 Hi, good morning. Good afternoon and good evening. I would like to welcome you to Storage X International Symposium again. On behalf of my co-director, Professor Will Chair at Stanford University, this now becomes our bi-weekly routine. We would like to welcome the people doing research caring about the energy storage to join us again for today's very exciting panel. As you all know, we launched Storage X Initiative at Stanford right here last year. Since about half a year ago, we launched the Storage X symposium. The X right here means nearly everything related to storage. Last time, we have X equals to Phil in addition to early events on the batteries. And today we come back to batteries again. And this time the X equals to lithium ion battery at the telewatt hour scale. We all know the electric cars industry are driving the whole battery industry growing very, very fast. And in a speed very likely to be in the next 10 years, we will grow to a telewatt hour scale. That really means roughly every three years we are about double our production of lithium ion batteries capacity. This is a mine. If you look at what's really needed for mining for materials from tooling. From each component you can think about related to lithium ion batteries needs to double in the time scale. So this is really a daunting task. Okay, and I feel like this is so important for us to hold a panel discussion on. So today, we are so excited to have three industry leaders to join us to discuss this topic. I will pass this podium to Will. He will introduce our panelists. Will. Thank you very much. And good morning from California as well. So, as he pointed out. Today we enjoy lives that run on batteries. And we're so pleased today to have these heroes and technology movers and shakers who made it happen and making it happen. Join us. We have three speakers and participants today, all working very hard on scaling up battery technologies. So let me introduce them in the order that they will speak. First, we've our colleague, Michael will tell from BSF. He is a organic chemist who received his training from the University of Heidelberg, and he joined BSF in 2002, and has been working on a range of our new activities, ranging from synthesis to catalysis. In 2018, he assumed responsibility for BSF's North American battery business, which is headquartered in Michigan. And as of September, this year, just last month, he is now the head of global R&D battery materials based out of headquarter in Germany. Our second speaker is another industry veteran, Selena Mike Wajjek. And she's a mechanical engineer by training received her degree from Caltech. And she has spent the last two decades in various aspects of the battery supply chain. She worked at Exponent, developing failure analysis method for batteries, then at Tesla, Uber. And since 2019, she is leading the battery R&D activity at Panasonic, as is VP for battery technology and at the frontline in the Gigafactory in Nevada. And finally, our third speaker is one of Stanford's most distinguished alums, JB Straubel. He co-founded Tesla in 2004 and was his chief architect for the electric vehicle technology, the battery subsystems and many things. More recently, in 2017, he founded Redwood Materials to tackle another emerging challenge of great importance to sustainability and to lowering the cost of battery deployment in terms of material recycling. So as I said, we're so delighted to be joined by this distinguished panel who is trying to make scaling work and are scaling every day. So we're delighted to host everyone. So let's begin. Let me hand the mic to Haiko, who will talk about the scaling up challenges in the synthesis of cathode battery materials. Haiko, the floor is yours. Right. Thanks a lot. So good morning, California. Good afternoon to Germany, Europe and the rest of the world who is listening today. I hope you can see my screen and hear me very well. And I wanted to invite you to the rollercoaster of battery industry for a chemical giant like BSF. So our roots are really in chemistry, ranging almost centuries back. And now we onboarded the journey to enter the immobility space. And I wanted to highlight to you a little bit the challenges that we are seeing for the industry to really make immobility and special viable technology for consumers in the end. Before I go there, I will quickly introduce what BSF is doing there and how the total market is developing and then zoom in a little bit into the challenges of production that we see today. Great. So here we are. So for BSF, the automotive industry is really one of the key industries we are serving already today and around about 21% of our annual revenue is related to automotive industry and all levels, for example, ranging from the coatings or the plastics. It's coolant additives, it's break aids and stuff like that. And for the division I'm coming from, we are also very strong in exhaust gas catalyst business. And obviously, the more the electric cars are penetrating the market, this catalyst market is going to shrink. So for a company like BSF, it's more than natural to invest into battery material systems just to compensate for the shrinking market with something that is emerging. But also all the other segments of BSF, which are more chemistry related are still benefiting from the immobility trend, for example, supplying the appropriate plastics and polymers for insulating of the cables and electronics and everything around that. BSF is focusing only on cathode active material, how we call it, and those are the nickel cobalt manganese the NCM types or the nickel cobalt aluminum oxides, which are used to coat the cathode of the battery. And those materials have a really tremendous impact on the cost on the weight on the range and the safety of your battery cell. And then in the end also to those properties of an electric car. So you really have a significant leverage of the overall performance of the car in the end, just packed in this cathode active material. And at the moment we are amongst the leaders for the high energy NCAs, for example, which are ranking amongst the highest nickel containing cathode material set which you can buy today in today's market space. Important to understand that the value chain is really starting with mining operations, because for the cathode materials that we are producing you need all those metals like nickel cobalt lithium manganese. And this is one key driver for BSF to make sure that we are building up on the one hand, reliable supply chain for our customers, and even more important, sustainable value chain. And therefore all our metal providers are audited and we are really doing special checks with regard to sustainability from social economic and eco friendly perspective to make sure that we do this in the most sustainable way in the metal sourcing. And we are also closely collaborating with various metal players around the globe to look into the opportunities for the future because the metal amounts required to grow this whole market will be tremendous. But our key expertise is really around those what we call the battery materials, the precursor production where you precipitate the nickel cobalt precursors. And then the final good that BSF is selling it's the chem where you then add the lithium during a calcination. And those materials are then sold to companies like Panasonic here, the cell produces around the world that manufacture the batteries and the packs, which then eventually go into the electric cars. But this is not where BSF activity is stopping because of the tremendous demand of metals and also the sustainability aspect of the whole thing. We started the whole work stream and collaboration activities to look into the recycling of the spent batteries to ultimately get the metals back in the loop. So we are developing our own tailor made processes to really collect the batteries in the market to dismantle them. And then ultimately to separate the lithium and also the nickel cobalt to feed it back into the production chain that eventually we have a closed loop. Obviously the whole recycling activity is a little bit delayed compared to the start of the electric mobility market as the lifetime is expected to be beyond the 10 years. So this is when then significant amount of spent batteries will come back that have to be recycled, but you have to get the value chain ready already today. So looking to the trends that are transforming the automotive industry and this is really important to understand on how the whole market works. In the end the consumers are expecting that also an electric car is only as expensive as an internal combustion engine driven car. And there are external trials like regulations which are very strong in Europe and partially also in China that tried the mobility. But if you look to markets like us, they're really the total cost of ownership is much more dominating the market penetration of electric mobility. But as you can see here in at midsize cars already 2018, we were very close to the cost parity in the end. And electric cars already today can be very attractive for a user. If you really look to the full cost of the car, including maintenance including fuel and including the purchase price. This all is possible as in the last couple of years really energy density of batteries and the battery materials has been constantly increasing. And at the same time the battery pack cost dropped significantly. And what you can see is the projection here from Bloomberg. We expect to reach a cost of around about $62 per kilowatt hour, around about 2020 2030 sorry. And this will lead them to a nice market ramp up of electric car penetration. This chart does not yet reflect the dip which is caused by Corona, but also the Corona situation might even accelerate the mobility penetration. As you can see for example in Europe, there are many programs now to accelerate the market launch by additional support for the consumers to buy an electric car. What does it mean for a materials producer. If those projections become reality. You need to look at the number or the volume of better material that will be required. And today, you can buy around about or we are producing round about 300,000 tons cathode material per year. Following the growth policy of electric cars. This will ramp up to around about 2.5 million tons of cathode material or in gigawatt hours round about 2000 gigawatt hours as installed capacity. So this is a tremendous demand of material required, which in the end also need all the materials to be produced. And also announced during the battery day that there's really not sufficient speed for the battery factories for all the component suppliers to provide that growth in the end. And also money wise, huge investments, it's beyond the $2 trillion in the whole value chain are required. The good part of this whole thing, it's really a bullish and growing market which will lead to new jobs. There's lots of challenges for academia and the scientific society. And again Corona might even accelerate the switch from combustion driven cars into mobility. But how do we scale that up. And this whole thing is even more complicated. There's more and more separation in clear market segments for better materials and so producer like PSF really has to make the choice where to position the resources to really capture the appropriate market trend to develop the right products and also to provide the right production capabilities in the end. In a simplified view you can say that you have your low range entry segment cars with which might be used for example for city traffic and those typically could be powered with LFP type cathode materials or more manganese rich cathode materials. For the luxury segment and the midsize cars also the mid nickel cathode materials are applying 60 to 85% nickel contained. And then for the high performance cars. It's going up to 85 nickel and beyond ultimate target is really to reach something close to 100% nickel in the cathode material. And further complexities arising that all the battery producers are chasing different cell formats which in the end also require fine tuned cathode materials that we have to provide to the self producers in the end. So what is the challenge behind that. So we need to really produce huge volumes of solid powders the cathode materials. And at the same time you need highest quality, because for example any impurity in your material can lead to impact of the performance in the battery cell on the worst case even to safety