 And so the question here is, how do we chart a course for that, what are the major areas where chemistry may play a role where the US could have a unique contribution. And how do we change basically how batteries are made, how they're sold and how they're recycled. There have been some exciting developments in terms of recent policy on the part of the US government, the Biden administration's passing of the Inflation Reduction Act and the Build Back Better Act really is seizing the attention of Congress and lawmakers. The administration has focused on energy storage as one of the key areas where we need to shore up our supply chain. And so the way they're approaching that is with a fairly complex portfolio of tax incentives and manufacturing grants. So the question is, can we increase manufacturing capability here in the US. How do you do that if we don't have control over the raw materials and the mines required for many of the materials for batteries. The key aspect of this is that traditionally in the energy storage community, developing a new technology and commercializing it takes between 10 and 20 years. And I would argue that the situation is dire enough that we can't afford to take that long. So how do we leverage our capability, more effectively to try to accelerate the discovery translation and commercialization of new technologies. And then finally, thinking about, you know, building manufacturing capability, building capability to develop new technologies for energy storage. How do we advance the field. And here is where we've the BCST board I think I can speak for some things that the government would benefit from next book committee to not only try to help advance the field, develop a strategic roadmap, particularly with respect to innovation. And to again ask the question what role does chemistry play. I think, hand in hand with that we need to have a holistic view of workforce development. Many of the new manufacturing facilities that are being built will be in rural areas as one of our board members pointed out. And so how can we help guide the way for developing training at the community college level the university level and beyond to really develop a robust workforce that can target different aspects of this whole manufacturing problem. And then finally, a big significant challenge both in terms of the technology but also the desperate need is, how do we develop the infrastructure for recycling batteries. Currently lithium ion batteries are made in very large volume, and most of those batteries end up in landfills. And so, both from accessing strategic materials, also minimizing the impact on the environment and extending cycle life in terms of these how do we develop a life cycle of different applications where these batteries can be used and then at the end of life, efficient recycling so those materials can go back into the manufacturing supply. So this is a complex problem, a big problem in terms of both innovation resiliency, again in terms of our position globally, and then also the impact on the environment and so what we're looking for today is all of your feedback in terms of what role can this committee play, what would a useful product look like and we'll come back to questions about that at the end. But first we're going to hear from experts in the field and get some some guidance in terms of not only circular economy but potential applications for energy storage. So, with that, I'm going to first introduce our first speaker, Dr. Maria curry Nikonza is the senior research advisor and lead at the National Renewable Energy Lab for the circular economy for energy materials and the advanced energy and strategic initiative. She prior to that had a long career in industry, developing teams to do R&D and product development development at BP and Roman Haas which is now down from there she then moved to Argonne National as the CEO of the physical sciences and engineering director, so significant expertise in building complex teams. We are going to also turn over to one of our other facilitators Dr. Jodi Lukenhaus who will help with the section. Dr. Lukenhaus is the holder of the Exalta coding systems chair and this is the professor in Department of Chemical Engineering at Texas A&M. So with that, I will turn it over to the two of you. Well, thank you everyone. On behalf of NREL, I would like to thank the committee for the giving us the opportunity to present to talk about some of our work related to the circular economy for energy materials and advanced energy materials. We will stress batteries but we do more than batteries here at NREL so I will just highlight a couple of those other areas as well. Next slide please. Okay, so I will give NREL as at a glance for those of you who are not familiar with NREL followed by a discussion about our critical objectives and in particular the circular economy for energy materials. And what is the circular economy, I'll briefly go over that, and then how do we apply the circular economy at NREL and give an overview. And if time permits, then I will discuss some of the research gaps that we see both cross cutting basic science and applied research. That's related to today's discussion. Next slide please. In NREL at a glance we have more than 3000 employees and of those 3000 employees, about 600 are, and we have more than 600 early career researchers, as well as visiting scientists. We have world class facilities. We have over 1000 partners from industry, academia and the government. And, and we have an incredible campus that's just full of life and buzz, in particular now because of all of the funding that's coming from the current administration. Next slide please. In NREL we have what are called three critical objectives. One is integrated energy pathways where we're focused on the grid in terms of thousands of devices that are going to have to be connected to the grid communicating with the grid and how do you do that. And not bring the grid down. How do you do it in a resilient way in a cyber secure way for electrons to molecules you can think of this as focusing on converting biomass to SAF or the use of hydrogen for fuel sales for mobility for stationary. And then with the circular economy, our focus is, and the circular economy is the critical research area that I'm going to focus on today. Next slide please. Okay, so what is the circular economy. According to the MacArthur Foundation, the circular economy is an industrial system that is restorative or regenerative by intention and design. It replaces the end of life concept with restoration shifts towards the use of renewable energy eliminates the use of toxic chemicals, which impairs the use and aims for the elimination of waste through the superior design of materials products and systems. Next slide please. Okay, thank you. Essentially, they're about 14 circular economy pathways, but 10 that I think, according to our scientists that are the main focus of research, they start with refuse refusing to use, or minimizing the use of toxic and hazardous chemicals or materials, they're being designed from the very start for circularity so making it easy to disassemble, recover and separate out valuable materials, and then reduce the amount of materials that we use. And in terms of extending the lifespan, repairing refurbish refowering remanufacture, the lifespan of these materials keeping them into the economy for as long as possible. It's no longer possible to keep them in the economy, as is unless recycled them in a smart way so that we're recovering all the value that we can. Next slide please. It used to be that when I would give this presentation on circular economy. I would primarily focus on the waste generation, in terms of being a reason that we should definitely be practicing circularity here in the US. For instance, if we look at batteries by 2025 is expected that at least 600,000 metric tons of waste will be generated with wind turbine blaze 300,000 metric tons by 2038 in Europe alone. And then for photovoltaic 78 million metric tons by 2050 globally. Next slide please. Excuse me, but now because and I think we owe it a lot to cove it there were a lot of smart people were thinking about the supply chain implications of the clean energy transition. Not even before cove it came around, but I think when we had the supply chains disruptions with cove it, it certainly made everybody stop and pay attention that we cannot possibly have this transition and let it and it goes smoothly, and America has to remain its economic competitiveness. If it's business, as usual, we have to focus on supply chain resiliency, and one answer to that supply chain resiliency, among several is the circular economy, the materials, the metals, the minerals, all of the the mining and extraction that we have done early on if we can keep all of those materials in the economy for as long as possible, then we, we need less of those resources. And as was stated earlier, some of those resources are not in the most are in some geopolitically sensitive areas. So we want to maintain our competitive economic competitiveness, the circular economy can help with that with concerns about continuing growth in demand of those materials because, you know, parts of the world are getting that are developing are also desirous of consumption of materials, we also have the clean energy transition. And so we have to really be prudent in terms of how we manage all of these supply chain pools. So, the circular economy can help to mitigate some of some of this impact on materials demands, and another area that it can help by reducing the amount of extraction that that is required in areas where there is conflict mining, and the use of labor. Hopefully we can eliminate all of that or eliminate or or influence better behaviors. And also reduce the amount of environmental burdens associated with mining. Next slide please. Okay, so we've already addressed and I'm going to go through this fairly quickly. As an example related to battery technology. We've addressed some of the supply chain issues so if you look at this particular slide, you will notice that the Democratic Congo is the major supplier of the cobalt that is used in the in a number of our libs. And it is most of their supply is contracted by China, and then that those contracted or is a refined primarily in China. And that gives the Chinese an opportunity to own a fully integrated supply chain, all the way through the production of the batteries. If you look at the bottom in purple that's where the US is currently right now in terms of mineral supplies as well as in and in terms of use for batteries. Next slide please. This story repeats itself with lithium. It's not so much the Democratic Republic of Congo, that is the major supplier for lithium, but one of our good friends is Australia is, but much like Congo Australia has devoted a bit of its supply to China, and that supply goes to China to be refined and helps in terms of China having a strong manufacturing base for batteries. And looking at the bottom in purple you see where the US currently is situated. Next slide please. In purple, a similar story, but not so much having the raw materials in a friendly place. Notice they are in Russia and China, but broadly distributed, more broadly distributed than cobalt for sure. But again the refining primarily takes place in China and and gives it a competitive advantage in terms of battery manufacturing. Next slide please. Okay, so what is NREL doing about this? Well we have the circular economy for energy materials, and our vision is to lead research that maintains energy technology products, components and materials at their highest utility and intrinsic value at all times, and mitigate negative externalities such as materials depletion, land, soil and water pollution, while promoting sustainable energy systems that improve global emissions, efficiency, environmental quality, economic prosperity, and social equity. Next slide please. Thank you. We focus primarily on redesign, so designing from the start for circularity, for reliability, extending the useful life of these materials and devices and systems, reuse anything that we reuse it long before we recycle it. It might be repurposed for another use, but certainly want to extend the utility of these components, and then recycle at the very end of life, like when we have had maybe multiple lives in the same use for a device or a component. And then and only then do we want to recycle it and take it down maybe into other component parts or down cycle it for other uses, but our preference is with recycling to upcycle. Next slide please. This is part of the team that makes it all happen with the circular economy for energy materials. These are more the leadership and then behind them are a number of very brilliant, very smart post docs and early career scientists. Next slide please. In addition to part of our research in addition to our internal teams we are also part of a number of consortiums. So, US map focuses on next generation PV and in particular with perovskites we lead that we participate and remade. We co lead resell advanced battery cycling and I'll talk in greater detail there but the lead organization for resell is our national lab for ACME which focuses on recycling for wind and then doormat with PV and a variety of others as you can see here. Next slide please. Sorry. Next slide please. Thank you. We take a multi discipline team approach in terms of analysis, we usually have at least one or two people on part team on the circle economy research teams that does focuses on the analysis the modeling and analysis piece. We do materials we usually have a materials processing expert who can help with the design with materials design discovery and characterization device systems with individuals who know how to fabricate and also disassemble and design the devices for ease of disassembly and the reliability lifetimes. We have a team of people are very good at developing testing protocols that can be used for certification of reuse of different components as well as different systems. Next slide please. With modeling analysis we cover life cycle analysis, techno economic analysis, equity and workforce supply chain and circle economy and we have a team that's constantly working to do kind of macro models that can do a number of these analysis in one system. Next slide please. Okay, next slide please. Okay, we have a website if you want to know more about a modeling and analysis capabilities analysis capabilities. You can go to the link below. Next slide please. Next slide please. Okay, I'm going to go very quickly through PV and I'm just going to talk about the next generation PV. As I said before it focus on metal halides. And also we want it also focuses on how can we do glass glass separation how can we do the flat glass because that is a huge weight component of the of the modules and and also how can we enhance the circularity of the bifacial silicone modules themselves. Next slide. And we answer questions, not just with PV but with all of our research related to does the existing manufacturing processes, enhance re-manufacturing of valuable recycled materials at an economical cost if not what has to change. If the solution is the solution scalable and economic and that applies to batteries, turbines as well as PV systems. Continue please. Okay, continue. Because I really want to get to batteries. We also participate in the Durmet II consortium. And the goal here for Durmet is to see if they can extend the useful life of the modules, the PV modules to 50 years. And to understand what are the degradation and end of life processes so that we can counterbalance them. Next slide please. Next slide please. Okay, and so in the field we do a lot of infill testing so the junction boxes, the back sheets, the cracked glass, the interconnects. We collect data for ourselves and also for industry to let them know how are these different components surviving and operating in the field and how can their weaknesses be mitigated. Next slide please. Next slide please. Okay, and then we have a modeling analysis tool called PV ICE, which is an open source analysis tool that quantifies the mass and energy flows in the PV, in PV manufacturing use and at the end of life accounting for the virgin material inputs, the energy output, and eventual disposition. Next slide please. And we participate in a number of international standards, working groups, PVCAT being one of them. Next slide please. Okay, so now we're at batteries, batteries. Okay, next