 Welcome, everyone, and I'm very excited to be hosting this first symposia of the winter quarter, and we have an exciting day planned for you with presentations on supply chain and recycling. So my name is Jimmy Chen. I'm the co-man, I'm the managing director of StorageX, and I've been asked to host this given an emergency that we'll have to leave on. So our first speaker is Yuan Gao. Welcome, Yuan. So as a quick introduction, Yuan has 25 years of experience in the complete supply chain of lithium ion batteries. He is the president and CEO of Fulig Technologies, and he's also on the Board of Directors of Lithium America Corporation, as well as the Board of Advisors at Nanoan and Mitchell Camp. He graduated with a B.S. from the University of Science and Technology of China and a Ph.D. in Physics from the University of British Columbia. So, Yuan, welcome. Well, thank you, Jimmy. I'm very glad to be back here. Just a small correction. I'm no longer CEO of Fulig. I retired in 2019, but I still sit on the Board of Fulig, but my about most of my time in the United States now here. Again, I'm wearing a many hats as you introduced. I sit on the Board of Lithium America's and also advisory board of Mitchell Camp and Nanoan and also doing some consulting work. Last year, again, we're happy to be back. Thank you very much for having me here. Last year, I discussed mainly challenges and castle manufacturing. Fundamentally, my background is really a material scientist starting with lithium ion battery castle. But today, I would like to talk a little bit more upstream, lithium supply, because that's really very, very important. As my talk will show you, I'll give you a little bit of flavor where lithium is coming from, how we're going to make sure we will have enough lithium to support this transportation revolution. Again, since I got short notice, I really just borrowed standard slides from Lucent America's. So I only added a few geological type of a slide to make the talk a little bit more colorful. So when it's more commercial, I will go faster. I will spend a little bit more time on the technical aspect, which I think is more interesting to this audience. So first, of course, this is a well-known. Everybody knows that I don't need to spend too much time. This shows you the projected demand for, in terms of battery capacity. One thing one would notice by 2030, which is seven years from now, or we can look at this 10 years from now. Either way, it would be three to four terawatt hour, which is a big number if you consider just a few years ago where we were. So this is really the way I call it. It's the 10x growth in 10 years. So if you translate into lithium demand, again this top line is the lithium demand, again it's about 10x. I would tell you if you look at the, say 2030, let's use this as a reference point. Remember last slide, it was three terawatt hour. Here's a little more than two million tons. LC again LC stands for lithium carbonate equivalent, which is a unit used, it's a convention, unit used by the industry. It's easier because most of the lithium shipped to castle producers in the form of lithium carbonate and some in lithium hydroxide. It's easier to use as a unit. So if you look at here, it's about a little more than two million tons versus a three terawatt hour. I want you to remember this factor is really theoretical. What I have observed in the past a few years it's more like a three, it should be three million tons versus three terawatt hours because today there's still a lot of inefficiency but of course as the industry matures the inefficiency should be, should start to disappear and then we'll get back to this more closer to theoretical number but what I'm trying to say this number, if we do achieve three or four terawatt hour, this number in terms of lithium volume should be higher but some people argue maybe part of the share may be taken by sodium, we don't know. So today let's just use this number that tells you where the lithium demand is growing and then down below you will see this is this solid bar. It's really what the known lithium producers including their projected expansion and then you have a highly probable and probable new project where you see it as the years go by there will be a supply gap. So that means really in the solution development world people really need to put in more investment to start developing new project now or come up with some other ideas otherwise the battery industry will have a problem in terms of lithium in 10 years and again because the the lead time for resort development pretty long which means we will have to start doing things now which we're here in order to have enough lithium in 10 years. So just a flashes slide that shows because of the shortage supply shortage since over a year slightly over a year ago we have seen a big run up in lithium prices. Right now it starts to soften a little bit but how far you will go down we don't know. A little bit about mineralogy again we will form a lithium being extracted today really if you look at the pie chart on the left on the right is the geographical distribution and the left is on the form of a mineral really I would want you to remember it's really on the on the left is a hard rock type on the right is what we have heard a lot of brine type and again this sorry this slide has been borrowed from benchmark just a note here I don't know why they have small share slide here called a pygmythite because spodermen lipidolite they're all forms of a pygmythite so they're all pygmythite that's what I want to say a hard rock but within pygmythite the majority is spodermen and if you look at the right most of them today come from Australia and the other roughly half and half you will argue more than half come from hard rock under 50 about half come from brine sourced lithium most of them as you can see here come from South America today really two countries Chile and Argentina and some from China western China in a province called Qinghai on the Tibetan plateau if you look at Asia Asia has every form really here most of us when we say Asia really means China again as I said brine sourced tend to be from Tibetan plateau spodermen in Sichuan lipidolite from Jiangxi province today people are starting to pay attention to Africa but I think there's some ways to go before it can come out in North here in North America this is quite a few project in Canada this is an interesting slide I would like to spend some time on because it tells you the type of resources in relation to the economics so if you look at the y-axis it's really operating costs then the x-axis is the volume so to the you if you are a developer or for the industry for battery industry for the whole industry you want to have a resource to the left for our left as much as possible for instance we all have heard Atacama in Chile here you see two players SQM upper moral they give you very large volume and a relatively low cost and then as you move to the right as industry grows we start to add more supplies the costs tend to be higher because of course naturally people pick low-high in food first so if you look at the two project listen to Marcus trying to develop one is the Karcheri in Argentina they do come aligned this year the other one I would like to talk more about it later is one right within the U.S. border called Tarcapas in Nevada which is here again another here is a famous one Homer Murto belonging to FMC or today called Lyman I used to work for them so you will see the early ones tend to be to the left a newer one see here as you add new supplies especially as people start to exhaust the more desirable resources very quickly the costs start to go up this one this slide doesn't even I don't think include the pitilite people are looking at I'll address a little bit later the cost some people argue the wrong $30,000 line here but I I think it's a little harder than those sponsoring those are sponsoring Australia so we don't know where that cost will go again if you look at number here that calls for alarm because it's less than a million tons remember I just mentioned we'll need maybe three million tons in 10 years and we'll need a lot more volume unless we add more volume here we're going to see the high cost of losing more to the right that's not what battery users want to hear so a little bit of geology where's the losing come from again here it's very rudimentary display of the earth you have a core many of iron and that's why we have a magnetic field we have a huge part of the mantle which is molten rock and we have a cross where we stand on which we stand on so listen being a very light element in this molten rock see if the molten rock is tend to bubble up they can be concentrated at the interface between the mantle and the crust if if the temperature is low enough it crystallizes it become a rock or maybe the geological time of millions of years you have extrusion the spartan mean got pushed out or then packing the tight got pushed out then you have a hard rock type of a mine or through volcanic activity you got ejected out onto the surface then you can over the years you got washed out into uh lakes if lakes is terminal lake it never flow into the ocean you get concentrated at the you get for salars this is the case uh in south america why is this uh becoming what we call lucian triangle you have probably heard three countries bolivia chili and ajatina but actually look at the map they're very close just happened to be in three countries so here's a very famous uh salar uyuni this is atacama and here a lot of development happening in ajatina let me zoom in again uh uyuni is out of screen now atacama is here uh we have heard the operating one uh homo uh myrtle by fmc now called liven and here is where lucian americas uh the new projects be coming online to start supply uh kachare and and also we have a few more uh to be developed in passo grandis in this area so what i want to show you is a lot of uh salars a brand type of resources under development in ajatina um so we also have said earlier we have another very exciting project within the u.s border uh in tarko pas it's the largest salars in the resource in u.s it's really um we uh we just got this very favorable ruling in our in the record decision so basically we got all the permits so our first phase will be 40 000 tons then we'll after that we'll do a second phase now we have a total of 80 000 tons and here uh i'll go the old slide over those slides very quickly at ajatina you see the evaporation pond um a beautiful scene i was just there uh less than a month ago and here's the really if you go there with two parts you have a farm of evaporating pond then you have a chemical plant again this is a close to four thousand meters above sea level um again for salar you have to be in a place with very high evaporation rate that tend to be high altitude um also uh the water should now flow into the sea so you have a concentration of a lociam salt um again uh since i need to save my time here uh the total cappac is about 0.8 0.9 billion dollars and we're coming online uh this year um i just mentioned just