this is the area called mineral processing. Basically, you have to find the properties of the minerals that will allow them to be separated and that could be anything. It could be their size, it could be their shape. It could be their density. It could be their solubility and mineral processors will look at anything. And basically, if you can do it physically by say magnetic, then that's obviously a good magnetic property or density, that's normally cheaper than actually going to the chemistry bench to separate things out.

So, you wouldn't do physical things first. Normally you have to crush the rock. And so, of course, most rock is pretty tough. So, that uses quite a bit of energy. Then you do clever things to work out how are these minerals different that I want to take apart, maybe it's colour on an optical sorter, just pinging them one way or the other with a puff of air. Maybe it's magnetic or maybe it's chemistry. And so, you normally come on eventually to chemistry. There's a very important process called flotation where things are hydrophobic or hydrophilic and tiny little mineral grains pop onto bubbles on a froth and get taken over the top.

So, there's hugely inventive science been going on here. And a lot of that is very clever and it's always looking out for ways to get even cleverer. And if I come back to our rare earth element or lanthanoid example, this is where we need chemists to get even cleverer. So, we can take the minerals out of the rock and then you have to dissolve up those minerals. And that normally leaves a lot of mineral acid. And normally the embodied carbon in mineral acid is pretty high. So, that will really put the carbon footprint of your deposit up. The more acid you use, the worse for that. So, I suppose we need low carbon acid manufacturer for a start. OK, so obviously renewable energy going into that I guess. But also new types of things that can dissolve minerals up.

So, we work with a group at Leicester University who are using chemicals called deep eutectic solvents. They're very straightforward chemicals and they have a much lower environmental footprint than things like their mineral acids. So, there are chemistry groups already in the UK. Others besides not just at Leicester but other places too, looking exactly for how you do that. Bio processing is another thing we're very good at in the UK. Can you use microbes in your chemistry to actually help munch up the things, either the minerals you do want and take the way in solution or the things you don't want and let the minerals fall out of that.

So, lots of chemistry going on. And perhaps the hardest challenge of all in our lanthanoid or rare earth chemistry is separating those elements from each other. That is a process that needs hundreds of steps in the normal solvent extraction process. It's really inefficient.

And if a chemist would please (CHUCKLES) like to invent us a really easy way, a much more effective way of separating those, that would revolutionise the industry. And what else? I was going to do one other thing. Oh yes, I think the other challenge for chemists then, I would say and I'm going to pick the rare earths again because they're such a nice series. Everyone will know lanthanum and cerium, all chemists are likely to know lanthanum and cerium. Cerium, there's as much cerium on the earth as there is copper. Neodymium, we all need in the permanent magnets that make direct drives in cars.

So, they're not in batteries so much but they're in most electric vehicles. And then there are other rare earths like thulium that very few people will have ever heard of. And so for chemists, please never invent anything with rare earths that are what we call the heavy rare earths and are in tiny amounts and really are precious things because that gives us a real tough challenge as geologists to go and find them. Carry on using neodymium magnets, they're fantastic materials. They do so much for us. That's a whole ‘nother podcast for you sometime.

DR SARAH GORDON:
So, with that and I think this is a case of whenever we're trying to extract something from the ground, we generally have all of this, we call it waste rock. Nothing's waste, it's all material that could be used for something. And I think as Frances is saying, our problem is that all of the lovely inventors of the world keep using the difficult materials that are really difficult for us to extract. So, instead, maybe as part of the specification, rather than thinking, Hey, we've got the whole periodic table to play with," actually go for some of the stuff that's easier for us to give to you.

The other challenge as well is as Frances mentioned, a huge amount of energy goes into smashing rock up. So, we can then use all of the fabulous different properties and characteristics to separate out those minerals and bubbles and magnets and everything else to do that. If we can extract the material from the ground without having to smash rock up. And so, some organisations look at leeching material out of the ground, which on one hand is great cause it means that you can basically dissolve out the minerals that you actually need and collect them. So, it sounds fantastic, provided you can do it without contaminating all the groundwater.

So again, it's like, "OK, I'm going to reduce my carbon footprint because I'm not having to dig the rock up and smash it up. But at the same time, I might be creating an environmental disaster because I am dribbling a load of acid into the ground." So, we need to be able to work out how can we extract the minerals and the material that we actually need from the ground, actually, in the laziest way possible. And chemists, I'm not saying that you are lazy. I'm saying that you are clever, so please help us as geologists to be lazy.

ALEX LATHBRIDGE:
So, you've both said really interesting things there. And Frances, to come back to the point you made earlier, about as consumers, do we ask if things have been sourced ethically and stuff? But I guess from what both of you've been saying, these sorts of technologies are everywhere in life. They're in your cars, in your phones, your computers, the screens, everything we do. So, if it's not just down to us as consumers, if this technology and these metals are such a part of our daily lives, is there something that we can do perhaps with chemistry or maybe some sort of expertise to recycle the chips that we have now

To recycle the things that contain these rare earth metals that actually aren't that rare? How can we move away, potentially, from having to do all of this new work into mines? Is that something that people have considered? That sounds so easy!

FRANCES WALL:
Yes.

ALEX LATHBRIDGE:
Have you considered just recycling? Huh? Have you? (LAUGHTER) be evolutionary.

FRANCES WALL:
The answer to that is yes, certainly people have considered it. And in some of the major metals, then the rates of recycling of aluminium for example, are actually pretty high. But if you come to lithium or neodymium, some of these very specialist things, then the rates of recycling are still really low and there's a variety of reasons for that. They may sound very glamorous but they're not very expensive. If you have something like gold or platinum, that really is expensive, then you'll find the recycling rates actually are pretty high because it's worthwhile people getting them.

And I think that's a challenge. That's a really good chemical challenge. As we bring new lithium into the system, new neodymium into the system, let's be careful with it. So, we do have a technology metal circular economy centre called Met4Tech, met4tech.org, have a look at the website. That's exactly what a consortium of universities in the UK, we've got together and with the British Geological Survey and to look across that life cycle. So, from the mining that we've been talking about today but through the youth, we've got business colleagues there through the how do you manufacture so that you can recycle at the end of life.

What are the good ways to recycle using environmentally friendly chemicals? Before you need to recycle, how do you extend the life of products? How do you reuse things? How can you repair things more easily? That right to repair. Go to University College London, they're running a fantastic big campaign on the right to repair. I think it's still going. You can fill in a little survey. So yes, make things have a long life. And then absolutely, that's a great challenge, great chemical challenge.

As we bring these new materials into our economy, we've got to make sure they're not going out to waste at the end, so that they're coming back round in that recycle circle and that we keep our new lithium and all the other battery metals like cobalt and nickel and graphite and all of these things, we don't only go for the super expensive things. We've got to learn to recycle all of them.

DR SARAH GORDON:
So, what you've got there is you've got legislation that has pushed for the recycling but you've also got we've been using LEDs for many, many, many years just like aluminium, copper, et cetera. Whereas it's only been relatively recently that technology has required the likes of lithium or the rare earth elements. So, they're relatively new in terms of us using them in any great volumes. And so, that's something where we don't have time to hang around to work out how to recycle these. So, that's why all of the research projects, as Frances has just mentioned now, are so important right now. We need to do the research and then we need to get that into industry fast so we can ramp things up to industry scale.

ALEX LATHBRIDGE:
OK, so we don't have a ridiculous amount of time left but both of you seem to be saying as we go along, just more and more interesting things. So, if you could stop doing that, that would be great. I jest. So, we've spoken about the fact that our technology is part of everything we do. We need these metals as it stands right now or all these elements. So, as we go forward, if we draw a line in the sand now and be like, We're trying to be better. What are some of the scaling issues, very briefly, that we might see if we're trying to be like, You know what, let's have more electric vehicles. Let's do this, let's try these new technologies." What are the problems that both of you have, I don't know, fall asleep and wake up sad about what, in terms of this, not like your personal lives. (LAUGHTER)

FRANCES WALL:
I don't know whether I wake up happy or sad but I think for us as geologists, of course, the challenge that we need 10 times more lithium in the next 20 years, that's not something to make us sad. It may be a difficulty for the manufacturers of batteries to think how are they going to secure their responsibly sourced raw materials but for us, that's great cause that's a fantastic challenge for us to go out and find the responsible sources of those materials. So, let's stick with lithium.

The really exciting thing in the last five years has been the realisation that we actually have some lithium deposits that may be globally competitive right here in the UK. In the South West, in Cornwall, there are two companies and they're busy exploring some different kinds of rocks and some underground brine, so underground water to actually extract lithium. So, we could have part of that battery supply chain here in the UK. So yeah, big challenges. But I think they're exciting ones for us to tackle in the scale-up. More deposits, yeah, will take us into new kinds of deposits and new challenges in the extraction.

ALEX LATHBRIDGE:
I like how that answer is essentially, You know what? It keeps me in a job, so I'm good." (LAUGHTER)

DR SARAH GORDON:
But I think with that, Alex, it's a case where yes, we could get really worried about this. And in order for us to be able to reduce our emissions by 40% by 2030, which is only eight years away. And as we just mentioned, it takes 30 years to go from finding a new deposit in the ground to mining it on average. So, there's something that doesn't quite work with regards to these timescales here. But what this means is that for all of us who are working in chemistry, in geology, in engineering, in innovation in general, it's an immense opportunity for all of us.

There's a paper that actually, Frances I think, very much contributed to where we think that in order for the UK to meet our targets, just with regards to electric vehicles. So, in terms of moving from combustion driven vehicles or powered vehicles to electric vehicles over the next few decades, for us to do it just for the UK fleet and just for the vehicles themselves, we will need twice the annual production of cobalt. All of the neodymium. Three quarters of the lithium and half of the world's copper supply just for the UK.

So, in terms of the supply-demand gap that we are looking at at the moment, it requires all of us to put on those thinking caps, to think, right as chemists, how can we separate those minerals and those metals in a more cunning way that not only gives us better production so we can produce more of these materials faster but also does it in a way that doesn't endanger the environment perhaps in a way that traditional processing techniques have done. And also means, that with all of these non-renewable assets because no mine is sustainable.

We don't have any intention of putting the rock back where it came from. However, we can be mining and processing in line with sustainable development principles. So, how do we therefore make sure that what we're aiming at is value for the future? So, whilst using the material in the ground at that point in time, how are we creating a better future for the people and the environment that live in that particular area? That's what we're aiming at here. So, it's an awesome and very exciting challenge for all of us that are involved in this space right now. And we need all the help we can get.

ALEX LATHBRIDGE:
I love it. I love that both of you are able to spin my negative into a positive. I appreciate that. And of course my final question, it's usually the most difficult one. Genuinely. If you could give one takeaway to the people listening, what would it be? One brief key takeaway that you'd want them to go away with, maybe chat to a friend and be like, "Hey, I learned something today."

FRANCES WALL:
Respect the materials in batteries. So, this is a battery podcast but respect the materials in everything that you're using. They've come from the earth. It's not just some piece, don't just pop it in the rubbish bin. Really think about what's gone into that. Just have a little bit more respect. And I often say a circular economy is a careful economy. So, just think about that. Ask where it's come from. Think about what you're going to do with it and where it's going to go. Please get it in the recycling. Take it to the waste electronics place and make sure it's going to go on into its next life. Don't just put it in the bin.

DR SARAH GORDON:
And I'll build on that and say, yes, respect the materials 'cause a lot of hard work has gone into extract them from the ground. So, let's keep them in circulation for as long as possible but also let's respect ourselves. Planet earth is going to be fine with regards to climate change. The bit of this ecosystem that will not be fine is human beings. So, the people who have got something to gain by working out how do we deal with climate change? How do we make sure we source all those materials for those batteries, et cetera, in the best possible way, are us as human beings. So, we're doing it, actually, for quite selfish reasons. We're doing it for ourselves because planet earth ultimately, in geological time scales, is going to be fine.

ALEX LATHBRIDGE:
That's right everyone. Life is fleeting. We are but a speck in the timeline of this earth. We will live, we will die and we will leave nothing. Yes. I hope you enjoyed this episode. Goodbye everyone.
(LAUGHTER)

DR SARAH GORDON:
Yeah.

ALEX LATHBRIDGE:

OK well, Sarah, Frances, I'll let both of you go and enjoy the rest of your day.

FRANCES WALL:
OK, thank you very much, indeed.

DR SARAH GORDON:
Bye.

FRANCES WALL:
Bye-bye. Thanks so much.
(UPBEAT MUSIC)

ALEX LATHBRIDGE:
That's all for this episode of Brought to You by Chemistry. Join us next time where we will be in the driver's seat to find out more about electric vehicles and why the future of transport might need all of us to do just a little bit more maths. It was produced by Hiren Joshi and Elizabeth Ratcliff and presented by me, Alex Lathbridge.
(UPBEAT MUSIC)

Episode transcript:

(UPBEAT MUSIC)

ANNOUNCER:
"Brought to you by Chemistry"
(UPBEAT MUSIC)

ALEX LATHBRIDGE:
Hi everyone, and welcome to Brought to you by Chemistry. What's "Brought to you by Chemistry" I hear you ask. Complicated reactions, complicated exams, even more complicated romances? Yes, but in this case, it's also a podcast series from the Royal Society of Chemistry. So, you see the branding there. So you see it, there's branding there. My name is Dr. Alex Lathbridge and we are back and better than ever. We're fully charged because in this series, we are taking a look at batteries, bringing together experts from inside and outside the world of chemistry to help us understand the ins and outs, the positive and negative, the ups and downs of all things batteries.
(UPBEAT MUSIC)

I am, of course, going to ask you a very difficult question to start with. It is, could you please introduce yourself?

CLAIRE MILLER:
Yeah, thank you, Alex. Yeah, my name is Claire Miller, I'm the Director of Tech and Innovation at Octopus Electric Vehicles. And so, my role goes across everything in our business, from our digital environments and the websites and the quoting tools our customers use to build their vehicles and order them through our systems. So, everything that our team needs in order to order and deliver cars on a lease to our customers, and also our customers to interact with our brilliant products, all the way across to innovation in mobility and energy. And so, I lead on vehicle to grid with our power loop, our vehicle to grid trial, and lots of fun overlap between, is your car driven by a battery or has your battery got wheels? So, yeah, that's the kind of cool innovation stuff I get involved with as well.

ALEX LATHBRIDGE:
Car driven by your battery or does your battery have wheels? That is a philosophical question. I like that, I like that. And that actually leads onto my very first question. It's a doozy, OK? What is an electric vehicle? Cause I hear it thrown around like a lot. People are like, electric vehicles, electric cars, electric (ALEX MUMBLES), what actually is an electric vehicle? Like lay it out for me, what is it?

CLAIRE MILLER:
That's such a good question. Thank you for asking it. No one asks me that. I think there's like an assumption that like, yeah, of course we all know what that is. So like, electric vehicle, it can be any vehicle that is driven by a battery as its propulsion unit. I think electric car is probably what pops into people's mind when you say electric vehicle. So, passenger car. You might think about Tesla, which is pretty famous, pretty ubiquitous, the one electric vehicle that went mass market, but that can go everything down to like micro mobility. So, it could be like an electric vehicle could be a scooter with a motor, could be a pedal bike with a motor and could be everything now up to like trucks and HGVs, and even more broadly, like if we want to really expand our minds, there's electric flight, like human electric flight is coming. So like eVTOL, like electric vehicle take-off and landing. And maybe even further than that, who knows? Like some shipping, there's like some very nice ships and boats and things. So there you go. It's about how do you propel yourself around the world on this vehicle? And if you're using a battery, it's an electric vehicle.

ALEX LATHBRIDGE:
OK, OK, so, I mean, I'm really going to expand the full range of how we're going to take this. So, you said electric cars, you can have electric cars, I'm just going to do quick fire, all right?

CLAIRE MILLER:
Oh, I love it.

ALEX LATHBRIDGE:
OK, cars, you can have electric cars, right? Yes, no?

CLAIRE MILLER:
Yeah.

ALEX LATHBRIDGE:
OK, cool, all right. What about bikes?

CLAIRE MILLER:
Yeah.

ALEX LATHBRIDGE:
OK, what about planes?

CLAIRE MILLER:
Yeah.

ALEX LATHBRIDGE:
OK, what about helicopters?

CLAIRE MILLER:
Yeah. Helicopter/drones?

ALEX LATHBRIDGE:
Stroke, OK, OK. This is the philosophy... You're really expanding, you're really pushing this. OK, what about tractors?

CLAIRE MILLER:
Yeah, although maybe hydrogen's better, like for the application, but yeah electric tractors, yeah.

ALEX LATHBRIDGE:
OK, all right, trains?

CLAIRE MILLER:
Yeah.

ALEX LATHBRIDGE:
OK, OK, what about Metro systems like the tube?

CLAIRE MILLER:
Yeah.

ALEX LATHBRIDGE:
Yeah?

CLAIRE MILLER:
Yeah.

ALEX LATHBRIDGE:
That could be a thing?

CLAIRE MILLER:
I think also there's a really good question in here, which is about like, are you charging up like a storage device and then you're using that to move you around? Or are you actually like taking the electricity, like as you are moving the vehicle? So, there's a really interesting crossover, which is around like vehicles that use pantographs. Have you come across pantographs? So, pantograph…

ALEX LATHBRIDGE:
Obviously, obviously, all the time.

CLAIRE MILLER:
You definitely have.

ALEX LATHBRIDGE:
I'm currently wearing pantographs. What's that?

CLAIRE MILLER:
OK, so if you've ever seen a train going along a track and it has like a kind of like massive coat hanger thing, touching from the rail up, like down to the train, that's called pantograph. And so, there are trials right now with HGVs, lorries, that drive on battery on the road, and then there's parts of the road that are electrified with the pantograph. So literally taking that railway technology and bringing it to sections of the motorway where the lorry can pick up contact to the pantograph, charge its battery a bit as it's going, and then like off it goes again. So, 'cause you've mentioned about underground, that made me think about that, like the underground has being driven by the electrified rail. So yeah, it's pretty existential, I'm loving this. This is awesome.

ALEX LATHBRIDGE:
That's actually kind of terrifying a little bit, cause you're talking about, oh, driving on the motorway, there a bit of the motorway where like an HGV can be charged up. But as someone that drives on the motorway a lot, like when you see trucks in front of you, when they're carrying like bits of woods and stuff and you think of the film "Final Destination," you think I have to speed past, or if it's a hydrogen tanker because like, I do not want to be here. I think of it like that, if there's a hanging down electrical thing, isn't that going to affect me? Like imagine if I had bikes on top of my car, wouldn't they get hit by this pantograph? Obviously I don't exercise really, but like, you know what I mean? This conversation is going in a wildly different direction from where you thought it would be going this morning.

CLAIRE MILLER:
No, no it's fascinating and it's a really good point. So like, yeah, so the cables are like really high. The systems have like an auto pickup with a motor, so they can like raise and lower depending on where the lorry's at to pick up the rail. And then also it has to like make the full circuit. So it's a bit like why doesn't the pigeon get fried sitting on a massive power line and it's not actually making a circuit, both its feet are on the same line, so, it's not actually making a full circuit. It's a similar kind of concept. But yeah, there are those safety considerations and it's really important to think about those as we are like innovating, is to think about those real world practicalities.

ALEX LATHBRIDGE:
Can you explain why Octopus, like as an electricity company are interested in the electric vehicle market?