slide. Okay, so this audience is probably far more experienced, not probably far more experienced with batteries than I am, but we know that batteries are going to be in very high demand in short order by 2030 it's estimated that there will be at least 20 million EVs on the road. And so that's going to consume require a lot of cobalt manganese nickel, etc. to manufacture the primarily used battery which now is in MC. But in general with batteries, you have the cathode and separators you have a variety of chemistries for each, and you can also mix and match the cathode and those and the separators, you also have the electrolyte salts, the solvents, a variety of solvents and additives such as binders that are part of the complexity of the mix. We are only recycling about 5% of the lithium ion batteries today. Next slide please. Okay, so what are we doing about getting the recycling rates up and basically doing the hard work of understanding the complexities of these systems and using them to our advantage in terms of recovering a lot of the valuable materials. So the Department of Energy Office of Vehicle Technologies is spending quite a bit of money in this area to in four, excuse me, three areas. One, the lithium battery recycling R&D center which is resale to next generation low cobalt battery research so going from like NMC 111 to the 811s and others in between. And then recycling, the recycling price which really focuses on some of the early stages like collection and separations technologies to lower the cost and make it a lot more efficient in terms of collecting the spent batteries. Next slide please. Okay, so there's basically three approaches to breaking down the batteries at end of life. And so resales mission and resale is now focused on all three areas. Previously, the main focus was on direct recycling, but it is recently expanded to cover both pyro and hydro recycling as well processes as well. So resales mission is to decrease the cost of recycling lithium ion batteries to ensure future supply of critical materials and decrease energy usage compared to raw material production. As I said, Argonne National Laboratory leads this. There's Warchester, Polytech as a participant, Michigan Technological University, UC San Diego, and NREL as participants in the consortium. As I said, resale has expanded to hydro processing and with hydro processing basically you're using assets to dissolve the materials and what's produced is leached out as metal precursors. And then with pyro is an intensive heat applied to the battery to kind of burn off the organics. And what you're left with is the slag that then is separated using the hydro processes with direct recycling. It's, although the other two pyro and hydro a lot more mature and commercially direct recycling. But although it's in the early stages, it so far may provide a more efficient route to recycling that record that eliminates the use of high intense heat, and also the use of of top of chemicals like very strong assets. Both an environmental and an energy benefit with the directory cycling. Next slide please. Okay. With the directory cycling which has been a key part of NREL's focus. We start with that end of life battery. It is shredded, not at NREL shredded at Argonne. But NREL has a role in the shredding process in that we help to develop the safety protocols because we have a facility that will allow us to pretty much abuse batteries in a very safe way. And so we develop the protocols and then we confer with Argonne and others who are doing shredding to help them to do it in a way that will do no harm. And then there is the electrolyte recovery, which we do not participate in, but others do. We take that shredded material at the cathode anode and and do cathode anode and metals separation to form what is called a black mass. And with the black mass, we separate the cathode out. We separate the carbon black and we're working to try to separate out the PDF. Once we have the cathode separated out from the system, NREL does do a relitiation process to upcycle the cathode. And then the cathode is then once it's rejuvenated, it is put back into the battery manufacturing process. And then then use and then the battery is used and starts in the closed loop system once again. Next slide please. Okay. In addition to the direct recycling area that we focus on we also manage the VTOs recycling prize, which is focused in five areas. The collection, separating and sourcing, safe storage and transportation, and reverse logistics. Next slide please. Okay, and we also have a modeling analysis tool called Libra, which characterizes the full circular economy for batteries. So, cost of resources during extraction as a part of it, as well as kind of some of the environmental impacts, changes in battery chemistry, doing material and product design that because generations and in particular batteries, the generation of batteries are constantly changing. And then designing what is the impact for designing for circularity, including information about battery lifetimes, potential market sizes, collection and transport costs, some of the second life market areas, including that information into the modeling analysis tool and then what type of recycling approach is being used, be it direct, pyro, hydro, and then how do we safely dispose of materials when we've taken all the value out and do it safely. And I think I'm running out of time. Am I correct? I don't want to go over time. You're okay. You have about another 12 minutes or so. Oh, great. Okay. Next slide. Thank you. Okay, so CE for wind, and I'm going to be very brief here, but just to give you a taste of some of the other areas that we work in. And so, we do polymer upcycling in we, in particular for wind and this is really an area for one of my colleagues. My co, another, we have another co-lead for the circular economy for energy materials. His name is Bob Allen, and his space does polymer upcycling and in particular for wind turbine blades. And so, some of the epoxy amines that are currently used. NREL has researched to produce biobased and hydrides that are used as part of the epoxy linkage and the epoxy and hydride linkage that ultimately can be reversed. And so we can break down the components into their monomeric precursors, and then reuse them at the end of life. That is the concept and we're well in a ways to realizing this. Next slide, please. We have the composite manufacturing education and technology facility where we actually do manufacture 13 meter long wind turbines. And so we can do not only the development of the polymers but we can do the fabrication and we can also test the performance. Next slide please. This is an example of the thermoplastic wind turbine blade that recently won the R&D 100 award. Next slide. Okay. And you can see more of our facility and the process of fabricating that 13 meter thermoplastic blade. Next step. Next slide please. Okay. Some of the research questions that we address are what is the impact on actual technology field performance and cost of utilizing new blade technologies reclaimed or used and or recycled materials products compared to using legacy primary materials and products. Next slide, please. Okay. And also, as with all of the other areas we also work in tonight on international working teams to help to accelerate reuse repair, circularization of clean energy technologies. Next slide please. Okay, so some of the gaps. Standardized testing standards in terms of standards we need standardized testing protocols and new testing tools for rapid assessment of state of health, safety, durability, and other critical performance factors for clean energy technologies. And this does definitely apply to batteries. Once we reuse repair and recycle. And then two standards to help develop warranties, objective pricing mechanisms to design robust business models and enhance customer trust. And three standards for digital systems used to track and monitor flows of energy carbon and materials globally. Next slide, please. Okay, simple regulatory gaps. Okay, some of the regulatory gaps, a detailed comparison and analysis of the impact of local national and global end of life regulatory practices. Analysis of how policies serve to incentivize and disincentivize circular economy behavior and practices. We have gaps in permitting clarity on how electrical building and fire regulations will apply to second life systems like using batteries on the grid and PV for grid and non grid applications and then certainty in terms of warranties and liabilities for second life systems. And finally clarity and consistency and regulatory waste classifications for interstate transportation. Next slide please. For basic science. And these are just examples. Disassembly with novel adhesive technology. Some novel adhesive technology to do two things to make it easy to disassemble some of these components but at the same time those the components have to maintain their performance characteristics. So they have to be able to be in multiple weather conditions and still hold up hold up for decades. We need basic research on replacement technology for like ethylene vinyl acetate. Laminates but in particular and I'm sorry, I, the focus is on battery technology. So we do need focus on some of the adhesives the glues that are used in the battery technology so that it makes it easy for disassembly more technology options. Yeah, we want to replace flammable toxic and fluorinated electrolytes and solvents without negative negatively impacting functional features like energy density and lifespan with batteries. Next slide please. For modeling and analysis gaps, we need to, we incentivize manufacturers and other key stakeholders to share more of their protected information, but in a way where the information will be maintained privately. So we need information in terms of the bill of materials, the processes, more details related to the processes that are used for recycling. We need better integration of technology environmental social policy regulation behavioral and economic performance factors and circular pathways to identify the trade offs the hotspots and the overall best strategies for capturing that the value in the end of life systems. We need assessments of how many local regional and national firms offer circularity services for clean energy technologies, including locations for collection and recycling capacity, their capacity for recycling annual mass recycle percent recovered, etc. There's just a lot of information gaps that would help for us to further refine our predictions if we had even greater high quality data. And we need analysis at relevant geographic geographic scales and temporal frequency projections of decommissioned clean energy technologies that incorporates significant factors, leading to end of life such as the failure modes, the performance degradation over time, how they behave in extreme weather events. And then we need to improve the sensitivity of our analysis. And then finally, analysis of small scale decentralized facilities should be compared with more centralized facilities. Next slide please. For digitization gaps, we need to incorporate more robotics. We need more manufacturing automation, the inclusion of AI and ML and designing for circularity for high throughput synthesis characterization and performance evaluations. We need to really become more mature in terms of using blockchain, echo labels, digital passports, QR codes, and RFID, so that from point of origin to the end of life, we're able to monitor what's happening to the components and also how are they performing over time. And then communication and transparency of data to help stakeholders in the use phase of select appropriate maintenance repair activities. We need better communications and blockchain echo labels, digital passports, QR codes could help with that. We need real time monitoring of system performance and diagnostic technologies to enable more efficient repair and thereby increase the functional life of systems. And then we need to optimize siding of end of life infrastructure through geospatial analysis tools. Next slide please. For applied research, we need validation of economic and environmental impacts of using LLBs to use batteries to provide a wide range of grid services in second life applications currently in second life applications. And we need research on the effectiveness of standardized designs for efficient automation and decommissioning and disassembly. Impact on CE of using replacement adhesives, laminates, and none lead soldering techniques and further research to optimize. Well, I'll skip down a bit because some of these are for PV and so we want to increase basically we want to have applied research that will help us to optimize methods for recovery. And and reuse in a both open and closed loop system. Next slide please. Okay, I think I'm within the time a lot it. Yeah, that was perfect. Thank you. Okay, thank you. Perfect. Thank you so much. Thank you so much for your presentation. I want to remind our virtual attendees that you can ask a question by raising your hand. Scott, I see you already. And then also if you aren't able to raise your hand virtually if you're in person, Amy can help with moderating as well. So we do have some questions already kind of pre populated so I'm going to take the first question and then Scott you can take the second question. So the first question I have for you is what is the biggest barrier to achieving circular energy materials and what needs to be done to overcome this barrier. Okay. So I think one of the biggest barriers is we have to develop the technology to make it cost effective cost competitive to land filling. And, you know, thank you to the Biden administration we're getting a lot of research dollars to help us to bring the cost down for recycling. And also what will help us bring down the cost even further is to work more closely, I think with industry, so that we can make sure that some of the solutions that we want to apply really do do help with their systems are easy to adopt within their systems, as opposed to have requiring a great deal more of capital investment. So those are a couple of areas that I think are challenges. Very good thank you. Um, I see Scott next. Yeah, Maria. So I wanted to correct one of your, your charts to highlight the importance of what you just talked about. So the adoption rate of EVs is far faster than what you showed and emphasizes the importance of the circular economy, the chart that you showed and I'm in industry I work for Dupont so we kind of track these things. You showed 2026 having over 10 million EVs and 2029 having over 20 million. I will see all that has been pulled forward five years we hit 10 million EVs last year. Next year we're forecasted hit 20 million EVs. So I just wanted to it's really important. It is, you're right, it's going much quicker than we ever thought every time we see the ZV forecast, they're doubling and they're they're rapidly increasing so your chart was probably like your Bloomberg report was probably a couple years old. Yes, going way faster than we ever thought, which highlights the importance of what you're working on. And thank you very much I know I'm modeling and analysis people are probably cringing right now Scott and saying, I can't believe she used that old report that old slide. But yes, I totally agree. When I saw it this morning I thought oh my goodness, I think, based on all of the money, just with the BIL that these numbers are definitely outdated. So, yes. Okay, thank you very much Scott. It highlights some of the challenge with addressing this issue is the numbers are changing every day. Yes, and it kind of looks like it's getting more critical every day, but it's it is hard to keep up. Thank you for your hard your next. Thank you. Very impressed by the holistic approach that has been shared with us, including failure mode multimodal mathematical analysis of the economy, and everything so this is very impressive. And I'm speaking by ignorance maybe is how do we think about the importance of envisioning the user interface. And I get it for electrical transportation I think that probably relatively easy but are we also thinking that electric appliances and device will also have to be replat form from energy material advanced conservation. What strikes me is, should we not study what will be the bottlenecks that the users the people in their today life, may either encounter, or maybe some of the benefits they can extract for it so I did not see any user interface. And