south of a calcheri uh we also have if you look at the map here uh the sort of a burgundy color is Paso Grandis uh we own it 100 to our acquisition of millennial lociam over a year ago and also we are acquiring 100 percent of another company called arena uh who owns the blue part of this uh big solar system uh issue the deal should close pretty quick uh pretty soon um now i like to spend a little bit more time on north america i just mentioned taco pass or is it uh so here's where you are today and if you go into navada you go to the north end uh there's a place called macdermid and taco pass it's really macdermid is uh codaria uh in in the in the southern end of that basin that's where the project is so very good infrastructure uh again a little bit to make add a few slides to uh to show the uh why we have a lot of lociam there so i remember i said the lociam got brought up uh with uh volcanic activities so in south america uh in the ancient times there's a eruptions or half spring even today some solar in Argentina they called the life solar because the house burns through feeding lociam into system so as to take lociam out more lociam still coming in but of course the rate is very slow so you have to wait geological time to replenish the lociam coming in but still there's a small amount of lociam coming in so that's one form of lociam in the uh uh form of solar here in north america it's slightly different at the end so uh if you we have probably most of us have visited Yellowstone Yellowstone is a big volcano in north in the world probably uh it erupt every time it erupts it poke a hole on the north american plate north american plate keep moving west so after a few million years that hole is west of today's active equator so mcdermott is one of the oldest quater basically as as i was erupted 16 million years ago a couple million years later erupted again so love the hole here and the hole here and the hole here i think there's a national monument here i think like a quater or moon uh in aroho but anyway today is yellowstone about 16 million years ago the system the same system was here and again uh it got a lociam all over the place on the on the rim around the equator over the years lasted 16 million years ruin water lociam to the bottom you have again the lake dried a long time ago the old form the lociam got absorbed uh on the surface very close to the surface on lake bat absorbed by clays so this is a new form of lociam it's really not spodermen not brine-based but very high concentration very easy to develop it's a spodermen again going back to how you develop spodermen x-ray lociam spodermen spodermen is really it's a lociam aluminal silicate type of thing of course you have to concentrate by flotation but then you have to spend a lot of energy to heat it to over a thousand degree fee to induce the phase transform from one form of silicate to another form of silicate then you can leach it out with sulfuric acid so here with the resource in tiger paths it's very the chemical bond is pretty pretty weak you don't need to heat it up there's no phase change required you just you can leach it directly with sulfuric acid of course you have to scrap it from the surface of lake bat and also you have to do some concentration but so here this slide shows you where this resource is in comparison to only known resource today see remember adagama here and and really it's one of the largest in the world oh adagama also i don't know why there's two adagamas pretty big and also so is the kachari all of us so we're again if we continue to explore we might find even more here is a schematic showing how it's a this resource is extracted again it's pretty standard you your script from this place and then you you do some concentration very standard mining operation what then you put in sulfuric acid to leach it once you start here the process almost the same of that of spodermen extracting lucine from spodermen uh which is which has been practiced for decades so what i'm trying to say here and none of the engineering staff on this chart is unproven or non-standard so have been practiced in the past but this resource is very unique it would be the first of this kind for lucine extraction if you are interested you can get on to our website there's a definitive feasibility study you will show you a lot more engineering detail again this is the uh i guess artist drawing of the plant setting it's not big footprint again this is a picture of the place uh it's uh actually if you stand on the top of hill here you will see there's a huge basin so another yellowstone type of but uh 16 million years older than today's yellowstone oh another exciting news i'd like to mention is not too long ago we announced both GM and LAC announced a strategic investment by GM 650 million into this project and again we're very very excited i think a little bit the economic that shows you uh we're going to with two phases 80 000 tons that will power more than one million EV per year so some financial data if you remember today lucine price more than 40 000 tons per uh 40 000 dollars per ton our economic models based on 24 uh even that i've gave you very favorable financial returns so moving forward we have again we apply for DOE loans so we're very excited to to move forward to develop this process project and also while continuing to add capacity in our project in Argentina in a country Argentina then we also have new resources just south of country of pastos guandis basin that's really combines all this together that will be a world-class lucine supplier so here um i think that's end of my talk i would like to end my talk really back to uh that uh slide i used earlier uh a year ago i was here uh calling on everyone uh players try to remove all the inefficiencies in castle manufacturing um us we move towards a terror watt hour multiple million tons today with uh here with this graph i want to leave your impression in order to continue to support the growth of EV EVs we'll need a lot more volume on this graph we have to add more volumes here to the left uh instead of a continuous growth of this curve yes we can continue to grow this curve for instance lapidilite a very low work rate of 0.2 percent versus say green bushes two or three percent that means a lot of waste rocks a lot of mining waste will be created a lot of reagents will be wasted we will need to add more resource here not just for sustainability the lower cost but also resource to the left tend to create less waste i use less region so it's more um i think it's more uh friendly practice more sustainable practice but again i know we have a lot of smart people in the audience a lot of geniuses sitting in the audience how do we do that again this is the example this uh target pass resource we call the sedimentary resource uh it's not was not considered before so some innovation is considered uh those so so innovation in geological discovery oh by the way uh i would recommend you to uh invite uh the chief geologist of of lack to make a presentation here his name is Dr. Tom Benson um he's happened to be a graduate of Stanford as well uh he would give you a lot more color on the new type of listening resources that can i will make our world more sustainable the other thing is the chemical engineering process development how we extract loceum i think i'll call on the industry and the scientific community to think about and work hard and how we can make this more sustainable by bringing in more loceum here and of course next i don't want to steal the thunder the other thing is recycling but that will be a professor talk uh after mine thank you very much fantastic yeah and thank you so much for this little for this overview of lithium supply demand uh and processing from the various sources um you know this slide that you have i believe is still up right is that correct justin justin yes that's right you can stop your screen share oh well actually let's just keep it up for a second yeah and so one of the first questions i have is in this chart uh is there a is one of these bars represent lithium from brine oh yeah uh if you uh the very famous ones are here they're in atagama they're producing today by sqm and the upper moral and also hobo moto by livened uh all of us by alkan those are producing one so the one by us lack will be online shortly in a few months we'll ship out our first ton of loceum this year okay fantastic so the it seems like in general the brine sources of lithium are significantly cheaper um but but it seems like those are those are being depleted is that a accurate assessment of this um i wouldn't call it a depleted but um uh let me go back and what they are they're all trying to expand uh they won't deplete until maybe a few decades from now but it's very hard to find that kind of a good brine resource uh in the future um again people always when they talk about brine they all look as a successful one for each successful one there'll be several um i i rule of thumb i look at the past report roughly every one six a successful one like three or four fail and uh you're not going to have more as shown in that map not too many known resources so really and the um there are limit i i think expansion more volume is very difficult uh one of the things if you remember um to oh i forgot to mention to make a losing carbonate you need a lot of fresh water yeah uh because uh then brine resource or good brine resource tend to occur places very dry so there's the limit if it's now dry you're not going to have a big salar but you do need a lot of fresh water so it's a limit uh it's uh uh so the production capacities tend to be limited by the vulnerability of fresh water uh of course developer today start to recycle water but still there's some limitation and again if you look at the green bushes this tell us and this is one example for spotting uh hard rock type of a lotion resource uh cost is higher actually this is lower cost of a rock hard rock because you have a lot of uh pill bar is another famous one spodermen in australia see the difference in cost um most of the cost increases because energy requires um to um to crack spodermen but also depending on our work rate and the location of the of the pit it can you might need to move a lot of what's it called overburden a lot of rock on the on the top to develop that resource so the cost difference can be so different so brine resource you don't need to move all this rock and for target pass again it's on the surface uh it's so much easier to uh to extract okay fantastic so the other question uh really is on this very exciting project you have in statue pass and um my question revolves around there is a there is a lot of activity right now on um installing battery manufacturing in the u.s driven by a number of things and i was just wondering are you know with these new with these new bills like the infrastructure bill or the ira is this part of the bills that are now making that your pass in domestic production of lithium attractive uh definitely a a a make a huge difference yeah yeah and do you see then that this trend will also continue that other uh