CLAIRE MILLER:
Yeah, so Octopus Energy is the electric part and the customer electric part of the business and actually, at the heart of that business is technology and also amazing customer service. And that is what actually goes through all of the Octopus group, all of our group companies, it's all about bringing technology to disrupt and deliver really amazing customer experiences. And actually think about electricity. Electricity is what is going to fuel these vehicles, and actually electricity is what we need in our homes. It's what we're going to need to heat our homes, we can talk about that. I don't want to dilute the electric vehicle chat, but moving away from gas, heating, burning gas in our homes, it's one of the biggest contributors to carbon emissions. And we need to have electric heating with air source heat pumps and other like technologies. And when you start to think about it, actually, the electric is at the heart of all these things. And so electric vehicles is one of those places in our lives where we will be using electric to move ourselves around, having an electric vehicle business, one, it is to help people transition away from ICE vehicles. We look at the price of fuel right now, I mean, even before the recent kind of fuel crisis and war in Ukraine, lots of these kind of bigger issues in the world, like it was already quite expensive to buy petrol and diesel. And actually it's much cheaper to use electricity to fuel your vehicle. And aside from that, moving away from those polluting vehicles as well is really important. So, that's like one of our main missions at Octopus Electric Vehicles. And yeah, so the crossover with the energy is then once people have an electric vehicle, it really opens your mind, it's like a gateway drug to thinking about energy and it's thinking about, hang on, I put the kettle on, it actually uses quite a lot, and actually all these lights in my house, why have I got them on? Then you start to think about at what times of the day do we have to burn a lot of gas to meet a really high demand around tea time versus overnight, often when it's windy, absolutely loads of electricity on the grid, but nowhere for it to go. And so, what we want to do is to help people understand like, yes, your electric vehicle helps you move around the world, just like your car does now, but it also does so much more. So, it's a place to put energy at a time when there's lots of renewables on the grid and it gives you then that choice in the future to maybe use that energy a different time of day when it's going to help you financially, and it helps the grid as well. So yeah, electric vehicles, there's a lot more to electric vehicles than your petrol-diesel car.

ALEX LATHBRIDGE:
That was a lot, there's a lot there, and I feel as though, as someone who's in this world, you perhaps understand it a lot better, which is why we have you here. It's not just for, I mean, no one can see this because this is an audio medium, but a fantastic jumper you're wearing covered in what? What's it covered in?

CLAIRE MILLER:
Little lightning bolts.

ALEX LATHBRIDGE:
Very, very on brand, I appreciate it. So, I am interested in an electric car, like my next car, I would like it to be electric. I've currently got a, what? 2008 Nissan Micra, if anyone's looking to buy one, let me know. And it's difficult, you are saying now with fuel prices being so high, but even in the past, like, yo, it's not fun being broke and trying to fill up a car, like have you ever tried putting your car into neutral and then gliding down a hill? Just being like, come on this has got to get me home. This has got to get me home.

CLAIRE MILLER:
When I was a student, 100%, that was definitely my life.

ALEX LATHBRIDGE:
And so like, what would actually happen if everyone, like tomorrow, everyone switched to electric vehicles? Could the national grid, could the country support that?

CLAIRE MILLER:
Oh, that's such a good question. I mean, and like you say, there's a lot, there's a lot to unpack there. I think the two main things there I think are around shifting our mindset to like the time at which you are buying this fuel, in inverted commas, like can influence the price, like you say, that's not something that we are necessarily used to. And the other one is can the grid cope, and I'm going to put some conditions around that, because right now, even if we could all switch to electric, we can't get those cars at the moment. There's a really quite a big restriction on supply of cars, and actually you mentioned your car. Do you know what? The second-hand car market is crazy at the moment. Cars are appreciating in value. So, your car is making money purely because you own it, because right now there are not enough cars available for the people that want to buy them. And it's a real, I don't know, it's a real economics case study, we are living in this living lab where there's not enough vehicles coming into the market new, that's electric or petrol and diesel, 'cause there's a massive shortage of chips, silicon chips. And you think about anything that uses chips, it's not just the vehicles, there were friends of mine who were trying to get video games, like Xboxes and things like that over Christmas, couldn't get them, couldn't find them cause there weren't enough chips. And actually, that's having a knock on impact in terms of car manufacturing. So, it's not enough new cars making it into the market. And we mentioned Ukraine, it's really starting to impact some of the supply chains now for all cars to get enough parts to the right factories to build the cars. So, actually second-hand cars are going up in price at the minute. Anyway, so back to the questions about the energy cost at different times, and that's all part of our transition to this new world of cleaner, greener energy and having choice over when you fuel and when you don't fuel. Cause actually, at the minute you don't have a choice as a petrol-diesel driver about when you fuel, like when your car's empty, you don't have a choice. You have to go somewhere else and you're stuck with the price that they are giving you and you have to take it cause otherwise, your car's not going anywhere. Whereas when you have an electric vehicle, you have a choice of like where you're going to charge. Not everyone has a driveway, if you've got a driveway, then you can access your tariff at home, cheaper overnight than during the day, or there's lots of on street parking and sharing other people's charges. There's lots of different models there. And then the other question about the grid, well look, the national grid, those guys and girls are amazing and they have got some very grand plans for how much they're going to increase the capacity of the grid. So, at the moment, if we snapped our fingers and we plugged in all the cars right now for literally everybody in the whole country, then yeah, it wouldn't go down so well on the grid. And actually on a smaller scale, we see that when everyone gets home from work is what we see, right? Or the FA cup final at halftime, everyone puts the kettle on.

ALEX LATHBRIDGE:
I thought we were going to go for the "EastEnders" effect. Is that not a thing? At the end of "EastEnders" or the start of "EastEnders" everyone puts the kettle on?

CLAIRE MILLER:
Oh yeah, I think I'm going to guess that now we have streaming services that actually there's not that many events now that millions of people tune in to at the same time. So, that's why when like FA cup or like World Cup final, maybe like opening ceremony of the Olympics, things that like people would be tuning in at the same time. But yeah, it's exactly that, like I know exactly what you mean. Everyone gets up, put the kettle on. And so, I think it's that effect that we are... We're looking to like help the grid certainly through vehicle to grid every day, sharing a bit of battery from vehicles to reduce the peak. But actually there will need to be an increase in the capacity on the grid and that's not just for vehicles, that's for heating as well. And actually, we need to do both together. So the grid's going to get bigger, more capacity, but actually if we can be smart about thinking back to that, is this a battery on wheels, somewhere to put energy and when you've got a lot of renewables, so, when we stop burning coal and now we're going to stop burning as much gas, we start making a lot more energy from wind and from solar, sadly, we can't make the wind blow and we can't make the sun shine. And though, unfortunately when we make energy using those technologies, we need to put it somewhere, so then we can use it later when it's not sunny and it's not windy and electric vehicles are awesome, an awesome place to store their energy to then use it later on. And so like vehicle to grid is a really good example of what we're going to be able to do in the future at scale, when we've got millions of cars on the road that can do it. Right now, electric cars just charging them overnight, like in an orchestrated way, in a managed way, is an amazingly powerful way of storing this energy. I know we're already doing that right now, so customers can get onto something called Intelligent Octopus where we can turn your car kind of to charging on and off overnight so that it's charged up to the amount you want it in the morning, but we've done it in a way that really helps the grid, and you get a really good tariff associated with that. So that's like the first step towards full vehicle to grid, and we're doing it right now.

ALEX LATHBRIDGE:
With what you've explained there, and I think for me, and probably a lot of the listeners, I guess it's that shift in mind from treating your car as being like this is just a functional thing, this gets me from point A to point B, I'm filling it with fuel using it to go somewhere. Whereas you are sort of thinking about treating cars, electric vehicles as like a decentralised sort of energy storage where there's that real give and take, real give and take. So, we are essentially, we are all small parts of the electricity grid, that makes sense. OK, is that sort of the vibe?

CLAIRE MILLER:
Spot on.

ALEX LATHBRIDGE:

Oh, sweet.

CLAIRE MILLER:

Nailed it.

ALEX LATHBRIDGE:

Oh, fantastic. OK, so with that in mind, why are electric vehicles so expensive, Claire? Look, you're talking like, oh yeah, it's a great thing to do, like why? Why are they so much money? Cause I'm looking to get an electric vehicle, but I go on second-hand, like I try and buy second-hand electric vehicles, they're still like 20K and even then, you'll be on the website and it'll be like, we are not sure if it hasn't previously been used as like a taxi, as an Uber or whatever, it's a year old, somehow, it's clocked 100,000 miles.

CLAIRE MILLER:

Yeah, it's another good point, and actually it goes back to partly what I said about supply. Actually, it's also about like being a newer technology in the market. So, actually, usually what happens in the technological steps forward is that it takes a lot of money for the manufacturers to develop and build and test and then launch those products. And so, the first products that come out are more expensive cause they kind of claw back their investment and then those products become a bit more ubiquitous and the prices start to come down cause then the next big thing comes out. So, I always remember my mom's car had winders on the windows, and was like wind your window down and wind it up again, and I remember this amazing day when we got our new car, which was like second or third hand, but it had electric windows. I was like, oh my God, we've completely arrived, electric window's amazing. And I think with electric cars, it's that kind of writ large, actually a lot of this technology is still really new and the manufacturers have spent a lot of money developing it and so they're going to try and claw back some of that. But another challenge to your point about second-hand cars is what I mentioned earlier is that right now, we are in a bit of a weird bubble that people have not seen before, which is that you've got this very restricted supply on vehicles generally coming into like developed markets and electric vehicles haven't been around that long. So, you also don't have that many that are coming onto the second hand market. So, you've got these two things at the same time, it's like, there's not many electric vehicles anyway, and the ones that are coming on second hand are suddenly making money, they're suddenly, like, honestly, if you, yeah, I had this thing where we were looking at one of our vehicles that we own as a business, that we use, and I was looking at the price, and literally over this course of six, 12 weeks, it was jumping like £1,500, like £3,000. It was literally going up in value because of this weird bubble we're in. So, what I would say to people is that don't be disheartened, the prices are going to come down and also there's going to be a lot more choice once the manufacturers resolve these supply chain issues, which being brutal, like could take another year or so to get those supply chains back up and running, but actually, there's so much demand, there's so much interest that they're bringing cheaper models and more supply. And then we'll start to see cars moving into the second hand market, third, fourth, and you know what the brilliant news is? Is that the batteries that are in these vehicles are incredible and the manufacturers themselves are starting to come out saying, we can't believe that our batteries are so great. Like we wanted to be conservative with a small seat and we still can't believe that they're so good. As a consumer, how do I know that this second-hand car battery is OK? So the good news there is that the manufacturers themselves are super excited about how their batteries are performing. And there's lots of interesting innovation coming in assessing the battery. So, like taking a health check of that battery at the point at which you might buy it is going to be really important. That's my like one to watch, yeah, that's my one to watch for the future. When you're buying a second hand, petrol diesel car, you go for a test drive, you listen to the engine, you might do the 50 point check with the oil and the battery and the brakes and this and that. With the electric cars, it'll be really important to assess the battery, but actually another bit of good news is that those manufacturers, they had grand plans for taking those batteries out of those cars and making them into second life products or maybe a battery that's just like bolted into your home that you use to store energy there. Or maybe like putting those together and making a grid scale battery, so, literally in a shipping container, having 20 or 40 batteries together to make a bigger battery. They can't get the batteries cause they're performing too well. So, it's kind of an irony that the vehicle batteries are amazing.

ALEX LATHBRIDGE:
I guess they're trying to build that infrastructure to recycle and reuse the batteries, but it's too early on to really see how we can do that because we don't have enough batteries that are at the end of their lives because the batteries that are coming out now are in fact better than they thought it would be. Do you think it would be possible to create a full circular economy when it comes to these batteries that you put them in cars, after they're done with cars, you can put them, like you're saying in shipping containers or use them to charge one part to power, like one part of your home or something, could that be a thing?

CLAIRE MILLER:
100% and it's really mind blowing and does it make you feel happy? It makes me feel really happy.

ALEX LATHBRIDGE:
Yeah, it makes me feel happy in like a general oh, cool sense. Me as a scientist, that's a really fascinating thing, oh wow, that's so cool. Personal sense, Alex, I'm still broke, so nothing at this point has changed. Let me be blunt, I'm still like, this is great. And so like, so you're saying that it could be, we could get to a point where batteries are able to sort of, after they're used in cars, they have this second life, but, let's say I have an electric vehicle, are they fundamentally cheaper to run? And like how long do you actually have to have an electric vehicle for savings to be worth it? Cause for me and my partner, when me and my wife, she'll get mad at me if I say partner, me and my wife have looked at, we've looked at sort of electric vehicles, one of the ways that we worked out that it might work out is like early, I guess, early adopter advantage in the like, I go to Lidl and then while I do my shopping, it's an hour free, or if I go to the cinema near me, you can get like 45 minutes free and you can have all these different charging points. Some are fast, some are whatever, some are not as fast does it actually work out cheaper? Are there actually savings to be had there?

CLAIRE MILLER:
Yeah, absolutely. So, we call this total cost of ownership. So, you might hear like people talking about TCO, it's a bit of a buzzword or a bit of a buzz acronym, right? So, basically what this means is, think about how many miles you do, and this is what's really important to this, it's really personal to you as an individual and your family and what you do with your vehicle, think about how many miles you drive maybe a year, and you think about what that will cost you if you put petrol diesel into a petrol diesel car, so you can work out just the running cost alone of like how much that's going to cost you. And right now, obviously, those prices are going up and up, so, you need to make some assumptions. We're scientists, we're engineers, we make some assumptions about what that might look like. You compare that to charging your electric car and how much electricity is needed to take you the same number of miles. You can do a like for like running cost comparison, you mentioned a really interesting thing there about like where you charge and trying to pick up free charges and stuff. There are still quite a lot of places where you can get a free charge and there are lots of places where at work, they're going to be installing chargers, for example, where you might be able to get a bit at work. And at home, your domestic tariff, Octopus leads the way in time of use tariffs, so tariffs that cost you different amounts, different times, but others will come. And again, I mean, there's a whole like side story there about what happened in the energy market in the UK when, unfortunately lots of energy companies weren't able to continue operating. And a lot of innovation I think was sort of lost out of that ecosystem, but it'll come, it'll come back. So, yeah, so there's lots of different options for charging, which will impact how much is going to cost individuals. If we take a big step back, actually over the course of three, four years, it's in massive, massive savings on those sort of running costs. And then you lump in the cost of the vehicle itself and you are totally right, Alex. Like it is more expensive upfront to buy vehicle. We actually support people into leasing vehicles. So actually the cost of ownership for somebody with Octopus electric vehicles is actually over the course of three, maybe two, three, four years. Our monthly payments is what you need to be putting in there, so the monthly payment, which kind of gives you access to that vehicle, that could start another conversation about why would you own a car? You want mobility as a service, like you want to go somewhere, you don't want to own the thing, but anyway, it's part of that for now. You can start to think about yeah, no terrible, but there's so many puns, so many puns in this space, yeah, park that for now. The cost of leasing over those few years, plus the cost of running the vehicle, it far kind of blows the ICE vehicles out of the water. And then in terms of like places to find cheap charging, like lots of supermarkets actually still have cheap charging. It's slow, so keep that in mind. So, you're going to do your shop, as you say you're going to pop around the shop, you might go to cinema, you might be doing something else. There's often like a free vendor or a free charger, and I guess that also hopefully starts to get people thinking about like how you charge your vehicle, it's a lot more like you charge phone than it is like fuelling your ICE vehicle, your petrol diesel vehicle. So, I should also say ICE is internal combustion engine, that's another little acronym in the industry, like petrol diesel, ICE vehicle. And so yes, if you can see a charger, like do a little top up, why wouldn't you? Especially if it's free.

ALEX LATHBRIDGE:
On that, I mean, this is just sort of a side thing, but like many people my age and younger, the 20s, we are looking to buy property and stuff and like I could buy a flat or a house at some point, that would be sick. One of the first things they say is like, we will look into the fact that you are, if you are leasing a vehicle that affects how much money you can borrow, that affects your ability to actually buy the home. So, like all of these things are sort of changing and saying, I know from your perspective, from Octopus, there's Octopus's perspective, there's the idea of leasing, I've seen that, but like for many people, they would like to buy a car outright, that would be a nice thing to have. So, I mean, you're talking about this idea of cars being really part of our grid and stuff. Like if I, let's say somehow I have an electric vehicle and I want to be able to sell money back to the grid or somehow be part of that ecosystem, will that affect my car? Will that make my car battery worse if there's electricity going back and forth and back and forth?

CLAIRE MILLER:
I think once people get their heads around the idea that you can get the electricity out of the car battery, as well as put it back on the grid, cause that's pretty mind bending, once you think about that, cause again, you don't take the petrol out of your car and put it back in the pump. And I think that is quite a big step for people to be like why would you do that? Why would you...

ALEX LATHBRIDGE:
That's the thing that gets me, cause that's the first thing I think of. It's like, no, once I take it from the place, it's in my car and I own that, that is my fuel, no taking away from me.

CLAIRE MILLER:
That's it, and I think like the point you made there about leasing versus ownership, again, it's about a kind of sharing economy, not an ownership economy and actually, it's a massive cultural shift, like thinking about, I just need a service that gives me access to music. Why would I have hundreds of CDs kicking around my house? Spotify totally makes sense. We made that shift, but like I remember having a very decent CD collection, I took a lot of time and money to build up. Totally not needed now, very upsetting, but just got to let it go because actually on listening to music, I don't want to own loads of basically bits of plastic, and I think with cars and then with this energy, similarly, I've kind of got to be a bit less precious about like owning it and controlling it and keeping it and actually the numbers, to your point around like owning versus leasing, it doesn't stack up to invest so much cash in something which immediately is worth less to you and the risk as well of like running that vehicle goes away when you lease it. But actually the question you asked me was about energy, and actually once you get your head around the fact that the energy can come out of the battery, as well as in, then you start to say, well, OK, how am I going to use that energy? And that's what I meant about like the gateway to thinking about energy in your home. You think, well, hang on, like I can choose when I use energy, now I've got somewhere to put it for later and I think that's the bit that's going to blow everybody's mind, will be really exciting. So on a practical level, like moving energy in and out of the battery is what the battery's designed to do. Now, for vehicle to grid, we park the vehicle somewhere next to a special charger and it sits there for a bit, gently discharging. So the energy's moving out of the car according to a very controlled exporting profile, which means it comes out nice and slow, nice and controlled, according to a quite smooth kind of downward curve, if you were to look at a graph of the energy leaving the battery, if you discharge the car the other way that it can do it, that means you've got to drive it. And so actually, thinking about energy comes out of that battery somehow, when you use the vehicle, and if you drive the vehicle to get the energy out, how are you driving? And that is another massive topic. So electric vehicle driving so different to an ICE vehicle, it's much smoother, it's much more fun, like it's direct.

ALEX LATHBRIDGE:
I mean, you are not going to say it's bad, like you're not going to come, it's like a car salesman.

CLAIRE MILLER:
Well also...

ALEX LATHBRIDGE:

It's pretty naff.