as I was looking at your multi faceted amazing work which is really impressive. How should we think about the human element of the ultimate users. And if they're on we have a group at in road that does agent based modeling. And so if I had taken the time to go through our models, that would have been one that I would have covered, and we applied that to all of the clean energy technologies and in particular batteries and EVs. And so those models allow us to see how decisions are being made. Okay, and made based on the benefits to the particular stakeholder. Not just the manufacturer, or the recycler, but also the end user. So, I always use this example on one of those end users with cars, where I will hold on to a car for 15 years, because I see a certain benefit from that. Okay, well how does somebody like me. In terms of the decisions I make about buying a EV, let's say, how does that factor in it, because I don't like buying new cars but yet I need to get an EV. And probably when I do purchase an EV, I'm going to hold on to it for 15 more years versus my neighbor across the street likes the latest and greatest of everything. And he can afford it. So, how do you factor in the purchasing behavior of both of these groups and the benefits that we get the reluctance that the end user may have that is this, I can't find charging stations. So should I purchase. At the end of life with this battery, what do I do with it there isn't you know when it comes to lead asset batteries. There is a mature market there, but what do I do with an EV battery and then who's going to pay for the replacement of that battery and how much is it going to cost. So we have modelers analysis people who are also factoring in that decision making process, the impact, and the way that the end users will behave. So if I may, that really increase my confidence in the program what you say, looking at the end user. I think this is maybe something we can think for all the recyclability of plastic and material. The end user is important. May I ask a last question. Are you also thinking about the end user for not the car but appliances and device or is it something that you will look at the later phase. Okay, so in rows of really big organization. In terms of appliances we have a whole team, we have a really an a building that's devoted to energy efficiency with appliances, and I would not be surprised if they are working on the circular economy related to those appliances. All right, I think that discussion also shows how important the social component can be then transitioning to a circular economy. Next I see George crap trees, hand up so George you can get in there. Thanks so much, Maria wonderful talk. And I like the previous discussion that you were highlighting john about. What about the end user, how does, how does the end user feel. I would so I want to point out two things the first one, just a comment that the end users is very different if it's a consumer, or if it's let's say a business or a big no organization or the government. They all make rather rational decisions and they'll all make about the same decision because they talked to each other, whereas consumers, as you pointed out Maria have very different points of view, you like a one year old car or you like a 10 year old car. And you know that's not in common. So it might be easier to start with the institutional consumers, because the you can predict a little bit better how they're going to react. It's simply a comment but maybe you have some reaction to that comment. I, I wholeheartedly concur with you George, and nice to see you by the way. And our modelers with the probably they jumping up and down and going, that's exactly right and they cover all of the agents but in particular they cover government they cover the manufacturers they covered the, the recyclers. And all of the business, the b2bs, they've covered extensively in the modeling and analysis. So yes, you're right. The consumers are part of it, but they're not the biggest part of the analysis, yes. The second question or comment would be, it seems to me that recycling and design to recycle has been left out of the just the thinking generally. And I know batteries better than other things but we never designed the lithium ion battery to be recycled in fact it's a nightmare. And that was always a second thought. Now we're starting to some of us are starting to say these words. I'm wondering if in order to get it into the national consciousness, a little bit more firmly, we should have an earth shot that's on recycling. We have something like eight earth shocks, earth shots now and none of them are really related to recycling they're all related to new technologies but how you got to recycle that technology once you develop it. So, just a question. I love it. I love the idea George. I, you know, sometimes people, especially scientists we feel like, well, recycling, being an earth shot. But I think the more we educate each other on the huge benefits of circularizing the way that we use these materials, I do think that we will see that it is scientifically worthy of our time and of our attention. And it is really critical that we use this as part of our all of the above strategy for supply chain resiliency. So yes, an earth shot for recycling would love it. And definitely, we'll probably follow up with you to. Yeah. Yeah, let's talk some more. Yeah. Excellent that touches back on some of the closed door session discussion. Yeah, I think that's where we thought, oh, do we need like a Manhattan project where we design a battery from initially from the chemistry itself so that it can be fully circular. And, and not just, you know, settle with okay we have a lithium ion battery how do we recycle it now let's redesign the chemistry from the, from the beginning. Yeah. So, next we have a question from a new thing. Hi Maria great talk and I wanted to follow up on George's question because I had the exact same question in a manufacturing for recycling right I mean and and it's the entire process I will just tell you I'm at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory around the engineering directorate. I have three FTE electronic technologist, just to get the batteries out of every single iPhone and iPad. Okay, and these are the people who also design tables for weapons. This is how much expertise is needed. So imagine if if a consumer wanted to you know get the battery out I mean Apple makes it intentionally impossible to get it out. So it's not just about the batteries themselves but that use the battery I mean if you can manufacture them to make it. Why can't I hit a button, and the battery just pops out. I mean you know to end user I mean if you make it easier that's the only way they will recycle so if you're thinking about that. We are trying to think about using robotics to do that, you know, love to hear more. The second part on recycling. What are the but is it a chemistry problem, or is it a scale up problem or both. Any any insight into that so that this committee can kind of start thinking about is there anything you know we can do to help. Okay, so I think there are a couple of questions if I were a recycler. Well if I were someone who was thinking about getting into the recycling business for batteries. Besides the technology I would want to know okay is this, am I going to be able to make this facility profitable. And when you think about some of the changes that we're making which are perfect. In terms of reducing the amount of cobalt or nickel in the battery that changes the economics of some of those plants. And so, we need the plants we need them to be built. We need them to be built in a way where we don't create environmental burdens on communities. So how do we as a nation do this, because we're going to dematerialize we're going to use probably materials, we'd love to use non rare earth materials for some of these technologies. But for batteries in particular. Now you have changed the economics LFP if we look at LFP recyclers really don't want to be bothered with LFP. They're making the manufacturers or whoever generates the waste pay them to take LFP off of their hands. So how do we as a nation, because we see that we want to recycle all of the above, whether it has great value or not economically but has other values to the to the economy. How do we as a nation address that. Do we do we cover the cost as a nation for the capital investments for those areas where they're not cost competitive. Do we help. Okay, add features like robotics, which will likely, it'll save labor cost, but upfront, you've got to make that investment. Do we help with that upfront. Yeah, there are a lot of dimensions to what you have to consider if you're going to get into this game, and if you're going to make money with this game. In some areas, the federal government is going to have to step in and help, because it just, there's no economic feasibility to it right now at least. That's a good, that's a good point and then by the time, you know, if, if we, if we don't plan appropriately by the time it is economically feasible it might be too late, like, we may not have developed all the infrastructure we need. But we, you know, we should learn from our mistakes in the past, right. Like if you look at lead asset batteries okay they're recycled now. But over time, and I think even recently we've seen articles where whole communities are suffering from chemicals that leached into their, their into the groundwater, destroying the soil, and trying to get clean up and having difficulties getting the companies that had the poor practices a long time ago that created the problem, having difficulties getting because they're bankrupt. So they have no money to go in and do the cleanup. If we start thinking from the start. Now with, and I love this earth shot idea. Again, George, we start thinking from the start can avoid some of these issues in the future. So we do need to learn from our master past mistakes. Okay, next we have a question from Tom LaGrasso. Thank you Marie very nice presentation. I wanted to make a comment about the earth shot actually there was an exercise and ideation exercise I think happened during the spring through the summer, looking at a recycling earth shot and I can make connections to the people leading that effort. But it would be a good connection. And I agree it's needed. My question goes to kind of some of the economics and the use of digital labeling or eco tags. The batteries in particular you showed a nice table indicating at least, you know, half a dozen or more different chemistries and you know when, when we start trying to recycle a variety of devices that contain lithium ion batteries that feedstock is variable. And that presents a real challenge for someone to build a factory to do the chemistry. In a way that that is efficient and not having to tailor everything. The other aspect to that is, if you don't have a way to sort. Then you just got this black mass as you talked about. I will talk a little bit about that and what we do, but you end up going back to the elementals. And you're starting over from really a very early stage in the supply chain, losing a lot of embodied energy. So could you tell us more about the activities around labeling and the work with the standard standardization agencies to somehow affect that sort of part of the recycling challenge. Okay, so notice I said that that was a gap. And that is an area that NREL is chomping at the bits to do research and work collaboratively with like the battery consortiums. But we have not as yet done a lot of work in this area we are planning to start doing some work in terms of robotics and qr labeling in our but we haven't started that's something that we recognize as a need, we have to find the funding for it. Thank you. I think to follow up on that idea. Is there any resistance from industry to having their batteries recite you know to enter into a recycling program because maybe they don't want other people to know what's inside their batteries. One of our challenges is the proprietary composition of the batteries. And so how do we create a consortium where industry feels safe. They know that their information will be protected will be safeguarded, much like we've done. The Department of Energy has done with less a fuel cell technology. Where it's under the proprietary information is under lock and key, or the same with PV technology, we definitely need to get to that place with a consortium with battery suppliers where they will share information but it will be protected information that will only be used in analysis and there will be no ascribing and it will be presented in such a way that you cannot kind of back calculate what the compositions are of batteries, etc. So, yeah, we would love for such a consortium to emerge that will include industry academic academia and the national labs. So that we can come up because that's the way that we're going to come up with the best circular economy solutions for the industry and for the nation. Thank you. I have about four minutes left for questions so I want to remind people if you have a have a last question. Now is the time. I'm going to take one more question and then I see George can go next. So my, my question is, when we're considering recycling and recovery, a lot of these processes that you mentioned. They look like they have a really high carbon footprint or energy footprint. So, how much should we care about like the carbon or energy footprints of these processes so like great we're recycling and we all feel good about it but what if we just made the environment worse by doing so. What are your views on that. I completely agree with you that's why we do modeling an analysis of the processes, because you can have something that is low cost, and it's technically successful, but a disaster. And I'm going to have to apologize because I just looked up my battery is going low. Excuse me, sorry. Okay, this is being recorded. Yes, so it can be cost wise, successful. Maybe depending on your definition of technical success. But we have to look at the overall impact, the impact on society, the impact on the environment. In addition to the technical and economic impact we need to do we do the life cycle analysis, we're now factoring into our analysis, the, the social impact and in particular on frontline communities. Yes, we, we cannot identify a pathway without knowing all of the benefits, as well as the burdens that are going to be associated with what we choose to do. So if you're going to order them probably in terms of carbon and energy intensity. Pyro metallurgy is probably, though, I don't want to say bad actor but probably presents the most challenges. It gives us the opportunity to do a lot of good research around those areas. And then the hydro processing with the strong assets that are used there. We probably can find some more environmentally friendly approaches to help with those separations processes. And I wouldn't say but not, but the, the least environmentally impactful right now is the direct recycling pathway. Right, thank you. Um, and so I promise George last question. So, to keep us on time. I'll, I'll kind of impose brief question brief answer perhaps and then we'll move on to our next talk, George. Yeah, thanks so very brief. There are lots of different battery chemistry is out there, which you alluded to Maria, and I'm some are a little bit radical for example what's coming in five years is probably a solid state electrolyte, which would require a different kind of recycling than the liquid electrolytes we have. What's the barrier I mean are people unwilling to invest in recent in developing the recycling technology for a given battery, given that it may decline in popularity or there may be more competitors coming along that complicate the issue. I have a friend who works in the space and they are monitoring the changes because they're coming pretty fast. We're going up with a business model, we're okay. They will pass the cost on to the receivers of the recycling materials to help counterbalance any economic deficits in doing the processing that's the model that they are going forward with. So what I'm working with, as I said LFP in MC works for any in a in a in MC is economical because of the cobalt content and the nickel content right now. So no worries there but they certainly monitoring the changes that are happening. And, and then he particularly mentioned the solid state electrolytes that they're not sure five years what's going to be coming at them that