available sources of lithium in the u.s are going to start to be new projects are going to go going to start coming online in the years ahead uh i i think so uh i think in that aspect not just the u.s say in canada uh in north america i think all become very attractive um so i think that it doesn't make a difference yeah and i was really excited to equal i i guess uh excited but also a little surprised that you got permitted uh new minds within the u.s seems to be a challenge and uh i can you describe a little bit about yeah it's been always that's that's the thing if we want to enhance our national security we emphasize on using domestic supply to support our EV industry then uh people need to be more supportive to mining so you can't have both and and i think in the past mining has been not uh putting in a more favorable light so but but then that's why we see a lot of minerals coming from overseas but now if if it's important uh to get the mineral at home then i think the attitude uh by the way the mining practice has improved so much in the last two decades i actually learned again i'm a physicist i just learned about this uh sumai korea in the past uh say 15 years um really the mining practice is completely different i think the general public tend to have a old impression of mining today in terms of tailings how you treat the waste how you treat things and the community relations and also very different so with because of the tougher regulation in this country so i think the mining has improved quite a bit it's different uh type of mining as we we saw when we were small yeah fantastic and and i can i can solely attest to the fact that the public impression sometimes is on technologies which are much older and the advances in that uh has really you know i think really uh there are a lot of people that are not aware of this and it's a different story um thinking about locally especially around california there's a lot of media around potentially the sultan sea and i was curious if you're if you have any thoughts on that and um and you know especially in california the sultan scene in southern california yeah it's a geothermal actually in fact i happen to be um i wouldn't call it directly involved but i i was indirectly involved with that more than how many years ago um 13 years ago uh yes the geothermal resource uh it's it's interesting because the the uh the brine underground contains some if i remember correctly 100 ppm it's not much so you you need that the hot brine to generate electricity so the idea is that you you add a future you can capture lucian but theoretically uh but the challenge is the you because the concentration is so low so you have a huge volume go through your filter that creates a lot of challenges um but i i'm sure that some smart people are working on that they can they they'll be because it's a challenge of huge volume so when you have a huge volume even a small small percentage something particularly that can cause problem to your future and then i hope that could be once it gets solved that become very attractive and viable because on the paper it's so it's uh you have to pump up the brine for for power generation anyway it's hot already oh interesting you just need to capture yeah also let me add mining in this country even mining in california is possible the the example is that the uh mountain pass rye earth mine in california i used to work for molecule i used to visit that mine once a month between 2010 2014 if you come operating mine that's the rye earth mine which is a little bit more challenging than lucian mine right then i think you there's no problem operating other lucian mine in california yeah you know i i think certainly uh i've heard from a number of people have talked to that uh one of the big challenges where you need now is arguably uh permit reform because uh you know you may have the money but the process of permitting right now is a big is a big challenge and so i was very happy to hear that in fact even in the case of the mining for the stature that you know it actually was approved and so that things are actually moving so let's go ahead and also also uh the federal job made a ruling as in favor of us when it was a challenge yeah that's really really good yeah fantastic let's turn to a couple of questions from our audience so one of the questions is does the lithium quality vary between plants extraction sites countries etc um i i would say the simple answer is that the input the feed is very different yeah but uh the customer now care uh words and losings from they give you the same SPAC so let's say you have a terrible feed then you just need to spend more money have more equipment to purify it to customer SPAC yeah makes sense um so the another question from the audience audience is do you think cathode or anode chemistry has more room for changing in terms of reducing lithium demand um really today in today's losin mine battery design although losin comes from castle so anode really has nothing uh well i i know uh sorry i take my word back anode has a bearing if you anode consume a lot of losin do the first charge your reversible capacity you'll waste the losin so it doesn't bear but in terms of uh castle yes um the the losin loadings um are different for instance the famous the layered oxide compound a lot of losin serve for the pillars so the losin will never they're in the as a pillar between the layers they will never come out so that's a that losin too so say losin matter of phosphate although losin will come out then you don't have a theoretically you have no losin wasted by design uh again solid state losin battery the losin coming in form of losin metal if you can reduce the passivation loss then you reduce the losin loading otherwise you have to let's say theoretically you need to 100 grams you might have to load to 200 grams because you have to compensate on the passivation loss so yeah uh there's a work to be done to reduce the losin usage for the same watt hour fantastic uh it's so great to see and understand some of the advances that are being made to supply lithium and as we undergo this enormous ramp uh in the years ahead and um it's uh it's also very interesting to see how uh you know you in the in the chart that you show showing the spot price how the market softened within the last four to five months it seems to be extremely volatile given uh given right now the uh the softness of the market or changes especially in the couple years ahead that's just my general sense right now that there's going to be incredible volatility as everything sort of settles um what are your thoughts on that oh well i don't have a crystal ball but um we do uh the fact is fact we we have seen a softening uh but again that's mostly driven by demand softening right we have to look at data uh ev sales unfortunately slowed down since uh uh november december uh it's not only in the u.s in china as well globally so that's the main factor uh it's not because all of a sudden we we found another at a gamma uh a big big supply uh supply continued to lack behind demand so if that one continues uh i i would think the softening would be temporary but however the biggest factor we need to watch is the demand if if ev growth continue on its course uh i would think this price softening would be temporary but of course if people all of a sudden say hey uh i if the dv ev growths delayed by a couple years then the price will continue to condone yeah and you know certainly here in california we're seeing uh you know we're seeing a a demand that's in for ev is much greater than supply for for a number of supply chain issues not just uh you know it's only not lithium but that's one thing that we are observing and we're starting to see that um you know literally uh right now the the price we pay for evs in california exceed the msrp you know by by about 10 percent and that's the norm at least it's been that way for the last year so uh we uh we expect that that uh that will change as the number of evs become more available but it's great to see that that happening right now okay fantastic thank you so much yon for that presentation and we'll have uh we'll have will tarpe speak next and then we'll bring both of you back for questions so um fantastic so it's my pleasure to introduce will tarpe an assistant professor here at stanford um the tarpe the dark excuse me the tarpe group develops and evaluates selective separations of wastewater at several synergists at several synergists sorry at several synergistic scales um and will got his bs in chemical engineering here at stanford and his ms and phd environmental engineering at uc berkeley and will recently was honored as one of forms 30 under 30 in 2019 in the area of environmental science and technology so welcome will and we look forward to your talk on recycling wonderful thank you jimmy and thanks to the storage x team for putting on this symposium um it's great to speak right after yon we've met before at a storage x panel and so we're excited to kind of put this two-part story together so i'm going to focus on the recycling part of lithium batteries which is certainly an exciting and burgeoning field and try to introduce everyone here to some novel materials and processes that are underway in terms of being able to recycle lithium batteries where i'm going to focus today on recycling from directly from lithium ion batteries but some of these approaches can also be used for improved extraction from brines and other sources so yon has covered this so i'll just have one slide on it but um clearly there's a large demand an increasing demand for lithium and our reserves aren't quite up to the challenge now of course um we will improve our quality of reserves through innovation and more extraction but we're also able to potentially solve both a discharge and a manufacturing problem by actually recycling lithium ion batteries so in the u.s the vast majority of lithium ion batteries are not actually recycled they end up in the landfill in landfills and only a small percentage are co-processed with other metals where separation techniques to turn these back into high purity metals are underway using recycled materials from these spent batteries could of course it decrease costs energy use and water use and we'll dig into especially those environmental impacts energy and water as well as emissions later in this talk and there's an increasing opportunity to actually make revenue generate revenue from recycling lithium ion batteries with roughly a fourfold increase expected over the next now two years or so so the vast majority of the growth in lithium ion battery production of course has been for electric vehicles but there's also a sizable portion of this for non-electric vehicles as well the department of energy has been really behind increasing a u.s lithium supply a u.s-based domestic lithium supply and so one way to think about this for me as a separations person is if i'm trying to recover some valuable product i start to think about where is that uh species most concentrated so to flip that around you could say okay how much of different sources do