CLAIRE MILLER:

Also, if I were to say it was bad, like everyone listening to this who's has got electric car, would be like, nah, it's amazing. So, like they would call me out straight away, so, actually, and the cars themselves are like much nippier and like quicker off the mark, but for the battery, that's not always the best life, right? So town driving, fast, slow, stop, start. But that's what they're designed to do, and that's what they're designed to cope with. And as I mentioned, those batteries are lasting incredibly well under those real life driving conditions. Compare that to doing a vehicle to grid session, that's like a spa break for the battery. We're starting to see studies now coming out, which actually say that not only does it not harm the battery, actually if you are doing it in that, so empty batteries are behave according to an S-curve, OK? So, they like to live between about like 30% and 80%, that like nice, I'm doing hand signals that you can't see on a podcast, but like anyone that knows...

ALEX LATHBRIDGE:
Is this sweet spot.

CLAIRE MILLER:
And actually in there, the battery's like super happy and there's emerging evidence that by doing this gentle charging, discharging cycling for vehicle to grid, you might even be like conditioning the battery. So actually you are extending the time at which it has quite a high state of health. So, the time at which it operates in its best state.

ALEX LATHBRIDGE:
So, I mean we've had this super long, super wonderful conversation. Now, would you be able to say, I mean, this is the last question I always ask people. If there was one thing you want listeners to take away from this, what would you want that to be?

CLAIRE MILLER:
The future is really exciting and it's really bright and it's really hopeful. And I know that day to day, particularly right now, it might not feel like that. And it actually, yeah, being serious for a minute, the things that you've touched on there around affordability and access to these technologies and equity or equitable access to things, that isn't the case right now, but it's getting better, and there are lots of us working really hard to make it fair and to have a fair and just transition in this transition to clean green energy and mobility. So yeah, it is a hopeful outlook, but it's coming and it's like, keep your eyes and ears open, be curious, bang on the doors, right? So, go to your energy supplier and say, what are you doing about this? What are you doing for me? When am I going to get access to these better tariffs and why are you still like buying energy from fossil fuels generation? So, you can make your voice heard, you do have power as a customer. So yeah, it is hopeful and it is coming and it is going to be really amazing, the next five to 10 years, it's going to be absolutely wild ride.
(BRIGHT UPBEAT MUSIC)

ELISABETH RATCLIFFE:
Right, so could you start by telling us basically what your role is and what do you do at the national grid?

JAMES KELLOWAY:
Yeah, so my name is James Kelloway, I'm the Energy Intelligence Manager at National Grid, ESO. So, what National Grid ESO do is we're kind of like the residual balances for the system. So, we make sure that the right amount of energy ends up with the right people and the right amount, and the amount that's actually generated matches what the demand is at any given point. We do that 24/7. So, our control centre here is primarily responsible for ensuring security of supply of electricity for the country.

ELISABETH RATCLIFFE:
OK, so, is it your guys' job to worry about when it's half time at the football match and everyone puts the kettles on and there's a lot of strain on grid?

JAMES KELLOWAY:
Yeah, so that's our control centre. So, they actually monitor that 24/7, we're more on the sort of the innovation side, which effectively leads into a pipeline. So, everything we do here goes into that room as a focal point, so they have the best decision making information they can get. And one of the things that I love about working on the grid at the moment is it's ever changing, it's ever evolving. I mean, to a certain extent, it's always done this, but we've seen an explosion of wind and solar in recent years, so give some idea, we've got somewhere around about 23 gigawatts of wind on the system at the moment, we've got about 13-ish gigawatts of solar on the system at the moment. That's beautiful in terms of getting to the point where we can operate the grid with much less carbon, but it's also presents us a really interesting challenge, which is they're kind of weather dependent and the listeners that aren't in the UK, potentially, the UK's weather isn't the most stable system in the world. So, it's clouds going across can affect solar panels, the wind is obviously highly variable, so it's kind of OK, how do you integrate that with the existing technologies? So, just to give you a brief example of how it's changed. If I go back a couple of decades, actually the grid was designed to work with a very small number of large generators, radiating power outwards effectively. Now, we're seeing a much larger number of small generators that can sort of flow in many directions. So, the really good thing about the way the grid set up is it can cope with that, and we can use it that way. It's a really good living setup if you like.

ELISABETH RATCLIFFE:
So, how do batteries come into play in how you manage that energy volatility in the grid.

JAMES KELLOWAY:
So, if I look at a typical home setup with a solar panel and a battery, OK? So, I look at the one that I have on my house, for example, you, I've got a 6.2 kilowatt R peak solar array on the roof, and if I just look at what that does actually, it's pretty effective, but it does vary a lot. So, if you've got a really dark cloud go over, the output of the array can be maybe a kilowatt, if that cloud passes away, you get a blue sky, even this time of year, that could easily jump to four or five kilowatts. Yeah, so that volatility changes quite a lot, and that's not something that you can control as an engineer 'cause obviously it's fully cloud dependent. So, this is where the battery really comes into its own because what we want to do is be able to have a controllable output, from that generation source, right? So, in my home, I've got a very simple lithium ion phosphate battery, which is about 8.2 kilowatt hours. And that will effectively take all that solar energy, it trickle charges it in. It's not super high, super low, super coming out. So, maximum charge in, charge out, it is about 2,700 Watts about somewhere around there. So, about the same as boiling an average kettle. But what that allows us to do is to actually then regulate that quickly changing solar to something that's much more manageable. Now, it then comes down to, OK, how do you apply that at grid scale? And also, what do you use the batteries for? Yeah, so there are lots of different ways that you can use batteries. In the home environment, typically it's around about keeping your costs down, certainly with the energy rises that we've all seen now. So, it's maximising off peak versus on peak charging times or even more agile type pricing structures. So, where you have lots of green and cheap renewables running, actually, let's store that energy from that period and use it in a period when let's say it's dark and not so windy. Yeah, but of course, it's kind of a smaller level. It's then a case of what do you do with those batteries on the grid itself, which I guess may be the next step to look at.

ELISABETH RATCLIFFE:
That's fantastic, I wanted to ask you about electric vehicles, cause obviously, there's a big push towards more people owning electric vehicles now, and I've seen like the motorway services, you've got them all lined up, they're all charging at the same time. And so, I'm wondering as we move towards more people having electric vehicles, what impact is that going to have on the grid? And is that something that you're preparing for?

JAMES KELLOWAY:
Absolutely, absolutely. So, let's just take that one at a time, because there's several really interesting points in there. So, I must confess, I'm on my fourth EV at the moment, I became an EV driver long before it was sensible probably to do so. Now there's really no reason not to do it. It's pretty much cheaper when you look at the running cost of the car and it's much better for the planet. Let's just have a think about how you actually charge an electric car. So, if I take my car to a motorway service station, you're quite right, there are lots and lots of charge points out there now, I plug in and then that takes a draw, now my Tesla's pretty good, it will take it input of around about 150 kilowatts plus ish, somewhere in there when the battery's in the optimum condition. I.e. it has to be at about the right temperature with the right state of charge for it to take that amount. Yeah, imagine you got 20 of those running at once, that's interesting, right? In terms of the power supplies. So, those rapid charges, if you like, they can be powered in a couple of ways. One of which is to directly connect them to the transmission network. So, where those motorway service stations are near high voltage systems. So, if you think the high voltage is like the motorway network, low voltage is like your A roads, that kind of thing, where they near there, connect them in there, they can just pull the power direct, it's not a problem because in terms of the scale of the actual amount of power that runs the country, it's quite small. OK, so that's cool.

Where it gets really interesting is where you don't have that connectivity, but you still need the charge point, right? I always think of it a little bit like a traditional toilet, which I know is a bit of a strange analogy, right? So, if you think a local battery at that site would operate like your system, yeah? And your flush would operate like your rapid charge, yeah? You would trickle the energy in, pull up your system and when your vehicle comes along, you'd quick discharge, yeah? So, you'd have an onsite battery delivering to your car battery. First rolled this out in Germany, I think, it's quite a cool way of using batteries. Yes, there's a little bit of loss of energy between the battery to battery transfer, but actually, it enables the thing to work really well. It's also worth having a think about the automotive battery, you know what I mean? My first EV, it did about 140 miles and that was considered very high at the time when I got it. I've got a small battery Tesla at the moment that can easily chuck out 220, 230 mile range without me really thinking about it in winter. I was reading that actually, they've just done a prototype battery test in the US, which is using a Gemini battery in a Tesla model S, which is effectively lithium ion phosphate battery, which is the same as I have at home. And they actually put that into a Tesla S prototype car, so, it's a standard, a stock car, but they took out the P 100 battery from the Tesla, they put this Gemini battery in, and that actually achieved a range of 752 miles on a real world road trip in winter. That's phenomenal, right? Yeah, it's probably not going to be commercialised until maybe 2026 ish, but that's the way the battery tech is going. As we start to go towards the solid state batteries, which is incredible because for those of you that haven't come across this, the solid state allows you to not have the liquid in the battery and it's the liquid really that determines the life and, to a certain extent, the safety of the battery as well. So, you see this stuff coming and changing very rapidly, where it becomes also very interesting is when you start think about bus hubs, something like that. So, if I look at the bus, so the one that we use here at National Grid House for example, so, the one that's Faraday House, National Grid House up in Warwickshire, so, we have a bus that runs between the office and the station. Now that is a fully electric bus, it's not a hydrogen bus, it's not a diesel bus, it's not hybrid, it's just a fully electric bus. And that runs all day, it just drives some circles around Warwick all day, and at night it comes back, it plugs into its 150 kilowatt charger in the depot, it recharges itself and off it goes. Yeah.

ELISABETH RATCLIFFE:
That's cute.

JAMES KELLOWAY:
Yeah, yeah, it is, it is. And I love it 'cause we're kind of like practising what we preach kind of thing. Where it becomes really interesting, OK, you got a fleet of 100 buses, yeah? How do you charge them? Because a bus really doesn't make money when it's parked. So you want to minimise that parking time, how does that work with much more heavy scale transport and this is where your storage element comes in. Do you do that with battery? For some journeys, yes, absolutely, so, the example where I'm doing my trip, or if I've got a light goods vehicle, something like that, absolutely go full of electric, it'll make sense to. Where you have long, heavy haulage, which doesn't really stop, actually, it might be worth using green hydrogen, green hydrogen being stuff that's actually made from renewables and it doesn't have the impact that blue hydrogen does on the planet, using that within the vehicle as well to maybe supplement the battery.

ELISABETH RATCLIFFE:
Thank you so much.

JAMES KELLOWAY:
Hey, no worries, Lizzie, I hope you enjoyed that.

ELISABETH RATCLIFFE:
I really enjoyed that, I learned loads, thank you. I've always wanted to talk to someone from the national grid. I find it really interesting.
(UPBEAT MUSIC)

PROFESSOR VOLKER PRESSER:
My name is Volker Presser, I'm Professor for Energy Materials in Saarbrücken. I have three affiliations, one is with Leibniz Institute for New Materials, the second one with Saarlands University and the third one with (INDISTINCT) Saarlands Centre for Energy Materials and Sustainability, where we try to make the world a better place.

ELISABETH RATCLIFFE:
Thank you, and can you just start by telling us what your work is at the moment and especially, I know you're working on something to do with mining batteries for precious elements. I'm really interested to hear more about that.

PROFESSOR VOLKER PRESSER:
Absolutely. So, well, the name of our team is Energy Materials. So, this really means we are looking into not just building better batteries, but also to really unlock otherwise sometimes hidden potential of electrochemical processes and more and more the sustainability thereof as well. So, we are looking into greener ways of making batteries. We are trying to use better technology to make water clean, but when you engage in this thought that by applying electric potential, you're not just storing charge because that is not what batteries do, batteries store ions. And if you understand that by pushing a button and applying electricity that luckily you get back after the charging process, you can play with ion management. So, this is where in the last years, we really went into what some people call ion pumping or desalination batteries, where we use energy materials to harvest ions from sea water or other aqueous media.

ELISABETH RATCLIFFE:
OK, and what would we use those ions for that we're harvesting?

PROFESSOR VOLKER PRESSER:
Well, the question is always, when you do ion harvesting or ion separation, what's the end purpose? One of course is making drinking water. So, you basically don't care too much about what's inside, you just need a certain threshold of ions to be under it, to make water safe for potable reasons, right? But the same thing applies when you look into contaminants, because sometimes, you want to get the bad guys or bad girls out of the system, we're talking about lead, we're talking about other pollutants like ammonia or phosphate, or sometimes you can swap it around and say, well, it's not the bad people that we want out in terms of ions, but we want the good ones. And there you are interested, of course, these days above anything about lithium. And lithium is the white gold, so to speak, it's definitely a precious resource to be tapped into.

ELISABETH RATCLIFFE:
Thank you. So, can you talk to us a little bit more about lithium and why it's so important to preserve it, and also what are we doing I guess, to reduce our reliance on mining new sources of lithium.

PROFESSOR VOLKER PRESSER:
Lithium is a tricky element. First of all, we are actually at the moment quite hooked on it by present day lithium ion battery technology, which is a topic of its own, will always be that way or not, that's the core of electrification of transportation and mobile computing at the moment. So, there's undeniable transition. Actually, the share of using lithium for energy is the largest use globally at the moment, for lithium, it used to be different applications, but now really has taken over. But lithium is an elusive element. At the moment we mine lithium by conventional mining technologies, terrestrial mostly, and by doing so, we are reliant on the presence of lithium ore, which is not homogeneously distributed or across the globe. So, you have certain areas like in South America, you also have Europe, a few clusters like in Portugal, but you don't have a lot and not in many places. And that really brings up absurdities that you mine lithium on one continent, like in South Africa, you ship it across the globe to Asia to be refined from into the ore specifically into then high grade lithium, then batteries are being built out of it and then shipped back to charming Europe for our users and customers to be used. In terms of CO2 footprinting, not very attractive at all.

ELISABETH RATCLIFFE:
So, are there ways of recycling lithium that's being used in batteries? Is that something that we're looking at?

PROFESSOR VOLKER PRESSER:
Absolutely, so battery companies and electric companies, they are not doing this because they love the environment so much necessarily, but there are very hard mandates of many governments across the globe, including the UK and European Union that actually mandate a high percentage of recycling. We're looking into 60, 70, 80% and upwards in the coming decades. To meet that, they're fairly easy to recycle components in batteries, when we talk about lithium ion batteries, lithium, yes, it's inside lithium ion batteries, but we have a large amount of graphite. We have a large amount of metal from the current collectors, like copper, and lot of those elements are easy to recover, like especially the metals from the casing, steel that use high grade there. And there are things that are not so easy to recover, like the electrolyte that you used or in this case, lithium. So lithium recycling that you go into shredding batteries, old ones, applying chemical, and very often, pure metallurgical processes to get back at those elements. Lithium is the one that is challenging to get, but it's definitely something that is driven largely also by costs, because if you can start recycling those systems, those lithium ion battery technologies and capitalising on the lithium as an ore not from the earth, but from a spent battery, then we are looking towards not only doing the nature and environment a favour, but also being much more cost effective in the long term and sustainable.

ELISABETH RATCLIFFE:
So, this episode of our podcast is about electric vehicle. So, I just wanted to ask you about, so my understanding is that a lot of electric vehicles today use lithium ion batteries. So, do you see that becoming a problem as we're moving towards a future where hopefully we'll be using a lot more electric vehicles and I imagine that's going to put quite a big strain on resources. So, do you see that as an issue and what do you think we need to be doing about it.

PROFESSOR VOLKER PRESSER:
Excellent question, and I could start with citing some numbers that are a little bit arguable, like 5% of lithium ion batteries are only recycled, including the cars, but are we talking about recycling or reuse? Because you see a lot of second life applications where either the car is being still used as a car with a reduced range or where you use a battery from a car as a stationary unit for large scale or medium scale applications. So, transitioning from the mobile application to an immobile application completely. So, we are seeing a large number of electric cars being produced, it's an immense amount of cars that in a couple of years will require to be thought of what to do with them and for continuity of this launching of a new technology into the market and coming back to the recycling plans. So, it's not just an environmental concern. Again, it's really the need to transition to circularity, to use this precious resource that we have in those car batteries to make car batteries again, or use lithium for something else.

ELISABETH RATCLIFFE:
So, your work in desalination and extracting ions, water and so on, is that one of the applications that you could use old car batteries for?

PROFESSOR VOLKER PRESSER:
Absolutely, so, the two tiers that we are currently working at is to extract lithium from naturally occurring resources, which can be sea water from the charming coast of Great Britain, it can be also of course, the mine water that flows here in the rural area of Saarland, but it can also be, a, the waste water from a battery company factory, or it can be the products from battery recycling processes directly. So, we are working on these topics right now in the laboratory, and specifically electrochemical measures have the attraction that they don't use and consume a lot of chemicals and not much energy. So, when you recycle, you really need to think about, well, how to do this also in a, well, cost prohibitive way, of course, would be a dumb way of doing it. So, you should do it by saving kilowatt hours of energy and resources, so that recycling actually is green and not adds to the CO2 footprint in too much a negative way.

ELISABETH RATCLIFFE:
So, did I understand that right, that some of the manufacturing methods and the recycling methods of batteries create pollution and that you can then use batteries to address that pollution, did I get that right?

PROFESSOR VOLKER PRESSER:
Yes, and that's one of the most wonderful closed circles of my career so far because materials like lithium ion phosphate, which is an up and coming electrode material for many applications, it has some drawbacks, but you see a lot of cobalt free technology is emerging on the market now, and these materials, they are wonderful for storing lithium, and it just turns out they just like lithium. So, if you offer lithium ion phosphate sodium or other ions, lithium is picked out. It's like having mixed nuts and you just pick the cashews that of course we all know are the clearly superior nuts. So, this material really has a strong affinity towards lithium, and if you offer them, for example, natural occurring water, or basically the hydro metallurgical residue of processed plaque mass from a battery recycling facility, then you extract lithium selectively, and we know the better you can separate the ions, the more precious and the more pure the final products will be, and the easier the following recycling steps will be also.

ELISABETH RATCLIFFE:
That was perfect, thank you.

PROFESSOR VOLKER PRESSER:

Perfect.
(UPBEAT MUSIC)

ALEX LATHBRIDGE:
That's all for this episode of "Brought to you by Chemistry." Join us next time, where we'll be finding out what can happen when batteries go wrong and why you shouldn't really take electric scooters on the London underground. It was produced by Hiren Joshi and Elisabeth Ratcliffe, and presented by me, Alex Lathbridge.
(UPBEAT MUSIC)

Episode transcript:

(BRIGHT MUSIC)

ANNOUNCER:
Brought to you by Chemistry.
(BRIGHT MUSIC)

ALEX LATHBRIDGE:
Hi everyone, and welcome to Brought to you by Chemistry. What's Brought to you by Chemistry I hear you ask, complicated reactions, complicated exams, even more, complicated romances? Yes, but in this case, it's also a podcast series from the Royal Society of Chemistry. So, you see the branding there. My name is Dr. Alex Lathbridge, and we're fully charged because in this series, we are taking a look at batteries, bringing together experts from inside and outside the world of chemistry to help us understand the ins and outs, the positive and negative, the ups and downs of all things batteries.
(BRIGHT MUSIC)

ALEX LATHBRIDGE:
OK, so of course, the very first question I'm going to ask both of you, you can decide who goes first, very difficult, could I get you to please introduce yourselves?