concerns. So it's really a high tech product and synthesis in a huge scale that we have to accomplish as industry. Ideally, industry would like to use something like rotary kills for the calcination where you mix the lithium nickel cobalt compounds. But today, this will lead to insufficient product quality. Those rotary kills which you use in other industries they will have corrosion issues quality issues. So they are not yet widely used. What we are doing is really batch operations both in the precursor of this in the first step and also in the calcination. This is really only a numbering up from a very small scale. And what you can see here is the standard roller half kiln used in the industry for the calcination. And you're filling your product that is to be calcined in those small ceramic saggers and move them slowly through the kiln in a very controlled way to make sure you have very accurate oxygen control very accurate temperature control. And you also need to make sure that your saggers are loaded evenly. And you can imagine if you want to produce 2 million tons of material, this might be quite a sophisticated task. And it's really only a small step from the lab scale to this industry scale because you're just numbering up those second calcination. And that's for the long term when you want to be economically attractive or real challenge for the industry. And to zoom in a little bit more what is happening in a sagger. Let's hear a scheme showing how you can fill your sagger with material. And in the early days we had low nickel concentration cathode materials. There you could really fill up the saggers to the to the maximum. But now the high performance materials which are required from the market, you are not, you can't fill them up to the limit. So the throughput of your calcination plant is even going down. And because the higher the nickel content the more sophisticated you need to control your oxygen, the partial pressure, the mass transport and the temperature distribution to end up with a high quality product at the end of the calcination. And as we are coming from the chemical industry, I also want to share with you a little bit of comparison on how chemical process are typically scaled up. And here we talk of the example acrylic acid production. This is a chemical that is going for example into production of diapers. If you polymerize acrylic acid, you fill it in diapers to take up the liquids from your babies and wherever you need it. And you start with a lab scale experience, maybe 100 grams. And then you go to the pilot scale, which is maybe around 1000 kilogram. And then you scale up for production scale with a factor of 100,000. And acrylic acid in 2018, you had a demand of around about 7 million ton per year, which could be covered by 70 world scale chemical production sites. If you now look into the battery industry, what's happening there. So as mentioned earlier, the global demand in 2030 will be 2.5 million tons of cathode material per year. And if you take a simple kiln setup, those roller half kilns, which I've been showing to you earlier, they produce around about 2000 tons per year, one single kiln. So you really need in the end to supply all that demand over 1000 production lines to meet that demand. So that is really a tremendous effort. And again, if you look to what other industries are doing, it doesn't make a lot of sense, right? Still, it's happening at the moment. All the players around the globe are just doing nothing but numbering up. You have your lab scale experiment starting with 100 gram calcination. In your pilot, you're filling a full-sized sector with 5 kilogram. And then in commercial production, you're just numbering that up and move those small sectors to the calcination field. The picture is not much different on the precursor side. Also here, you're basically numbering up your precipitation rather than using large-size equipment or high throughput processes. So here's a very clear need for innovative and scalable processes in the future that we can meet the expected cost targets that eventually we all as consumers are willing to buy an electric car other than for sustainability reasons, but also for economical reasons. So to put out the challenge here for our academic audience, it's really key, at least from perspective of BSF as a materials producer, that we find new and smart approaches to allow a low-cost cathode material production, which again are the key driver for performance of electric cars with regard to cost, range, lifetime and safety, and the amounts required are really tremendous. And the low costs can be tackled by various levels in the end. And for example, if you look in the raw material value chain, are there smarter ways rather than using high-purity, better-recreated raw materials, nickel-cobalt lithium to get to the required starting components that we would need for calcination, for example. The other point is looking more and more into the recycling opportunities for raw materials. Once the batteries are coming back, we have a raw material source where the metal concentration will be much, much higher. But in the end, it's a very decent source of new raw material, which we need to prepare already now to have it ready in maybe five to ten years from now. But then also on the production technology, I was talking from the cathode material calcination. What continuous calcination technologies are out there? How can we avoid this numbering up of what the industry is doing today to get to a real economic process? Are there alternative kill concepts or are there even kind of direct synthesis leading you to the better material which then the self-producers can buy? So there is lots of work out there to get from the standard approach which the industry is choosing today, still delivering high-performance cathode materials, but in a much more economic way going forward. So it's really one key task from a materials producer's perspective that we are gaining a much deeper and better understanding of the calcination and also of the chemistry behind that lead to the high-performance cathode materials. And this is where universities, research and academia can really support a lot. All right, that's all I had as a teaser for the discussion later on, and we'll turn it over to Selena, I guess. Hi, everyone. I'm Selena Mikowajic. I'm vice president for battery technology and engineering at Panasonic Energy of North America. That's the division of Panasonic that produces cells at the Gigafactory near Reno, Nevada. And I wanted to give you guys a sense today of what production at this scale really looks like, what it means. So this is a bit of video from the Gigafactory, just to give you a sense of what it actually looks like, and some few shots of inside the factory. This factory is immense. It produces millions of cells every day. When I started in the industry about 20 years ago, a factory was pretty amazing if they could produce a million cells a month, five million cells a month. That was a lot. We produce those kind of numbers in days at this point. It's an immense facility. And it takes a lot of raw materials coming in, a lot of people to run. Let's see if I can get to the next slide. Here we go. It's also not the same size and not the same picture that I showed on the first slide, which was the conceptual size of the factory. In fact, at the moment, the Gigafactory sits on about 30% of its original planned footprint. And Panasonic occupies about two thirds of that footprint. And inside there, we've achieved about 35 gigawatt hours per year production or more. This looks a little bit, you know, like, okay, is it really that big? What you have to understand is you're looking at a three-story high factory and actually they're three tall stories. So it's more something like a six-story factory dividing into three floors. So this is a very, very big facility. And to give you a sense of the timeline for this facility, groundbreaking, or we started, groundbreaking started in 2014. Panasonic started equipment installation at the very end of 2015. The first cell mass production at the very beginning of 2017. That was on a single line. And as construction continued, we were producing cells while the factory was being constructed around us, which had significant challenges. And we kept adding lines and additional lines. We achieved, you know, 100 million cell shipment in 2018, and 100 million cells is like a, you know, it's a big milestone. A lot of factories, you know, that would be years of production, many years of production. And this was done within about a year. The first billionth cell was shipped in February 2019. And despite, you know, COVID, we shipped our three billionth cell in August of this year, which gives you a sense of how many cells are produced and how big this factory actually has to be to do that. So where does this come from? You don't just kind of create this kind of factory in the first go. Panasonic itself has a hundred year history of cell making. And what does that mean? Well, you know, the 100 years ago Panasonic was making a little bicycle lamps with the batteries to power them. Very different chemistry. Lithium ion turns out to be the latest in a long line of chemistry is the Panasonic has produced in, in reasonably high volumes, maybe not quite at Gigafactory volumes until now but in substantial volumes. And what does that mean? That means that you don't have to reinvent absolutely everything when you go and build something like the Gigafactory. You evolve designs, and you evolve them from previous chemistries, the little alkaline cells that Panasonic used to make were cylindrical. And so, you know, Panasonic knows how to handle cylindrical cells and is known for a long time. And you also evolve it from the most recent factories. So, when I first started in the industry in about 2000 I was able to go see Panasonic's early lines with lithium ion lines in Japan. And then when I was at Tesla, I went back and started seeing more lines and commissioning more lines in Japan, and got to see a few different factories and it was kind of interesting because I could see how the equipment had evolved along different design lines itself within the different factories as I went from some of the oldest factories to the newest factories. And the Gigafactory itself is really, you know, the latest factory of lithium ion cells. There's about seven previous factories in Japan and China that Panasonic had that produced lithium ion cells. So there's a lot of learning embodied in this factory. And then how do we work at Panasonic? The cell R&D, the materials development, supply chain development and so forth is handled by our teams in Japan. They have been doing this for quite some time. So they lead all of that. And then what happens is these cell designs and new equipment are brought to PENA. And our engineering teams lead the final cell and equipment design validations, which often means that we're making adjustments to all of those designs to allow them to run at the high volumes, high scale that we have at Panasonic at PENA. And that's different than we see in Japan. So we will see equipment and we'll see cell designs that work fantastic in the lab. They work very well in smaller scale factories. And then we bring them to PENA and we start looking at ramping them to the speeds that we run at and the scale we run at. And suddenly, you know, we discover some things and we need to make the adjustments work with the Japan teams to make the adjustments to deliver the final product at the volumes that our customer needs. This is really important. It's important that the factory be deeply involved in the iteration process on the design side, both the cell side and the process equipment because it's just hard for people, even people aren't working in a factory in Japan. It's a real factory. It's a fantastic factory. It's big, but they don't quite understand or quite can envision all the difficulties that occur when you're at even bigger scale. And you can kind of intellectually know it, but until you've really seen it and been in them in that mix or even tested your equipment and tested your designs in that process equipment. You don't actually know what it's going to what it's going to turn out like. So we see a lot of those challenges. As I mentioned, PENA was designed to really take advantage of all the previous technology that Panasonic had. But it is unique. The equipment that's in PENA is really larger and faster than anything that Panasonic has had built