i need to produce one ton of battery grade lithium and so you can see that for lithium ion battery waste we're in order of magnitude more concentrated in lithium more or less than traditional approaches like ore and brine traditional feedstocks and so one of the things that we've done through storage x this is how my group got into this work through a seed fund a seed grant from storage x and this is in collaboration with professor sally benson and professor nez asaveto both of whom are in the energy sciences engineering department energy science and engineering department in the new stanford door school for sustainability we got together and said okay let's try to compare in the side by side away as possible conventional and circular supply chains of lithium production so in this kind of block flow diagram on the left you can see tracing through three major steps here extraction logistics and refinement those all caps words and then uh going through two different pathways and the conventional case what yawn just stepped through there's natural mining you extract and make a some concentrate that concentrate is transported from the extraction location to a refining location that may be uh several thousand miles away those materials are refined into battery precursor materials so the circular case and of course this doesn't quite exist at the same scale as the conventional case right now is to collect spent or wasted lithium ion batteries that's the equivalent of the natural mining when we have those together aggregated we need to transport them just like we would transport the conventional concentrate and then rather than a refinery we have a different type of refinery or cycling facility where the output of both the conventional and circular case is battery precursor materials that then go through the battery manufacturing process now you can imagine doing this for a whole battery but of course as we know battery chemistry is very this came up during the discussion after yawn's talk and also uh there are different elements that uh we'll need to consider and so these types of scorecards the text is intentionally small because I'm more introducing you to the idea but you can see this is for lithium nickel cobalt manganese aluminum and copper and what we did was sort of track what are the top three places where each element is mined the top three places where each element is refined and the top three uh places that manufacture batteries that contain that element then we we looked at where the top reserves are so of course there's large concentrations of lithium in australia and in uh south america and then we looked at the composition of typical battery packs and also where those EVs batteries are being consumed so what this gave us a sense was is what's the kind of average if you will distance traveled by an amount of any one of these elements as it goes from mining all the way to EV battery production and so you can see all of these are on the order of thousands of kilometers from the mind to the consumer per atom and so the um potential here is that by being more circular we might be able to decrease this transport distance as it will and with that decrease all of the emissions and uh costs that are associated with that transport so to dig into this first we started thinking about from a systems level um how would we evaluate some of these environmental impacts of recycling lithium ion batteries and so we did this by focusing on two common formulations nca and nmc the stoichiometry shown here and um we wanted to normalize all of those um descriptors of our process by the weight of one kilogram of battery active material and so we also thought about this from uh an elemental standpoint and so you can think about it and as the weight of each element given the composition is shown here on this graphic so to take a step back before we uh dig into comparing uh our life to doing our um showing you the results from our life cycle assessment of a novel recycling process developed by um redwood materials in Nevada here in the US I want to sort of just make sure we're all on the same page in terms of uh what state of the art is in lithium recycling today so the two major approaches for lithium battery recycling are pyro metallurgy uh using temperature as a driving force and hydro metallurgy um in short using ph as a driving force and so in pyro metallurgy we're basically um heating the the battery components up uh until we make uh some type of slag phase and then we're able uh to recover some of those metals downstream now some of the advantages here that it's been well developed so it's feasible at large scale and you don't need to add uh as many chemical reagents especially um strong acids and strong bases disadvantages of course include everything associated with temperature driven separations which are well known in chemical manufacturing to contribute a disproportionate amount of environmental impacts and so in separations a lot of our work broadly speaking in this field is to reduce the extreme temperatures and extreme pressures that are required uh for high purity materials so the second uh big category of recycling methods is hydro metallurgy where we're using aqueous solutions that tend to be acidic in nature to achieve high recovery and high product purity the challenge is that we end up polluting a lot of water and the lithium recovery rate uh there's basically large error bars on what recovery rate can be accomplished now the third uh type of uh battery recycling that's sort of increasing in scale but it's certainly not at the level of hydro and pyro metallurgical approaches is direct cathode recycling where rather than decomposing the cathode into substituent elements we're trying to recycle the whole cathode as it were through um through solvent extraction potentially and so with this lifecycle analysis our goal was to uh address the fact that even the three recycling methods I just showed you are relatively limited and so uh this ties back into extraction methods being decades old which is not a bad thing they work for the constraints they were developed in but recycling has different constraints uh than um uh extraction uh from naturally occurring uh mineral deposits for example so our our goal was to expand the the depth of knowledge we have about current recycling methods in particular in terms of their environmental impacts and this is very interesting because through a lot of our meetings through the storage X uh consortium we're able to chat with um battery manufacturers and battery recyclers who are increasingly uh establishing pilot plans and sometimes demonstration plans and they're they're often limited uh to um kind of taking technologies that have been developed for other uh approaches like for extraction and trying to piece together a recycling plan and so our goal here was to try to give a little more guidance to those decisions of which technology and which uh combinations of technologies would minimize uh some of the environmental impacts and so here we did this gate to gate environmental assessment comparing conventional refinement uh to uh lithium ion battery recycling so to zoom all the way out you can think about this as just feedstocks and consumables think energy water etc going in uh to this process at redwood materials and then what comes out is our product outputs our battery precursor materials and of course the output emissions and so to bring it back to this uh block flow diagram we're zooming in and when we say gate to gate we just mean at the refinery or recycling facility so ignore everything upstream and downstream just focus on what's highlighted in red here and then we're also able uh to do the cradle to gate which is the full uh the full um process flow here from extraction all the way to refinement and so again we can think of those three big steps and caps extraction transport refinement where gate to gate is focused on just the refinement step and cradle to gate is all three extraction plus transport plus refinement so some of our findings here redwood has a um uh like we mentioned a uh an adapted uh process a novel process that combines some elements of hydrometallurgy with some elements of pyrometallurgy and so the the details aren't really critical to this assessment um but we can we can dig into the the uh results and some of the key conclusions here so I'll orient you to this graph which is for energy and then I'll show you two similar graphs for water input and greenhouse gas emissions so here we're looking at energy on the y-axis and there are four bars so the first one is the conventional mind and that is normalized uh you can look at the whole bar but you can also look at the constituent parts for each element and then we can look at uh uh recycled batteries and so in the first uh recycled case we can look at mechanical uh plus hydrometallurgical approaches and that's for a charged battery that you need to discharge first before you recycle it so this is with conventional approaches then we can cross that dotted line and make the comparison of the reductive calcination approach plus um um mechanical and uh hydrometallurgical approaches and then we could compare that uh to just mechanical and hydrometallurgical but with recycled scrap so we can compare the middle two bars for the same feedstock recycled battery and look at the effect of the reductive calcination approach and then we can compare the third and the fourth bar to compare the effect of a recycled scrap versus recycled batteries so we can see that we're getting really big drops here in terms of energy consumption and similar stories here for co2 equivalent emissions so that's all the greenhouse gases normalized as if they were co2 and then for water consumption as well and so this is our kind of take on an apples to apples comparison as much as possible of conventional refinement with recycled with several different recycled battery uh process flow diagrams and so we can see that of course if you don't have to discharge the battery you can just take scraps off of the manufacturing floor as it were are your environmental impacts will be quite low but even if you have recycled batteries with this reductive um uh calcination process you can actually get close to the environmental impacts of recycling um scrap but for recycled batteries so one of the key another of the key insights from this study that we performed was the fact that where you get your electricity will of course influence your environmental impacts and so that's not necessarily a novel insight but quantifying it in the context of battery recycling certainly is and so what this brings to mind one way you can think about this is where you put your recycling facility really matters in terms of the environmental comparisons the results of those environmental comparisons so here we have several different electricity grids and around the US and so the CISO is the one in California where we are and redwood is located in the NEVP uh grid that's shown here and so we included some others as well just for comparison and so you'll see when I say where your