will completely upset their strategy. So, yeah, all of this is being taken under consideration George. So that concludes on that includes the discussion portion on Dr. Maria crate Nikonza. I applaud you I thank you so much for your talk and insights. Thank you for the invitation and for the great questions. Okay. So next, I will be introducing Tom, the Grosso and just a moment. This next session will be moderated by Dr. Shelly mentor and Amy Piedro. Dr. Shelly mentor is an associate chair of chemistry and the Dale and Susan polter endowed chair of biological chemistry and the Department of Chemistry at the University of Utah. Our next talk is going to be from Dr. Tom La Grosso. He is the director of the critical materials Institute. He's been a member of the leadership team since the inception of the Institute, leading the developing substituting focus area. He's been a material scientist at the Ames laboratory since 1988. His background is in solidification physics and he's applied his background to the synthesis and design of new and novel materials and single crystalline forms. He is the co inventor of a rare earth free substitute for the magnetostrictive alloy to fennel D, which is used in small engine components and petroleum exploration. We look forward to your talk and thank you. Thank you very much for the introduction and hopefully you are seeing a PowerPoint presentation that is in full screen mode. Great. Okay, well, first of all, thanks. Thank you to the board for giving me this opportunity to describe the work we're doing. I want to thank Maria for providing an excellent background, both for the framework of the background for my talk. So I will go over that part really quick, as well as the questions and answers which really sets up some of the outcomes that the R&D efforts that we are pursuing in CMI are trying to achieve like reduction in energy, carbon footprint. So we are an energy innovation hub. Our mission is to develop innovative scientific and technological solutions to secure, to develop robust and secure supply chain for rare earths and other materials important for the clean energy transition. We are a public private consortium led by the Ames National Laboratory with three other national labs, Oak Ridge, Livermore, and Idaho National Laboratories. And we have 15 universities and 32 companies whose NASCAR logo banners is shown at the bottom, but it's really important to have this ecosystem surrounding the technologies, especially when supply chains don't exist because it really does require when one has an innovation to surround it by a set of companies that can feed the feedstocks into the process and of course, enter into the offtake agreements. Otherwise, well, frankly, the technology gets orphaned. So we are driven toward a sustainable future. Really the two driving of all the national initiatives, the two that are important for CMI is the electrification of transportation, which we are targeting obviously by 2035 and net zero carbon emissions by 2050 to achieve that transition. It's not just the change in the makeup of electric vehicles going to a much more larger variety of minerals that are needed for an electric vehicle, but also in the power generation offshore wind and solar PVs become more dependent on minerals. So really the fuel, we're really the transition is a fuel is from a fuel intensive material intensive transition. So, I won't spend a lot of time on the next slide because Maria covered it very well. The vulnerabilities. We're sourcing for rare earths circular diagram shows a very inner ring is mining and USA is is now producing 40,000 metric tons of rare earth mixed rare earth concentrate. And we are the second largest producer. Unfortunately, it all goes to China to get separated into the individual rare earth and in particular the magnetic rare earth. And this is a story that plays out for across all of the mineral space so really the vulnerabilities are the gaps that we have in our supply chains are in the midstream and and and downstream manufacturing. And so we focus on trying to address some of the challenges associated with that. And those those parts of the supply chain. In the end, our goals are to diversify and expand the supply of materials in the appropriate quantities needed for clean energy transition through unlocking domestic sources and appropriate quantities. We need to account the temporal need right right now we need to be able to produce a lot of these minerals in order to meet the growing demand for, for, for example, for the easy transition. There's also needs longer term. And how are we going to address the sustained needs. And that's where maybe recycling can can become a significant part of that equation. We need to reduce the energy intensity of mineral processing materials processing by at least 50%. We're going to go to renewable energy sources that we have to be able to make these materials in the most energy efficient way. Finally, of course, we need to decrease the environmental health and water usage associated with production of critical materials. As the last question pointed out, hydrometallurgy, lots of energy, hydrometallurgy, lots of toxic or harsh chemicals. We need to be better about protecting the environment throughout the process. We need to meet these challenges. I'm sorry, how do we meet these goals. We've kind of developed us six different challenges associated with critical materials production. And that's going critical. And so, as, as indicated a lot of modeling and analysis about vulnerabilities and gaps in supply chains. We use other people's analyses as much as trying to do our own. But can we anticipate criticality, and can we find solutions before we run into a situation where we have a drastic need or a black swan scenario. There are critical materials from unconventional sources and how can we do that through smart mining practices and responsible mining, and, and open up and optimize the processes to not just unlock unconventional sources but also the primary sources. How do we minimize waste streams. We need to develop highly selective extraction and separation from complex sources and this applies both for the upstream and geologic ores, but also to recycle. These are complex sources, whether it's the mineral you want in a sea of rock you don't want, or the rare earth magnet in the sea of aluminum and plastic and circuit boards. You can extract things effectively and selectively. Once you get these materials in a form how do you convert them into a refined product. We don't use elemental lithium. It might be a bad example we don't use rare earth oxides typically for for transportation uses we need to be able to make the metals and alloys and magnets so can we go more direct processing from the mineral to the magnet. That would be great if it could be one step. A great process intensification. Unlikely but there are ways to be to have more direct processing paths. Water management is becoming more and more important. Most of the sources are in areas that are challenged, they're arid use of water is very important to the communities. Often the most important factor, don't contaminate my water. So if you're using it how do you reduce the use how do you remediate it, how do you reclaim the water, and how do you reinsert it back in so the circular economy applies just to water. And then we need to do this also very fast. Can we increase the speed of discovery and integration, not only to meet the immediate short term needs, but the development cycle for materials for manufacturing for acceptance of understanding lifetime. How do we incorporate that into a validation scheme that allows new technology new innovations to be deployed quickly. And then I had us focused, as I said, on electrification and generation. We group the materials we study into three classes permanent magnets which drive EV motors, as well as wind generators and they're concerned about rare earth elements and cobalt cobalt is used in magnets, often the compensate for for less rare earths, but for lithium ion batteries. lithium cobalt and graphite have been our targets, nickel and manganese are important, and they show up in the recycle streams and and and so we pay attention to those two. And then finally, electronic materials gallium indium terrarium, these all fall into a class, you might call byproducts or co production, and those actually are very important from power electronics and solar energies applications. So our approach is to to really take a look at across the supply chain. We're not just going to focus in on say beneficiation. As the second step after my first step after mining, say how can we extract material better from the rock around it, but, but also what's the form that it comes out of this stage at and how does it feed into separations, and so on and so forth, around kind of these five simple supply chain stages. And of course, there's the circularity that applies, both within each stage, as well as between stages that that factor into our our selection of of R&D projects. We do three basic approaches if you don't have enough of a material or if that material is subject to a supply chain risk, then you can mitigate that risk by diversifying supply, developing new expanded sources, and developing more efficient ways to utilize the sources that we have developed substitutes, of course, maybe the word better, better word is alternatives. Are there alternative materials providing similar functionality that uses less of your critical material. And of course, once you have that material, being good stewards, how do we reuse it recycle it. This is the fourth category of R&D projects that are cross cutting. They, they address tools that will enable our science, they can be thermodynamic databases, computational tools for leg and design, and, and they just help the other three areas. And accelerate the development and of the R&D of the other three areas, we look at environmental sustainability, because that's an important factor, and, and then ultimately supply chain and economic analysis. We do early stage research, generally trl two through four more fairly productive, but mostly what we've created is a network of 45 plus active team members across the criteria critical material supply chain. And what that does is it allows midstream people to input on the upstream processes and the upstream to kind of understand. Well, if I produce a lithium hydroxide that feeds directly into downstream processes so we are in our 10th year of operation. We've strongly have had a strong education and workforce development program, and we're proud of the our alum who've gone on both into national labs universities and the private sector in in these fields to kind of illustrate this holistic supply chain approach. So we just picked on rare earths. And so the basic process of course is you have an or you need to, you need to separate the mineral from from the rock, or the gang, and you do that through floatation processes. Often you have to roast, and then leech extract the elements of desired, and then go through a concentration process. And so we develop a series of projects around this pathway. Everything from developing computational approaches that are enhanced with AI and ML do to really design new leggings for improved separations. And we then take those into the lab, synthesize them validate that indeed they are validate those predictions. We apply them to different separation techniques and this particular case membering based separations it's proven to be quite effective for rare earths both in the upstream activities as well as recycling. So one of the holy grails is rather than leaching everything all at once, and we go in and selectively this dissolve the rare earths that we want. If you're familiar with the rare earths there are the three, and maybe four magnetic rare earths. That's what drives the economy of rare earths is is the magnets. They're in Presidium, their neighbors, their light rare earths and then dysprosium and terbium too heavy. No reason go in and extract any of the others we just need those four, and that's going to be the most economical process. And then finally to eliminate harsh chemicals and we've developed an acid free dissolution to recover rare earth magnets from electronic waste. So all of these kind of combine in a way that that can address the diversifying supply and driving reefs and recycling. I think I might just skip this slide. It does go into a little bit about the way we are designing new leggings and new molecules for both extraction, flotation extraction separation. Clearly what we're trying to to strive is to take advantage of various design principles that that affects selectivity efficiency, solubility, as well as stability. In the end, as I said, we come up with extractants that are more effective with separation factors, two to three times over existing extractants. I like all Amid extractant has been licensed by Marshallton research laboratories. I see my slide is all to they are scaling up the commercial synthesis and in fact they are getting interest from a number of our other team members for kilogram quantities so this is for testing in solving extraction flow sheets so this is exciting. We're also looking at the direct alternative ways to to refine rare earth oxides to metals and magnet allies, preferably along routes that require less energy low temperature. Most of the rare earths are produced by electrochemical molten salt processes, and we're looking at new, more continuous thermal metallic reduction methods, and again, tested out at the laboratory now being developed by service corporation at the 10 kilogram batch scale. We also developed alternatives in this case it's a neodymium magnet, but it has 25% Lanthanum substituted for the neodymium. So about 25% reduction in the critical rare earth. I'm going to add a little bit of cobalt just to compensate Lanthanum is not one of those magnetic rare earths, but Western Digital is quite interested in evaluating the use of this alternative reduced critical rare earth magnet for for use in their hard drives. Western Digital also as many of the tech companies are concerned about the end of life and so they they come to us looking for better ways for recycling and disposition of their hard drives, how do they get. They'd be good stewards, even if they're not doing the recycling themselves, but how do how do they ensure that their materials and their products are being managed responsibly. And finally, as I mentioned the acid free method. This has actually been licensed by a local company here in Iowa, they're putting the finishing touches on a pilot plan operation, about 8000 kilogram batch size so this is taking mostly hard drives, which are crushed and shredded for data security reasons. And this acid free method, very selective those in just removes the rare earth, anything rare earth dissolves away, it leaves the aluminum the steel, the precious metals. The plastic, everything else intact, and that can be normally recycled. And for the copper for the steel. So it's a very nice process. The same approach to do the batteries. And, and so we do look for diversifying the sources for lithium and cobalt. So lithium kind of comes in two varieties, at least two varieties that we worry about one are hard rock sources, and the other are aqueous brines or produced waters. And, and we've developed methods. Well we've analyzed. What are the technical barriers for these sources to be really developed and for hard rock sources. It's, it has to do with the. Well I have a slide, I'll come back to that for the brines and produce waters, it's the effective separation of lithium, usually from sodium and potassium, which is also contained in these brines so we've developed to effectively absorb the lithium and then to deletion that on demand and concentrate it actually through a forward osmosis membrane process. We're also looking at electrochemical recovery of cobalt from cobaltite. And the issue there actually has to do with the arsenic and how do you sequester the arsenic. Disorbents have been extended now, not just take we as brines, but to a tailings. There are lots and lots of tailings across the country. This is a particular site. It's the boron mind tailings that has a rather high concentration of lithium, and taking the lessons we learned from the sorbates, we've been able to develop a sorbate based on Gibbs site, and it's very effective in selectively removing lithium from the sulfate sulfate based leachate solution. And, and, and concentrating that. And so