anywhere. To give you a sense to, there are eight coding lines inside the Gigfactory. So that means eight coders running cathode, eight coders running anode. A typical factory that I had visited prior to being at Panasonic. One coding line is a lot. You get one good coding line and you run a bunch of assembly lines off of it and that's great. We've got eight. That means that we've got 32 die heads because you coat top top and bottom of the electrode. And then downstream of that press machines and slitters. These are all running 24 seven every day. Those coding lines feed at present 13 assembly lines. These assembly lines. I think the first assembly line has some of the same equipment that we had in our most up to date factory in Japan. And then since that it's all new and evolved equipment, including three high speed lines. This is just shy of 200 winding machines. I'm not sure how much how many of the audience have seen a winding machine before. It's a intensely complex piece of equipment that brings anode cathode separator together welds all the tabs on the cell puts on the tapes and winds everything up into a jelly roll. And, you know, these things have the other daunting if you stand in front of one. So we have 200 of those just shy. There's also all the lines that support support these things there's 13 top cap production line so the top cap that goes on the cell yeah we we press that we make that we have to make that in time for assembly lines. And then seven formation lines. That's where we do charge discharge and testing of cells. Again to give you a sense of scale. You know cells when they're made they go into a formation tray formation tray goes into the charge discharge equipment. We fill 19,000 formation trays per day. Trying to think about where you would just put 19,000 of anything is daunting and realize that, you know, we do this every day and formation is a process where you count the formation process lasting in terms of days and weeks. And imagine how much whip we have to manage. If we're filling 19,000 trays per day. Okay. At the same time, you know these are all daunting they're super hard but these are the things that really enable price reductions. This is what economy of scale means. It doesn't just mean that you're buying all of your raw materials in huge quantities. It also means you're buying your equipment in large quantities you're buying the spare parts for that equipment in large quantities. And you have to just have processes that will enable you to maintain this equipment. That's running as I said 24 seven 365 days a year. You have to maintain these things and keep them running some new new things we're adding our fourth the cell assembly line at Pena. That's going to be even more advanced generation equipment. There's construction on that and that equipment is starting to land soon. And we continue to evolve these evolve our equipment or always pushing to the higher production speeds, more and more automation, because you can imagine it takes a lot of people to run this factory there are thousands of people inside Pena every day. And you can't sustain just kind of growing a city. You have to try and automate. You have to use big data to look at this if you've got close to 200 winding machines. How do you know which ones are working well and which ones are not you can't and the scale you can't look across a factory floor and say things are going well, except over there. There's there's no looking across the factory floor you have to get into the data to take a look at your equipment and equipment efficiency with regards to people as I said there are thousands of people in the factory every day. And we were in Reno, Nevada. It's not until the Gigafactory came batteries were not a thing. Okay. Even manufacturing was really not something that was being done at a substantial scale in in this area. So how do we do that. Well we've had to focus pretty heavily on people development and that means a lot of things. We have to do a lot of training we have to teach everyone how to how to work with you know this incredibly complex massive equipment. And you know some folks are coming into into our Gigafactory they're coming from the hospitality industry and you sit them in front of, you know, a winder or you sit them in a coding booth and say, Okay, go. And people will like, look at this and say, Oh my God, I can't do this but we teach people how to do this. So we train technically we train on leadership skills. There's continuous coaching. Our colleagues come from Japan and they teach local members and we're not just sending engineers from Japan or bringing engineers from Japan we bring operators from Japan to treat teacher operating operator teams, people who do maintenance. Those folks are coming over from Japan to teach, teach our, you know, all our workers. And then we have to develop, we had to develop a high performance culture approach that helps systematize how people work together how people learn and how we bring up information from the floor because again, you know you've got thousands of people there's just no way that as a manager you can walk around and touch everyone see everyone and ask them how their days. You have to really bring that up from a culture perspective. The engineering staffing needs is also difficult. Again, this is a very growing industry. And there's just not. There's not really strong programs or you know programs that are focused especially at the undergraduate level on batteries. Okay, this is not a traditional discipline. There's no single right discipline in the US that we're going to recruit from either. You know, we hire a lot of engineers so 95% of our hires have never really had any battery industry experience. In many cases we're lucky if if folks have seen batteries in the lab we're like woohoo great. Right. So we look for candidates that are really comfortable working across traditional engineering disciplines because when you look at battery when you look at production. You know, you've got a. You've got chemical processes going on in the factory you've got mechanical processes going on the factory you've got a whole lot of controls and engineering electrical engineering. Things that you have to think about. There's a lot of statistical analysis and so forth so we really hire from diverse educational backgrounds also diverse industrial backgrounds because again we're looking at people that know chemical processing people know mechanical systems. We have also diverse personal backgrounds. And we find that's really good for creating new ideas and challenging the idea of well we've always done it this way. Nice thing about Panasonic having a hundred year history. There's a lot to draw on. At the same time, it's really great to have people coming from different backgrounds who say, Oh, in my other industry we did something a different way or have you thought about doing this another way and and that kind of challenge and tension is very good. So some of the cell innovation roadmaps. Right now we're converting lines to increase energy density. It's a it's a great new cell that's that's going to be ready soon. It's got excellent fast charge performance with that increased energy density which is really exciting. It's a road map for continued cobalt reduction. And we do plan on ultimately a cobalt free design that's difficult but we think we can achieve it shortly. And then, you know, continued increase in energy density for for our chemistry. And finally, one of the one of the other innovative things that we've been doing at the factory that is a great deal of fun is that we've begun a partnership with redwood materials in Carson. It's a database company and redwood is taken over recycling our typical factory valuable waste. This would be things like coated electrode that scrap jelly rolls that are rejected. Don't go into cans and then waste cells are yields and our production processes are very good. There's kind of Giga at the Giga factory so you know we have a very small scrap rate but in actual scale in actual tonnage. It's a pretty daunting amount of material. So we're really glad to be working with someone to recover that very effectively. And you know we were also trying to develop some processes that would just recycle waste that would be typically classified as hazardous and would require a disposal for example land filling or incineration so we're excited to do that too because we think that has some real possibilities to recover a lot of those materials and bring our price down our cost down substantially. Of course we're working together and we're hoping that redwood can develop some processes so that we can return a lot of those materials and also the materials coming from the consumer electronics side of recycling back into the battery supply chain and of course obvious the obvious ones there are copper, cobalt, nickel and lithium. So that's a great bit of the future and we look at this as recycling being an important part of reducing our cell bomb cost over the long term. And that gives you a sense of what we're doing. Thanks. Thank you, Selena for the introduction to the cell, the challenge right there. Next we will have JB to come to come to the podium to tell us about the recycling. JB will not use slide but JB you can just feel free to share what's in your mind. Thank you, and hello everyone to all the different time zones. It's a pleasure to be here and have a chance to share some thoughts. Of course the majority of my career was spent in the EV market and at Tesla and I was one of the co-founders there back all the way into 2003 and 2004 as we started to ramp. And, you know, it was just an amazing, you know, adventure watching, you know, how fast the EV, you know, e-mobility market has developed. I think it's hard to even remember, you know, that these times 15 years ago when, you know, electric vehicles were, you know, not even close to mainstream, you know, and really most people didn't expect that they would, you know, take on any significant market share. It was more focused on fuel cells and HEV. So, you know, it's pretty amazing I think and really wonderful to see the fact that, you know, sustainability and e-mobility has, you know, accelerated to the extent it has. But, you know, for me through that whole time, you know, it was becoming increasingly clear that, you know, we kept moving some of the challenges further upstream. The scale of the entire automotive industry and the scale of, you know, the energy industry, you know, to some extent as well, needed to support that whole change, you know, is just massive. And, you know, on a personal note, you know, I remember, you know, way back in school I always was kind of lamenting an engineering school I was kind of lamenting the fact that, you know, it felt like all the big innovations that already happened and, you know, we kind of missed the time when, you know, the Edison's and the Nikola Tesla's of the world got to invent, you know, a whole ecosystem or the Daimler's or Ford's got to invent a whole industrial ecosystem. And, you know, it turns out that, you know, we're actually, I think, you know, living in almost exactly the same sort of time in this generation of engineers and scientists and, you know, industrialists who get to architect, you know, a whole new industrial system for sustainability. And, you know, it's just been, you know, such a fun and wonderful, you know, thing to be a part of and a wonderful journey. And as I said, you know, at Tesla, especially as we, you know, got into ramping the Gigafactory type of scale and going from Model S to Model 3 and beyond, you know, it really was clear that, you know, this challenge was continually moving further upstream. You know, one way to look at that is just, you know, seeing the incredible focus, you know, shifting toward, you know, the cost of the materials that go into the products. And if you look at an electric vehicle versus an internal combustion vehicle, the big change in that whole supply chain, you know, it kind of obvious, but it points straight into the battery. And then the battery, you know, so much of that goes into the active materials, as Pico and Selena pointed out, you know, they make that up. You know, today, you know, there's varying different numbers, but you know, the percent of the bill of materials cost, you know, what that represents of the percent of a whole cell cost, you know, is surprisingly high. So it's more than 50% in almost every case and maybe, you know, closer to 75% in some really high