electricity comes from I mean what mixture of sources you have so in the CISO case we have a lot of renewables associated with the electricity grid here in the Bay Area and in Nevada for the NEVP is what the standard is but actually this analysis kind of informed redwood a decision by redwood to move towards this paying a premium for this renewable energy because it drastically lowers the environmental impacts and so we can take a closer look at why our our conclusions are so sensitive to electricity mix by simply looking at the contribution to the environmental impacts along these different refinement pathways so lots of colors here but suffice it to say that these are the different inputs you need throughout the whole process flow diagram in the redwood facility and so the biggest takeaway you can see is the red bars are the largest and that's exactly the electricity input so that's exactly why we're so sensitive to electricity source so in short electricity contributes the majority of environmental impacts energy co2 emissions greenhouse gas emissions and water input so thus the environmental impacts of the electricity that's provided will play a large role in what we see for the overall process so we can take a closer look at that looking on the x-axis here at different electricity sources or electricity mixes and looking at co2 equivalent emissions and water consumption on the top and bottom respectively and so we can see this comparing to the the red which is the conventional case and so then we can see that some of these approaches are they all experience lower emissions here but what we get is a trade-off with water and so this is because the the nv star uses a lot of geothermal power and so what that means is that even though the emissions are low you're consuming more water and so again this just establishes that in any lifecycle assessment we're not so much after like what's the optimal answer but just establishing those trade-offs so that decision makers and stakeholders can say okay which is more important to me is that the emissions or the water consumption and establishing that there is indeed a trade-off so that's sort of some of the work on how we're evaluating this at a systems level scale now I want to dig into some of our more bench scale molecular scale work on developing novel materials for selective lithium extraction so to sort of set the stage here I want to again go back to what's the state of the art for lithium selective materials that can achieve actually extraction of lithium from complex aqueous waste stream so you can think about this as downstream of a hydrometallurgical process what you'll get is an an aqueous stream that has many different metals in it and our challenge is how do we select just lithium out of that mixture of metal ions in an aqueous stream so to date many people have focused on ion exchange membranes or IEMs and so these are of course used in many different systems like electrolyzers, aqueous batteries, etc and Nephia would be an example of this as well which many of us are familiar with so these have fixed charge functional groups that allow transport of oppositely charged counter ions while rejecting like charged co-ions so to take some of that jargon away what I mean is that if we're looking at a cation exchange membrane it's called that because it lets cations through but it itself the membrane is negatively charged so that it lets cations through but repels n ions and so these ion exchange membranes to date are quite selective in terms of charge right we can discriminate between positively charged ions and between negatively charged ions with some success now the challenge the ongoing challenges here are that we can within like charged molecules so within cations we can do a pretty good job of separating mono versus multivalent ions so separating lithium from magnesium for example or calcium with a selectivity value on the order of five to ten but what the real challenge is right now the state of the art here is can we separate monovalent like charged species from each other so lithium from something like chloride no problem we're doing that already commercial membrane lithium from magnesium or calcium with the valence difference we're doing pretty well but lithium from sodium those have similar charges and they're both positive and so there's the real challenge in what we're after so one of the first things we did was just look at lithium selectivity and lithium flux are related to permeability for a series of different commercial membranes we wanted to see what's our baseline right now on the market for lithium selectivity so let's look at this bottom graph first you have lithium selectivity on this y-axis on a log scale and then we have several different membranes reverse osmosis membranes nanofiltration anion and cation exchange membranes and so these circles are for lithium versus different ion selectivity so a selectivity of one means you're not really able to separate the two ions at all so the more extreme either higher or lower the better and so here we can see that the lithium to sodium selectivity is indeed just about one for all the ions we tried particularly all the membranes we tried specifically and particularly the cation exchange membranes but the lithium to divalent cations is can get above 10 so we're just establishing what we're seeing kind of with commercial materials now the lithium flux here doesn't very much beyond the kind of a one and a half order of magnitude estimate here so the selectivity is really what we're after here to distinguish ourselves and so state-of-the-art membranes here as as we and others have started to think about lithium selective extractions you can think about adding coordination chemistry to achieve not just physical separation based on size but chemical separation based on affinity to ligands that are in the membrane matrix and so here we and others have explored different types of ligands that have inner sphere coordinations with lithium so you could think minidiacitate for copper people looked at crown ethers for potassium and lithium and also for cesium and sodium but the challenge here is that you might we need to tease apart the effects of these ligands on getting the ion into the membrane and also transporting that ion across the membrane and so we we talk about that as partitioning which is getting the ion into the membrane out of the water and then being able to actually get diffusion or migration through the membrane and so that's where we start to see trade-offs here between permeability and selectivity as shown here in this bottom graph with work by Chris Bates and Benny Freeman and others and so as we see it there are some key research areas of opportunity here we're from membrane materials trying to achieve monovalent monovalent selectivity we can focus on a charged ligand grafted membrane so that gives us both charge and chemical affinity as selectivity measures measures towards achieving selectivity we can also focus on process design here and so design new processes in addition to the conventional pressure driven like reverse osmosis and electrodialysis so we can combine multiple driving forces to achieve selective separations and then we're really excited about digging into some of these transport mechanisms from a more fundamental perspective so that this enhanced mechanistic insight helps us design next generation membranes as well so as an example we can think about something like ligand grafting density which we're really interested in right now where you might imagine it's not immediately apparent whether you want a very high ligand grafting density or a very low one if you have a very high one you might say oh that will allow me to achieve migration through my membrane but it might also increase the chances that your lithium ion gets stuck in the membrane and simply sorbed rather than transported so these are some of the questions we're looking at from both molecular dynamics approach through collaborations and from an experimental screening approach as well so in terms of designing these membranes again what we're trying to achieve is lithium going through and other ions being rejected and so these molecular level design degrees of freedom we have are things like size separating based on size based on the pore size of the membrane which we can control during synthesis charge valency and then this ligand affinity as well so what this looks like for us in two of our key approaches first is using a ligand enhanced nano porous membrane for lithium and magnesium separations so taking a nano porous membrane that we can apply an electrolytic setup and adding ligands like a simple carboxylic acid that will interact with lithium and allow it to transport through the membrane but reject something like magnesium using an aromatic polygamide membrane we're also in collaboration with professor Yan Xia who's in chemistry here at Stanford and this is through another initiative funded by storage x we're looking at actually counter-intuitively using a positively charged membrane that is ligand functionalized such that positive cations like sodium are rejected based on the charge repelling but ions like lithium can make their way through to overcome that repelling effect of the like charge of the lithium and the positively charged membrane so in short we're trying to use anion exchange membranes to transport cations which sounds like an uphill battle and is but is one that we can potentially scale by controlling the ligands that are in the membrane so what does this look like in the lab actually we're fabricating a library of ligand functionalized membranes starting with acrylic acid as a key ligand and going through this process of preparing monomers then irradiating this pre-polymer film with UV light and making membrane coupons that we characterize in a variety of ways so the monomers we can look at via NMR to make sure we we have what we intend to make and then for the membrane coupons we're looking at kind of three different groups of tests so for mechanical testing IR spectroscopy elemental analysis water uptake and ion exchange capacity and then the last two are about that partitioning the the sorption test and also about the transport of the ions these diffusion tests so this is definitely a trial and error approach and we're trying to rapidly upscale the number of membranes we can screen but we have some promising results that are coming up now so a couple insights into deeper dives into what i mean by generating these membranes and maybe one second i'm just getting a okay there we are we can use FTIR like i mentioned to look at membrane composition and so we can control the percentage or the weight loading if you will of acrylic acid here and start to see of course in FTIR larger peaks associated with moieties associated with acrylic acid so the C double bond O the CO and OH peaks kind of increase as we add more acrylic acid which is no surprise another thing that we're doing is actually testing the membrane performance in diffusion experiments and so here what we can do is we've 3d printed these cells that