ANDREW GAUSDEN:
So Andrew Gausden, I currently represent the National Fire Chiefs Council and the waste and recycling fires group. And we do a lot around the waste industry and supporting the waste industry and the hazards and risks involved in those processes.

PAUL SHEARING:
And I'm Paul Shearing. I'm a Professor in Chemical Engineering at University College London. I also hold The Royal Academy of Engineering Chair in Emerging Battery Technologies, and we do a lot of research into the science of battery safety, including with a large Faraday Institution research program called SAFEBATT.

ALEX LATHBRIDGE:
Wonderful. OK. Now, throughout this podcast, throughout all these episodes, I'm learning a lot more about batteries. And I think to start with, let's get away from the chemistry to begin with. So Andrew, just in terms of batteries, what can go wrong with batteries?

ANDREW GAUSDEN:
We find a number of specific issues and one of those are people buying replacement chargers that haven't got the right battery management system in and therefore it creates a problem with the battery, and that's due to really wrong equipment. The other issue that we really come across is, how we, where, what is the end life of a battery? How do we manage that process to end of life? You know, when we buy something, we've got to look at the whole life cycle. And at the moment, a battery's a, you know, they're these small items, nobody's really clear on where to dispose them. There is a battery recycling and collecting scheme. There's a battery compliance scheme. Those that put batteries onto the market have to put in place processes to collect the batteries to ensure they go for safe disposal, but, you know, that that's just one thing in our life. And people really struggle of identifying what is the quite correct way to dispose of a battery at its end of life, you know, where do I take it? You know, it becomes a burden. And we've got to get much better at that, because what we find from my perspective is the wrong battery in the wrong place, and it's all about the right waste in the right place.

ALEX LATHBRIDGE:
Oh, wow. The right waste in the right place. I like that. Now, I mean, something you said there, it's people using the wrong types of chargers. Like, we'll get onto the chemistry in a second, but for the real world, like I buy, you know, if I lose my, you know, phone charger that comes with my phone, I'll buy, you know, a knockoff phone charger. And if my battery, you know, in older phones, if my battery's gone, I might buy a replacement on eBay or something. Are you telling me that there could come, you know, there could be issues in doing a combination of those two things?

ANDREW GAUSDEN:
100%, I'm sure Paul will back me up that, you know, the battery and the charger are very much matched to the equipment. And it is absolutely critical that you go back to original manufacturer of your equipment because they're set up, they're paired together, they work together in partnership, the battery management system and the battery and the equipment. And therefore just buying a either or replacement, just a cheap Amazon type search that comes up and you buy a replacement battery, that can lead historically to problems.

PAUL SHEARING:
Yeah, I think with, you know, as with anything, you get what you pay for and batteries are no exception to that. So I think that, you know, in general, people rely on batteries every single day of their lives, right? Recording this podcast, I'm sure we're all using lithium ion batteries to record this podcast. And I guess the guys listening to this podcast will be using lithium ion batteries for that as well. So almost all the time we're using these batteries and the chance of anything going wrong is extremely rare, but, as I mentioned, it is the case that you get what you pay for. And so particularly in the sort of, you know, replacement battery market, making sure that you are buying, you know, authenticated, good replacement batteries, and having them replaced properly is really important, because we know that there are a variety of different manufacturing qualities that can lead to batteries that, you know, last longer or less long, and batteries that may have sort of more safe operating characteristics than others.

ALEX LATHBRIDGE:
OK, look, you know, this is a Royal Society of Chemistry podcast. It would be remiss of me not to ask and jump into the chemistry. Do you like that use of remiss? That's the first time I've used remiss. I feel pretty happy with that. So let's jump into the chemistry here to begin with, like when batteries go, you know, wrong, problems arise with batteries, what's happening there, like chemically what's happening to them functionally?

PAUL SHEARING:
Sure. Well, so let's start off with what happens in a battery normally. So it's a lithium ion battery, so what you are doing is you're effectively shuttling a lithium ion between the positive and the negative electrode when you are charging and discharging the battery. And lithium ion battery is a very energy dense and also very efficient, so that reaction where we're charging and discharging has what we say has a high columbic efficiency, and so we can do it hundreds and thousands of times. And that's why lithium ion batteries are so great. And we use them all the time, both in our consumer electronics and our electric vehicles, and increasingly in sort of really large applications like grid-scale energy storage. But things, you know, can happen that are somewhat unexpected, and they usually result from some unexpected chemical side reactions or some electrical phenomena that can lead to short circuiting. So on those side reactions, you can also get a bit of gas generation sometimes, and that can affect the integrity of the cell, and with some reactions like lithium plating and so on and so forth. In the rare occurrences that they do happen, you can eventually get some short circuiting behaviour. In the case where you do have a short circuit with a battery and as I, you know, point out again, that this is really a very, very rare occurrence that it does happen. You can effectively discharge that highly energy dense battery very, very quickly and that generates a lot of heat, and the heat leads to exothermic reactions and you get this kind of snowball effect. So, you know, a little bit of heat gets generated, but that's enough to trigger another exothermic reaction, also generating heat, and this sort of snowball can proceed. And if it proceeds sort of unchecked, then we can get this phenomenal called thermal runaway, which the sort of large sort of catastrophic failures of batteries, again, extremely rare. And just because you get some of these side reactions, most of the time, they won't lead to thermal runaway. But as part of the research that we do, it's sort of our responsibility to often understand the worst case scenario in terms of what can happen. And to do that, you know, we do things that are definitely, you know, do not repeat at home experiments. We take batteries and we expose them to electrical abuse or to mechanical abuse, or to thermal abuse. And, you know, we have great fun under controlled conditions blowing these batteries up, but it definitely comes with a health warning that this isn't something that you should be doing at home. We fail batteries under really the worst case scenarios just to understand exactly what could go wrong in those very worst cases.

ALEX LATHBRIDGE:
I mean, I'm enjoying the caveats there. And I was thinking you could add an extra one there to really test these batteries under, you know, a controlled condition. You could subject into psychological abuse and sort of tell them they aren't good enough and they'll never be good enough, and that’s important.

PAUL SHEARING:
Oh, well, I. I'm always singing the praise of the lithium ion batteries, so I don't think there's any psychological abuse. But it's interesting when you think about some of these abuse tests as sort of just one that the audience may be familiar with, but it's a standard test that's called the nail penetration test.

ALEX LATHBRIDGE:
And what? No, no, no, no, Andrew, why are you nodding like this a normal thing? And I'm like, oh, this is a thing that listeners will be familiar with. That's not a normal, who goes around putting I'm look, you haven't even explained it, but I'm assuming you put a nail inside a battery or you stab it with a battery.

PAUL SHEARING:
It does what it says on the tin. Yeah, the nail penetration test is exactly that. You take a nail, hydraulically drive it into the battery. That is the extent to which these batteries are abused during qualification. And yes, as, I mean, Andrew might have some experiences of the outcomes of having done that extremely aggressive test, but it's a standard thing that battery manufacturers do in order to make batteries as safe as possible before they go out to the consumer market.

ALEX LATHBRIDGE:
So with what you've learned and, you know, all the stuff that you've done, like very, very briefly, how can we detect any failures or like any degradation or anything inside the battery? Because to me, I look at the battery, a battery is a battery. Obviously you, Andrew, and you, Paul, can look at a battery and divine some magic from it. How do you do that? How do you know if a battery is good?

PAUL SHEARING:
Well, I can sort of give you an indication sort of during normal operation how we know a battery's good. If you're using a battery in a mobile phone, you know, or a laptop or electric vehicle, there'll be a battery management system, and that tracks the state of health of the battery, and that can be relatively simple. It might sort of monitor the current and the voltage. It might monitor the temperature. Some of them are a bit more sophisticated, and they have other probes in there that can tell you about the sort of physical state of health for a battery. And obviously in the lab, we've got huge arrays of tools and we are sort of pointing all kinds of x-ray beams and neutron beams and acoustic probes of batteries all the time to try and establish the state of health of a battery at all cases. That then gives us some sort of signatures of when things sort of begin to decline in their performance. You know, you might see a change in the internal resistance in the cell, for example, which is an indicator that the battery's beginning to degrade. Over time, I think everyone will have experienced that their mobile phone battery needs charging more often, and that's because you get this capacity fade problem, which just means that the reactions inside the battery are no longer operating as effectively as they used to, and some of the active materials within the batteries are perhaps becoming isolated. So we've got a huge range of tools and techniques to give us the state of health of a battery, and also then to provide us with some indicators as to when the battery should be removed from service. And then it ends up in the recycling facilities. And I guess there's a whole different range of tools that the recycling facilities use in order to sort of maintain safe operation there, but I'll let Andrew answer that one.

ANDREW GAUSDEN:
And that's a really important point, I think, Paul, that we use a battery, it has a certain life. It's quite obvious to the user when the life dips away and the length of service becomes such that we want to replace the battery. Within there, your specific question, Alex, around when do we know a battery fails? And with that, the general, there are two things that you'll notice, either your battery's starting to get hot when you charge it, which is a telltale sign that actually something's not operating correctly, and the other one that, and we certainly get calls around this in the fire services, is my battery's expanding. And when they start to break down, you get this buildup of pressure inside the battery and you'll see the battery expand. And those two circumstances, that's when you need to start thinking about what am I going to do with this battery? And that's the challenge for the consumer, you know, how do you dispose of a battery at that stage? And that's the bit that we're working on at the moment, that public education around disposal of battery at the end of its life.

ALEX LATHBRIDGE:
So again, this is an audio medium, listeners can't see my face. But when you said there about, you know, the two points that we should really be thinking about batteries, now, I know when batteries like expand, I should really be like, at that point, obviously there's something wrong, you know. But when they're heating up, like a lot of the items I own, I know that when, you know, when I put in the cable, wiggle it maybe, like you feel maybe after a while, it'll get hot. So, I mean, at that point, is that, that's an issue?

ANDREW GAUSDEN:
It unusually hot. So if the equipment you are charging becomes unusually hot, then that's the time. Yeah, during the normal process, heat will be generated, won't it, Paul, you know, as part of that?

PAUL SHEARING:
Yeah, exactly. So, I mean, it unusually hot is definitely the watchword there. I think sort of, if you feel the back of your laptop computer, so you've got a battery and you've got lots of other kit in there and fans and so on to try and keep it cool, but, you know, if I pick up my laptop now I can feel that it's kind of hot at the bottom. It's not unusually hot so it's not something that I'm worried about. I think it's also true as well that a lot of consumer electronics probably have a function in them where if the battery gets hot, it will sort of reduce the functionality and go into shutdown. You might have seen on a really hot summer's day, if you've left your phone out in the sunshine, you get a message that says, you know, temperature exceeded, we're going into sort of sleep mode for half an hour while things cool off. So again, there's a lot of intelligence baked into these battery management systems to try and keep things safe. So again, we don't want anyone to panic if the back of your laptop feels a bit hot, but not unusually hot, it's not really anything to worry about. But there are some sort of telltale things that we're concerned about, you know, gas generation is one of them. So if it begins to puff up, then you know, that's time to sort of take some action, and that means, you know, don't try and charge the battery any further. But certainly don't think about, you know, puncturing it or trying to take it to pieces, this is when things begin to go really wrong. So if you've got a battery that's puffed up, take it to a repair shop, they'll dispose the battery and replace it with hopefully a sort of certified replacement. But, you know, batteries are a bit of a black box, and we're happy to describe what goes on inside those batteries, but also just to sort of give a, you know, a bit of a health warning that these batteries are not designed to be taken apart at home. So that's certainly not recommended.

ALEX LATHBRIDGE:
I mean, Andrew, do you feel, like I do, a sense of hypocrisy there where he says, "Don't open the battery and don't try and like penetrate the battery." But, you know, in my controlled environment, I like to do a nail test and stab batteries and just to see what happens. The sense of real hypocrisy there.

ANDREW GAUSDEN:
Well, and that's the point, Paul, isn't it, that these tests and these extreme tests are done so that we test them beyond their normal operating environment. So, you know, you drop your laptop, you overcharge it, all that's dealt with, but actually we take it that one stage further and we puncture and deliberately damage them to see how we can make 'em safer. And that's part of the development there, Paul, isn't it, that we extreme tests to see where these ultimate weaknesses are, and how we can develop and evolve batteries to make them even safer?

PAUL SHEARING:
Absolutely, yeah. So these really aggressive tests that we do under very controlled scenarios, like the nail penetration test, but that's just one of many different abuse scenarios that are applied during the sort of development and qualification of batteries. They are really heavily road tested in order to understand what the absolute worst case scenario is to make sure that the batteries that go out to the market are as safe as possible, but also to inform what we're going to do next. By understanding what can go wrong, it gives us that insight for sort of engineering strategies to mitigate even the worst case scenarios.

ALEX LATHBRIDGE:
OK. All right. So I mean, very briefly, I think this is a question for Andrew, what can people do just like to be safe? There are lots of systems inbuilt in lots of devices, but in certain situations where, those rare situations where things can go wrong, like what can people just do to be safe, like to be vigilant and stuff?

ANDREW GAUSDEN:
So I would come back to my very first point and that is a piece of equipment with a battery in has a set of instructions, follow the instructions, make sure you use the right equipment. Where you come to replace your battery or your charger, particularly those two items, make sure they are compatible, they are good quality. As Paul said from the start, you get what you pay for, and we see this with the hoverboards, didn't we? Four or five years ago, there was some cheap imports of hoverboards, you know, kids toys, they weren't compliant, hadn't been tested, didn't meet the standards, and the Office for Product Safety and Standards stepped in there and they were withdrawn from the market. So, you know, it goes back to you get what you pay for. And when you are buying equipment battery, you know, whether it's a laptop, whether it's a hoverboard, whether it's a toy, buy from a repute supplier, you know, you get what you pay for. And you can buy cheap imitations. You know, we see it with the e-scooters. You know, you can buy a really good quality e-scooter, and you can do an internet search and find 1/2 the price. Well, if you're paying half the price, there's got to be an inference there that you might be getting half the quality.

ALEX LATHBRIDGE:
OK, for people listening, who don't know London very well, you know, there's a London Underground system, and I was on there, I was on a two, a couple of weeks ago, and we got stuck at a station because, and the announcer was saying that a person with an e-scooter, like telling a person with an e-scooter they weren't allowed on the tube that they should like get out, and I was wondering why. Now, is it because like a battery poses a hazard in sort of those environments?

ANDREW GAUSDEN:
E-scooters are quite challenging at the moment. They operate on the boundaries, a really good piece of kit, and we've seen the use of them through COVID and e-transport, a critical part, a net zero, how we introduce these sort of transportation modes. The problems with e-scooters, I'll leave Paul to deal with the more technical element, but from my perspective, an e-scooter's quite a robust piece of kit. And where do we put the battery? We put the battery between the wheels underneath. And hopping up and off curbs, et cetera, et cetera, those batteries tend to get quite a level of abuse. And we've seen a number of e-scooter failures, you know, we can't step back from there. There have been a number of fires in people's houses, charging overnight. And it's almost like going back to, you'd have seen the Indesit issues with tumble dryers, that we're seeing a particular problem develop around e-scooters, but that's being worked on looking at how we can make it more robust. But because of a couple of instance, and bearing in mind the number of people that use the London Underground infrastructure, you know, you've got millions of people using that. On a couple of occasions, we have had an e-scooter fail within the Underground. And because of the confined environment, London Underground have taken the decision to ban in e-scooters at this point in time from the London Underground. Hence your delays because London Underground stepped in and said, though this person's got to leave with their e-scooter, and it's a bit like there's no smoking on the Underground. You know, I remember days gone by where people used to smoke on the Underground, and we see a hazard developing in a specific circumstance and therefore we regulate against it.

PAUL SHEARING:
Yeah, and I mean, from the technical side of things, happy to sort of chip in with some of those sort of unique features of e-scooters, but also worthwhile is a sort of quick disclaimer as well. So that I've got an e-scooter, I've had it for about three years. I use it quite regularly. It's particularly during the pandemic being able to sort of get round independently and off of public transport. They're really, really effective, but they are quite energy dense batteries that you have in an e-scooter, so you're sort of packing in quite a lot of energy into relatively small space. And as Andrew pointed out, the space that you use in the scooters, obviously right there in the skateboard, and if you're bumping it up and down curbs, that's really quite as potentially you've got a, I don't know, 80, 100 kilogramme adult riding around on the e-scooter bumping up and down a curb. And right at that point where the skateboard is likely to hit the curb, that's exactly where the battery sits. So that's quite an extreme example of really mechanical abuse that can occur. And going back to the sort of qualification test that we do, like the nail penetration test, that's the exact reason that we do it, to understand what the worst case scenario could be. Coming back to the e-scooter application in particular, we've got a sort of market there that isn't particularly highly regulated, and here is definitely this issue of you get what you pay for. If you're buying an electric vehicle, they've all gone through a very sort of comprehensive homologation process, which means that they've all been qualified and certified and signed off, but with some of these sort of e-scooters, that's not always the case. So there is a sort of really diverse marketplace back to that original statement that you get what you pay for. And then you sort of couple that with a potentially, you know, quite aggressive duty cycle in terms of the risk of mechanical abuse, and, you know, there is a potential for things to go wrong there. And I think that the decision that's taken by the London Underground recognises that, again, as Andrew said, they've got some particular challenges in terms of risk management because of the confinement of the Underground system, that means that they have to regulate at risk. So it's a sensible decision, but I think it's quite a unique one. I don't think anyone with an e-scooter needs to sort of be particularly panics, as I say, I've got one go on myself. I use it all the time, I think they're great, bits of kit, but there are some particular challenges with that market.

ALEX LATHBRIDGE:
OK. All right. So that is really interesting. So it takes me onto my next point. You know, e-scooter is one thing, you know, but we've also got, you know, electric cars, electric vehicles, do either of you, I guess, starting with Andrew here, like, are you prepared, are we prepared for more electric vehicles? Like when it comes to those batteries, those batteries are very different from the batteries that I might have in my hand, or the ones, you know, even in e-scooters do, are there provisions in place for sort of more electric vehicles coming to market? And like, are there any problems that you have to sort of think about and you have to anticipate before then?

ANDREW GAUSDEN:
E-vehicles are quite a challenging scenario coming back to Paul's points about energy density. So once you get up to vehicle size, you are now going to a huge energy density in a small space, and that's where lithium really excels in that energy density, but now the battery is getting somewhere near 80 kilowatts. It's quite a large piece of equipment with a large energy density. So there are two elements there. We see the impact of car fires and the difficulty if that then goes on to involve the battery and extinguishing that because the energy density, the heat release rates, et cetera, when you get into a battery failure. But let's be clear, battery failures because of the point Paul made about homologation, battery failures are very rare.

The batteries are very highly armoured unlike an e-scooter so that they have to deal with vehicle collisions, and that comes back to the nail test that Paul talked about. We have to really put those batteries through an extreme set of tests to cope with all the scenarios that may be realistically involved. You're always going to have the, you know, the black small moment aren't you, where you have a situation that you haven't prepared for, you know, and that's a risk within life. For us, what we start to see at the other end of it is the first generation EVs are now coming to the end of their life, and therefore we're starting to see a ramp up in the recycling capacity to deal with these batteries. But exponentially over the next four or five years, we're going to see a huge increase in these batteries, these battery vehicles, the use of these high, high numbers of batteries, high frequency, battery energy, storage systems for the grid, grid-scale storage. So the volume of batteries that is then going to come to the end of their life in the next five to 10 years, it just grows exponentially. And we are starting to work towards ramping up, but we're still developing the recycling technology. And one of the issues with the recycling, the end of their life is that each battery is actually different. Each manufacturer puts different materials in there in different combinations, and therefore the recycling process at the moment is in its infancy.