volume cases where, you know, factories have done an excellent job at reducing the assembly cost of all those materials and reducing the manufacturing, the labor and energy, but it pushes more of the problem toward the bill of materials and toward, and even toward the commodities that go into those, you know, fundamental engineered materials. And for me, seeing that trend was really exciting and interesting, but also laid out a pretty clear challenge for where, you know, I was excited to focus. And personally, I'm, you know, I'm, I'd say, you know, 50% entrepreneur and 50% engineer inventor, and just really love building teams, you know, building technologies and innovation. And as, you know, grown to such an amazing scale, it's incredible to see, you know, but it is, you know, needing a little bit of a different focus, especially in some of, you know, the leadership at the top levels. And for me, you know, I, I'm actually having, you know, an incredibly fun time and really enjoying, you know, building a new small company and building, you know, the foundation of for a technology for something that, you know, I see as inevitable in the future, that we have to, you know, put more focus on. And, you know, turning to Redwood, more specifically, you know, our mission is kind of threefold, you know, on the front end of our business, you know, we focus on, you know, appropriate disposal, you know, avoidance of kind of all the negative effects that happen or could happen at the end of life with batteries if they're not handled appropriately. And again, that was a challenge we struggled with at Tesla. There weren't that many, you know, very robust, you know, well-developed companies in the space. There weren't many technologies to handle that. And, you know, it tended to become a high cost and a high fee, you know, to handle that very appropriately at the end of life. So at the front end of our business, you know, that we're making sure that batteries don't create a negative effect at end of life. But it can go much further beyond that. And, you know, not only is it not negative, but it can be a very positive, you know, cost benefit to the battery cost structure. So in the middle of our business, we're focusing on similar to what BASF and Hyco touched on, we're focusing on, you know, materials recovery and reprocessing. We're taking these valuable raw materials and, you know, basically inventing and improving the ways to most efficiently recover them and very directly move them back into, you know, the right quality and consistency of compounds that can be reintroduced to the supply chain. And then on the final side of the business, we're looking at, you know, kind of merging these different pieces of technology together so that we can, you know, find ways to more efficiently and more cheaply, you know, go from basically an old battery to the components that make up a new battery. And today this is very, very siloed and very discreet and, you know, people break this into many different, you know, companies and processes and, and it's also scattered all around the world in a very efficient way, inefficient way. And these materials, you know, take an incredible journey, you know, physically throughout their lifetime, they might get mined in, you know, some part of the Pacific or Asia or Siberia, and then move thousands of kilometers, you know, to a place where they refined and then thousands more to where they get made into battery materials, then again into cells, then they live as an electric vehicle or the device. And then they kind of retrace that entire journey through some of their recycling pathways today. So there's a great opportunity to vertically integrate some of that, to compress that physical supply chain and to overlap some of the chemical and manufacturing processes to save, you know, a great deal of cost and just repackaging efforts where, you know, something is done and then undone. But, you know, this, this is an interesting industry because, you know, I think Heiko pointed out the scale challenge, you know, very clearly. You know, it's being pressed on one side by an incredible need to ramp, you know, to these, you know, massive, massive scales to satisfy the automotive growth. And on the other hand, you know, trying to innovate and figure out how to, you know, invent new processes and push innovation in at the same time is scaling, you know, at a breakneck pace. So it really is, I mean, it's a lot of fun from an engineering point of view, and I think, you know, it's a very fascinating blend of process engineering and an industrial automation and controls and data, along with, you know, chemical engineering, chemistry and R&D, you know, working very tightly beside each other. And that's, that's the team that we're building today at Redwood, you know, we, you know, we're already recycling, you know, a great deal of material in North America and, you know, focusing today on both the production, you know, fallout and production waste material that Selena mentioned from Panasonic and others, but also on consumer devices. And that's a market that's been, you know, much more stable in its volumes for the past, you know, several years and also has a shorter lifetime. You know, so the, it's, it's more of a, you know, closed loop system already, where it should be. So, you know, we're receiving, you know, surprisingly large amounts, you know, of consumer electronics device batteries and materials and can reprocess those and basically, you know, upgrade them into, you know, more advanced devices and better use some of the materials like cobalt to allow them to build actually more of a modern chemistry of battery. So that, you know, today is where we're focusing and, you know, definitely, you know, growing the team quickly and, you know, anyone, you know, with the passion for some of these topics, you know, recycling, process engineering, chemical automation, you know, we'd love to hear from you and, you know, love to, you know, talk to you about possibly joining the team. So with that, maybe I'll, I'll wrap up here and leave a bit of more time for the panel and Q&A. Well, thank you JB. This is very exciting to learn about. Let me bring back all the panelists. We could spend the next good part of about an hour to have a discussion. Maybe I will kick off with the first question, you know, from Haiko to Selena, JB to you. Three of us give us an overview of materials to sell and to recycling. And we keep hearing about, of course, that's today's topic, scaling. Scaling is so important. And remember when I joined in Stanford faculty 15 years ago in the Silicon Valley right here center around Stanford, I've been talking about innovation. All this cool IT technology coming will test like the time just started not too long, a small startup, and people don't talk too much about scaling. I mean, it is a scaling issue in IT industry as well, but not a whole lot. They don't mention that innovation is on all those cool ideas. And, and then the whole energy space clean energy sustainability come not scaling become so important. I see knowing how to scaling by itself is already a huge innovation scaling is the innovation right here we are talking about. With this background kicking off. I want to ask the first question. I went and listened to three of your talks right I have the feeling we are doing scaling so fast. It's like running really really fast right 100 meter dash. But at the same time, you still need to do innovation scaling and doing your technology innovation everything think about 100 meter dash. It's like you're running so fast but at the same time you're changing the style how you run. That's very hard. Oh, would you like to share with us you know scaling and innovation along the way, you know that better material the new recipe come coming in right and the sale manufacturing Selena. I haven't seen the you know Gigafactory title better manufacturing yet, you know you need to do how know how to do changing and your manufacturing and all the cell and JB as well in your case you know you're doing recycling I assume you know this you're building up this. A process bigger and bigger. So how do we think about innovation and scaling at the same time I maybe Selena you want to take it first and the hacker and also JB can make comments. Yeah, sure. My engineers work a lot. Okay. The thing about scaling innovation. When you're scaling manufacturing systems. It's helpful if you're actually working on those production lines. My engineers work spent a lot of time on the production lines, even I get on the production lines occasionally which is, you know, vaguely terrifying from my engineers. But, you know, you have to be there in the space when you are there in the space you realize what's difficult. Right and it's not obvious it's not something that, you know, you look and you say, oh, you know, on my cell assembly line, you know, I've got my equipment and it's doing these things. And I'm, you know, I've got the jelly roll and I put it in the can and I will my tabs and then I fill it and then I close it and then I crimp it and you know, it goes on and on and you're like oh you know I should obviously work on one of these pieces of equipment to scale. Funny thing is when you actually work in manufacturing you realize how long you spend cleaning, for example the filling electrolyte filling machine. Turns out electrolyte assault inside a solvent. You know everything looks perfect and good and except that once you run a filling machine for a few days, you find all the salt crystallization on all the different components right and if you've got crystallized salt on all your components, you're not going to feel very effectively. The seals that you're using to fill are going to be bad and so forth. So you'll run into problems. So you have to clean that machine. What does that mean? That means someone puts on a full, you know, paper, a pure, a powered purifying or respirator. It's this whole hood climbs in the machine starts pulling things apart and then having to clean this stuff. And you realize actually, if I'm going to scale, I need to automate the cleaning process. Okay, I don't need to worry so much about, you know, the dynamics of electrolyte filling. Yeah, I can worry about that. You know, can I film, can I film my jelly roll? What's the uptake into the cell? You know, can I speed that up a little bit? Sure, you can and that's an important thing to study. But your operational efficiency for that equipment, how many filling machines you need, what the uptime on that equipment is going to be, is now suddenly dependent on how fast you can clean that equipment. Right. And that's, like I said, it doesn't come from the doesn't come from an academic study. It doesn't come from looking at Oh, this is my process. It comes from being on the production line looking at this guy. Wow. We're spending a lot of time cleaning. Right. And it's so not sexy. The machine we've got to automate cleaning, very sexy. Right. But, you know, the original problem is, you know, you think, how hard could this be? It's actually really hard. Right. So that's, that's kind of, you know, how do you drive that innovation? Well, a bunch of my engineers work in a lecture light line, we're like, this is awful. This is the worst job in the factory. We need to automate it. It's amazing to learn. I hope you have something to share. I can absolutely second what Selena just said right also for the cattle productions. It's very similar and just one simple example if you want to do a production transfer of a lab precipitate. First you produced an NCA nickel cobalt aluminum. And next week R&D wants to run a trial on nickel cobalt manganese you have to clean the plant really really in a sophisticated way that you're not contaminating your commercial NCA product with a manganese. Because in our area with this cleaning task is really a big challenge. And obviously the plant wants to avoid that in the end and it's the constant battle between research development and operations to launch new products. And it's getting even more challenging as we are looking for step change innovation also in the process technology, right. So we invested in production equipment and research is constantly looking for new ways to produce, but then you have put all your capital in, in certain production equipment. So that's the usual challenge to manage kind of development and breakthrough innovation. You need to keep that separate in the head somehow that you are open minded enough to find those new