we clipped together so the membrane is right between these circles where that red clip is keeping things together and we can just track over time how much of each ion lithium or nickel in this case goes from feed to permeate and what's in that permeate is just nano pure water and so by tracking the lithium and nickel transport we can start to observe potential selectivity so the flux is going to be related to the concentration a change over time normalized to volume and area and this partitioning coefficient we can calculate as well so you can see from this example we're starting to achieve some lithium selective separations but not quite very yet but this gives you an example the type of data that we're collecting from these experiments so I wanted to wrap up with some thoughts about that's both that are both concentrated on materials and processes for lithium recycling and step out of the membrane way of thinking and look at its sorbents as well so its sorbents are very typical in water treatment as a way to remove key pollutants from different iguis streams and so lithium is naturally a good candidate for potential removal and recovery in a selective nature via adsorption so here what we have is many different or many identical beads ion exchange resin beads that will attract lithium and other cations the key insight that we're bringing to this is using electrochemistry to regenerate these ion exchange resins and this is based on some of our other work on other ions and other waste waters actually but showing that one of the Achilles heels in terms of environmental impacts of adsorption is actually the regeneration process and so having to add concentrated acid or base can really dominate the the CO2 emissions and the energy input required from a life cycle perspective for adsorption so we've been looking at using electrochemistry and simple water splitting to basically generate on-site acid and base using renewable electrons to then desorb and regenerate this resin and in the process actually make concentrated lithium solutions and so from we've been thinking about this for geothermal brines and so you can see here the challenge is that lithium is at very low concentrations compared to its competitor cations and so if we look first at just commercial resins we see that there's not really lithium selective commercial resins yet and so the in fact these are lithium anti-selective if you will lithium is the least has the lowest affinity for these adsorption sites and and so if we look at look at the selectivity that selectivity is below one and but that's only the selectivity of the adsorption step and many adsorption developers would stop there and say okay let's move on to the next absorbent because we can't really work with this it doesn't absorb enough lithium it only absorbs less than 40 percent of lithium compared to 100 percent of these divalent cations but the key insight we're taking here is that adsorption is only one lever you have to control selectivity of your overall process the other that's less engineered and less understood is the desorption part so what we've done is actually use electrochemical regeneration to achieve selectivity even with this unselective absorption on commercial resins so to step through that we can look at the recovery of different cations over time and in every horizontal line you're seeing that's the amount that was absorbed and so you can think about the percentage of the recovery as what you see in the dots over time relative to the horizontal line so in short lithium is where you get the dots closest to the line and so you've gotten most of the lithium off relative versus getting almost none of the magnesium and calcium off of the resin and so we can get nearly complete regeneration of lithium with zero divalent and we can get in the first 20 minutes we can actually get a lithium over other cation society with potassium here selectivity of 25 now if you remember from the membranes 3 to 15 was a good for lithium versus divalent cations and the lithium versus the sodium potassium was only one so we're able to get quite a selective desorption process here and this is even higher than if we just add add acid manually because we're sort of dosing the acid because it's being generated in the same place as the desorption is occurring and so this means multiply the 25 times the 0.1 and we can get an overall lithium selectivity of 2.5 for commercial resin again this is not that much higher than one but you can start to see that if we are able to develop a resin and insorbent that is lithium selective and combine this with this electrochemical regeneration that is also lithium selective we can really start to improve the selectivity of the overall process so what does this look like kind of overall to zoom out we're really interested in comparing different technologies insorbents membranes solvent extraction as well to to determine what are the cost and environmental benefits of different approaches especially when you think about putting technologies in series rather than just comparing them in parallel so we can aggregate some of these metrics and the literature is quite heterogeneous in terms of what it reports and one of the big outcomes we wanted this work is to define and compute some unifying metrics that are comparable for productivity or throughput selectivity and also specific energy map some of these technologies to applications like lithium ion battery waste as well as geothermal and then constructs some life cycle and techno economic models that will help us be able to adapt to specific case studies that will hopefully be of a lot of use for industry and for academics as we move forward in lithium recycling so to summarize in our group we're focused on a few different aspects of lithium recycling in addition to the systems level assessment you're seeing at the bottom here comparing metals and process performance we're developing and characterizing membranes and insorbents for selective lithium recovery I wanted to stop with just a quick highlight of some of the work at Stanford that our students have been engaging in so last year we were able to host a battery recycling day in partnership with Redwood so this is Michael pictured here who's a postdoc who as a former postdoc is now at Toyota Research Institute and Sam pictured here is one of my PhD students and they really led this process along the storage x to collect batteries all across campus we had staff faculty students all returning disposed batteries and then these went straight to Redwood to their process and it was also a great educational opportunity so one of the beautiful things about working on a university campus is connecting the research with education so just wanted to highlight that as well and with that I'll acknowledge my group members and also want to acknowledge our collaborators as well the Benson labs the Acevedo lab and our collaborators at Redwood materials and more than happy to answer questions and looking forward to the discussion well thank you so much to a snapshot of all the areas that you're working on it's very exciting it's actually you know I see all this activity and all this learning and creativity on top of that it's very exciting I just wanted to pass along some of my thoughts on that so you know one of the so we'll start at the high level looking at the systems analysis you just discuss a lot about the process and just do you have any insight into how the collection and how the transportation the batteries how they play a role in this whole recycling value chain yeah that's a good question Jimmy so I left that graph out just for brevity today but what it comes down to is that in the conventional case the those steps the extraction and the transport actually they don't play as larger role because the refining itself is a bigger part of the bar but in the recycling case when you decrease the the size of the of the refining bar if you will then actually the transport and the the aggregation of the batteries play a larger share because we decreased the refinement and so that's when then actually there's a lot of work that can go into and we did some kind of preliminary modeling of okay say we have this many batteries in California and you collect them in this way what are how would you minimize some of those environmental impacts so I think speaks to the larger question of which I think is a fun part but could be an overwhelming part of these approaches which is like yeah when you do better on one one one contributor if you will the refining part then it exposes that you need to do better on the other parts right but I think that's kind of actually how we get down to minimizing environmental impacts it's this iterative circular approach to closing the loop on closing the loop yeah fantastic you know and do you have a sense just roughly and in a relative manner how the the cost of say the collection and transport compared to the cost that you're seeing in the process portion are they bigger you know or they actually comparable or smaller yeah that's something we don't have a sense for yet we early on we decided to focus on environmental impacts first and then bring in cost and so we haven't we haven't gotten kind of high quality cost data yet and I think that would take some more collaboration with some other industry partners who might be focused on pilot scale treatment as well but definitely an open open question and we have some colleagues in the business school who are interested in supply chains and how to minimize the costs as well the business school here at Stanford and so definitely an open open question as far as I'm concerned yeah fantastic you know one of the reasons it was so exciting to work with your students on the collection part of it besides their overwhelming enthusiasm and passion was that really understanding the psychology behaviors and motivations and incentives and of collection was you know was something that is ripe area it's there's very little known about that and so part of the part of the thinking was well if we could potentially understand that better we could have a big impact on that because right now to my understanding there's not a whole lot that we really can figure out about that right now you know which is short have we put up a bin and hope people will go by and drop it absolutely absolutely yeah and I think it just underscores how how we say this all the time but really how interdisciplinary this problem is right this is something that I can't just solve as a chemical engineer right so this is the the kind of all hands on deck approach that we need the behavioral psychologist and the environmental educators etc on board to really make this a reality yeah so I'm gonna just get your thoughts I know you're not a policy walk but I'm just curious right if we think about like in the case of lead acid batteries where we recycle in this country at least over 90 percent and here we are with lithium ion batteries where 95% goes into the landfill you know we have so much that we could do there and in your sense if you were the guru if you were the policy guru