the real question was, did the sorbents, we developed for brines, which is typically chloride chemistry, will they work in sulfate and we've been able to do that. Coming back to the, the hard rock. We, we the United States have a number of spot amine hard rock deposits in the southeast of the country Tennessee, North Carolina. And really the technical gap there is, is you have to take the rock and you have to roast it. You have to take the mortar for for the lithium mineral to be leachable. And so, so we've taken an approach that basically allows for a room temperature extraction, actually conversion through a mechanical chemical means to take the spot and transform it from the low temperature alpha spot amine to a leachable form of spot amine that usually requires this 1100 degrees heat treatment. Furthermore, the spot amine that is the mechanical chemical approach. It actually transforms it to a leachable but then a variety, but also can perform the chemistry to to convert it directly to the, either the carbonate or the hydroxide. And so we get rid of the acid and cost is caustic acid or caustic leach steps. So, lots of process intensification here. The latest report just this month was we were achieving 83% extraction of the lithium that's present in just a few months after we initiated the project so so this is holding lots of process, lots of potential. We were connected with a Pete mountain lithium as partner in this, and they will be evaluating this for their newly awarded demonstration facility. When it comes to recycling. We've been teaming with retrieve actually they've been recently brought out by zebra. So, we team with them. They were still from a commercial standpoint. The conversion of these batteries is directly to black mass. That's where you take the batteries and you're grinding it we produce this, this black mass literally. And, and we've been trying to take the hydro metallurgical approach of leaching, separating, and then producing high purity salts. And we've been looking at ways to combine these three steps to be able to reduce the energy intensity of the process. The example of this is, again, the mall membrane solving extraction that was developed for rare earths, but it's equally applicable to, to the black mass, and we can develop a three stage process where we can separate the cobalt and the cobalt and the manganese from nickel and lithium in the first stage. The second stage separates cobalt and manganese in the third stage separates nickel from aluminum. So again, you know we're taking it all the way back to the elements but we produce for independent lippers of lithium nickel manganese and cobalt. We also try to apply electrochemical assisted leaching in this process, and we've had some excess, the electrochemical leaching allows us to remove iron, aluminum and zinc by inserting a stage zero. So this technology has been licensed by Momentum Technology and they recently received an investment to build a recycling facility. They have, they actually licensed the technology to do rare earth recycling and they found they couldn't find enough hard drives, enough sources of magnets to be able to make that profitable. So we turn to the batteries and, and clearly the opportunity is there, and that's what they're pursuing. So sometimes, again, the innovation is met for one thing but it finds a different use, depending on the situation. We to try to understand the impact of the different processes. So this is a lifecycle analysis of this electrochemical enhanced leaching process, where we use iron as a reductant in the process to assist leaching. The alternative is to use peroxide, that's what you choose today. So hydrogen peroxide based leaching method. So, with EC leach we attain the same sort of leaching capabilities, but we see that, that the number of factors are reduced significantly. For example, global warming potential is reduced by 90%, greater than 60% in all categories. In addition to LCA, we also do TEA to ensure that at least bottom line projections of bottom line are consistent with something that can lower costs over existing techniques. So, in a similar way, our technology is getting out there. As mentioned, the sorbents are being considered for, for produced waters from oil gas production company called LISOS is actually licensed abundance technology to recover lithium from produced waters. We've been working with Rio Tental Boron, the main mind tailings from their borate processes. Exergy has licensed this technology that allows the recovery of high purity lithium and manganese salts from waste batteries, using a water, DMS, EME watering precipitation scheme and quantum venture is piloting CMI technologies. It's a process called e-recovery. Again, electrochemical assisted recovery. In that case it was developed mostly with platinum group metals in mind, but it is also effective in recovering rare earth and battery materials from e-waste. And with that, I'm happy to answer questions. Excellent presentation to all of those in the virtual world. You can raise your virtual hand. Otherwise, if you're not in the virtual world and you're in the room, then Amy will sort of let me know that you're ready. I kind of wanted to get us started, kind of thinking about basically, you know, you talked to, you know, quite a bit about sort of separations for sort of, I guess, handling non-earth abundant materials. But what are the promising sort of abundant and domestically sourced energy materials right now? Well, lithium is certainly one of the more abundant domestically available critical materials. Of course, rare earths are ubiquitous. We have the mountain pass mine in California, it's one of the best grade ores. It's a bastonite for and that's, that is leading to the current production of roughly 40,000 metric tons. Actually, their tailing piles is the second best and perhaps the world's best tailing pile. It contains two to 3% of bastonite as well as monazite. For the rare earths, monazite is usually the secondary ore. It's frowned upon a bit because it tends to carry the radioactive components and so it often ends up in the tailing piles. We have mineral sands come in the southeast for rare earths. They typically run about 500 parts per million. Those sands are more titanium and zirconium bearing, sometimes yttrium. Some have scandium. And then there's what you might consider the unconventional sources. So phosphate mining has about the same levels of rare earths. The red mud that comes from aluminum mining also has maybe about 100 ppm rare earths and then coal and coal byproducts continue to be a source, particular fly ash. It ranges between tens of ppm to hundreds of ppm. Each of those unconventional source brings its own challenge. Right, of course, of course. We continue on. Idaho is cobalt, but it's tied up typically with arsenic. So we have a sequestration concern or a valorization concern. How do we make use of the arsenic? Could be gallium arsenide. And then there is an operating nickel mine in the upper peninsula and a potential mine in northern Minnesota for nickel, along with cobalt and platinum group metals. So there's a spattering of some of these around the country. Really the question is how do you open it up responsibly. Right, right. I'm not sure exactly who raised their hand first. So I apologize if if I'm doing this in the wrong order, but Jennifer. Thank you. I was just wondering if there one step that is the most energy intensive step in all of these extraction recovery processes. Being a particle technology person, I know grinding has to proceed. Many of these, is it that or is it does it vary with the process. In general, roasting. It isn't the most energy intensive than its its metal production, because basically you're reversing what mother nature has done naturally. And that's converted to an oxide or sulfite. I think combination of the or breaking it down into particle sizes that are suitable for flotation is probably next. It's hard to say the amount of vibrations depends probably on the material stream. So rare earths, you don't get a large separation factor, typically 1.2 to 1.5 so you imagine these stages and like it mountain pass. It's a football field, long or to set of separation stages. And so you got lots of inventory, lots of pumps, lots of running. That's why these new agents, separation, ligands, even if they double their, their efficiency. You have to number stages so you have half the capital investment, half the inventory of chemicals and half the operating costs so so that's, that's really the holy grail isn't it better separations improves everything. Thank you. Okay Scott, we can't hear you Scott. Okay, I hope it's just me but I can't hear you Scott. Can you hear me now. Yes, yes. Oh, all right. Tom I your little. When you mentioned arsenic so my son goes to school in the upper peninsula. There are a lot of contaminated lakes from tailings. Sounds like Michigan. That's where he goes. Yeah, he goes college and is beautiful but there are contaminated lakes because of the copper tailings. Yes, it does our pursuit of all these rare earth metals. Extraction, does it concentrate other things that have to be dealt with and is it there any technical challenges of the tailings that we have to be dealing with as well. Excellent question. There are for rare earths it has mostly to do with the bad materials you're an inventory. And, and one has to be careful, because if you concentrate them above. I'm pretty sure it's point one percent, then it becomes a source material and you're regulated by the NRC. Mining is regulated enough you don't need the NRC coming in. So, so one has to be careful now there is one mitigation outlet. And that's a company energy fuels they are uranium mill operating in southern Utah. And they have begun to process rare earth or is from mineral sands. In fact, their license requires them to have a certain level of radioactivity so so they're so they announced recently their trifecta. They took mineral sands they were able to recover uranium vanadium and the rare earths. And so, good value proposition for them. But yeah, the, the question becomes how do you valorize some of these materials the nickel mines. We're coming with soda and near market Michigan are sulfur based one quickly goes to the soft fertilizers right and maybe converting that into something useful there. The arsenic is challenging. So, these minor components, we do have to pay attention to Scott you're absolutely right. That's Michigan Tech, by the way. Okay, let's go on to you, Gerald. Hi Tom, congrats, can you hear me. Yes, congratulations. After the annual talk it's amazing what interdisciplinary team can do. And now you bring different teams feeding each other so that's terrific in this spirit, I have a question of curiosity. Do we think that bio processes could play a role at one point in time I mean the microbiome the bio fermentation by your remediation is really exploding. It was a bit absent from an REL and from your talk but you are so interdisciplinary do you see some areas where it could help mitigate, you know we see a lot of acid and caustic and make a no chemistry looks like still very very very robust any other elements on that Tom. Yeah, I admit I had to make some choices. We have a fairly active program and bio inspired approaches. It could be microorganisms that actually consume rare earths and concentrate them. It could be microorganisms that mild acids and that are typically used for heat bleaching, which is commercial for for copper and gold type of recovery, but we've shown that indeed all of these methods work for the rare earths. They're not fast. And so improvements on reaction rates. They are nice and we'll call it mild acids. One of the approaches we've seen with a bio lexate lex, lexiviant has been an organism called gluco gluconobacter and it produces gluconic acid. We first ran across this organism. And it was fairly effective at rare earths. We did the TEA, we found out that the most important cost was the sugar to feed it. This was done by a team of an Idaho and it aims so Idaho and Iowa. So we turned to food waste products, so potato wastewater, and corn stover and sure enough the bugs thrived on that. So we made it use of a waste product to feed these bugs. But then as we dug into it deeper, it turns out that it's not that the bio lexiviant actually does better than just pure gluconic acid. So there's there's another factor that comes into play with the organism that allows it to chelate some of the rare earths in addition to just leaching. And so that's good thing for extraction. Maybe a little more challenging to them have it release the rare earth when you want it to be released. And then the final area is proteins. In particular, we found a protein called land modulin that ends up being a good attractor for rare earths. Again, you know, it's not extremely efficient, but but it is, it is renewable in that sense. And we're figuring out how to best build scaffolds and, you know, and utilize this protein. Wide open field. We haven't even begun to maybe design or optimize some of those proteins. Going forward, we're looking at maybe bringing some computational and design high throughput computational design efforts to maybe design more selective again for the rare earths it's about being selective. If we can just get a single rare earth out of a mixture and enhance that, then, then we don't have to go down the series right. So, yeah, sorry just didn't have a lot of time to include many of the different approaches we've been looking at. But clearly it's in your consideration set so that's absolutely. Shodi, we're at time. So do you have a quick question. I think I just have a quick comment, which is, we are learning so much from separations from critical materials. And it looks like it can be translated to lithium ion batteries. And it looks like one of the limiting factors in, in, in all of this is is the separation process and the environmental impact of the separation process, the cost of that process. And separations is a is a major cornerstone of chemical engineering so I do think that there is a, you know, there is a contribution here for, for this board. So that's just my comments. Yeah. Thank you, Judy. Jody. Okay, Amy, I'll turn it over to you. Yeah, thanks, Shelley. And thank you, Tom. That was a great talk. So we're going to take a short five minute break, and then come back for the last presentation of this afternoon session. So let's aim for 205 up 405 sorry wrong time zone. Welcome back everybody are the closing talk of the session is going to be presented by Dr. George Crabtree is a member of the National Academy of Science. George is the director of the Joint Center for energy storage Jay Caesar, which is the Department of Energy Battery Hub, centered at Argonne National Lab. He's also a distinguished professor of physics, electrical mechanical engineering at the University of Illinois Chicago. So George has really led Jay Caesar now I guess almost a decade and really pushed more of the, the combined science and engineering side of new innovations and energy storage so we've heard a lot about. I would say some of the more engineering economic modeling side of things and now George is going to talk about opportunities for chemistry in energy storage for climate change so with that thank you George I'll turn it over to you. Can you hear me first of all you can. Okay. Thank you Amy wonderful intro. And I will talk a little bit about JC's direction I'm going to focus more on opportunities. But I'm happy to talk about anything and the discussion has been excellent I think today so I'm really looking forward to it. I was planning to talk let me get my laser pointer up here. These things little bit about climate change because that's what's driving energy storage right now. The fact that we lack about half the commercial technology that we need to decarbonize says here by 2050 but by any year. And I would like to propose electrochemistry, both for its applications and batteries. Where's the next generation battery. We've already talked that we can't do everything with lithium ion so we're going to need some more. And the last point, decarbonizing industry with electrochemistry that's a bit of a far out notion, but it might be something that really has merit and we ought to start thinking about now. So first, a couple of words about the changing energy landscape go back to 2012. If you can remember that far back. It was all personal electronics, and it was all lithium ion. And lithium ion did everything laptops iPad cell phones