leads, but at the same time, try to make use of what you already invested right to make use of your assets. So it's, it's a lot of challenges and I think battery industry is a roller coaster to get all this managed in a fast way because at the same time. We are really looking for highly innovative materials that the capacities capacities need to go up safety requirements are increasing lifetime requirements are increasing so we need new materials. And this is only possible with R&D. But it's, it's a big challenge. Thanks. Hi, David. I totally agree with the general, you know, the premise here I mean it's in, you know, innovation is really, you know, targeted in this case so much at scaling. And, you know, I think people often underappreciate you know how hard that is, and just how challenging and technically complex it is to run these facilities at scale and do that well and continuously. And I think this is a great forum to help kind of highlight that, you know, into the academic community a bit more strongly and into the, you know, the students as well. You know, these are where, you know, probably more than half of the really meaty technical challenges exist, you know, in industry right now and it's so important to kind of realize that it is also very directly tied to the mission of this whole movement. And, you know, I mean we're, we're ultimately trying to do something to solve sustainability here, you know that that's one of the big pushes for this place and, you know, why the demand for batteries is higher, but to make a big difference there we have to achieve scale. So, you know, we're kind of forced, you know, to, to really, you know, apply innovation at this incredible scale. You know, it's not enough just to sort of solve something in the lab, you know, if you don't see a very clear and very fast pathway, you know, to, you know, literally today almost gigawatt hour scale. There's so many examples from as we were ramping Model 3 that were, you know, quite entertaining in the factory of, you know, great concepts our engineering teams had that just turned into an absolute nightmare in practice. You know, I mean, it's like robots throwing batteries and spraying glue and, you know, it just everything is organized and perfect and you know big professional company it must be, you know, really, really nailed down but, you know, at the end of the day it's it's a lot of engineers trying to, you know, make complicated machines work and solve problems, you know, even at the biggest so. Yeah, thank you JB I'll pass that now podium to a real real will have questions to to ask. Actually, let me jump in and build on this topic. I think it's really important to learn about these push and pulls right so he talked about the sort of the challenges between choosing innovating the technology and of course continue to scaling and innovating this the manufacturing. I'm actually curious here so Selena you you mentioned a couple of keywords, you mentioned the scaling laws, you know the use of drop in technology changes versus massively refamping the production line. JB you talked about, you know, using recycled materials as as initial reactants for making new materials. So, I think that makes me think of qualification right so you're qualifying recycled materials. And all these for my, you know, ivory tower are risks, right. So, if you want to massively change the production line something might not work there is monetary risk. If you are taking on a unknown new supplier or taking on recycled material. It has to be qualified and that's cost. So how do you see, what's the decision making process when when do I go between okay I'm just going to rip out the production line and make versus I'm just going to tweak the composition by 2% so I can drop it in. You know when do I go to a new material supplier that could be better and take on the risk. So what's the calculus there in your minds. I love to hear from everybody. JB do you want to go first. Yeah, sure. I'll take a shot at it. You know, there's, there's a ton of balancing factors there and it's really, you know, a complicated decision. And, you know, there's also all the capital and the sort of, you know, time cost of ramping these things you know it, it takes an incredibly long time to actually just physically build some of these pieces of equipment. So, you know that that also can enter dramatically into your, your decision about you know how much innovation to push into a process or when to make a dramatic change to a process because you may end up, you know, missing. You know, missing the boat on when certain material is needed or missing a boat on on the whole ramp up of a, you know, factory or a product. So I mean, I think that that balancing of risk and cost and innovation is, you know, sort of central to, to, you know, how to do really good engineering and management of these different projects. And it's one that probably doesn't get taught enough, because it's, you know, it's really tempting to just sort of pick the best technology ideal and you can optimize that in a vacuum but, you know, it almost never is the right answer. You know, you need to find and balance a lot of other trade-offs. You know, the validation on some of those materials just to touch on that very quickly. You know, it depends, you know, a lot on on on sort of where you where you go and reintroduce these materials back into a known process. And, you know, we spend quite a bit of time looking creatively at, you know, what is the right place. You know, to re-insert materials so that we can minimize validation and, you know, making things that look familiar enough that, you know, they don't require a really unique process. You know, in recycling, for instance, there's, you know, so-called direct recycling where you try and kind of refurbish a cathode material and then rebuild a battery with it. It's very, you know, appealing, you know, intellectually and, you know, from an energy point of view looks great. From a validation and risk point of view, it's awful. And, you know, I don't see that scaling very quickly, you know, as a result. So that's one concrete example. Maybe I can jump into here. Requalification is really a big challenge and it happens everywhere, right? I mean, even if you want to switch your raw materials or you typically have to re-qualify with, in our case, with a cell customer, because you need to make sure that you're really meeting the right performance in the end, safety-wise, capacity-wise, and talking of raw materials, small impurities can make a huge difference in the end in the performance. We are knowing from our experience when we are transferring from our plant in Japan to the production plant in the US. Even in those cases, our customers are expecting a full re-qualification. Despite the fact that the kills are basically identical, right? But still, you need to go through the full process and this is time-consuming. It's lots of cost and in the end, also risk for the industry. So if you have a real generation change in your material, then you really have a full-blown re-qualification that is required. So it's really important to understand that. Yeah, there's also ways to mitigate those kind of risks, right? So a lot of times you talk about scale and you want to have really big equipment, right? And you do, but it's really helpful to have multiple copies of that same equipment, right? So we go and we're saying we're going to convert lines, right? There's 13 assembly lines. You don't take them all down at the same time, right? You take one down, you convert, you keep the others running. There's no, like, doing an all-stop in a factory at scale, by the way, is really hard. Like, all stops are, we've done one in the entire history of the Gigafactory was for COVID. It took us a month to stop the factory. We were down for two weeks and another month to restart it, right? So that stops. So you want to have your, you want to set up your equipment, you want to set up your design so you have some flexibility to try things, right? If I want to try a new graphite, okay, I'm not going to put it on all eight lines at once. We'll take down one line, we'll clean it, we'll run graphite on one line. It's an eighth of our production capability, okay? But from our customer's perspective, you know, we're still producing the bulk of our commitment, right? And we're looking at what our customer's demand is as well and saying, okay, when can I afford to take a line down, still meet my customer's demand plan and do some trials? If everything goes well, it's awesome. But if things go pear shaped, and I have to say, you know, we're going to cut that trial, we're going to go back and go back to the previous style, I have to have that capability. It's the same with, you know, other pieces of equipment on an assembly line. You can build an assembly line that's fully integrated, all one piece, and it's all going down the line. Great. It's a lot easier if you have some unique parts that you say, okay, I'm going to try and swap a process out. Maybe I put some extra space on my line so I can run, you know, I can run a bypass line from assembly so I take it out of one piece of equipment, run it through my trial piece of equipment, put it back on the line. If it works well, I'll pull out the old piece of equipment, reinstall it so that it sits nicely. If it doesn't work well, I'll just turn it off and go and trial again and come back and try when I have something better. So, you know, you partition your factory and your plant so that you cut down on the risk and give yourself the space for that innovation and the ability to try some new things. So where do you want to ask a question or you want me to. All right, back to you. Yeah, yeah. Okay, so I have a few more detailed question. Maybe we'll do kind of like speed dating question. And I think one question is a few free if you think it's in your domain and then you want to answer. I think that that should be great. I can see some of the questions still can can cause multiple people. So one question about purity, we mentioned purity. I think for materials hike arrival recycling. I mean, I think I call in your presentation you mentioned can we use metallurgical gray or silicon input, sorry the raw materials input to do things. I'm doing that process I'm thinking, do you see a need. Mostly for Hico and JB I'm doing recycling as well. For example, you purify lithium, you purify cobalt and come out a method that could purify this with a lower cost with scale and and did you see such a need right there is a current technology sufficient. Yeah, I mean, that's a relatively easy answer if you consider only talking of the cathode active material. The majority of the cost is just the nickel cobalt and lithium. Right. And this is largely driven by the, the publicly listed prices built by demand and supply in the market. And in the end those prices are also built up on the cost the mining industry and the refining industry has ultimately right and the purer your raw material would be the higher the cost is and if you take for example nickel sulfate crystals. They have highest purity they have significant manufacturing cost to produce the crystals. So if you can get around that. That's already the first step to take out costs on the further down in the mining stream you get the better it would be for the cost situation in the end. So definitely yes. I think an interesting problem is that you know there doesn't seem to be a great understanding of which impurities and which concentrations have the biggest impact on cell performance. And I think, you know, often the answer is just, you know, keep the impurities low, keep everything low, you know, and, you know, that that's an easy answer and it's the kind of, you know, low risk answer but it's also the most expensive answer. So, you know that that could be an interesting area for I think a lot deeper understanding on some of this, you know, it's horribly complex though because you have, you know, the periodic table of stuff that can get in there and then you have to kind of sweep, you know, elements and concentrations and maybe there's combinations of elements that are worse than the sum of the parts. So, you know, that that I'd say is kind of at the frontier of people's really, you know, good understanding of what purity is required. Let me jump in here actually, Haiko and JB if I could. So, you mentioned battery grade and E mentioned metallurgical grade. So, can you give us a sense of the history, how battery grade was decided