god and you could wave your one and said okay you know how would you incentivize uh or put in a place you know and what lessons can we learn from say the lead acid batteries to enable this yeah I think I would send to it I would kind of have a two-pronged approach where manufacturers could do like uh like you get a rebate the consumer gets a rebate when they return the battery and I think we can also take advantage of the fact that many people buying electric vehicles are do we have the environment or climate change or sustainability as at least one of their motivators and so I think a little bit of education when you buy the EV to say like you probably haven't thought about this yet but did you know um I think we could easily leverage that easily is a strong word I think we could leverage that there's already that motion towards um sustainability that is driving people to purchase EV um EVs uh that I think we could leverage that to think about end of life as well but it is kind of like a two it's a chicken and egg problem because the recycling our recycling methods aren't quite there yet to uh be able to um convincingly recycle the batteries at the scale we want to but we also need more batteries to recycle to to get them to get those processes to that scale so it's a bit of chicken and egg but I think we need to go from both sides yeah fantastic you know if I not sort of bring us to the to the question scalability which is which is one of the key questions I have is right now in in your assessment and stuff are the processes um essentially ready to scale you know so I know you talked about redwood you talked about some of the other ones and we know we're going to have this amount of batteries coming right because we see that already with the number of EVs that are purchased so five ten years now it's going to be coming uh is your sense right now and I'm saying that these processes are essentially really to scale you know the this you know the size that you study and stuff you just replicated or whatever you know how far are we along on that yeah I think it's really a spectrum some of the technologies are ready to scale yesterday because they've been done at scale and they're actually extraction processes just adapted um in terms of the selective uh approaches those aren't I would not say are ready to scale yet but we still have the spectrum of like even with the adsorbents I mentioned right we can use commercial adsorbents and change the process a little bit now we've got something that's a little bit more drop in place versus trying to design membranes where membrane modules haven't been used in that that would be the most nascent approach so I'm often of the mind that we need both the like new nascent work that will get commercialized in 10 15 years and we need the kind of turnkey solutions um that will get us part of the way there and I think sometimes the discussion can get to a place of like which is better and we should as if we put all our money into one technology and I just think that's so rarely the most good idea yeah it's just I'm always like so you'll note that even like when I do a life cycle assessment it's very rare for me to say like well this approach was the best right it's more like this is the best in these circumstances right um and so I think we can try to and again that's like a mindset thing from a research perspective but rather than winners and losers it's sort of like okay well where does this make sense and the answer might be it doesn't make sense yet but it would be great as a field to know why it doesn't make sense and what conditions would have to change for it to make sense and if those conditions never change then it's not like we should spend billions of dollars on that but I don't know it just comes down to like a diverse research research portfolio from my perspective well I think your your work on these um these membranes and essentially customizing and we're using different uh aspects of them to induce the properties to allow separation and collections of this fascinating and exciting work and potentially I think groundbreaking if you're you know you're able to achieve it because the the the way of doing it of just filtering it or regenerating it's going to be I would imagine even on that chart that you show with the energy and everything else it's going to be even way lower you may not even see see a show up there right so it's very exciting yeah it's incredibly exciting um so let me just turn and see the questions from the audience what is the chemical origin of high desorption of lithium and low desorption of magnesium and calcium what is the chemical what's there chemical origin I'm not sure I can yeah yeah yeah so of loads okay yeah so it's mainly that it's it's less about the ions themselves and more about their valence so and you can just think of the um kind of approximate here but like that charge the charge density if you will and magnesium ion is is more charged per space than a lithium ion and so if I'm attracting it with a negatively charged resin the the divalence will always beat out the monovalence so that's the that's the chemical origin of why the divalence are are more likely to be attracted to the negatively charged surface fantastic okay maybe we can go ahead and bring i am back to and we'll have a discussion with three of us uh it's uh it's interesting that actually there was a whole bunch more questions that came in about lithium so i'm just going to go ahead and just uh one of the questions actually that came in from an audience member was a a question around petrol lithium and you know particularly in sort of what are your thoughts about and can you comment on petrol lithium yeah um actually at some uh lithium industry conferences i met several people were uh promoting uh recovering lithium from um bryans that is really when you we have all have heard the fracking so you have to inject hot water underground uh to to crack the the rocks to recover petroleum then that water when you go get it up uh contains some ppm i think it's even lower than sultan uh remember we talked about sultan c in california yeah it's uh it's it's um a sultan c if i remember correctly it's under water of a hundred ppm this is slightly lower but still significant considering in seawater in seawater it's less than one ppm lithium so even you have a 50 that's significant higher but in adygoma it's a 1000 ppm i give you perspective yes there's a lociam but the challenge is that the concentration is low i think if with the world needs more lociam um at the end of day we have to look at the old source of the lociam uh people will have to work out um economic process to recover the lociam i i come out of the patrol petroleum production um i think there's added to challenge here compared to southern sea geothermal geothermal pumping everything is free because they they the the brine comes up by power station they power generation they have to pump you just simply add a future here you will have to work with uh oil people to um to devolve a process and to have the equipment on their site and also i my understanding is that the the well life uh for the um shell gas or oil is relatively shorter than the conventional one so they keep on moving uh so you don't have an oil well that the oil well will stay there for decades compared to a power station so you have to develop some some ways you keep moving with them um to to develop to extract lociam from that source yeah fantastic thank you again so will one of the questions uh actually uh was around with these new technologies that you're developing um like the the membrane stuff have you actually talked about or potentially explored uh incorporating these in battery manufacturing where many they might have residues or other things and they will be you know a way to to not have that in their wastewater or other streams in fact get that out as a value is that something which you've explored or are we just imagining that's a fantastic question in short no we haven't and that's simply just because we haven't built formal and when i say we my lab we haven't built um formal collaborations with battery manufacturers yet but i think that's a great way to think about a more constrained version of the problem potentially that sort of lets us like get a foothold onto um into the more ambitious recycling affair if you will um yeah but that's a great that we've had sort of preliminary conversations a lot of them through storage acts with where could electrochemical approaches be useful um and uh yeah but that's definitely something i would be open to and i think is a really great idea to pursue yeah so let me just take that one step further Yuan as in your role in your space uh as someone who's been in this a long time looking at some of the stuff that that professor Tarpe is looking at uh you know could you see some applications for this within uh the mines and extraction processes that you are familiar with in traditional traditional rocks yeah um well actually um if you look at the extraction lithium extraction past 20 years i would think there's a lot of non-traditional technology being promoted it's uh so uh people heard a lot about the direct lithium extraction uh first practice by my old employer efforts the lithium now called livened in Argentina and there's a more uh actually the the developers working on Salton Sea uh they're trying to use the direct lithium extract as well because that's the only way you can have a precipitation of operation pound there so so and and also in uh Qinghai China the brines there Salafs there tend to have a a challenge of very high compared to South American Salafs the magnesium and lithium ratio significantly higher so they have a developed technology or in some membrane technology what i heard in the practice there to separate as uh professor uh tarpon just mentioned divalent a monovalent with uh with uh with a membrane so i have been seeing um i think 20 if you turn the clock back 20 years ago this space is pretty steady the last 10 years you see a lot of new technologies that um because this space has started to attract a lot more attention when you have more attention more investment then you have more researchers coming in to start to work on it you will see more technologies and more innovation which is good fantastic i mean i i i just add of in a lithium battery uh recycling um uh purification um and the processing towards the back end uh it's important but the only more importantly is front end when you got a half a ton a battery pack how you safely sort them and uh and cut them into pieces it's very important as well um i i ask people to pay more attention there because once um the elements in solution um this it become very standard to chemical engineering yeah yeah no exactly and i think uh i think that point was made in a number of places and with a number of people that we've talked with you know um and you know i think even one idea was mentioned for can you standardize batteries you know battery packs and then make it easy then you know there's a standard with this assembly and stuff i i actually i would