ALEX LATHBRIDGE:
I'm going to quickly jump in with something 'cause we're going to touch on recycling in a moment. But I'm actually have to offer an apology to you, Paul. So I was sort of, you know, joking around when I said the nail penetration test is a bit of fun. But knowing that this is sort of upscaled now to being representative perhaps of, you know, an electric vehicle being caught in a collision essentially, you know, I guess, OK. I apologise. I now...

PAUL SHEARING:
No apologies necessary. I mean, some people have heard about this and it does sound like a bit of a comedy test, the nail penetration test, but it is described in the UN standards as something that people need to do to qualify the batteries. And that just gives the audience maybe an indication of the length that we go to to try and make these batteries as safe as possible. And that's true for batteries that go into a mobile phone or batteries that go into an electric vehicle, they've all been through for sort of, you know. Well manufactured, qualified batteries, they've all been through this really extensive certification process. And that's why the failure statistics for batteries are actually really very, very low. Difficult to get exact numbers, but we reckon somewhere between about one in 10 million and one in 40 million batteries, so really, really low numbers in terms of failures. But recognising that we've got more and more batteries and increasingly demanding applications, making sure that we understand everything about what can go wrong in the worst case scenario is then letting us conceive of some strategies to how we can really engineer completely fail-safe batteries. We, you know, with electric vehicles for example, those failures are very, very rare and it just becomes a managed risk, exactly the same as a petrol vehicle. I mean Andrew will probably, from his experiences, know about the tens if not hundreds of petrol fires that there are at the roadside every year. But people don't worry about that when they get into a petrol driven car, because we've all learned how to deal with that sort of managed risk.

ANDREW GAUSDEN:
And coming back to you there, Paul, the really important bit that, you know, where we start to worry about this 80 kilowatt battery in our car, but we don't worry about the 80 litre fuel tank in the car. And actually, you know, a leak from a petrol fuel tank is actually inherently more dangerous than a leak from the battery or a battery issue when, you know. It's heavier than air. It's denser than air. It builds up in low spaces. And a leak from an 80 litre petrol tank, from a fire service point of view, can create more problems or more dynamic problems than an EV battery to put it in comparison. But it's new. It's new technology where we see these isolated instance, which are very rare. And this is something new. This is something we're not accustomed to. And we've got to change our perspectives.

ALEX LATHBRIDGE:
I mean I really like there that you said like, you know, ATD to petrol tank as if I'm not driving a 2008 Nissan Micra, which has the fuel capacity, I'm going to guess of a thimble, so…

PAUL SHEARING:
We need. We need to get you onto an EV, Alex. That's the only answer.

ALEX LATHBRIDGE:
Yeah, no, that's what this entire series is about. It's essentially me asking contributors which electric vehicle I should buy, but also there is a second point of I'm broke. So (laughs) in terms of now, in terms of things, Andrew, you know, you spoke about electric vehicles and petrol vehicles, you know, both of them have a small risk of, you know, having roadside fires as you mentioned. How do you deal with battery fires in the electric vehicle or in generally, or in general, because I assume you can't just spray it down with water? I luckily have never had to deal with a battery fire, but how do you deal with it? Is it any different from any other fire?

ANDREW GAUSDEN:
It is very, very, very different. And there's a lot of work ongoing at the moment as these obviously, as the volumes of the EVs increase, so the volumes of EV fires will increase. And we're starting to now on that learning journey of looking at different methods of dealing with EV fires, because this battery is armoured in the nature it's constructed because it's got to be safe in use. They do create certain problems. And we are seeing, for example, they will burn for several days in certain circumstances, because they have to be deconstructed. You know the battery pack, that unit is very well armoured. It isn't like a petrol tank. Once a petrol tank fails, it splits. The fuel comes out and we put it out. That energy density and the release of that energy, you know, it doesn't happen in five minutes, it happens over a period of time. There's a lot of cool in that has to go on to control the thermal runaway, but again, it's encased and it is producing challenges. There's a number of different scenarios that have been looked at. For instance, in Holland, they bring a skip alongside full of water and dunk it in the skip. We're looking at penetration of the battery case which is on the extreme level, and I'm not quite comfortable with whether that is the right way forward. It's isolation and cooling ultimately, but in a different set of circumstances, and we're providing a lot of training nationally. They've also looked at fire blankets, put a fire blanket over the car to contain, you know, it becomes a containment exercise, and I've seen those used to good effect. But the training, knowledge and understanding that goes with tackling EV fire is very, very critical, because it's a different set of hazards and risks that we're not accustomed to.

ALEX LATHBRIDGE:
So we've really spoken about batteries in use and batteries, you know, investigating the risks, the very small risks of batteries, because of all the wonderful science and testing that go into it. Now, when it comes to disposing of batteries, like, you know, I have, I've got batteries everywhere. I essentially have a bag of batteries in my drawer that I've used that I have no idea what to do with, do I just put the batteries in the bin? Like my wife is sort of saying, No, you shouldn't do that, but then I also don't really know what to do with them. So what do I do with these batteries to just take them away safely?

ANDREW GAUSDEN:
And that is the wicked problem at the moment. And the government are just about to consult on looking at recycling, how the local authority collects, recycling, particularly waste electrical and electronic equipment. I've, you know, recently Curry's have taken big steps forward as that, because the responsibility lies with those that put the equipment on the market in the first place, so batteries, electronic equipment, your washing machine, and that's why when you buy new washing machine, quite often, someone will collect the old one for you. And that is part of this extended producer responsibility about dealing with the end of the life. Your small batteries that you've used, your disposable or recyclable battery, rechargeable batteries that you've got on your desk there, generally you will find in most supermarkets, outlets where they sell batteries, they will have a battery recycling point. And that is part of this extended regulatory battery compliance scheme about collecting these batteries, going back to my bed about right waste, right place, ensuring that it gets to the right end of life recycling facility that can then recycle those batteries. Remember in a lot of these lithium batteries, they contain a lot of rare earth metals, and it's important for us to recover those rare earth metals and put 'em back into reuse.

PAUL SHEARING:
Yeah. And I think that one thing that we see obviously with the electric vehicle market is that the challenge of recycling is an order of magnitude, at least larger than what we've had to deal with at the moment. Probably everyone's got a drawer at home that's full of all of your old mobile phone batteries, right? You just sort of, you know, get a new mobile phone contract, the old mobile phone gets chucked in a drawer and left there. But that's not the case, people don't have driveways full of every single car they've ever driven in their entire life. So when you get rid of your 2008 Nissan Micra, Alex, would, you know, take that to an auction or to a scrap merchant or whatever, and someone will take it off your hands and they will recycle it, and that's a well established process. But we need the exact same equivalent for the electric vehicle market as well. Recognising the fact that if you've got a, you know, a battery that goes into an 80 kilowatt hour power train for an electric vehicle, it's probably, you know, thousands of times larger than a laptop battery, right? And so people sort of, you know, not only then have this challenge of how to recycle it, people want to recover value from it as well. It's a big investment. People have bought a car, and when you're finished with it, you want to be able to, you know, recover some of the economic value from it, and you want to be able to, you know, safely and responsibly dispose of it at the end of life. A lot of people, particularly who are early adoptive electric vehicle technology are doing it, cause it's the right decision for the environment, and, you know, that's, you know, I am completely on board with that as well. But there is a sort of industry wide responsibility to make sure that at the end of life, we have sort of environmentally responsible ways of disposing with things, of recovering those critical elements within the battery. And sort of making sure that that environmental consciousness is embedded throughout the entire life cycle from when we first get the materials out the ground to when the battery ends up at a recycling facility. And yeah, and that's a critical point at the moment. These first generation electric vehicles, because the residual value is still in the vehicle, a lot of those are going to vehicle breakers where the parts are taken apart and they're resold. There's still value in the vehicle, and we've not quite transitioned to the situation. With your Nissan Micra at the end of life, you'll take it to an end of life vehicle recycling centre, they're deconstruct a vehicle, re-collect the materials, and then they go back into the life cycle of vehicle manufacturer. We're just starting to see that. And I had a conversation recently with a large metal recycler in the UK about, they start to see one of these a week, but they're expecting over the next five years that that ramp up to 10 a week, a hundred a week, you know, even to the point that we'd be seeing thousands of these get to the end of the life. So we're seeing that curve rise now, and the industry is now working towards, you know, what does that look like? What is the value chain at the end of the life of the vehicle, and how is it recycled? How do we recover that? And those processes are now starting to be built within that recycling infrastructure, but it's this wicked problem of chicken and egg. At the moment, you know, companies haven't got the volume of the EV vehicles coming into the recycling chain to invest in the infrastructure to recycle them. So we're playing catch up and trying to sit on that, you know, that swing at the moment, you know, are we ready to commit this investment into the recycling infrastructure for what is about to appear, but yet hasn't come?

ALEX LATHBRIDGE:
I mean my first question, obviously, Paul, Andrew, would either of you like to buy a 14 year old Nissan Micra?

PAUL SHEARING:
I'm going to politely decline on that one, Alex, but thanks for the offer.

ANDREW GAUSDEN:
It depends on the price, actually. I used to work for this and believe it or not, and their value has gone through the roof, Alex. So you might want to hold onto it at the moment, their fetching good money.

ALEX LATHBRIDGE:
Oh, OK. Going to flip that Nissan Micra into a Tesla. That's right, turn that mindset into a grind set. So in terms of what we've spoken about, you know, we've spoken about it in terms of very much a manufacturer level, but just very briefly in terms of personal responsibility, you know, people talking about our, you know, draws of batteries and whatnot. When we dispose them safely, is it just a case of me going to the supermarket and there might be like a drop off for batteries? Is it as simple as that? As a simple, is it as sort, a single point as that?

ANDREW GAUSDEN:
Very much so for your individual batteries, what we're also seeing now is that the government is making big moves around what we call WEEE, waste electrical and electronic equipment. I went in my B and Q the other day, and I see that they've got a WEEE collection point, because it comes back to energy density. And battery tools are particularly issue, because they've got quite a high energy density in those batteries. And it's once you get to that size, that's when you start to get the problem. If that goes in your cardboard recycling for instance, and much of the waste process is about dividing the material and separating it, and that process will introduce mechanical damage to a lithium battery. You know, we have shredders and all sorts of equipment within the waste industry, and that recycling process then mechanically damages the battery, and then we create the problem through mechanical damage.

ALEX LATHBRIDGE:
OK. OK. I mean, all right, that makes perfect sense, yeah. Don't put a battery inside a place where it might get mashed up, because it getting mashed up can sort of make the bad things happen. That's Alex's full use of science words. Now let's look towards the future. I mean, we love the future. The future apparently is going to be better than the current, which is a low baseline, let's be honest. Paul, what are researchers right now doing to give batteries like a longer lifespan, because that's the perfect world? What can we do to make batteries? What can scientists do to give batteries a far longer lifespan, so we don't have to continue buying them and manufacturing them?

PAUL SHEARING:
Yeah, sure. Well, we do a huge amount of work in sort of understanding battery degradation. And for a lot of people who are consumers, the battery's kind of a black box at the back of your phone or in your hoverboard or in your electric vehicle, they don't necessarily think about sort of detail chemistry that's going on inside it. Of course, the Royal Society of Chemistry audience, I suspect they're a bit more chemically literate and maybe understands some of those materials that we have. So normally in a negative electrode, we have something that's made at a graphite. In that positive electrode, we have a mixture of lithium and some transition metals like nickel, manganese, and cobalt in a sort of oxide type material. And the sort of chemical, the physical, the crystallographic nature of all of those materials will dictate a lot about how the battery operates, and therefore changes to all of those fundamental materials' properties, then change the overall properties of the battery. So we talked a bit about sort of everyone's had this sort of frustrating issue where your mobile phone battery, after you've had it for a couple of years, it needs charging more and more frequently. And that's due to sort of, you know, these chemical structural mechanical changes, a really quite small microscopic scales within the battery. The materials begin to just behave slightly differently. We get sort of degradation phenomena that starts almost at the atomistic level, but then the consequences are felt by the consumer because you've got to charge your battery more frequently. And so a lot of the work that we're doing on to sort of trying to improve the lifetime of batteries starts with understanding those microscopic processes of what begins to change as a battery gets older. Why are the chemical reactions different for a two year old battery or a 10 year old battery compared to one that's just come out of the factory? Why does the crystal structure of that battery begin to look different? Why the morphology, the particles begin to, you know, fall to pieces in some cases over long-term operation? And the first step in our journey in improving lifetime is let's understand exactly all of those sort of really fundamental science events. And then let's think of some strategies for how we can improve them. So can we change the shape of particles? Can we introduce some new chemical dopants so we can sort of try and retain the good chemical reactions and, you know, minimise the bad chemical side reactions? Can we think about how to engineer better battery architectures in order to sort of maintain the battery in its safe operating window for the maximum length of time? So there's, you know, there's been great progress already, but there's still a long way to go. Because ideally, we want a battery that's going to last forever and that's never going to be realistic. All these materials are going to degrade over time, and particularly as we use them in sort of very demanding applications. But you know, that fundamental understanding of all these changes, and again, back to what can go wrong means that we can come up for solutions, come up with solutions for how to minimise that.

ALEX LATHBRIDGE:
OK, now I'm going to take it out of the lab, you know, out of nail into battery land, into the wider world. Now, Andrew, looking forward, let's say like 10 years, 20 years, where do you think or where do you hope will be when it comes to batteries, and how we sort of like, how consumers interact and like use batteries? I mean, do you think we're going to get to a safer point? Do you think there are any changes that people need to make? Or basically do I have the power to make the future better or is it down to manufacturers and government and whatnot?

ANDREW GAUSDEN:
All of the above, Alex. And a question for you, Paul, what I'd like to see is actually looking at the whole life cycle assessment of the battery. Because at the moment, recycling is we put it through a shredder, we create this black mass, and then we separate it out, and is there a better process? Can we design in the end of life of the battery? But they're such complex chemical processes, aren't they, that we put together to actually pull those apart at the end becomes very difficult. And, you know, it's really important when you look at the future, Alex, or, you know, our rare earth metals are finite, aren't they? You know, we've seen this with fossil fuels where we're getting the same with our rare earth metals. And what's really important is what we build, we can reuse, repurpose and recover at the end. So it's the whole life cycle. So what I'd like to see over the next 10 or 20 years is a, you know, cultural change, human behaviour about, you know, right waste, right place, but then ultimately, how we recover. You know, we shouldn't be talking about waste. Everything we throw away is a resource, and it's how we recover that resource. And I'd like to see as much effort going into the design and the longevity of the battery as the ultimate end life. You know, what's the end point?

PAUL SHEARING:
Yeah, I completely agree with that, Andrew. And it is one of those things that the circular economy requires us to do all of the above because we want a battery that is well designed to give us high performance. And there'll be a sort of consumer pull on the manufacturers because people want electric vehicles with longer range, and they want them to last longer. So let's get better batteries with higher performance. There'll be a bit of a consumer pool. There'll probably be some regulation that will help to support that as well. And let's make those batteries operate for as long as possible in their first life application, right? So let's make that, you know, battery within an electric vehicle run for 200,000 miles or more, so we get the maximum possible value. Then at the end of the electric vehicle's life, let's think about what we can do with that battery next. It might be that the battery's no longer suitable to power a vehicle, but maybe it could go into a less demanding application. So we have a second life for this battery. So maybe we can put it into a grid-scale energy storage application, continue to monitor that, and inevitably at some point it will really genuinely come to the end of its life. And then it will go to one of the recycling facilities that Andrew's talked about. And obviously that industry is ramping up very, very rapidly, particularly to meet this sort of demand that's coming online from sort of end of life electric vehicles.

ALEX LATHBRIDGE:
I mean, we could go for hours talking about recycling and circular economy and whatnot, and we will. In other episodes of this podcast, we will have another episodes of this series. Now, for now, I'm going to ask the most difficult question that I like to ask people when we chat to them. It's if you could have the listeners take one thing away from this, this entire conversation, what will it be? Andrew, I'm pretty sure I know what yours might be. It might say something about waste and place, but go on. Surprise me.

ANDREW GAUSDEN:
So yeah. Recognise that there is no such thing as throwing something away. All you are doing is putting it in another place. And what I do see is the consumer wants to do the right thing. So if they're putting a battery in the recycling, even if it be the wrong recycling bin, they're trying to do the right thing. So what we need to do is assist that consumer to understand what is the right method of disposal, and that's the critical thing. So the human behaviour is there. We're putting the battery in the recycling. We're trying to do the right thing. What we've got to do is create an environment where that is easily defined for the consumer. They immediately know what they do with a battery at the end of its life, depending on the type of battery, whether it's in their, you know, their battery drill, their microwave, their washing machine, or out of their mobile phone.

ALEX LATHBRIDGE:
And Paul, of course, to round this off, what would you say your one takeaway from this is?

PAUL SHEARING:
My one takeaway message I think is that batteries have been very well engineered, very rigorously tested, and the chances of anything going wrong for a given individual is really, really rare. So I mentioned earlier that we estimate this sort of chance of battery failure, somewhere between one in 10 million and one in 40 million. So the chances of your mobile phone battery going wrong, really, really rare occurrence. But nonetheless, we want to do everything that we can to understand the worst case scenario, and that's why we do things like the nail penetration test, and why we do a lot of research into abusing batteries so we can design even safer batteries moving forward. And there are load of options on the table in terms of how we can improve the safety of current generations of lithium ion batteries, both through improvements to the materials and the devices, and the control systems, but also next generation chemistries like solid state batteries, where we're removing some of the hazardous and flammable components in their entirety. So I think there's, you know, the risk is extremely low at the moment, but there's reason to be optimistic that that will continue to diminish as we move forward.

ALEX LATHBRIDGE:
Wonderful. I love ending on optimism. Guys, thank you so much. I think this is it for us. Both of you go. Have a wonderful rest of your morning. Go have lunch early. You've earned it, but, you know, make sure you do it safely.

PAUL SHEARING:
Thanks everyone. See you soon. Take care.

ANDREW GAUSDEN:
Yeah, yeah.

PAUL SHEARING:
All right. Bye.

(BRIGHT MUSIC)

ALEX LATHBRIDGE:
That's all for this episode of Brought to you by Chemistry. Join us next time where we'll be finding out how better batteries could make energy cheaper, more reliable and more accessible in the most remote communities across the globe. It was produced by here in Hiren Joshi and Elisabeth Ratcliffe, and presented by me, Alex Lathbridge.
(BRIGHT MUSIC)

Episode transcript:

(UPBEAT MUSIC)

NARRATOR:
Brought to You by Chemistry.