that, you know, this 99.x percent purity. This is still valid. Are people trying to push it down and say okay maybe 99.1% is acceptable JB this is to your point. This is just a standard that there is and the industry's been operating around it or this is a moving target all the time. I think it's a blend of various things. I mean, if you do research you typically start with your chemicals from Sigma or which or something like that you're highest purity. And then you start working from that and then nobody dares to deviate from that typically right. Obviously in industry you try to directly jump to more industrial grade, but especially for cathode materials and it applies for the other components to a large extent as well. There are elements that are known to impact the electrochemistry negatively right and unlikely a large part of the periodic table causes some issues so you really need to be careful here. It can be magnetic impurities leading to short circuits, but but even standard things like magnesium or or silicon or whatever could be an impact of on on the electrochemical performance sometimes beneficial and sometimes adversely. And it's, it's time consuming tool really study this in a systematic way that you really have the full understanding. And then there can be different species even and it's, it's a huge field for research in the end, get a good understanding. Yeah, the other, the other piece of it is when we're talking about electric vehicles, we're looking at eight year tenure lifetimes we want on those batteries. We want to make something for a cell phone. Okay, it's gonna be through your life. Right. And it's not that expensive. Right. I mean, not really. You want to put a pack into your car, and then you want to replace it because didn't realize that little contaminant was going to mess you up at your five or your seven. That's, that's a heck of an expense right so just running out the cycle testing on some of these things right you're going to say oh I'm going to I'm going to allow higher concentration in my NCA of this, this mineral and you want to do some accelerated testing. You might be three years doing that accelerated testing at which point your recipe for your NCA has changed. And now you got to start again. So I think you're really point out another key challenge, which is the qualification time after you have taken the new materials or whatever. And, and I guess this is the, the curse of the batteries that they work so well. So, so, yeah, in most cases. I mean, the current state of the art is actually is very, very good. And I mean, I think, you know, we're seeing that it's good enough to already make you know these incredibly compelling products and you know that's what pushes our problem more towards scaling doesn't mean innovation ends obviously but you know it's, it kind of creates a whole new problem. So next question for three of you. You know when we talk about recycling. Well, JB I really appreciate you know you you analyze this you know the material shipping to better manufacturing and then you shift to the car. And how do you call locados right and look at the whole circle economy, you know how where the cause come from. So one question related to recycling. And this might all, all the ways from starting manufacturing the cell, do you do you see, and how we design the cells can help the recycling better. So, at this moment when recycling shipping leaf in my battery turned out to be that's a kind of 50% of the recycling costs right now as one examples. So this is the safety requirement, you know to do shipping and so on. We design a cell from the beginning and recycling this relationship did you see opportunity right there. There is some opportunity, but having previously kind of worn the hat of you know cell engineer and module engineer and product engineer. You know I really don't think that's going to be a strong lever for making things more or less recyclable. For a number of reasons but you know there's so much intense pressure to improve the product performance and you know the product cost and iterate that quickly. That recycling is kind of the bottom of the list of priorities on what a lot of these different. You know companies I mean even a Tesla, you know, you know frankly needs to take into consideration when designing the whole product. And if you look at some of the modules today it's almost like you couldn't design it much worse for recycling it's sort of everything glued together and you know it's just utterly unassent undisassemblable. But you know I'm not I don't think that's necessarily wrong because it also minimizes upfront product cost it makes them more manufacturable and it gives better range better performance so you know, if you first have that 10 year lag problem, you know this is a heavily kind of almost depreciated value of recycling to the to the manufacturer. You know so I guess the way I would really look at this is almost more in the chemistry choice and not worry as much about the individual cell format or size, but there are some some pretty fundamental differences, you know in in recyclability and in the closed loop process we can envision with different cathode chemistries for instance, you know if you look at you know iron phosphate based chemistries versus higher nickel chemistries. You know they are certainly recyclable, but it's much harder to do that, you know economically and to really efficiently recover those metals. So, you know that that's something to consider and I, you know personally I think if we look at a whole future ecosystem where things are really closed loop. You know, I personally think that you know one focus more around high nickel chemistry is going to be more dominant, where you can recover that value efficiently you can recycle it efficiently and also have the best product attributes the best range and, you know, therefore lower, you know pack cost and things like this. Sure. So, in the spirit of this speed dating. Let me now maybe throw another question out there. Hi co you talked a lot about sort of the scientific challenges of developing new chemistry and scaling up so this is very familiar to me. But Selena on the cell level. That's a little less familiar to me in terms of the scientific challenges and I want to come back to this sort of overarching question is what can we do on the academic side. Can you maybe give us a few examples of problems that you think you know but beyond the cleaning example. What are the scientific problems. Would you like to see the dress but you don't have time to address in the scaling up itself. You know, give us three problems and I'll write them down. So, high volume high speed manufacturing. You're dealing. The interesting problems tend to come into things like rheology, you know things like coding, right. You know how you lay down a coding smoothly efficiently cleanly consistent coding weight at high speed at high volumes. How you dry those things. Those kind of problems are, you know, super fundamental. They're not usually battery problems there may be handled in chemical engineering. Maybe but it's not really like a big field of study. You run into those problems in high speed manufacturing surprising amount of fluid dynamics, you know, and airflow issues, you know, you've got a winder that's trying to try to spin up and wind a cell and apply tape and so forth. You know, you started in getting aerodynamic problems around, you know, how those how those materials are flowing through the winder, right and affecting the stability of the of the winding. Right, which, again, you're like, how's that related to a battery but you know it's, it's, you run into these kind of problems, you run into vibration issues, right and stability of your equipment because you've got a lot of spinning that, you know, you've got these couple of assembly lines and all this spinning metal and, you know, a little bit of vibration when you're doing some very very precision welding, for example, you know, we weld the bottom of our tabs. And we're welding to micron precision levels. Right, if that machine that's doing that welding because we don't do it well stopped we don't stop a line we do all our processes while things are largely in motion, including welding. You know, how do you handle that kind of decoupling vibrations from your welding process right. These are really in a lot of ways very fundamental engineering problems that appear in many many disciplines. You know, and I tend to think of the mechanical engineering ones that's my background. But they're applied in a different way. They're not, you know, you're not talking about lift on an aircraft wing, you're talking about lift on a piece of foil. Right, so it's just a little bit of reframing and I think sometimes that's the thing where you know when we hire engineers, we're looking for engineers who have these, you know, these background disciplines, but they can reframe what they've done into this, you know, topic area where the problems that you saw in your in your books did not talk about, you know, foil flapping. Right, they talked about a wing moving but it's it is the same problem it's just a little different. Hi, Selena I really enjoy this remark because you know at the end of the day equations are the same. Yeah, even the actually dimension of the system might be fully transferable as well I just you know the wing is just much smaller in this case, and then I couldn't help to notice that you also mentioned fluid dynamics problem in calcination I think you were noting bringing oxygen for the nickel rich calcination as a challenge. So this seems really interesting that perhaps, you know, more experts from mechanical and chemical engineering can really look at these processing a bit more. Thank you. Have people thought about clever ways to enhance mass transport during calcination, or is it are we just talking about putting powder in a box and in a tray and let it go. So is bsf thinking about innovations in that regard. Definitely we are thinking about that because that is the key to enhance your throughput in the existing equipment right. So that's a constant task for our research and development team and the engineers in bsf. And indeed we are using lots of simulation to really model the gas flows in the kiln the heat distribution and everything to really get the maximum output here. And I mean if there's new ideas out there highly appreciated them. We are taking notes JBO curious, you know, can you also talk about the science questions behind recycling. You know when I think of recycling I conjure up this very low tech you know throw everything in the furnace type of thing but I think it's that's a very naive picture. Can you tell us more about the science that still need to be addressed and scientific gaps. It's a that that sort of you know image of recycling is exactly why it's there's an opportunity I think you know because it's an industry that hasn't typically seen as much technology focus and really science and automation. It's surprisingly complex to do this well and you know it really is you know manufacturing in reverse that that's that's how I see it and you know I think we're we need to treat it that way you know with the same kind of you know rigorous, you know quality measurement and thought. But you're starting with something very complex and making it more and more, you know, simple. So it's, it's a kind of an interesting, you know, reverse, you know process, you know some of the challenges in specific, you know, our, you know, dealing with, you know, these strange, you know, mixtures of materials that don't really occur in nature. You never see nickel and lithium mixed together in nature you know it's just a not not a naturally occurring. But you know this is basically our feedstock you know this is the ore. You know so if you kind of go to the mining, you know, industry and what's worked for 100 years of you know nickel deposits you know it's very different. And so now we need to figure out how do you recover both of these things that, you know, usually are found, you know, one in a continent, you know somewhere in, you know, different totally region thousands of miles away. You know, so it's, it's, you know, bringing together some different chemical disciplines to, you know, focus on those separations and managing impurities and managing how to, how to make those processes work. And also just to jump in really briefly on your question to Selena I cheated and wrote down a few thoughts while she was talking. You know things that