ask for it because it's painful even even charging um i used to have a Nissan Leaf i installed a charger for the Nissan Leaf and about a Tesla and then i have to have a doctor because Tesla charging is not compatible with the other one so we don't even have a standard standardized charging for our iPhones versus Android phones so that that's really regulatory oh absolutely you know uh you know i think of that as uh you know another form of permitting where you know trying to you know trying to get standards or formalizations about this that allows you to explore these things which i think are low hanging fruit in many cases can be very challenging and quite quite a long time to get established actually too which makes it very makes it very difficult to implement so um i don't think so i don't have any other questions that i have and the audience is looks like it's pretty most of the questions let me see this one um can you talk about the use of selective lithium extraction and direct lithium extraction to production lithium from brines and rocks yep um it can it's it's all about economics depends on the your your resource by the way this typically used for brine based it's not used for hard rock because the processing people pretty much already mastered the process to process Benjamin um so this is really for brine based and now brine based uh if you have it depends on what kind of the nature of your resources if you have a resource um that's as good as i say adegama or as a talker pass you don't actually you don't need selective absorption because if the uh more standard conventional ways that turn out to be cheaper however if you are working on a more challenging resource uh say dirty brine i'll say you have to remove a lot of impurities a lot of impurities start to interfere with for instance magnesium if you have a lot of magnesium it's very hard to concentrate your brine because when magnesium drop out it take lithium there's a salt that have a one molar magnesium one molar lithium it drop out and then you lose you you lose the lithium to that i think in that kind of a or or places like uh sultan c you have a very low concentration so it uh challenging brine resources tend to require this kind of selective absorption this kind of a technology is more suitable for but i think we will see this more and more because as we the volume demand become higher and higher we will have to look at those less desirable resources then you have to apply deploy this kind of technology right right fantastic so um i know that uh will you may not be able to join us for backstage so i'm going to give you guys an opportunity to ask each other questions if you have any to ask each other since uh we may not be able to have that opportunity in the backstage is there any questions you would like to ask each other i think the audience has asked several of mine to join i feel like i'm still getting used to understanding the lithium challenge at scale um but one i had i think is that you showed uh the kind of artist rendering of the plant in the um the thacker pass um and in the corner there was a sulfuric acid production part what is what is that for oh yeah yeah why are you doing it on site yeah to uh to for acid leaching this is pretty almost the same as leaching lithium from spodermen so you need sulfuric acid in our economic model it's cheaper to produce sulfuric acid on site than to truck in sulfuric acid from far away that's why in our plan we're going to build a sulfuric acid on site right there that's why got it and probably in part because it's so remote right here uh so there was one more question actually for you will from an honest it just came in is there any energy benefit to chemical slash physical ion separation versus electrical electrochemical ion separation oh yeah good question it actually ties into the question i just asked you on actually any time you're using chemicals acid or base sulfuric acid that's actually a regenerant that we use in some of our processes you have to get it to the site and so that means you're paying the cost the the monetary cost of transport but you're also paying the emissions costs of if you will that you're paying you're spending emissions to get that um chemical to you so that's borrowing from some of the insights from wastewater treatment where actually a sizable portion of the embedded the life cycle energy and greenhouse gas emissions for treating like municipal wastewater actually come from the chemicals that we add because we add so much of them to stabilize different steps of the process that onsite generation of these same same logic as you on was just getting at can be really productive in a cost monetary cost sense and from an environmental perspective as well yeah well fantastic um i have a question for will on uh actually it's more of a common and then question you you showed us a wonderful war with the membrane uh separation i have you considered i think it's not only useful for battery recycling but also as i mentioned earlier for some challenging losian brine resources it could be applicable as well have you considered uh working with those people on your methodology yeah that's a good point we have just started working with um exxon mobile on some of their extraction from brine um approaches but yeah again that's a new step for us so one we're still learning about but that's i think our where we're starting is like and where we always start as aqueous chemistry people i guess is like what's the composition of the wastewater what selectivity is needed and what can we do to achieve that what steps can we take to achieve that but like you said every source is different and so there will be different approaches that we can think about there yeah and the other comment i want to make um recycling it's that uh to your question jimmy earlier um is that uh it was simplified recycling a lot more if there's some sort of a regulatory approach uh the spun battery gets sorted out by oem so let's see see if you uh oh the battery are mixed uh it will become big mass that there's a lot of energy and money is spent on uh treating unknown source yeah but if let's say if you um i'm a tesla driver at the end of life and i will return that to him and if i drive a gm you will return to gm they know exactly the nature of the history or you can first of all small amount of money is some sort of chip on that battery pack i know exactly when the battery was manufactured the composition everything so that will go along and then recycling receive those known battery from oem not from a consumer from consumer massive you never know the nature but if you receive if you receive today i i know they receive most of their battery material from factory scrap which is easy but say in 10 years a lot of car battery will start to retire right if cyclers receive battery already sorted by oem which is easy if you have a chip on the pack right it can be done automatically with the computers yeah then then it will be a lot simpler and cheaper to recycle yeah i i completely agree with you in fact i always go back to the lead asset example where when you buy a new battery that you buy it from your dealer you know there is automatically a charge there that's built into that you know it's credit toward when you return your old battery environmental levy right and so there's already a system in a expectation in place which is facilitated and then the dealer wraps them all up and so on uh so this is part of the thinking that i think uh many many of our policy makers need to think through in order to enable this and do it before we already have these amount of batteries going to various places and unknown sources is as these as these car dealerships and new EV batteries come alive right how do we enable and facilitate that whole recycling process and and from known resources exactly you know my nightmare when i see recycling is like there's a recycling plastic bin right and they give you this long list of only the plastics that sit this criteria and i'm just like looking at them just like yeah good luck with that right everybody's gonna throw anything that looks plastic to them in there it's a it's a challenge it's very challenging for consumer electronic type of battery but it shouldn't be like that for EV battery because no one will throw their EV in their garbage bin you know usually 99 percent of time is it returned to dealers or trade-in so it should be uh easier to return the battery to the OEM then to the recycler yeah exactly and uh one of the models i look at also is for apple's recycling process uh you know and and how they incentivize that and you know they offer they offer um so when i bought my last uh new apat they offer some i forgot 50 or 100 for me to return my old apat hey that's well i have no use of my old apat so much well just return it to them yeah which is good i agree you know and i think you were more successful than i did and maybe it's because your iPad was uh more recent but i remember going there with a stack of old iPhones and these were much older right they just were you know just sitting in a corner and i brought them they said they should increase that rebate for right that was part of my yeah exactly i was like oh okay well i'm glad i you know i i'm glad i helped you collect it right uh and uh you know uh and that was the full incentive you know that they offered without oh we have a place where you can put your old iPhone materials uh anyway fantastic i'd like to thank you will uh tarpe and will and uh thank you young gal for participating this uh this very informative uh and uh very important and even it's going to just become more important as we wrap uh on this and uh i hope you guys have fun and i hope that everyone learns something and uh since we're finishing it a little bit early will i hope you can join us a little bit for backstage because we have a we have a number of people and i'm sure in some cases they probably just want to uh meet you and potentially ask you through their questions uh okay so should we start the backstage earlier too yes i i recommend that we start to walk in there okay yeah so uh for the listeners are who are participating in our backstage let's go ahead and finish uh this symposia now and then go ahead and transfer over to our backstage uh just a quick announcement um so um please uh join us for registering registering for our upcoming additional winter symposia which is on friday march 10th on minerals for 500 terawatt hours of energy storage where we now see this stationary scorch really going up and becoming very important uh and how do we supply the minerals for that kind of scale um by professor jeff carse and grace bucy here at stanford and then on may on march 24th um with professor dan camman and megan melter uh an approaching grid energy storage from a systems perspective systems perspective so lots of exciting materials coming and we look forward to facilitating all these kind of activity within our stanford storage x community and other activities thank you all be safe be well and we'll see you at the backstage for those who are joining bye bye everyone