(UPBEAT MUSIC)

ALEX LATHBRIDGE:
Hi everyone. And welcome to Brought to You by Chemistry. “What's Brought to you by Chemistry?" I hear you ask. Complicated reactions, complicated exams, even more complicated romances? Yes, but in this case, it's also a podcast series from the Royal Society of Chemistry. So you see the branding there. My name is Dr. Alex Lathbridge and we are fully charged because in this series, we are taking a look at batteries, bringing together experts from inside and outside the world of chemistry to help us understand the ins and outs, the positive and negative, the ups and downs of all things batteries.

(UPBEAT MUSIC)

So thank you so much for being here. I guess my first question is, could I get you to introduce yourselves? I'm going to start with you, Brenda.

BRENDA PARK:
Sure. Hi, I'm Brenda Park. I am chief operations officer at StorTera. I studied Earth Science originally, so my degree is in Earth Science and then I did a PhD in physics. And now I am, yeah, as I said, Chief Operations Officer for an energy storage company called StorTera.

ALEX LATHBRIDGE:
Wow. And so, other guest, could you please introduce yourself?

PROF SATISH PATIL:
Hi, I'm Satish Patil, I am currently professor at Indian Institute of Science in Bangalore, India. I did my PhD in chemistry, my training I'm a chemist. So currently my research interest is in the area of energy storage, as well as in energy generation. Primary, our research is mainly focused on developing new organic materials for energy generation as well as storage application.

ALEX LATHBRIDGE:
OK, wonderful. So, just to be upfront with you, I have absolutely very little knowledge about batteries, like and battery storage and energy storage. So you are going to be teaching me a lot of things. I've got two experts here, so this is very nice for me. I get to start my morning learning, which is the best thing. So my first question, first couple of questions are for you, Satish. Could you please tell me what is the Sunrise Network?

PROF SATISH PATIL:
OK. Sunrise is in an international project essentially the main objective and goal of the Sunrise is to address the global energy poverty through developing next generation solar technologies as well as battery technologies. So this project is essentially led by Swansea University. This network unites several leading universities and industry collaborations from UK, as well as the global South in a very interdisciplinary research collaboration fashion. So this network aim to apply our research into renewable technologies to create an impactful solution for people and the planet.

ALEX LATHBRIDGE:
So you're talking about solar power here. I mean, how do batteries feature in this work? I mean, what's the importance of having batteries?

PROF SATISH PATIL:
Batteries are essential component of any energy component because batteries essentially store the energy, and batteries bring a number of environmental advantages. For example, by enabling a greater share of renewable energy in the power sector, they help to avoid this negative environmental impacts of fossil fuel or a nuclear based power, such as air function and corresponding efforts on human and ecological health, as well as I would say, also in a greenhouse gas emission. So batteries can be recovered, you can recycle.

And some of them, unlike fossil fuels, which are burned and lost forever, but when you use batteries, batteries can be recovered. But in any typical energy system during intermittent power, suppose during nighttime, when the solar energy is not essentially available, that time battery plays a very, very important role. They store the energy and they can release the energy as when you desire. So the batteries are very, very critical component of these renewable energy devices.

ALEX LATHBRIDGE:
OK. I mean, just, you have explained it a little bit, but to ask the question very simply, I mean, what is a flow battery? Cause I've never heard of those things before?

PROF SATISH PATIL:
So this is another a kind of electrochemical energy storage device. As in Redox Flow Battery, the chemical energy is stored in electrolytes in dissolved form of action material. So what happens in typical Redox Flow Battery, the electrolyte containing one or more dissolved species flows through electrochemical cell that converts chemical energy directly into electrical energy. Additionally, electrolytes, it's stored externally, generally in a external redox and is usually pumped through the cell or a stack of its cell.

And although, essentially the Flow batteries can be rapidly recharged by replacing the liquid, electrolytes, filling fuel tanks, or it is recovering the spent materials for re-energising. So if you just compare a Flow battery with the conventional battery, a conventional rechargeable battery, like for example, you could take example of lead-acid battery, a lithium-ion battery. They store the chemical energy in the form of active materials in electrodes and during charge and discharge of such batteries, the electrode materials oxidation and reduction reactions. Whereas in typical redox flow battery, the redox spares are stored in an external tank. So there is a difference between a conventional battery and redox flow battery.

ALEX LATHBRIDGE:
Wow. That's amazing. I'm learning so much. I mean, I'm now going to jump to you, Brenda. You are in the hot seat now, you better be ready.

(BRENDA LAUGHS)

Brenda, I mean, can you tell us about the new battery technology that StorTera is working on? I mean, what's happening where you are?

BRENDA PARK:
Yeah, sure. No problem. And thank you Satish for explaining what a flow battery is because that's what we're developing. We're developing a very exciting, kind of flow battery technology. It's not your common, like Vanadium redox is a very well-known type of flow battery. Ours is based on lithium sulphur technology. So currently lithium sulphur technology as a solid state battery is being developed for things like aerospace, or large format transportation, things that require high power density and high energy density. It's also quite a light battery compared to other lithium-ion systems. But there are problems with this technology.

So lithium sulphur has inherent challenges that need to be overcome before it's fully commercialised. So our flow battery is based on lithium sulphur technology, and it overcomes these inherent challenges that lithium sulphur technology has by being a flow battery. So we get the advantages that flow batteries offer. As Satish said, he only mentioned them being decoupled, power and energy being decoupled. That means you can scale your power and energy separately. So the electrolyte that's stored in an external tank with the flow battery can be as big as you want it to be. You can have that determines your energy capacity.

So you can have a huge tank or numerous tanks of electrolyte liquid. And that goes through your flow stack, which determines the power capacity, and both can be scaled independently. So you can have exactly the power and energy capacities that you need. Now, you can't get that with lithium-ion batteries. They are kind of encased permanently in, the cell has a predetermined power and energy density or capacity that you can't scale independently. So that's one of the great advantages of flow batteries. So we get to offer them along with the high energy density that lithium sulphur technology has.

So our flow battery is a lot more energy dense than other flow battery technologies. For example, Vanadium Redox is about 70 watt hours per litre, while ours is closer to 200 at the moment. Now, what does that mean? That means you need less space to get your energy capacity that you want. So you'd need a lot more area to get what you need, if that makes sense. Yeah. That's our flow battery. We call it the single liquid flow battery because unlike other flow batteries, we just have one liquid. So one tank, one pump, and that liquid gets pumped through the stack. Whereas normal flow batteries have two, a positive and a negative tank.

ALEX LATHBRIDGE:
OK. I mean, so we're talking about sort of these tanks, but like for a person, for our listeners sort of hearing this, what do these batteries look like? I mean, how big are they? What sort of shape are they? Because for me, the only battery I know comes in the sort of cylinder shape. What do these batteries look like?

BRENDA PARK:
Our flow battery is still very much in the lab. It's R&D stage. We've installed one prototype so far in 2017 on the west coast of Scotland in Knoydart. And that ran for two years successfully. So that one, this is kind of Mark I. Our first prototype was a black HDP tank, and that had the electrolyte in it. And the stack was really just a rectangular box next to it. But that's prototype stage and it's evolving. We're now building the next generation system that we're going to install for Perth and Kinross Council this summer. So it'll be part of a smart energy network we're building for the Council.

So that one really from the outside, it'll just look like a box, I think, but what's inside is evolving and improving with every iteration of the system that we do. When you get to grid scale, it will all be in containers. And we will have scale modular units, say 25 kilowatt units that will be within that container. If that helps.

ALEX LATHBRIDGE:
That makes... Honestly, that does help.

BRENDA PARK:
Good.

ALEX LATHBRIDGE:
I mean, it's very helpful. Otherwise I would think of these and probably listeners would think of these as these sorts of nebulous concept, or really huge, like AAA, AA batteries. They're just massive ones. So this might be a really stupid question. All right. But why do we need energy storage? Why? Like, what's the reason that we need this? Why can't we just all have like AA batteries sitting in drawers everywhere? Like, why do we need energy storage on such a huge scale?

BRENDA PARK:
I love this question because there's so many reasons why we need energy storage. First of all, we have this big race to net zero. We need to decarbonise. We need to remove our dependence on fossil fuels. And to do that we need renewable energy, like solar farms and wind farms. And very simply because the sun doesn't always shine and the wind doesn't always blow. We need energy storage to fill in those gaps. So store energy, when there's too much wind or solar and then release it when there isn't enough being generated or when demand is high.

So to get to a net zero grid, a net zero economy, we need energy storage to do that. Now in the UK, there is a thing that happens called wind curtailment. So that's when the grid cannot handle all the wind that's being generated. And when that happens, the wind farm owners are paid to turn off their turbines, which is crazy. In 2020, this happened 75% of the year. Wind farms were paid to shut down. So that was 3.7 terawatt hours were not generated.

ALEX LATHBRIDGE:
Why? That doesn't make sense. If I'm making energy, surely more energy is good and it comes from the wind. I don't see downsides here.

BRENDA PARK:
I know, you would think, but if there isn't demand at the time, the grid can't just take infinite amounts of energy, unless people are using it. And this happens at times when everyone could be asleep in bed, demand is low. So they have to be turned off or the grid just can't handle it. So it's expensive to the UK government, it's very expensive and that energy could have been stored in batteries and then delivered back to the grid or to customers. That's a problem. That's a real problem here in the UK. We need to sort that out. So we need batteries for that.

And then as we electrify heating and transport, so we're looking at EVs, we're looking at electrifying heating, demand is going to increase significantly. So we need more renewables, we need more batteries, also energy security. Look what's happening now with our dependence on Russia for gas, we need control of our energy here in the country. So loads of reasons, also energy storage allows you to do something called arbitrage. So you charge your battery when electricity is cheap or when there's lots of renewable energy available and then discharge it when prices are high or when generation is low or demand is high. If that makes sense. So it gives you this kind of flexibility. It gives you control, and it allows us to have more renewable energy on the grid.

ALEX LATHBRIDGE:
That's actually really clever, this arbitrage. I like it. In terms of batteries. Now you've both told me a lot about batteries, but in terms of lower income countries, I mean, how transformative can batteries be? I mean, it seems like they can have a big impact.

PROF SATISH PATIL:
They do actually. So because you see there's a rapid demand for energy, for urbanisation or industrialisation in the developing world. So this will also have a impact on the environment, but essentially if you have a clean energy to mitigate these problems, so the battery plays a very, very important role. I'll just take an example. India has pledged like 30 to 35% reduction in carbon emission intensity by 2030. For that to happen, a massive expansion electric mobility and renewable energy is essentially required.

Suppose if you just take a immobility or if you take an example of, you want to decarbonise electric mobility in India. The Indian automobile industry is very unique. The large number of two-wheelers are dominating the personal mobility segment. So for example, two-wheelers are close to nearly 80% of the total vehicles. So the development of battery technology focused on these vehicles is a bigger challenge.

So for the developing world, the demands are very different. For example, perhaps in a developed world, the majority of the focus is on a premium four-wheelers, if I simply take electric mobility as an example. But in a developing world, there are different types of vehicles, where we need to focus off developing batteries for decarbonised electric mobility. So how are we going to meet those energy demands without impacting the environment? So you need some environmental friendly solutions. So this is where the battery plays a very, very important role.

ALEX LATHBRIDGE:
Oh, wow. I mean, you've mentioned it a little bit, but to ask sort of specifically here, Satish, if you were to have battery technology, getting to a point where you were very happy with it, sort of in the next 5, 10, 20 years. I mean, what would the potential social impacts be there?

PROF SATISH PATIL:
OK. So I love this question, so I will take it up this one. So battery, again, plays a very important role for, it has also a huge social impact. I will give you an example. During pandemic, what happened, the entire education was sort of conducted on a digital platform. And there is a large number of community in a developing world, they are grid deprived community. When I say grid deprived means they do not have access to the electricity. So essentially that large number of population did not get the education during pandemic. Imagine they are having access to the electricity. Imagine they're having access to the Wi-Fi connections or internet.

They also could have got education. So this is a one very recent example where we experienced during pandemic, a large number of population, we could not provide the basic educations. So this will have a long term impact, a long term social impact. If we would've had a simple renewable energy solutions, for example, I can have a micro print of a different variance where I can use a free source of solar energy, but interfacing with the battery I can use that electricity during nighttime. So this would've solved a major problem and this would've also made a huge impact on this society. So that's one example. But during Sunrise, we also felt that we were implementing, for example, a small micro grids.

When I say micro grids, it involves two major component. One is solar and battery. What we felt in the places where there is no electricity, for example, a cooking midday meal, or people have a access for a bright room light, that makes a huge impact on education. So I find it, this has a direct correlations for the growth of the country, as well as it has major social implications. Having a clean access to the energy for the entire population it will going to address many, many problems on the planet.

ALEX LATHBRIDGE:
All right. And Brenda, I mean, what about you? Cause I mean, you might look at it from a slightly different angle. I mean, are there any major social impacts of batteries here in the UK?

BRENDA PARK:
Yeah. I can talk about the UK, but I'd also like to give an example of a developing country project as well. I'll do both. So our founder and CTO, Pasidu Pallawela, he's from Sri Lanka and he's running a project there that's energising a rural community that's located in a UNESCO World Heritage rain forest. So there's communities of people who live there and they have no energy, but they, and they have issues with elephant, conflict with elephants. So elephants come into their community and cause damage and they need a solution to keep these elephants away.

So they need lighting and a special kind of fencing. And they're creating a pathway that allow the elephants to pass through and allow the people to live safely and reducing the conflict between them in a humane manner, it's all being done, very sensitively to the environment and to the ecosystem there. So people are carrying by hand batteries and solar panels to this community, 'cause there's no roads, there's no routes to get there. So they're bringing solar energy to this community in a very sensitive way.

It's a nice project and that avoids the need to build roads or dig up routes for cables. And that would really damage the ecosystem. So that's a nice example of how batteries are helping overcome those challenges in a nice way. And then here in the UK. So while we're developing our flow battery, we have some products that we sell currently using lithium fluorophosphate batteries. And one of those is a small scale system, we call the store tower. So you could have one of these installed in your home. So we send them up to the Island of Hoy up in the Orkneys where there's a lot of fuel poverty in these remote islands because energy costs are really high. So people...

So we're installing our store towers along with solar panels for these homes. And that gives them energy independence, it reduces their bills and that in turn reduces fuel poverty. We've done about 10 systems so far, but the plan is on the Island of Hoy, we're working with the Hoy Development Trust is to roll it out to all the homes there. And our system is a bit different because we have an AI platform that manages the solar and the battery. It manages it intelligently and it uses all of the solar in the house intelligently. So it can divert energy to maybe a hot water tank or certain loads in the house to make sure it's all used in the house. So it doesn't export anything to the grid, which is important in a location like that, where the grid is very constrained.

There's a lot of renewables up there and the grid is struggling to manage them all. So the grid kind of doesn't want any more energy being exported there. So we've created this zero export, renewable energy, little system for the homeowners there that helps reduce fuel poverty.

ALEX LATHBRIDGE:
Right now, here in the UK, what are we actually using for energy storage if people on wind farms are being paid to turn off the sort of wind farms? I mean, what are we doing right now to store energy? Are we doing anything very good?

BRENDA PARK:
We are doing a lot. I mean, we have old, we've had pumped hydro in the country for years. We have some large pumped hydro sites. There's a lot of energy storage, utility scale storage being installed in the last couple of years. I think we have 1.7 gigawatts installed now. And these are mostly lithium-ion, large scale lithium-ion battery sites. And there's a lot more coming. There's a huge pipeline coming. And a lot of these are grid scales. So they're there working to support the grid. They're giving the grid energy when it needs it taking energy from the grid when it can't handle it. So we are doing a lot. We're getting there. But they are lithium-ion, mostly lithium-ion batteries, which have quite a, well, they have a lifetime of about 3000 cycles. So that would last say eight years if you cycled once a day.

But if you cycled twice a day, which you're more likely to do, it will only last four years. So that's not a very long time for such a large system to last, all the batteries that have to be replaced. So flow batteries offer a much longer lifetime, more like 20,000 cycles. So it will last 15 years, if you cycle twice a day, that kind of thing. That's where we are right now. There's a lot of new, a lot of innovation going on in the UK as well. BEIS, that's the Department for Business Energy and Industrial Strategy are funding, particular funding around looking at long duration energy storage. So that's batteries that can output power for more than one or two hours.

So you're looking more like four or five, eight hours, outputting for longer times. And that's seen as an important component of the energy mix of the future.

ALEX LATHBRIDGE:
Just on that topic, I guess, Satish, actually both of you will be able to answer this hopefully, but Satish sort of chemically, what happens to batteries, to these batteries, sort of flow batteries and the batteries that we've been talking about, what happens to these batteries at the end of their lives? Where do they go? What happens to them?

PROF SATISH PATIL:
Yeah, that's a very, very interesting and very important question, especially when we are addressing questions of net zero. There are different components in the battery. So I will give a specific and I'll come back to flow battery example a little bit later. But a type of electrolyte used in a battery has a major impact on the performance of a battery. It is essentially some substance, for example, in lithium-ion battery, the kind of electrolyte people use it can have a negative impact on human health. For example, sulfuric acid is a common electrolysed used in lead-acid battery, is a very good example of this problem. It has a negative impact on human health.

And lithium-ion batteries are not even, also having other issues. It's highly flammable. The current electrolyte using lithium-ion batteries are, it can form a toxic substance. And if they get released in an enclosed space, space such as in a garage or internal, so this can cause a lot of negative impact on the environment for they also use very sort of a highly toxic, it can also form highly toxic and cursorial byproducts, such as hydrogen fluoride. This is as you know, some of the issues with the lithium-ion battery. Whereas in a flow battery, at the moment, as Brenda mentioned, they are, some of the flow batteries are commercialised.

For example, Vanadium flow battery, but the kind of battery we are developing at this stage, one of the serious attempt is how we are going to recycle, because that's a major advantage with the flow battery. So this electrolyte tank, you can simply recycle, you can change the solvent tank, electrolyte into these external tanks, and you can recover back again those electrolytes. So that's a major, major advantage with the flow battery as compared to the conventional batteries like lithium-ion and lead-acid battery.

ALEX LATHBRIDGE:
OK. And so, Brenda, from your perspective, what happens to batteries at the end of their lives? Like from a business sort of perspective, what happens there?

BRENDA PARK:
Yeah, I just, I agree with Satish there, it's a major challenge with existing technologies. There's a lot of companies looking at it, what to do with these batteries at the end of life. There's a risk that we're going to have a battery waste mountain with all the EV batteries that are going to be used as we electrify transport. So this is really important to us. This, and I haven't mentioned this yet, but we want our flow battery to be a sustainable battery. There's no point bringing along more technology, more battery technologies if they're not sustainable. So we are trying to build a circular economy with our flow battery, and we're working with Zero Waste Scotland to do this.

And we want to source as much raw materials as we can from the UK to create supply chains if they're not already there. So our main materials like sulphur, sulphur is a byproduct of the oil and gas industry. So we could source our sulphur there. Lithium, we'd love to get lithium from used batteries, but as Satish says, it is challenging to get that lithium out of there and in a usable form. But there are people looking at that. And our main solvent is a byproduct of the wood processing industry. So we're engaging with that industry to see if we can source it, how much it would be, what purity level it is and that kind of thing.

So always trying to make it a circular economy and for it to be fully recyclable, that's our goal. We want it to be fully reusable at the end of life. So we have HDP tanks can be reused. The electrolyte can be used as Satish said. So it's a major challenge with current battery technologies, but new ones like ours are hopefully addressing this issue.