everything you could think of. So that sort of formed our thinking. We realized that it wouldn't be perfect for, say electric vehicles or the electricity grid. But we thought there could be a single next generation battery that is perfect for EVs and the electricity grid. We estimated that it would take about five times the energy density and one fifth the cost to realize this vision. Then 2015 along come the Paris Accords there was finally international agreement that we have to do something about climate change quantitative goals that we all know about. And as I mentioned, we have another slide on this we lack about half the commercial technology. That means there was an urgent need for discovery and innovation to get all the technology we need. And now it's 2022. If you look at the cost of lithium ion it's come down by more than a factor of five in the last 10 years so suddenly it get it qualifies for some things. And in particular we've already talked about it's viable for cars passenger EVs and for four hour grid storage because that's as long as lithium ion can discharge at full power. And it's not viable for the heavier duty transportation like rail or marine shipping or aviation need a better higher energy density battery for that. And it's not good for multi day grid storage so there are two examples of applications gaps that cannot be filled by lithium ion. And the revised energy storage vision. It's a diversity of batteries for a diversity of uses design the battery for the application instead of taking one battery and trying to use it for every application. And the corollary to that is, we need this a predictive understanding of electrochemical phenomena at atomic and molecular level so we can, as this visual here says so we can build batteries from the bottom up. So we have two systems that we need. We know how they're going to react. We know what they're going to produce. And we put in the things we need to produce the overall behavior for that battery be at high energy density long duration discharge or whatever we will be able to get transformative materials and architectures that we haven't seen before. The nice thing about this is it serves all application needs so tell me your need. This is the vision of the future tell me your need I'll design a battery for you. So here's a little bit about lacking half the commercial technology. This report came out about a year and a half ago from IE a and it plotted how every sector here. Could decarbonize by 2050. And it looks pretty easy when you just look at this graph will reduce everything will eventually get there. It's actually dramatically different difficult so for example, one of the marks on this graph. In 2030 we have to put in four times as much solar and wind as we did in 2020 and 2020 was a banner year for that record breaking year, and we have to do that every year from 2030 to 2050 that's pretty tough to do some of the other things here by 2035 100% of personal car sales have to be electric. We come close to that but 50% of the heavy truck sales have to be electric and that we don't know how to do. So, this, this actually influential report I think has been verified by others who come to the same conclusion. Here are the things we have. So we can roll out solar cells we can roll out wind. We can roll out batteries at least lithium ion batteries we can electrify buildings and we can electrify personal cars. It's clear that we can do that commercial technology exists. The challenge is to roll it out fast as really a challenging rates. Here's the things we don't have. We have advanced batteries that we need for. Well, let's look at the at the applications manufacturing cement steel plastics chemicals agriculture and land use where it's very different. It's not really fossil fuel use. It's in the case of land use fossil fuel or carbon dioxide absorption and storing. In the case of agriculture it's the plants and animals that produce actually different greenhouse gases, not carbon dioxide but methane and nitrous oxide that we have to know how to stop so this we just haven't thought about enough. And here's the heavy duty transportation down here we don't have those things. So this report identified three areas advanced batteries green hydrogen and direct air capture technologies that we basically have to invent. This is a situation for heavy duty transportation so IE a also about a year before the previous report. These are the emissions the carbon dioxide emissions, and you see as a function of time again it's a roadmap to decarbonize passenger cars are about half of the emissions carbon carbon dioxide emissions from transportation. Trucks shipping aviation and other things that make up the other half. So EVs can work for passenger cars, probably as you go up this chain get heavier duty they work less and less well. And we need some technologies there there are some options. So you could have high energy density batteries that would be like lithium oxygen, for example, which has maybe five times the energy density of lithium ion. We're not there yet. It's quite a long ways off you could use fuel cells, and there is a battle now with semi trucks, should they be fuel cells should they be should be they be battery and something that's even farther out a carbon free chemical energy carrier that is not a fossil fuel. And we have two examples, green hydrogen, or another version of hydrogen ammonia and H3 which has the advantage you can liquefy it and send it off transported through pipes. Or maybe there are some new materials that ultimately will replace fossil fuels as chemical energy carriers and say a little bit more about that later. If you look at the electricity grid so we look at heavy duty transportation how about the electricity grid. Well, we have a lot of chemical storage on the electricity grid now we use natural gas in peaker plants, stored underground seasonably because we know when cold climates we're going to need that for heating. And, and we have to worry mostly about the demand we're trying to satisfy demand which is variable in tomorrow's grid if it's renewable it will be the supply as well as the demand so overcast days, calm days. And you could use batteries for some of that as we said, but you may need carbon free chemical storage. So what are the applications well intraday passing clouds, you can reduce the output of solar panels by 70% while the cloud passes over. Clearly you need a battery and it could be lithium ion that takes care of the seconds to hours variations cost of lithium ion now it's about $140 a kilowatt hour. But that won't work for multi day overcast or calm days maybe historically 10 consecutive days in a row it's happens fairly frequently. You may need the next generation battery and do is already established a target for that. Get the cost down by a factor of 10 so it's got to come down to $14 a kilowatt hour. That's a challenge, although there are opportunities there. And then there's seasonal demand, partly because the supply changes in winter the sun is low. There's less sunlight less daylight. So you just have less solar energy there. And of course there's the demand variation season will be depending on your Nicole climate or in your warm climate. You probably need some chemical energy storage for this because batteries will discharge over a six month time period, and it could be molten salt thermal storage or again, something that's not a fossil fuel but that is a chemical energy storage medium for, you know, that's that doesn't have any carbon in it. So those are two of the, of the examples of two things that require something beyond lithium ion, but the supply chain itself is a challenge as we've been talking about all along. And lithium ion has just about the opposite supply chain you want. The materials are expensive. They're earth limited and it's an international supply chain and this illustrates visually what we've already said today that a lot of it comes from China somewhere, maybe 60 to 80% of battery materials are refined in China they're not necessarily sourced there, but it's a bottle potential bottleneck in the supply chain. So you'd like to have an alternative. And the aspiration is here, make it inexpensive, make it earth abundant, make it domestic. And there are, there are batteries that will do that, for example, metal air batteries, or multivalent batteries with magnesium calcium zinc aluminum, two or three electrons per per ion, you get two or three times the energy density in principle from that. So here's an interesting graph here or table, iron air, aluminum air zinc air lithium air, they're all candidates. You can look at the operating voltage that's interesting. Here's the practical energy density and for iron air it's rather low for lithium ion practical energy density might be about 300 watt hours per kilogram so you see aluminum is higher zinc is higher. It's really high it's a sense you know a significant fraction of fossil fuel. And here's the cost, and it's pretty low for iron as you might expect pretty high for lithium just because lithium is expensive but these are things that we need to think about how do we do that. And I, as we were saying earlier, you could imagine that some of these batteries with the very favorable supply chains could replace lithium ion and some of the applications that it's used for now, just because lithium ion is too expensive. So what are some of the solutions. This is a bit technical, but here's lithium ion, it has a graphite intercalation anode. It has a liquid organic electrolyte, and it has an intercalation cathode of transition metals and MC, which is also an intercalation process so it's intercalation on both sides and it's an anode and cathode. Well, you could replace graphite with lithium metal. And by the way when you intercalate graphite to its maximum amount you get one lithium for every six carbons. So you get one seventh of the atoms doing storing energy for you. If you had a pure lithium metal and every atom would be storing energy for you so you get the energy density up. You could have a liquid or solid electrolyte solid electrolyte would make the battery much safer. And if you pair it with a with a metal anode, you'll get a higher energy density and typically you want to keep the intercalation cathode and here's some examples of what's around. What you can do to keep it up is to get rid of the intercalation cathode, use what's called a conversion cathode, typically, typical example sulfur and oxygen, you can have a liquid or a solid electrolyte, but with the conversion cathode. Every atom in that cathode is storing or releasing energy for you so it's the same argument that you have on the anode side. So we've done a lot with lithium ion of course, and that means, except for the metal anode, this part of the battery would be the same in in this configuration here. So the most radical get rid of the intercalation electrode on both sides, and we've done far less here this is a huge I think opportunity to develop to develop the science the technology of how to build these batteries and how to recharge them. So there's another option, and that is the so called redox flow batteries, where instead of solid electrodes you have liquid electrodes. They've been around for a long time they've always been too expensive. The, they're already commercial in terms of vanadium redox flow batteries. But they haven't caught on commercially, partly because the expense is so high. So we can look at this as another frontier that we ought to be developing. So batteries, we talked before about hydrogen and fuel cells. This is like fuel cell is like a battery with no electrodes. So hydrogen comes in one side, oxygen comes in the other side, electrochemically you react them you produce water. And in the electrochemical process you have to have electrons flowing, they flow through an external circuit, and that's the fuel cell. A lot of advantages they're much lighter weight, or back to our carbon free energy carriers. So hydrogen, we have, we have ammonia at the moment, they both have their downsides and neither one is anywhere near as versatile as fossil fuels. So hydrocarbons, you've got methane you've got propane you've got butane, you've got gasoline you've got diesel you've got jet fuel, all different forms of hydrocarbons that you custom designed for the application. That's something you really can't do with at least these two energy carriers. There's another one called liquid organic hydrogen carriers. The idea here is you take carbon rings, and you take double bonds. In this case, convert them to single bonds and that releases three hydrogens in this benzene ring. So you don't, you don't really want to burn the liquid organic hydrogen carrier it's just a carrier, but you can extract hydrogen from it, and then use the hydrogen in a fuel cell or for combustion. So those are the options. And I think we've already emphasized this slide often enough. It's not just the battery. It's the supply chain, and it's the application. You want to look for an application that you got to have. It's a killer application. You want to make a battery that is designed to that application and you want to make sure that the supply chain for that battery is inexpensive earth abundant and domestic. That's, you have to look at the whole ecosystem. I thought I would spend a little time talking about some of these frontiers. Atomic and molecular level. And the first frontier I'd like to talk about is salvation. Why, because it controls nearly all the static and dynamic electrochemistry of batteries. So you imagine a lithium ion coming in off the anode. It suddenly goes into solution surrounds itself with solvent molecules that cluster that salvation shell moves through the liquid electrolyte over to the cathode. It has to desolvate. And the lithium ion has to react with whatever's in the cathode. So it really controls almost everything. And of course there are solids liquids glasses and polymers that you could put in there so this is really a very broad field. There is I've called it here redox murder design I have in mind flow batteries, and instead of vanadium which is kind of limited and what it can do and kind of expensive. So you want organic molecules, where you can design the molecule to do what you want to make that flow battery do what you want. So do you want a high energy density well make the molecule more soluble. Do you want it to self repair. So when some of the organic molecules degrade that you just cut them off and replace them and especially if it's on an oligomer backbone, you cut off the bad ones. And then you replace them with good ones. So there's the idea here, there's a huge design space. And if you can make it cheap enough, then you can. You can actually make the redox flow battery, let's say bring it to a practical level. And the third one is multi valent ion materials design that's magnesium calcium and sink working ions they advantage they have two electrons per ion so you could on each reaction you actually don't usually achieve fully twice but more energy density than you get with lithium ion and they have the advantage they're much more with abundant and cheap. Probably the most promising one right now is zinc. It's the farthest along the path. Imagine zinc in water electrolytes. So waters the cheapest electrolyte you can think of with the right cathodes that are cheaper, safer, and would replace some of the lithium ion applications that we have now. So these are the three places. And in salvation. There is now JC Zer is working on this a unified framework for salvation and transport in liquid and solid electrolytes so liquids glasses crystals and polymers and not to go into the details but if we could bring this to maturity, it would give a uniform way of looking at all electrolytes and selecting the right one for a given battery application, much more straightforwardly than we do now. Another breakthrough in salvation and that's high concentration. We think of as I was saying earlier, isolated lithium coming off the anode being surrounded by solvent molecules as the salvation shell and moving over to the cathode, but if you put any more lithium ions in there. So that means this there's not enough solvent they have to be shared in neighboring salvation shelves. And that makes this concentrated electrolyte a collective system, it's not isolated lithium is acting alone. It's, it's, it has to be collective. They have very different properties than the than the isolated limit and we're just finding out what those are. And if you go to even more