come up. You know one one to me as a humidity management. It's a huge capital cost and some of these factories and it dictates so much of the infrastructure and layout and flow and you know just really old technology you know that you know you don't see, you know an incredible innovation happening in dehumidification technology and how to manage that or, or even how to measure and manage moisture ingress into facilities and things like that so I think that could be a really interesting area to focus on. You know, cell seal integrity, not a very sexy thing but you know incredibly important to that 10 or 20 year cell life. You know how do you make it incredibly cheap seal seal that you know doesn't ingress moisture or, you know, out gas, you know, at the same time over that long period of time. Maybe also a case and can integrity. You know that that's a surprisingly tricky one. You know if you look at this case material that goes around these cells, you know, in a typical EV, you know you have to guarantee the stuff doesn't have any porosity has no holes you know is, you know cheap and robust for 20 years and yet has square meters of area. It's a very big challenge. Yeah, these are not the sort of sexy, you know, electrochemistry, you know, issues but they're very fundamental to the performance and cost of that whole system. And JB is teasing me because I when I was at Tesla I was chasing rust on cell cans constantly. Those are the real issues that they are. So when the D team goes off and focuses on this stuff for, you know, months and the factory, you know, chase is its tail and, you know, you spend a tiny bit of time focusing on some, you know, really advanced, you know, the chemistry, you know, innovation and a lot of time focusing on some of these seemingly mundane issues. This is really fascinating to learn about I think and academia we rarely heard here about these issues but sounds like super important. We still sometimes remaining a little bit time remaining. Let's take some questions from the audience so the first one let me read out. This is for Selena is for everyone as well. You know, this hasn't been discussed many times industry conceded the battery swapping infrastructure. Is this idea still viable first of all. And second, you know, what's the what I added some of my thought as well. So if this idea exercise if this idea how does that change the scaling issue. Yeah, any comments. Jumping on that one maybe quickly. It's exciting. It's still, I mean, technically this works there's no doubt whatsoever you can swap batteries you can build a car in a pack that'll do it but I don't think it makes sense. And, you know, really, you end up with such a complicated infrastructure in a, you know, management system for this. And you drive a lot of cost in the vehicle impact design, you know, to allow it. And as fast charge gets better and better, you know the need for this just continue that you just narrow that window. So I think, you know, there's a very, very few applications that are maybe fleet based that have really centralized, you know, depots where they come back to and are managed as a close fleet where it might make sense. And even that, in my view, is not making much sense. And, you know, I think we'll focus much more on fast charge and, you know, trying to, you know, to sort of size the battery in a way that it gets utilized really efficiently in its application. But, you know, for cars, I agree with JB, by the way, I don't think it makes a lot of sense. But at Uber, we looked at this for bicycles and like Gogoro does this in Taiwan with scooters, right? They're in the city, and they have a bunch of like kiosks where you can swap out your battery pack, right, if you're a part of the system. And, you know, we, like I said, we looked at this for e-bikes that are, you know, running kind of in a shared fleet, right, where, you know, the bicycle pack could get dropped into a kiosk and pull, and you could pull a fresh one and put it on the bike and go. But that's a fleet, as JB said, that's an owned fleet, right, that's maintained by an outside vendor. But at that point, it kind of makes sense, but a bicycle pack is about, yeah, big, and you can kind of create a lock and you can just personally, you know, pick it up and shove it into a bike, and that's fine. And harder, much harder to do economically with a car. And you got to remember too, when you've, when you're swapping batteries, you have to make more of them, because you have to have them all in these depots, right. So if you're looking even for an e-bike and you're going to set up a system, a city network, you're not having one battery per that bike, you're going to have two, or, you know, 1.7 or there's going to be some optimal number depending on how you've distributed your fleet. So you've got to make more. Yeah, it makes sense. This is a key point. I often also remind other people by doing swapping, you need to have a backup somewhere, right, you need to make more. So next question, where do you want to ask or you want me to? Sure. Let me ask this another question here on the decision making process between recycling, repurposing, and re-manufacturing, right. I think today we heard from JB on recycling. So this question asks, how do you make the decision between do you send something to the recycler or do you, you know, combine a couple of modules together to make a new pack, or do you send it off for second life applications for storage? How is that decision being made today? Do we, do we have the tools to make it? Maybe just, just quickly, not try and answer it. You know, ultimately everything, you know, has to get recycled, you know, so I, you know, I'm in full support and totally agree that, you know, we should be trying to reuse as many components as we possibly can in whichever way possible. And I think the first thing we'll see with automotive modules and packs is some sort of, you know, almost factory refurbishment and kind of recycling back into a warranty reserve fleet. You know, we already did that at Tesla and that was, you know, quite viable. You know, it saturates pretty quickly though. And as soon as these things start coming in higher volume, you know, you won't have as much demand there. Then, then there's, you know, sort of component harvesting, you know, and a lot of mechanical components, you know, can get reused and have a much longer life than maybe the electrochemical, you know, pieces of the cell and module. So, you know, for instance, a bus bar, you know, there's no reason you shouldn't, you know, remove a bus bar and find a way to reuse that and, you know, perhaps the second pack that a vehicle might use in its life. You know, but that could go to electronics and contactors and, you know, enclosures and many other parts. You know, this is where maybe some of that design for reuse might actually be more impactful sooner, I think. And then to the whole second life topic, you know, this is a really hot issue and I know there's several startup companies focusing on this. You know, I think part of the challenge here is that, you know, today, a large scale, large format EV pack actually has a negative value. You know, it costs money for people for the most part to dispose of it. So, appropriately. So, so people go to enormous lengths to figure out how to keep that thing from from being, you know, written off or disposed of. You can find a way to put it in the second use of any form, even for a couple years you delay a cost, you know, and push out a cost. In the end, I believe that, you know, we'll be able to turn that into a residual value, a pretty large residual value for that battery pack. And I think that will change the decision criteria quite a lot when you're looking at, you know, okay, I could recycle this and recover raw materials and reuse them and get, you know, X thousand dollars, or, you know, push this into a secondary application and see how you how much value you can derive from that. So, my personal feeling is that the secondary storage second life stuff is going to be a struggle to scale. I don't think that's going to compete all that well with purpose design products in that space and I think, you know, we'll see more of those products going into recycling reuse route so that you can quickly recover the materials and put them in a new product. I agree with that. Yeah, okay, so then I'll go ahead. Yeah, I agree with that too because, you know, you design your cells to for the application right so something a cell that's really designed to be great in a, you know, personally owned vehicle is really optimized for a certain kind of life. It's, you know, a certain number of cycles a certain amount of rest time makes for a great car. It doesn't usually make for a great stationary storage battery pack you could do it that way, but it's really not optimal for it. You'd rather design a cell. And you know it comes down to how you put how you put your electrodes together. Really, not so much even the raw materials there's something about that there's some a bit about the blend but a lot of it's just how you actually structure the electrodes rather make a cell that's really great for stationary right and use it as such the other piece that comes comes to this I get out of the fire code work that I do. Usually when we're making you know equipment for something it goes through any some kind of a validation process. You know safety testing for cars that's a lot of testing that, you know, crash testing and other stuff that, you know, has been put together by NITSA to make for good cars, safe, safe performance for stationary systems for like a home stationary system. A lot of that means listing to something like a UL standard. Right. So, it's not necessarily so trivial to take a pack, you know, and I always got this question on the fire code you know do you want to let people take, you know, repurpose, you know model s pack and put it on a wall right and no, no, a model s pack is designed to be under a model s. Okay, that's the way it's designed to be and it's the safety is great. The moment you take it out from the model s pick it up and stuff it on your wall it's a whole different right. And if you're going to put it on your wall, you want it to be designed to be on a wall and manage the safety implications of, you know, being in a residence as a wall mounted thing, which is different, right. So, you know, a lot of the, a lot of these ideas are kind of they look great on paper but when you actually go in to try and implement them and try and do this in a mass market way where you've got, you know, proper testing and listing of all these devices it gets really complicated. So, I want to jump in a little bit about this right so the limitation understand from engineering design for for particular purpose. Instead of battery cycle life is the main one of the main factors to say well you know if I repurpose that I don't really know how long it will last. And it just doesn't last long enough assuming you have a very long lasting battery right 30 years. So, you know, you know, 20,000 cycles, would that change the thinking a little bit, you know, about the JVN. I mean, I understand there's other factors you will be good to hear from you you know what other considerations are coming in. Yeah. I just think there's kind of a fundamental mismatch between what stationary customers want in scale and used kind of secondary components. I was, you know, kind of at the beginning of starting and launching our whole stationary energy business at Tesla and, you know, often trying to talk to these customers and sell utilities on this model and businesses and you know they want incredible reliability they want, you know, guaranteed operation for, you know, 20 years, you know, longer than, you know, we could really even feel comfortable on a chemistry side. And to sort of come into that with, you know, well this is a used piece of equipment, you know, it might have a few years left, you know that it's not what they really want to hear. On the technical side though, you know, the number of cycles is maybe, you know, having a 30,000 cycle battery might not be that helpful, because most of those applications are looking at daily cycles for renewable energy. So unless you can have a battery that lasts, you know, some enormous calendar years with very high confidence, that doesn't help you that much. And also you have to think why did it come out of the vehicle application, you know, like what why, what was the impetus to remove it from the vehicle and