ALEX LATHBRIDGE:
One thing that, you sort of mentioned when it came to the UK and how we sort of process energy in the grid, can you explain, like, what is this idea of community energy? What is that?

BRENDA PARK:
Sure. So this is when a community owns a renewable energy asset. That could be a wind turbine. It could be a solar array. And the income that's generated by the asset is put back into the community. So the community can invest that in other projects like that Hoy project I mentioned is being funded by income that's been generated by a community owned wind turbine. So that's going to pay for the solar and storage that the homeowners are getting with income from a large turbine. So that's a really good example of that. Another example would be like a community owned solar installation on a community building like a clubhouse or something.

So if the building didn't have very high energy demand during the day, if you add a battery, then that community gets the better, they get to use all of their solar, they get better benefit. It reduces the bills, that kind of thing. Cause it's always better to use as much of the renewable energy that you generate to offset bills rather than sell it to the grid. Especially as energy prices are going up and up, you get the best benefit by offsetting your bills.

ALEX LATHBRIDGE:
OK. So let's say, my community or our listener, well, let's say our listeners, let's say they've got a community that want to really explore this idea of community energy. Maybe it's just a group. Maybe it's just some friends who really, really enjoy sharing power. How do batteries fit into this? I mean, how can a battery be involved here? How could one of your batteries help?

BRENDA PARK:
Yeah. So I am one of those people who sit in a community group who want to do something locally. It's harder than it sounds.

ALEX LATHBRIDGE:
Is it just you and your mates with like a doodle poll or something being like, "OK, you have to generate more power today. Well, I generated power last week. Can you believe it? Brenda doesn't even put her solar panel on, alright. Ugh!" Is it like that?

(BRENDA LAUGHS)

BRENDA PARK:
I wish. I don't even have solar panels, to my shame. I don't. Maybe in the future. Yeah, a kind of peer to peer. There is, you could have an app that sell... You could sell energy to your neighbours or your friends. That's been done. We worked on a project in London with EDF and Repowering London and there's solar and batteries on the roof of an apartment block in Brixton in London and homeowners within that block, they all own a little bit of the solar and the battery and they can sell energy to their neighbours if they haven't used it. So that's much more doable when you have a battery there. Otherwise you're kind of only during the day when the sun is generating. So the battery brings a lot more options into the mix.

PROF SATISH PATIL:
Yeah. May I add opinion on that same question? May I add something?

ALEX LATHBRIDGE:
Definitely. That's exactly what we want. Yes.

PROF SATISH PATIL:
You know, one of the example I can give in Sunrise, so we build a sort of a solar powered, smart building in a rural part of the India. So what essentially does is we have a, these solar panels integrated with the batteries. So where we make a large storage rooms because in a small community, in a interior India, where if farmers grow a, for example, flowers, farmers grow different vegetables, but they have to sell in a town or city, an urban. For example, somebody has to sell the flowers fresh in the next day morning, they can store the flowers in those cold storage. Similarly, it also helps in a dairy farm.

So the milk produced overnight, it perhaps may go bad if you do not store at very low temperature. So having access for the community, they can all make use of these smart buildings, store their products in those smart buildings and sell the next day as the fresh atom. So this way, whatever the farmers generate in an interior part of the country, they can next day morning, they can sell it off as a... and they can still make it the same benefit. So this is the way these small battery solutions will help for such community.

ALEX LATHBRIDGE:
Now, with that in mind, this is actually my last question for both of you. I'll start with you, Satish. Is it better if I were to set up some sort of community, community energy, or even for an entire country like the UK, is it better to have one big battery with lots of storage or a network of smaller batteries?

PROF SATISH PATIL:
The demands are very, very high. For one kind of battery is very hard to meet all those demands. So currently, it is the battery technology, there is no single battery technology will meet that demand. Each battery technology has its own limitations, as Brenda mentioned. Suppose if I put a lithium-ion battery, it has its own limitations. It has also lifetime maintenance, cost becomes an issue.

So at the moment we do not have any solution for completely, to make a transition from fossil fuel to the renewable energy resources, because there are no solutions available as such. This is true in case of solar energy generation. This is true in case of energy storage, which is battery. So we have to come up with new battery technologies. We have to also come up with new emerging solar cell technologies. Cost play very, very important role here. Cost is very, very critical. And remember that you are always competing with the fossil fuel cost so that whenever you are providing a solution, you have to outsmart the existing technology. So for that purpose, it is very, very important to have a very cost effective energy generation devices, as well as energy storage.

ALEX LATHBRIDGE:
And so, Brenda, same question to you. Is it better to have one big battery with a huge amount of storage or lots of little batteries with smaller storage?

BRENDA PARK:
Sure. Great question. And yes, difficult one to answer. So I'm going to cop out and say, both. Both have their role to play. Stanford put out a report that's kind of predicting what the future's going to look like. And they see a battery in every home. And that battery, that's your energy for the day in that battery. You will get a set price, you will pay a set price for that battery. And when that, so you don't have these peak prices and you don't have high prices and low prices throughout the day. It's just, you take your energy from the battery that's been charged when there was energy available, it's just a much more manageable...

It's almost like it would be like a subscription service. You just pay a fixed amount to have that battery in your house, and that will charge your car and your house, everything you needed to do. And it's cheaper for everyone. There's less billing costs and all that. So that has a role to play. Cost, I think, costs are still too high for everyone to have a battery in their home because it costs money to generate energy and all a battery does is store it and release it. So you really only want that to cost a couple of pens per kilowatt hour, if you've already had to pay to generate it. So costs need to come down for a smaller scale system.

And then larger batteries are needed to support the grid and they're needed to support industrial applications and bigger things like that. And you do get economies of scale. So you do get cheaper with larger batteries, but we do need new technologies that are lower cost, more sustainable, longer lifetime, which we happen to be making. So yeah, things like ours are needed to create the future grid that we need.

ALEX LATHBRIDGE:
I love it. I love a good green grid. And hopefully we can look forward to seeing it in my lifetime at least. So, I mean, those are all my questions. Thank you so much. This has been really great. Like in the space of one hour, I have had an entire, like new world open to me. So thank you so much.

BRENDA PARK:
You're very welcome. Thanks, Alex.

PROF SATISH PATIL:
Thanks you, Alex.

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ALEX LATHBRIDGE:
That's all for this episode of Brought to You by Chemistry. Join us next time, where we'll be going from start to finish, and then back to the start and finding out how scientists are trying to make the batteries of tomorrow more recyclable. It was produced by Hiren Joshi and Elisabeth Ratcliffe and presented by me, Alex Lathbridge.

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Episode transcript:

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NARRATOR:
Brought to You by Chemistry.

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ALEX LATHBRIDGE:
Hi everyone and welcome to Brought to You by Chemistry. What's Brought to You by Chemistry? I hear you ask. Complicated reactions, complicated exams, even more complicated romances? Yes, but in this case, it's also a podcast series from the Royal Society of Chemistry. So you see the branding there. My name is Dr. Alex Lathbridge, and we're fully charged, because in this series, we are taking a look at batteries. Bringing together experts from inside and outside the world of chemistry to help us understand the ins and outs, the positive and negative, the ups and downs of all things batteries.

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So I am going to start with the very difficult question. Could I please get you to introduce yourselves? And I'm going to start with you, Jyoti.

DR JYOTI AHUJA:
OK, so my name's Jyoti Ahuja, I'm a research fellow at the University of Birmingham Law School. And my research focus is on sort of how do we regulate science and technology to achieve sustainability? So I've worked for a number of years on the Faraday Institution ReLiB project, where we looked particularly at EV batteries, how do we regulate, you know, EV batteries to develop a circular economy? I'm now sort of taking that research back a little bit to the root, I'm working on something called the Met4Tech project. And what I'm looking at now is how are we going to source and supply all of the critical material that goes into making those EV batteries and lots of other products? And how are we going to make sure that we continue to have supplies of this stuff that we need to go green?

ALEX LATHBRIDGE:
Now you've seen it done, Rob, can I please get you to introduce yourself?

DR ROBERTO SOMMERVILLE:
Hi, I'm Rob Sommerville. I'm a Faraday Institution research fellow at the University of Birmingham. I'm working on the ReLiB project, looking at physical processing techniques in the recycling of lithium-ion batteries.

ALEX LATHBRIDGE:
So Jyoti, the first thing I'm going to ask you is, very briefly, 'cause I'm going to ask you again later, but very briefly, could you break down, what is it that you do?

DR JYOTI AHUJA:
What do I do? I basically look at the regulation of science and technology. So I'm a legal researcher essentially. And what I do is work on how do we regulate science and technology to be sustainable, to achieve sustainability and circular economy goals. So I started by working on EV batteries. That was my first project. And I looked at how do we develop, you know, the legal structures needed to bring EV batteries into a sustainable chain. I now work on the building blocks of those batteries. I now look at the technology metals, the nickel, the cobalt, the lithium that we need to manufacture these batteries, and how are we going to continue to get an ongoing supply?

ALEX LATHBRIDGE:
Oh, wow. So you're properly going in, like in depth there.

DR JYOTI AHUJA:
That's right, that's right. So we're going back to the roots in a way, you know, to the building blocks of all these materials that we are going to need for the green technologies that will shape a more sustainable future.

ALEX LATHBRIDGE:
So going back to basics and back to the building blocks, Rob, could you please very briefly tell us what is it that you do?

DR ROBERTO SOMMERVILLE:
So I'm looking at how we can separate out the various components in lithium-ion batteries so that the more cost intensive and energy intensive recycling processes such as hydrometallurgy can get a cleaner feed stock of materials so that their processes can be more cost effective, less energy intensive, and generally better. In an ideal world, the physical separation processes would be so amazing that we could directly reincorporate the actual materials from an old lithium battery into a new one, but that would rely on the crystal structure of the battery to still be intact, which is not necessarily the case for a battery that's had a long, hard life.

ALEX LATHBRIDGE:
I mean, when you say like...

DR ROBERTO SOMMERVILLE:
I'm going into too much detail here.

ALEX LATHBRIDGE:
I mean, you don't have to but when you said, "Oh, a battery that's had a long, hard life. Like this battery has been, you know, going to a job day to day, had to pay taxes, you know, had to deal with landlords, like a battery that's really had a difficult life experience. I like that.

DR ROBERTO SOMMERVILLE:
There's a lot of production scrap, which has not had a long, hard life. It will have been rejected during the manufacturing process because they didn't like one small aspect of it. They found that it maybe has a wrinkle or a crease or some kind of short circuit or something. So it was rejected before it even left the factory. These batteries will not have been cycled. So the active material will still be in a wonderful, pristine condition.

And this represents, it varies depending on manufacturer, but some may be up to 20%, 20% of the material that's produced is rejected. So this is the sort of material that would be very well suited for a direct recycling approach, which is where it doesn't go through a hydrometallurgical process to break it down into the individual metals. And you could just reincorporate the active material back into a cell.

ALEX LATHBRIDGE:
We're going to come back to that don't worry. You can't get all your battery juice out right now, because this does lead me onto a question for Jyoti. Like when it comes to recycling, I mean, what for you are like the big questions that you sort of ask and try to answer in your research? Cause the stuff that you do is really, really broad.

DR JYOTI AHUJA:
Yeah, so when it comes to recycling, I'll talk about batteries because that's a sort of good example of the problems that we face with recycling, right? So lithium-ion batteries are obviously the batteries that are being used to power the new technology for cars, electric cars. We didn't have these batteries in the cars that we've used traditionally until now, the petrol and DC cars. We have had lithium-ion batteries around for some time, they're used to power our smartphones, they're used to power our laptops. But the size and volume of battery that you're going to need to power an EV is huge and enormous.

Recycling these lithium-ion batteries is really challenging that, you know, it's the kind of work that people like Rob do, but it's really challenging for many reasons because it's very different from the traditional batteries that we used in the traditional automotives. So the lithium-ion batteries used in electric cars, they're not standardised. They come in a whole variety of designs, a whole variety of different chemistries. And so you can't really sort them very easily to be recycled because different chemistries need different recycling processes. The technology itself is still in development for recycling these batteries. And that's what people like Rob are working on. Our biggest problem in the UK is that we don't have the infrastructure needed to recycle lithium-ion batteries.

So at the moment, we've only had to deal with small volumes of these batteries from very small devices. We've tended to deal with this mostly by exporting these batteries out to other countries to be recycled. But once you know, enough numbers of EV batteries, big, large, enormous EV batteries start to get older, and they start to come off the cars, we are going to have a much bigger problem on our hands. We're going to find it very hard to transport them. Firstly, they're very unsafe and hazardous to transport and move around. They could blow up at any point, they could explode. They could release all kinds of toxic gases.

So we have to build our own recycling infrastructure very quickly. But then there are economic problems with that, because it's a sort of chicken and egg. In order to build a recycling plant, I need a feed stock of batteries coming in, a good, large number of feed stock, to make it profitable. But the batteries haven't started to age yet in sufficient numbers. So who's going to want to be interested in recycling them, or setting up a recycling plant when there isn't enough stuff to recycle?

ALEX LATHBRIDGE:
Ah, OK. That's actually really interesting, so what you're saying is like, you know that in the future, this is going to be super necessary, but right now it's like, you're trying to go to businesses and be like, Hey, hey, hey, hey, right now you're not going to make a profit, all right, and I know there's no economic interest for you do it right now, but trust me, just pay a lot of money now, and you know, keep your business going somehow. And then in the future, you're going to make money."

DR JYOTI AHUJA:
Absolutely, absolutely. Yeah, pretty much. How are you going to convince somebody to put loads of money up front, with nothing coming back for a little while, and just promises of something possibly coming back in the future?

ALEX LATHBRIDGE:
Oh wow. OK, so that from a sort of real world infrastructure, I get, and I sort of depressingly, I kind of understand that.

DR ROBERTO SOMMERVILLE:
I'd like to interject.

ALEX LATHBRIDGE:
Yes, oh, thank you. This is exactly what it's for.

DR ROBERTO SOMMERVILLE:
There've been a couple of announcements. Veolia have announced a recycling plant in the West Midlands. I think they said it should be opening in autumn. Can't remember which year, it might be next year or this year. I assume that's going to be a copy and paste of what their existing process in, I think France. Glencore have also announced a recycling facility on the South Coast, and they're collaborating with Britishvolt?

DR JYOTI AHUJA:
Britishvolt, I think.

DR ROBERTO SOMMERVILLE:
Yes. And I believe they're going to be shipping materials by boat around, across the East Coast of the UK. So people are starting, but yeah, as Jyoti said, currently there isn't a large scale facility in the UK, and it would be really neat if there was. There are also a few SMEs that are looking at tackling the problem, small to medium enterprises. So these are companies which might already be taking in batteries. Currently, there's a lot of companies which take in batteries, sort them, package them, and export them to recyclers in the EU, that was working fine. But now we've got Brexit, that's less fine. It's also very expensive for transport batteries because they require some very robust packaging in order to make sure that you don't have an impromptu barbecue in transit.

ALEX LATHBRIDGE:
So basically, you are saying it's very difficult to do so they don't explode.

DR ROBERTO SOMMERVILLE:
It's perfectly feasible to do it so they don't explode, it's just very expensive. You need to make sure that your packaging can stop a fire from propagating a lot. And depending on how damaged the cells are, if it's a very large pack and it's been in a car crash, you're going to have some very expensive packaging required to make sure that it doesn't reignite or doesn't catch fire or reignite in transit. But if it's just production scrap, it's probably going to be fine.

If it's a discharged battery, it's probably going to be fine, but it's still, you can't just stick it in a brown paper bag and stick it in the post. It needs to be properly packaged, safely packaged. And that's expensive, especially when you're sending it overseas to be recycled in the EU. It would be far better if it were recycled here. So we could retain those strategic elements and critical materials that we cannot source locally.

ALEX LATHBRIDGE:
I mean, as soon as you said, sort of brown paper bag and then economically feasible, I saw Jyoti's face just sort of go, "Oh no. These things are very difficult and I've been trying for so long.

DR JYOTI AHUJA:
So the thing is, you know, for all that we know in the books, so the law in the books would say that you can't put them in a brown paper bag and transport them. We've known of people who possibly don't know that, and have tried to do quite just that. So again, you know, I think the hazards of these batteries aren't well enough known. That's another real challenge that we have with these batteries. I don't think people who do the normal, you know, career delivering and things know enough about lithium-ion batteries to know that they need special packaging, that they're classified as hazardous material for transport. So we've heard of some pretty hair-raising incidents.

ALEX LATHBRIDGE:
Very briefly, do you know, are you legally allowed to tell us any hair-raising incidents?

DR JYOTI AHUJA:
Not the specifics, not the specifics. But I'll give you an example, for instance, you know, one of the things that people have tried to do with these batteries, so when a lithium-ion battery comes off an electric car, you know, when it reaches a point where it can't really power the car, it's still got quite a lot of power in it, you know, because moving an electric car needs loads and loads of power, but there's other things that you can do with say, 80% of capacity that's still left in the battery. So people have tried for example, to put it to, you know, various forms of second use.

And that's a really good way to get lots of value out of the battery. So you might be able to use it for example, as an energy storage device or, you know, something to back up the grid, power systems or whatever, but because people don't know enough about how to do this safely, and there isn't enough regulation at the moment in the UK, you know, that forces you to do it safely, we've heard of people taking these sorts of lithium-ion batteries and installing them, for example, in their house, in some very sort of, you know, within the premises next to a boiler. All sorts of terrible stuff could happen if it blew up. And many of these are just risks waiting to happen.

ALEX LATHBRIDGE:
Oh, good to know. I'm glad you've told me that, because in my head I was like, ah, you know what? That sounds like a really good idea. I'm just going to take quite a big battery out of a electric car that I don't have, and stick it next to my boiler. Yeah, that's a sound, that's a class idea. I'm going to do that.

So thank you, thank you for telling me that. I mean, so we were all talking about sort of safety here, I think for the crux of it, just so I understand and listeners understand, I think the question for you, Rob, how does one recycle a battery safely? Like what happens there?

DR ROBERTO SOMMERVILLE:
OK, so there's three main approaches at the moment. There's pyrometallurgy, which is where you put the battery into a furnace and melt out the valuable metals. There's hydrometallurgy, which is where you shred it, sort out the components, and only expose the active material to some strong acids. And then there's direct recycling, which is what people are researching at the moment, but is yet to be proven on a large scale.

ALEX LATHBRIDGE:
So, which is the best?

DR ROBERTO SOMMERVILLE:
Right. So we don't like pyrometallurgy as much, because materials such as lithium tend to end up in the slag or the dust phase. And it's generally not recycled. People have been publishing research about extracting lithium from the slag, but it's not clear on whether or not it's being done on a large scale. Graphite is consumed as a reducing agent. Aluminium is consumed as a reducing agent. You will not be recovering all of the materials through a pyrometallurgical process, but there is a lot of existing infrastructure which can be used to recycle in this manner.

And you can put any old battery into a pyrometallurgical furnace. You can co-process batteries along with some ore, so you've got some cobalt smelters that see lithium-ion batteries as tasty morsels full of cobalt that can help to supplement their cobalt ore supply, and increase the cobalt content of their product. That's great for them. They're not battery recyclers, but they are kind of recycling batteries. So yeah, sure, that works. New recyclers that are starting up new businesses tend to go with a hydrometallurgical approach.