concentration you find remarkably and surprisingly phase separation in the in the solution, and it's if it's water, it's water dominant. So we're actually on the nano scale so we call them nano scale aggregates but some are water dominant dominant summer and I and dominant. And these have again very different properties that we might be able to exploit for for the next There are also some very incisive new experiments in particular electrophoretic NMR, which when combined with molecular dynamics calculations gives you the velocity of every molecule in that electrolyte the anions, the cations, the solvent. And this is a level of information, really at the atomic level that we haven't had before. So this, this will be very useful for example in filling out this unified framework for salvation and transport. Across all the, all the materials classes. The second one is x-ray photon correlation spectroscopy that's x pcs. It tells you the velocity everywhere in the cell of the solvent, and you can imply with molecular dynamics calculations, what happens to the lithium as well. The interesting thing here is that it depends on coherent x-rays, and at the ALS and the APS at Berkeley and argon, both are being upgraded. So the coherent fraction of x-rays will go way up. In the case of the APS it'll go up by a factor of 100. For x pcs it depends on the square of that coherent fraction so that's going to go up the sensitivity by a factor of 10,000. So when those upgrades become available in probably three years, maybe a little less, suddenly we'll be able to do this experiment at much higher levels. So there are ways both computationally and experimentally to explore salvation. Similarly in with for flow batteries. The trick is to find out of the vast white space of of possible organic molecules, the ones you want. And you, it's, it's too big for the human brain, but you can use artificial intelligence. In 2014 there was a techno economic paper published that compared organic electrolytes with water electrolytes, and asked which ones are going to be the favored ones and remarkably, that team a analysis said well, depending on where you work in in your design space, they can be equally attractive economically and for performance. So that set off. And again this is JC's or work, but that set off a whole time sequence from 2015 till now of using AI to find analytes and catholites as they're called, called with the properties you want. And they've gotten steadily better for example. And this all the ability went up with this particular. I guess this is a Catholic 2019 here in also in 2019, the first 3.2 volts, all organic flow battery. And we thought that was difficult, we now have our eye on four volts batteries, so you can get the voltage range up. Preventing crossover and degradation in 2020, latest thing 2022. It's an oligomer with redox active organic molecules on the backbone. Identify which ones of those molecules have degraded gone bad with a fluorescent signal. And then that's the first step to say, well, I'll cut that link to the backbone and replace that molecule with something else. And we've learned how to cut the link. We haven't learned yet how to replace the molecule but that's the next step. This is a really promising direction and it would bring a whole new category of next generation battery into into play with multi valent. The trick with multi valent is, unfortunately for calcium and magnesium and zinc and so on. None of the anode none of the electrolytes and none of the cathodes that work for lithium ion will work for these multi valent materials so it's a matter of rediscovering almost everything. They all exploit a pure metal anode so it would be magnesium calcium or zinc as a pure metal. But the question is the electrolyte and the cathode, but starting the discovery process again here are two cathodes iron phosphate which we did use for lithium. That also works for calcium but what works even better is this vanadium phosphate, which gets near three volts and stores a lot more calcium. There also is a lot of progress on the electrolyte again for calcium batteries. This is an organic one works at room temperature with an anodic stability of four volts. So there are plenty of opportunities here to to make the next generation multi valent battery. When it comes to zinc. It's really a question of the water electrolyte that's the cheapest one, and remarkably, looking at a lithium battery here but in concentrated water electrolytes this happens to be lithium TFSI, and a separate cation this organic cation just put in as a supporting salt, which does two things for one thing. It doubles the solubility of lithium TFSI so suddenly you can get a lot more in. The basis as this diagram shows the the voltage window for electrolysis it goes from 1.23 to 3.25 volts so you get a much higher operating range. If you do the same thing for zinc. And that's this with a different anion, and of course a different cation. It raises the solubility, but it also sort of forces the reaction for protective layer has zinc sulfate internet it has zinc carbonate and a cup and zinc fluoride couple of other we don't know too much more about it other than its composition, but this transmits zinc, but nothing else, no electrons, and enables very high efficiency stripping and plating across the zinc electrode. So this is very promising for a zinc high and battery. I think I won't say too much about artificial intelligence but clearly simulation and artificial intelligence are very important if you want to know what's going on at the atomic and molecular level. And for example, this is a program that was developed to calculate the salvation energies of organic molecules like benzene for example in water. In this study there were 133,000 different molecules cations that were taken as examples, and five different solvents including water and organics for a total of 660,000 combinations. And this is the kind of thing you can do with AI and now start looking at these combinations for the, for the performance that you want designed from the bottom up. I think I'll skip that one. And that one this is maybe the most interesting one. I'm taking a given set of reactants and asking how many reactions can these two reactants participate in. So it's a cascade but of course the products of the first reaction become the reactants of the next step in the cascade. And what do you finally end up with. And the test they looked at was let's try to predict the SEI formation in. It's just a lithium ion battery now because we know a lot about that FEI SEI. And indeed, they were able to predict what you would get out and verify it with what we already know about lithium ion batteries. So it in this particular exercise involved 6000 different species in the cascading reactions and 4.5 million different reactions and it's remarkable that it even came close to predicting what actually happens. But this is the kind of design from the bottom up that you can explore now on the science front, maybe in five years you could do this on on the applications front. So a little bit about J. Caesar. It's a national organization. We have 20, 20 partners, six national labs 13 universities one private company that's Raytheon. And we have at any time 180 to 200 grad students postdocs and scientists working in these 20 institutions. We do a lot of collaboration we collaborate with 68 other US universities that are outside our partner said 34 European universities in 11 countries. I have collaborated with 14 minority serving institutions and seven EPSCORE university so we're really part of the big community and I think that's one of the secrets to why we're able to do so much. I think I'll, well, let me, let me talk about this. We talked about fossil fuels as an ideal chemical energy carrier, what would you like to replace them. Well, if you look down this list and I won't read it, you can see what it is, but you'd like an ideal chemical energy carrier to do all this stuff. What do we have we have hydrocarbons. So you basically it's a CH to chain polymer chain you just keep adding CH two elements to it, and you can vary the properties dramatically here three examples. And so this is a basic backbone for fossil fuels and for plastics like polyethylene. So, they're versatile, hard to beat the versatility versatility of hydrocarbons, they're available from fossil fuel sources, they're cheap. We actually know how to make them, and we've relied on these hydrocarbons for what, much more than a century as as just our go to chemical energy carriers. They fail on these three items so they are not non toxic in fact they're toxic. They're definitely environmentally harmful that's climate change, and we tend to not recycle them we burn them or something. And just let the products go where they go often into the atmosphere in the case of carbon dioxide. So here's the question are there better alternatives we've already talked about hydrogen and and ammonia. First of all, they're not anywhere near as versatile as hydrocarbons you've got these two things and you can't do much else with them. So you have to use these for every application you can't design for the application. Trouble with hydrogen it's low density, you can't really compress it, because if you do, you've used up so much energy that you've kind of defeated the purpose. It leaks through pipes because it's such a small small molecule, and in brittle pipe so you cannot use methane pipes for hydrogen, you'd have to start over. And with, with ammonia, you burn it, you're going to get oxides of nitrogen, which can be actually very toxic so there are some downsides. So the question is what else is there. And one thing that has come out are these liquid organic hydrogen carriers. I was saying earlier, you, they're not for combustion they're just for storing hydrogen. You take a benzene ring and you convert the double bonds and the single bonds and that releases three hydrogens. You reverse the process you can absorb those three hydrogens and store them for the next process. A couple of interesting papers here on on that. And it's getting some play. However, even this is nowhere near as versatile as fossil fuel so my contention is, we haven't yet found the right chemical energy carrier to. To decarbonize and that is a very open at this point scientific question. Two more slides. One is, can we make a circular carbon dioxide economy, instead of letting it go off somewhere and cause climate change can we do something useful with it. This is an idea for that so you would first capture the carbon dioxide out of the air directly from the atmosphere. Usually you pass it with a large fan through some chemical agent that absorbs the CO2 and concentrates it. You heat that that material whatever it is that releases the CO2, which is then concentrated and you can do something with it. And it leaves you with air basically with no carbon dioxide in it. If you take this carbon dioxide and ask what can you do with electrochemistry. Well, you might make carbon monoxide out of it you might make formic acid you might make ethylene, which is the precursor to almost every plastic in the world or you might make methane. And you would do this at basically ambient. Well we do it now with thermal chemistry and this takes high high temperatures. You do it with electrochemistry, you could do it at ambient conditions, and the interesting equation that kind of drives this is this one. dv equals kt just an energy equation. If I take one electron move it through one volt. That's equivalent to a temperature of about 12,000 degrees Kelvin. So there is plenty of energy in electrochemistry that we could we could use exploit to make chemical reactions work that we now do with thermal chemistry use temp we use high temperatures. So this already has a sort of a community forming in on the science side to predict and make the electrochemist the electro catalyst that you need to promote these reactions. And to get the feeds use the feedstocks that you need for these reactions namely CO2 you may need some hydrogen as well. And to make it work. So that's I would say a scientific vision. And here's another scientific vision, and it's for electrochemistry as well for many things like steel cement, petrochemicals. We take fossil feedstocks. We burn fossil fuels to get the temperatures for thermal chemistry. Both of those produce lots of CO2 and you get these products out. And in principle do the same thing with carbon neutral feedstocks with renewable electricity, don't do it at high temperature do it at ambient conditions with electrochemistry and produce the same products. So much farther out, but something that we ought to consider. And again, there's a dedicated community out there already who is working on these things and again, this energy equation sort of tells you that this could work. So what's the challenge is the discovery and design of electro catalysts. It's getting selective. So most electro catalysts will catalyze more than one reaction and that is not what you want so you have to get the selectivity up. And you probably need more than one reaction you won't get your final product with just one electro catalyst you may need two or three do a min sequence. So these are the challenges but they're really ripe out there I think now for for exploitation. Here's some examples. Of course green hydrogen that's electrolysis of water that's over here. We already know how to do that it would replace the steam reforming of methane. And that we can do ethylene production now done with thermochemically steam cracking of that thing requires high temperatures. Here's a recent paper from 2020 where there was an electro catalyst found that does the same thing taking CO2 reduction does it room temperature. And it's pretty good. This may be not quite good enough to replace this yet, but it's on the path. So those are the things I wanted to cover. Thanks for listening. Questions. Yes, so now we'll open it up to questions. I'm going to start with the first one while people raise their hands. Thank you for that those are really big picture of you not just of energy storage in terms of just batteries but just innovation in terms of energy management I'll call it. What strategies do you think would help the US close the gap and competitiveness in terms of energy storage worldwide. Great question. So right now it's batteries and clearly China and others have the advantage over the US. However, should look at this 10 years ago that was not the case. China did not have the dominant battery industry. It was spread it was South Korea and Japan and not the United States but it was other countries. So clearly China through my view industrial policy. They incentivized the growth of the lithium battery industry in China, and they were did it very strategically I think nobody else noticed this until recently, and they had built up the supply chain they needed that was I think a strategic decision they made. So historically does not have industrial policy like that. So, historically, if you go back to the 20s. We did have industrial policy because we wanted. I'm sorry the 30s, we wanted to end the depression. Yeah, in the 40s we had plenty of industrial policy because we wanted to win World War two so GM was not making cars they were making airplanes. Somewhere around the 60s or the 70s we got enamored with next generation technologies computing curing diseases and semiconductors and things like that. And we said let's have an R&D policy will incentivize the next technologies that we might build. But we didn't incentivize it, building the industrial base for those technologies. Instead, we said, the government should not be picking winners and losers. We ought to let the free market do that and competition gives you the best result. So, probably true. That's right. The, the flaw that we didn't see was that other countries were having were incentivizing industrial growth. Japan started South Korea started then China, of course took over, but the industries take lithium ion, never developed in the United States it went, went to Japan first. Tony who did it they made a business decision, they had a camcorder the battery was too heavy and they put in lithium ion. And that's bought lots of other things of course. So, I think, and this has started last summer the inflation reduction act among others has started to incentivize making stuff here. And you do that by first underwriting the cost of the factory. That's at least the first few factories and subsidizing or giving a tax incentive for every unit that that factory produces