put it into the second life. And, you know, was it a loss of range, was it technology obsolescence or, you know, something has to happen to sort of have that movement application change. And, you know, that's not always the most predictable repeatable thing, you know, that took it out of the first application and put it in the second. I guess I'd leave it with that. So we're coming to the final 10 minutes of our time. So I thought I might take the chair co chair prerogative and come back to another discussion. You know, as Stanford, we're very interested in technology but we're also very interested in the policy aspect, the regulatory aspect, the business aspect. So I thought maybe we can spend the final 10 minutes talking a little bit about that. And, you know, Hico, maybe let me start with you. The need for regional ecosystem seems to me quite clear and all three of you have highlighted on that. And I'll just pick on the European example. I've seen many discussions of bringing battery manufacturing, you know, raw material synthesis car manufacturing to to Europe and Germany certainly is leaving that effort. Can you discuss a little bit on what do you wish to see more on the political regulatory side and or the business side to make this happen to have this regional ecosystem in Europe. And one key point is really to make immobility also a viable technology for the futures really look into the aspect of sustainability, right. And this is something PSF is trying to do as as good as possible to make sure that all the components that we are providing are produced in the most CO2 friendly way. For plant in Europe that is currently under construction both in Finland for the precursor and also in Schwartzheide for the Calcination. We're using green energy because obviously we are doing the Calcination, which needs a lot of energy, right. And if you do that with the coal fired power plant. There's in the end no sense to build an electric car based on that right. So this is something all the supply chain partners need to acknowledge. Immobility only makes sense if also the cradle to grave concept is sustainable right. It doesn't help to only get green electricity to recharge the car, the whole supply chain needs to build needs to be built in that way. And that's certainly something governments can foster can support by regulations by really looking into that. What is really the CO2 footprint of each component in the car, and then does it really make sense against the combustion car. So that should be really something countries governments and policies should drive and support. Michael, am I correct to say right now. The CO2 footprint is not a decisive factor when you choose between process one process to process three yet. Or is it something that you already consider seriously as you look at the various options. Yes, this is almost mandatory so our corporate strategy is heading in that direction so there's a huge. It's a new corporate strategy that is trimming the whole chemical production of PSF into the direction of sustainability to reduce the global CO2 footprint and we do this in all the segments. And that is working on right, not only the battery materials production but also all the chemical processes. But for the battery industries of special importance obviously to make the whole electric car sustainable as well, but really it's in our corporate DNA to do the things in the most sustainable way possible. JB looks like you have something to say. Thank you. I was just saying I totally agree. And I think that is a really a great place where policy could could help, you know, make sure that the industry is growing in the right way. And you know the sustainability of the product manufacturing and the, you know, components that go into it the materials. It is really where the biggest, you know, embedded CO2 footprint is of a lot of these things. And it can make a big difference. I mean we studied this pretty deeply at Tesla and we're studying it really closely at Redwood now. I mean, you can have a, you know, a car, as you said, you know, built off coal power if you do everything with coal power, you know, it, you know, it still may be marginally better than an internal combustion car but but not as much. And, you know, on the flip side, if you build this, you know, build the materials build the cells build the vehicle with, you know, solar energy or renewable energy. You can actually, you know, reduce that sort of recovery time, you know, so that as the car is being used it has a net positive benefit, you know, from day one. And JB, you bring up this really great point. You know, at the Gigafactory and I believe I was at Redwood material there's a great discussion of using the carbon free and inexpensive electricity from solar and wind. And if you give us a sense, in terms of the overall CO2 footprint, is that making a huge dent in terms of recycling or manufacturing, just by switching to carbon free electricity? Well, I'll mention it quick and maybe let Selena chime in too but, you know, at the Gigafactory one really interesting thing that that, you know, we did when we architected the whole thing is we made it all electric. We literally did not build a natural gas line to that facility. And, you know, it was, it was kind of a cool benefit we got to do and we built it from a, you know, basically a desert scrub brush field is, you know, said okay every single process that goes in this massive facility will have to be electric. And actually there's, you know, little to no local emissions at that factory and it makes it much easier to shift the whole energy source to something sustainable. When you kind of weave natural gas into your process all throughout a facility it gets much harder to chase it out and just shift that away. It does make a difference and you know that the energy consumption of all of these processes, you know, all the way back up to the mine, you know, is significant and it's a significant, it can be a significant impact so I think as we start to look at, you know, these terawatt hour scales of production you know we have to start thinking about that and make sure that, you know, we're not, we're not creating unintended consequences as we go through this whole industrial shift. That's sort of why we are in this, you know, situation in the first place is, you know, we created some unintended consequences that despite a lot of smart people looking at it, we kind of missed it and we're trying now rapidly to to remediate that. Yeah, JP's right there's there's no natural gas it's all electric. It gets entertaining sometimes I'll be honest with you but it also sets the factory up for the future because we can bring on more and more renewables around the factory to supply that power. And that's, and that's great because, you know, we're getting more and more opportunities to do clean electric. You know, Panasonic is this big multinational it's a big company does a lot of things does a lot of consumer products all over the world. You know, one of the things that I love about Panasonic was the original founder had Mr. Matsushita had a had a philosophy that, you know, he he thought deeply about what's what's the purpose of a business person right you know what's your what are you supposed to do as a business person what's your responsibility and his viewpoint was that the purpose of a business of a business person is to bring prosperity. And this was written about you know 50 plus years ago so you have to excuse the older language, but to bring prosperity to the community to the nation to the world. And, you know, prosperity is not a word that we use that much right now but what does it mean. It really means that you know you're improving people's lives you're making them comfortable pleasant enjoyable that's what prosperity really means. And so you know if you think about prosperity in a big way that includes sustainability because you're not living a prosperous life. If you're dealing with climate change. In fact it's kind of antithetical to prosperity for for for a world. And so this is something that you know Panasonic thinks about overall and globally and you know drives the drives the corporate philosophy. So, you know when we look at recycling we look at sustainability in the factory. It's part of the goal of the business is to develop is to make sure that yeah, you know it's not about just the financial return on the business it's on the prosperity return for the community for the world for the business that's really what it's about. And that's that's important and then you know if you think from that all kinds of things like you know being efficient with energy being efficient with resources recycling. Not producing lots of CO2 on a process if you don't need to if you can do this in a different way that all fits with that. Mr. Master sheet out that's a really well said Selena. Thank you. Maybe back to you Oh JB sorry did it. Did you want to ask something as well. So we are coming to the close to the end of this panel. Why don't we do this we have thousands of thousands of graduate students, early career people listening. Can each one of you giving your one minute or less concluding remark you want to share with a young students you know what's important you know just anything in your mind right right now but less than one minute. We're hiring. That's equally good. I think that's all of us right well I'm sure JB is the hiring as well. I mean it's an exciting industry and I think you know there's a ton of opportunities for people, you know just graduating or coming close to that. I guess I would encourage people and we've touched on this before but to look at and pick up understanding and knowledge along the way for for production processes. You know, you know take one or two classes in that or just have a little bit of visibility in that even if you're a research scientist or for someone deep in a technical field. I think that's really helpful so you can speak the language there and, and for people on the industrial side of things you know, starting to really realize that, you know, we're trying to industrialize something that's innovating so fast. So process automation controls data, you know and that blend of chemistry and high volume production is a really interesting area. All the, all the aspects of that are super fascinating. Yeah, I can I can add to that I mean this whole industry is so super agile and things are happening so fast right. So on the one hand you need to keep up your curiosity, right. You need to love to enter a roller coaster because it's always going up and down very fast right. Sometimes things are upside down. And what what's to me is most fascinating is really this combination of permanent innovation and having the eye of to the production and really being part of the big change of society. Yeah, so that's really fascinating to be part of such a new industry, it's not a new industry but it's now a new application field right. This doesn't happen to to to often in our industry ages nowadays so it's really fun to be part of that. And also bsf is always looking for for talent that are creative and inspiring the old guys in the company right so Yeah, thank you I'll pass this back to where do you want to conclude well. Sure. Well, I just like to take a moment and repeat what I said in the beginning of our session here that Selena, I code JB you guys are moving the needle one step at the time. Slowly but surely so I like to thank you for doing this and and also thank you for hiring our graduate students and postdocs and give them a real job. So then we as academics can have impact as well indirectly. But let me ask Justin or Evan maybe we can queue up the slide. So this is being a very interesting session as part of our x equals question mark for storage acts and following this excellent symposium today, we will have another one in which x is going to equal to heat. We talked a lot about batteries and electric chemistry. We talked a lot about the need for low cost storage and heat is one of the very strong contender in this area. So we are going to be joined by our colleague Bob Laughlin, who is a professor physics Stanford, and also one of our alums and to Ponec, who co founded and Torah energy, and both of them are working very actively in looking at heat as an energy storage medium. So with that, I would like to thank our participants one more time and and he and all the staff who was making this happen and thank you all for listening in. Have a great day. Thank you all now. Bye bye.