So this is where you will stabilise the battery either by discharging it and then shredding it, or by shredding it under an inert atmosphere such as CO2 or argon, then they will separate out the components, remove the casing, remove the plastics, separate the active material from the copper foil and the aluminium foil, and then dissolve just the active material into the very strong acids, and then use some solvent extraction to separate out high purity sorts of nickel, cobalt, manganese. And they'll also be recycling the lithium, ideally, as well. So for direct recycling, instead of dissolving the materials in acid, they will reincorporate the high purity active material straight back into a cell, maybe with a little bit of relithiation, to put back in the little bit of lithium that was lost in the process.

Hydrometallurgy is the best available technology at the moment, because it is suitable for production scrap as well as cells, which have had a long, hard life on the road. Direct recycling would be ideal for production scrap, but isn't yet proven on a large scale. And pyrometallurgy is a well-established approach, and there's a lot of capacity to pyrometallurgically recycled materials, but it's very energy intensive, it's very carbon intensive, and it doesn't recycle all the materials.

ALEX LATHBRIDGE:
I mean, wow. I mean, wow, that's, those are lots of different ways. I'm glad that, you know, one of the methods you mentioned is essentially put the battery in a shredder, in an environment, and pray that it does not explode. So I like that. I'm breaking down your research into something that's very simple and potentially wrong, but you know, very briefly, you've sort of laid it all out there. What are you specifically working on when it comes to batteries? Just very briefly.

DR ROBERTO SOMMERVILLE:
So I'm looking at improving the separation processes that come between the shredded material and the hydrometallurgical processes. So for this, you've got some very low density non-conductive plastic in the separator, you've got some pouch materials, which is the same sort of material you might get in your coffee bags, or you've got some hard steel shells, like you might get in a cylindrical battery. And you want to remove these so that you have a mixture of aluminium with your active material, and copper with your graphite. So then you want to separate out these active materials from your foils, and get them at as high a purity as possible.

When the active material is dissolved in these strong acids, the aluminium will not be recycled, and it will be a wasted material. If you can try and keep as much of the aluminium in its metallic form as possible so that it doesn't get dissolved in strong acids, you can save an awful lot of the embedded energy and the embedded carbon cost that was used in producing this metallic aluminium. It takes about nine times as much energy to make aluminium out of bauxite, as it does aluminium out of old aluminium.

ALEX LATHBRIDGE:
You've told me a lot of science here, a lot of chemistry here, there's a lot going on in terms of recycling. So obviously we are advancing in terms of recycling, but putting it into the real world context, Jyoti, if all of this is happening, all of this advancement in our ability to do it, why isn't it happening? And you mentioned sort of economic factors, but are there other challenges like legal, or you know, what have you? Why isn't this a thing?

DR JYOTI AHUJA:
Yeah, that's a really good question. So, you know, you have people like Rob and, you know, other scientists like him doing all his great work, trying to recover the useful stuff from the battery that we really need. The problem is recycling costs money, right? It doesn't come cheap. It's not devoid of significant cost. Now at the moment, you know, I think for such a long time, we've all worked on a very linear model, a very linear way of looking at production and consumption. So, you know, we've always thought of stuff as being something, you know, you make, and you use, and you throw away. And that's because we've focused always on just the pure money side of things, you know, how much does it cost me to buy a product?

How much does it cost me to manufacture it? What does it cost me to throw away? What we haven't perhaps factored in very well, you know, into our equations, as a society, is what is the environmental cost and what is the social cost of just constantly drawing resources from the earth and chucking them away? And because we don't factor that into our calculation, it might seem to us that buying virgin material, stuff that hasn't been used before, might actually seem cheaper than buying recycled material, because obviously the recycling is going to add to the cost.

So on the face of it, we sometimes think that buying fresh lithium that's just been mined, or fresh nickel, or fresh cobalt, is cheaper on the market than buying recycled metals. But it isn't really, because that's a very shortsighted way of looking at things. Eventually we are going to run out of this stuff, and then what are we going to do? So firstly, we need regulatory and legal models that make us include the environmental and social cost of that manufacturing into the market value, so that it doesn't look like virgin material is cheaper than recycled material, so that you have a truer picture of what the cost is. So we need better incentives for people to use recycled material. We also need, you know, a bit more obligation, a bit more requirements to be put onto producers, to make stuff that's easy and cheaper to recycle.

So for example, one of the biggest barriers in recycling, one of the biggest costs of recycling EV batteries is the design of the batteries itself. You know that they can be hugely difficult to take apart. They can be really difficult to get the important, critical materials out of them. If batteries were designed better, if people thought about the end of life, right at the beginning of the product, and designed a battery to be easier to disassemble and easier to recycle, we could hugely reduce the cost of recycling, you know, enormously. But then perhaps this isn't going to happen by itself. We need laws and we need appropriate regulation to make that happen.

ALEX LATHBRIDGE:
Oh, OK, OK. So what you said there, it makes sense to me, and I get that. And I guess I'm kind of, I guess, a little bit disheartened that it's not happening already. You know, I mean, is that an issue with like, infrastructure in the UK? Is it that the UK doesn't have the ability to do that yet? I mean, what does it look like in the UK?

DR JYOTI AHUJA:
Not at all, not at all. And you know, perhaps it's a mistake to think of this as problems that nobody's thinking about. People are thinking about this, you know, again, when it comes to infrastructure, as Rob pointed out, there are a few brave players who have, you know, despite the fact that there aren't enough batteries to recycle at the moment, who have made a commitment to start building recycling plants in the UK. They're not up and running yet, but they will be soon. So we've got Britishvolt, we've got Glencore. Will these, you know, two or three or few people be able to recycle all of the batteries that come through?

I'm not sure, let's hope that more players enter the market and we can meet our needs in the UK for all the recycling that we need soon. When it comes to regulation, you know, I mean, the UK has been very preoccupied, haven't we, in the last few years with the whole kind of complications of Brexit and things. But there is active, you know, consultation going on by regulatory agencies who are trying to build the new battery regulations for the UK. The EU has moved along. The EU has just, in 2020, released a set of proposals where they are trying to address all of these problems with batteries' regulation. And this is not a reason to get disheartened.

So one of the reasons why regulation is lagging behind is because, you know, we're working to old regulation, we're working to 2006 regulations for batteries. There were no EVs then, you know, the regulation didn't need to worry about these EV challenges. But now that EVs have started to come out in a big way, we need to adapt the regulation. We need to build new regulations. So the EU has already released proposals to overhaul all of the battery regulations.

It's not fixed yet, but they have come out with some really good proposals to address these problems. In the UK, of course we are now post-Brexit, so we don't have to follow EU regulation anymore. The question is, what are we going to do now within the UK? And this is an opportunity as well as a challenge, because it means that we've also got a chance now to rewrite our regulations in a way that we can manage our batteries really well and really effectively. So the opportunity's out there, we've just got to make sure we take it.

DR ROBERTO SOMMERVILLE:
Manufacturers could do a lot to make things easier to recycle, but there's no incentive for them to do so. From a manufacturer's perspective, they want to get as much electricity in and out of as small and light a box as possible, in as short a time as possible. They're not really going to care about recyclability, because there's very few manufacturers that are also recyclers. The recycling is someone else's problem. When they manufacture the pack, they'll often weld modules together. They will use adhesives, which are difficult to break apart, and that makes things difficult. There's also no information describing what is inside the pack.

It would be ideal if we can recycle different battery chemistries separately, you don't want to mix your lithium-ion phosphate with your nickel manganese and cobalt oxides, because they could really do with completely separate recycling processes, so that we can limit the ion contamination in the NMC, and NMC contamination in your lithium-ion phosphate. There's talk of battery passport system, which would be really neat, and I would love that to happen as soon as possible. Having a label on the outside that describes what is inside the cells would be really helpful, but I would be pleasantly shocked if anyone tries to make recycling easier, unless they're made to do so by regulation.

ALEX LATHBRIDGE:
One moment, because you said something earlier that my eyes lit up, you can't tell because the video's off so I can get better audio quality. Maybe, Jyoti, you've heard about this, but what is a battery passport? Because, either of you, what's a battery passport? The batteries have passports?

DR JYOTI AHUJA:
So it's a sort of way of tracing, you know, the journey of the battery across its lifespan. It's a sort of certification system. So this is something that's come up in the new EU proposals. It's what the EU wants to do in its new batteries regulation, is a way of certifying a battery so that you can actually better assess the battery at the end of its life, and decide what's the best way to manage this battery. It will give you important data, A, about where the material has come from, you know, things that might have happened to the battery, what its current state of health might be. So it helps you manage the battery better. I don't know if you want to add anything to that, Rob, in terms of the battery passport from the technical side?

DR ROBERTO SOMMERVILLE:
Being able to know that your cobalt hasn't been mined artisanally by children in a war zone is also a nice, comforting fact. Traceability, where your materials came from, so that you know that it's been ethically sourced, it's made up of X percent recycled material. This would all be very good, especially if producers are going to try and help consumers make a better informed choice about what is in the products that they're buying.

It might not necessarily always be the cheapest thing to buy a product which was ethically produced, but some consumers might be willing to pay that little bit more, to make sure that the products that they're buying are low-carbon, were produced without exploiting people, and other such green things.

ALEX LATHBRIDGE:
You know, there are products like phones, you know, laptops, you know, you can very much see ethics, like this is ethically sourced. People understand that. And they'll take a moment to think about it, because you know, it's quite a big deal. The batteries are batteries. You know, I don't think about my batteries. I buy them bulk, you know, 24 at a time. So I'm not going to be sitting there going, "Oh, you know, which one is more ethical? I don't really have time to think about that. I know it sounds immoral, when we've spoken about just how batteries are sourced, but I'm talking about myself mentally as a consumer.

You know, I might know a certain thing ethically, but in the moment, I'm not going to wait to read about it. So Jyoti, in terms of like legislation, and making it as easy as possible for that to happen, or removing the ability for people to buy batteries that have essentially come from, you know, exploitative, sometimes child labour, how do you make that happen? You know, you say we are working from a 2006 guideline, like way before I did my GCSEs.

DR JYOTI AHUJA:
That's a really good question. And it's a really huge challenge that we face now. Now here's the problem. You know, a lot of the material that goes into making a battery, for example, doesn't come from within the UK, it comes from lots of global sources, and it can't come from the UK because obviously it relies on mining. It depends on what deposits you've got in your particular area. So we can't say, "Oh, let's start getting our cobalt from the UK," for example. If there aren't cobalt deposits in the UK, you have to go global to get them. It's obviously a lot harder to regulate things in another country. It's a lot harder to keep an eye on them.

But I was just going to say, as Rob was speaking, you know that things like battery passports and so on, they're a very good idea, but what they also need, if we want things like that to work, is, they need people to start caring a bit about this kind of stuff. And I think the bigger problem is that people don't know enough about what goes on. You know, I mean, batteries aren't terribly interesting, are they, you know, they're just there somewhere. What we don't realise, I think, is how much of our lives as we know them are dependent on this stuff that goes into the battery.

Perhaps we don't know enough about why we should care, but things like battery passport are what we call softer regulation, because what they do is they don't force the manufacturer to get their stuff from good sources, but they do make it more obvious and transparent to the buyer, whether something is coming from, so it's up to the buyer making the right choices. So we call it soft regulation. Hard regulation would be a law that makes it, that sort of outlaws, you know, a battery manufacturer not checking their sources, not checking what goes on there, forces them to buy responsibly sourced cobalt. Now we don't like, the UK, traditionally, we don't like hard regulation if we can avoid it, we don't want to interfere too much, you know, in the market.

We don't want to make rules so hard and so difficult that nobody wants to get into manufacturing a product. So we are trying to walk a tightrope all the time. We're trying to balance things out, but I think people have started to care a little bit about ethical sourcing, about responsible sourcing. What we would rely on is, you know, people like yourselves perhaps to take this message out a bit more about why this is important, and why we need to make the right choices. And then regulations like battery passports will actually start to have an effect.

ALEX LATHBRIDGE:
That's so interesting. And like, in terms of that combination of soft regulation over hard regulation, what do you think the future will actually look like? I mean, and what do you hope that it will look like? What is the end goal for you, in 10 years, 20 years, 30 years?

DR JYOTI AHUJA:
In terms of regulation? So I would say that we need really strong what we call EPR, extended producer responsibilities, to be placed on people who manufacture the batteries. So, EPR is a concept, it's used in lots of product, used for lots of products where managing the product at the end of life is difficult. So plastics and packaging, where we are worried that a product could pollute the environment at the end of its life. And the idea of EPR basically is that the person that was responsible for manufacturing the product should also pay for it to be handled properly at the end of its life, rather than if they just manufactured something, put it out on the market, and leave it for somebody else to handle the problem.

So extended producer responsibility makes the producer responsible for the end of life. Now in batteries, producers do have some responsibilities. They have to show that they've, for example, if I'm an EV battery manufacturer, I have a responsibility to take the battery back at the end of its life. So if somebody rings me up and says, My EV battery's no good any longer, it's sitting here in my garage, come and pick it up, I have to pick it up. But you need stronger obligations than that. You need to have stronger responsibilities than that.

So they should have some targets to show that at least a certain percentage of the batteries that they sold, they brought back into the supply chain. The other thing, you know, and this is something that the EU is doing, the EU is going to make sure that the new batteries regulations don't just give you one broad target, you know, saying you have to recycle 50% of your whole battery, that it's going to be much more targeted regulation.

So the EU is going to want battery manufacturers to show that they've recovered so much of the cobalt, so much of the lithium, so much of the nickel. We need to go down that path in the UK, so that we actually recover the stuff we really want, rather than stuff that we don't care about much one way or the other.

ALEX LATHBRIDGE:
OK, now, one of my final questions for both of you is going to be, if you could have listeners take one thing away from this, what would it be? But I'm not going to ask that question just yet. So you get time to think about it, Jyoti. Rob on the other hand, gets some more questions before we get to that point. He doesn't get the chance to think about that. So Rob, in terms of the future now, like looking ahead, what do you reckon that the future of recycling, realistically, here in the UK, will look like? Is it going to be like super-efficient? Is it going to be super good? Like will the UK even be the leader? Will it come from somewhere else around the world? What's going to happen in the future, Rob? Tell me, so I can place a bet on it.

DR ROBERTO SOMMERVILLE:
In the future, I expect that lots of countries will be recycling their own materials, because transporting whole batteries is expensive.

It is less safe than shipping just shredded materials, or just active material. So I'd expect a sort of hub and spoke approach to be taken throughout the country. So you'll have a hub which will do the expensive, energy intensive hydrometallurgical recycling approach. Then you'll have spokes that will have shredding and sorting or maybe disassembly, and you'll have regional sub-centres that might shred a cell, because transporting a shredded cell is a lot safer than transporting a whole cell, and they can transport just the relevant components to these hubs. I'd expect, in a country the size of the UK, two, maybe three, large recycling facilities that will do the hydrometallurgical recycling.

And these can feed these materials directly into factories, which are producing new batteries. Hopefully, we will no longer be exporting the materials that we need to import to make our own batteries. We're not going to be able to completely stop all imports, because the recycling is never going to keep up with the fresh demand, but we can hopefully reduce our reliance on some of these imports.

ALEX LATHBRIDGE:
I mean, that sounds, that's a measured response.

DR ROBERTO SOMMERVILLE:
It is.

ALEX LATHBRIDGE:
Yeah, that's a measured response. OK. I mean, of course my last question, I've mentioned it. I'm going to start with you Jyoti. If you could have listeners, you know, wonderful listeners, who've got this far, to take one thing away from this entire conversation, what would it be?

DR JYOTI AHUJA:
I think what I'd like people to perhaps think about is the reason that batteries aren't terribly interesting to us is because we are not aware of just how much of our lives is dependent on these lithium-ion batteries. Our lives, as we know it, would be completely different without these, you know, without our smartphones, without our laptops, without our, you know, all of the devices that run on them. The material to make these batteries isn't going last forever. It's running out. We need to start thinking about, you know, sustainability and circular economy.

We hear these words, but if we don't start thinking along those lines, then our lives are not going to be the same, we're not going to be able to carry on as we have. And so, you know, the whole kind of move to electric cars, it's one of the biggest technology shifts of our lifetime. We have a real chance here to start thinking about doing this in a sustainable way, about using circular economy principles so that we can carry on doing this. You know, we shouldn't lose this opportunity. This is the time. More sustainable products might cost more, but that's only, you know, because we're looking at the short term. In the long term, if we don't start to do this, our lives are going to change.

ALEX LATHBRIDGE:
Oh, wow. Rob, I'm going to give you an extra second to think about your answer, because one thing I didn't ask, Jyoti, is there anywhere in the world right now that you think that we can learn from in regards to, you know, recycling?

DR JYOTI AHUJA:
It's a challenge for everybody, because electric cars have come in very suddenly. We are in the middle of a transition, transitions are never easy, they always bring challenges. The EU has come up, like I said, with some really good proposals for new battery regulation, which can really, you know, target some of these problems, the regulation, they haven't come into force yet. They're just proposals at the moment. But if it takes off, you know, there are some really useful things there that we in the UK could pick up on and carry on using. But no, everywhere is struggling with this challenge at the moment, but here's our chance. We can rewrite the regulations now, to really achieve what we want to for a sustainable future.

ALEX LATHBRIDGE:
Oh wow, that's so optimistic. And I'm actually really happy about that. Rob, what about you? If there's one thing you could have listeners take away from this conversation, what would it be?

DR ROBERTO SOMMERVILLE:
Actually recycle your batteries, but not just your batteries, all of your e-waste. Batteries are a very good example of a common product which contains a lot of materials that we need for our high-tech society, our low carbon economy. A lot of them are sitting in drawers. A lot of them are not disposed of appropriately. They shouldn't be disposed of with common household waste. Batteries should be recycled as batteries. They say on the back of them, don't put them in your household waste. That's for a very good reason. We need to recycle them appropriately. Some household waste will be landfill, some will be burnt, and it's not an appropriate way of recycling them.

You see battery bins, often a wide variety of places such as supermarkets, take your batteries there. That's a great place for the batteries to be recycled. Then they can enter the recycling loop. The same applies for a lot of waste electronics. They shouldn't be disposed of with household waste, and they should be disposed of appropriately as waste electronics, so that we can get the valuable and rare metals out of them. All of the work that we are doing at developing these recycling processes is going to struggle if the materials don't actually get to the recycler in the first place.

ALEX LATHBRIDGE:
Yeah, I mean, that's - OK. Fair enough, I like that. That is a good, solid, round off point. There's personal, there's personal responsibility, but also manufacturers really need to take note, and the government also really needs to care, it's everyone's problem. But we also can maybe help at home. That nice little ramble at the end here is going to cut out obviously, but thank you so much both of you. I think, this is it for us. Brilliant, that was fantastic. Ah, I have learned so much.

DR JYOTI AHUJA:
Thank you, thanks very much.

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ALEX LATHBRIDGE:
That's all for this episode of Brought to You by Chemistry. Join us next time for the final episode, where we peer into the looking glass and find out what the batteries of tomorrow could look like. It was produced by Hiren Joshi and Elisabeth Ratcliffe, and presented by me, Alex Lathbridge.

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Transcript coming soon