and incentivizing consumers to buy that stuff. So, a good example is EVs, you can now get a $7,500 credit or tax incentive, if you buy it. They're also incentives to make it and incentives and loans to help the help build the batteries. There's a there's also a protective element there that incentive only applies if a certain percentage of the of the battery and the EV were made in the US. This is a sea change, and it may introduce an era of really incentivizing manufacturing here and would help us catch up. Okay, I'm looking for hands, and if there are none yet. I think the next question is you. What struck me at the end of your talk was this theme of electrochemistry enabling a lot of different sciences and so I am in technology development so I'm curious about your thought of what the current state of workforce development is in the US. And what opportunities do you see considering how you place the technology and in context. Yeah, I think workforce is really important, and maybe that hasn't gotten the attention that it needs. It's not only electrochemistry but a workforce across the board for all the new technologies that are coming out to to mitigate climate change. One feeling is electrochemistry is due for a huge growth spurt because there's what's driving it. We've always had fossil fuels which are inexpensive and we've always had thermal chemistry which served all our needs we didn't have to develop electrochemistry. But now that climate change has changed that picture and fossil fuels are, you know, they got some downsides that we have to worry about. What's this, what are we going to what's going to jump in and fill those gaps, and it could be electrochemistry had taken to, let's say a much higher level. But we need to look at that workforce development, there are a few universities in the states and maybe it's 10 or some number like that, which really specialized in electrochemistry and they do an excellent job of teaching it. Often it's kind of buried in the bigger chemistry curriculum, and probably needs more attention. So if we're really going to be strategic in long range we would develop I think that that workforce to a much higher degree than we're doing now. But those as I said earlier those comments also apply to many other disciplines that are going to be needed. And I think we do need to look at that. The emphasis right now is on catching up and on taking care of climate change within a certain timeframe but I think we need to look a little bit more broadly than at workforce is one of the places. Next, Anup, would you like the next question. Yes, great talk, George, and I'm going to play back your question to you, which is, you brought up the point how can we design for recycle. Have you been thinking about it, perhaps this is where we can take the lead because if you can recycle a large percentage. The cost comes comes down quite a bit, not just in terms of, you know, making it greener but also, you know, if you can use it multiple times I assume lithium can be used many many times. Of course it's already kind of being used many times in a single battery. Yeah, that's a great question. And I know in the battery field we usually think about designed to recycle as the last thing. As proof of that concept in my entire talk, I didn't mention it. And I probably should have. But I think that's the way the community thinks, you know that if we can recycle fine. If we can't, we still want the battery because it's going to solve other problems for us probably should not think that way I mean I think the analogy is supply chain. Go back 10 years, maybe a bit more 15 years we didn't think about the supply chain we just thought about the battery. Now we're definitely thinking about the supply chain and that's a, that's just a, you know, a different way of thinking, maybe need to make that happen on the recycle side to. I will say that if we are able to build the battery from the bottom up, looking starting at the atomic and molecular level. We could apply that that vision. Let's design it at the atomic and molecular level to be recyclable. And if you're dealing with things that are earth abundant. You know, inexpensive and domestic which are the three supply chain, sort of gold standard criteria. That may be easier to do. It's probably easier to recycle iron than it is lithium or cobalt or manganese, you know, or nickel, just because it's a common element it's everywhere and that means that nature has found ways to deal with it already we just need to imitate nature we don't have to get so fancy to go beyond nature. So I think they may go hand in hand that if we can get these solve the supply chain issue we can also at least address the recycling issue. Thank you Amy. Thank you, George. It's more that I take stock of one thing that you said, again, electrochemistry can have a far reaching impact on science and innovation. And I was looking at this example of redox summer with AI and first principle modeling, which I'm saying for my industry will say wow. And what I'm taking stock is the field of polymers and I'm not talking rigid polymers that are relatively easy to model eyes, and I will say small molecules are also very advanced for the use of AI and all that but there is this new field of polymer innovations that will be important for us for the batteries but for bio degradation superior sustainable product and you name it right so I'm just taking stock this is this looks like another evidence we need maybe a support to look at to say what will be the power of AI and what computing power and infrastructure and the talents. So that's more a question for us and for you. But I do believe I look at that as well as also saying you said, you know, we invested too much in R&D in the US not enough in the manufacturing and we are saying we need also to stick stuck on what you say let's not go the other way, where we do a lot of manufacturing and then we say what could be the next thing that could be a geopolitical vulnerability but we are missing sustainability and stuff like that so I'm just trying to see you know you inspire us with some areas of science that maybe we support to stimulate the explosion. I think you raise a very good point and I have thought about this others as well, then the emphasis now is on manufacturing and let's solve problems that we need in the next 10 years. Thinking about climate change. It's a 50 year issue or maybe it's even more, it's probably goes to 2100 so it's probably 80 year issue. And if we get all the technologies that we need for the next 10 years but we've ignored innovating for the following, you know, 70 years, it could look pretty bleak at that moment. We're out of balance and I'm not saying that we're out of balance now I just I don't know if we are not, but we want to be sure that we were doing what we need for the next 10 years but also for the next 30. And I'm at least this year, much less investment by the government in let's say basic science opportunities as opposed to applications opportunities. Very helpful. I will say for the industry where we play. Let's call it the fast moving consumer. We have our responsibility to contribute. And I will say it's not 21. It has to be in the next 10 years so it may not be as the highest magnitude of what we need to deliver in the next 50 years and we can debate that but there are things that we cannot deliver that we should deliver because the research, especially this one is not developed. It may even make your point we should stop earlier, other than later. Well, and I think it's absolutely correct that industry has to do things that can be done. And everybody is aware of this rule of thumb. If it costs you a dollar to discover something cost you $10 to scale it up to a demonstration and it costs you $100 to make it commercial. And you don't want to be spending that $100 on everything because there's a lot of failures at the science level. Most things are failures you might say at least in terms of technology that might come from them. And you'd rather find that out for a dollar than find it out for $100. The research can be shorter faster and accelerated. Yeah, if we advance the computing chemistry whatever we call it power because that makes chances of success for higher and the time of development shorter. Well, and I think there, it's one thing to play in the sandbox on the science side this is fun so let me look into it any application well I don't know. We're looking at the applications gaps and saying let's find science solutions to those gaps because just as we do, we look at the application before we make the battery. Well we could look at the application before we do the science and then ask, let's solve that problem. And that's historically has not been the common attitude but it could be. And I think it's much more intentional than just doing science because it's fun. In a way I feel that the NSF directorate directions I'm just mentioning that are also going into your directions. Let's do basic research but inspired by a problem to solve a solution application to be made. I think the, the puck is going into this direction for the good point. This is huge to long. I don't have access to a hand to raise in my government restricted. So, I wanted to indicate George that I thought your talk was great. I actually picked up on some things that I'm not investing in right now although I am investing in the bulk of what you talked about. I'm even investing in the CO2 one but I was surprised that in your discussion of the science areas that you were doing an interesting job of taking talking about both the pauses and the negatives. But for the CO2 I didn't hear anything at all about the CO2. In other words, where are they getting the CO2 how are they getting it. Can you really produce enough. I mean I have people working in that both in electric chemistry and photoelectric chemistry but you know I'm looking at it more as a scientific curiosity then it's any it's going to really result in anything because I don't know how they're going to get enough CO2 in order to produce the fuel that they're going to have to replace so do you have a comment on that one. Yeah that's a great point and I think that you know today that is definitely a true statement. I go back to these learning curves and we were saying that both solar panels and batteries have come down in price by about a factor of 10 maybe not quite in the last 10 years. So let's do simply to the market, the demand is so high and the production levels are so high learning curve typically for a new technology if, if you double the output the price comes down by 18%. That's a common sort of rule of thumb, and that is powerful. This is what DOE has done it with their earth shots. And the they do have an earth shot on carbon capture. And the idea is to get the cost of capturing that carbon down by a factor of 10 and 10 years. Now you may want to do that by science breakthroughs. You may want to do it in part by incentivizing the industry to just be more more efficient. And I think both are really, really important. When you think of CO2. It's very nature uses it all the time. So photosynthesis for example it's CO2 water and sunlight. So it's got to be a good feedstock, and to, you know, populate the earth with all the plants that we now have that works pretty good. So there may be ways to make it more effective than it is now. I mean there's a problem capturing from 400 parts per million in the atmosphere you really do have to concentrate it and that's going to cost you. And I think that's where maybe most of the cost is, but that could be addressed. I mean, my, my feeling is that along with the other earth shots are worth, worth giving it a try. And I find that, okay, doesn't really work. But we ought to, we ought to give it a shot. I saw talk this summer at a Gordon conference about that CO2 capture and they were trying to demonstrate these huge fans that they were using to suck in the air to process it. And people didn't notice it till it was pointed out to them that building was five stories tall and those fans were humongous in order to be able to capture that and they were using a tremendous amount of energy to produce that. So that was my only concern with that one. I do think it's always good to look at the scientific endpoint that if you, if you do happen to find a way in order to get yourself enough CO2 to be able to work at least you'll know how to process it by what you've done after the point you utilize in the CO2. And so that's what we're investing in. But I'm always concerned about that, especially if somebody comes to me and says, well, you really think that's gonna be realistic anywhere anytime soon. So anyway, nice talk. Thanks. Yeah, thank you. Scott, why don't we end with you. Sure. Well, I can't think of a worse starting material for a chemical chemist or a chemical engineer and then CO2. But it's not really. What about if we use bio routes? I mean, it seems like we shouldn't compete with biology, we should use biology, and then deal with it. Right, I'm like, if you were starting from a blank sheet of paper, you would never pick CO2 as you're starting raw material because it's a low energy state. Lowest energy state. And the only reason why plants work is that they use lots of energy that's free. Yeah, but why wouldn't we want to work on bio routes to deal with the CO2 rather than trying to do physical chemistry routes and then deal with it by the bio products. We know how to deal with cellulose and things like that a little bit better than CO2. So it's a good point. I guess I would. And I haven't thought deeply about this. So I'm just brainstorming here. But you might worry that the energy. I plants do it with the sun, which happens to be up in the sky. And so we'd probably do it with electricity. Or at least that would be everyone's first thought because you can control that. And it's a question of how much electricity would it really take to do that and how much could you really produce. My guess is at this moment, it doesn't look favorable. But again, I'll go back 10 years and nobody thought lithium ion would ever be used in a car and in only 10 years. Now it is. So that may be an especially good case. But if we put our minds to it scientifically get the electro catalysts and maybe they'll be photo electro catalysts. For example that use the free sunlight. We might be able to do it. I think that's, that's the value of science that stuff that's improbable may actually happen. And whereas on the, on the industry side, you only want to deal with things that I know I can do because they're too expensive otherwise. Okay, just to be respectful of everyone's time I would like to just very sincerely thank Maria Tom and George for really thought promoting talks and spending their time with us this afternoon. I think what I heard big picture is. I think we can all agree that we as a society need access to energy. And we're using energy and increasingly high rates. We're becoming more critical every day. And we've talked pretty clearly about the current lack of competitiveness in the US in terms of global technology development manufacturing and supply chain and so we need to think about what this committee can do to help guide a strategy accelerate a strategy so that we can close that gap. I think what I thought what I thought was just so cool in terms of the themes from all three of you is. We're talking about next generation technologies but fundamentally all of this comes down to good science. So whether we're talking about separations for enabling recycling or talking about other chemistry chemical synthesis these are all areas that the US could have significant strengthen and that translates to a wide range of potential applications and so I think use inspired science is how I think about it but but fundamentally it comes down to just solid fundamentals and I think we we could think about how to develop that into a strategy. Just to end by reminding you that tomorrow we're going to have our closed session starting at 945. With that, let me see if Shelly or Jody have any final comments they would like to make. Well said Amy. All right. Excellent. I really love the breadth of the presentations today and the discussion. Agreed. Okay, so before I let you all go I just want to give a huge thanks to Linda for doing so much work to help us organize all this. It's just incredibly effective. You were amazing. Thank you so much for making this all happen. So with that, thanks everybody have a good night and we will have our yeah closed session tomorrow morning.