 Hello everybody. Welcome to this open session for our October meeting. We're meeting virtually because of the situation we all find ourselves in with COVID. So we have a great session this afternoon calling preparing the American Chemical Enterprise for disruption. And I will tell you we should have had this session three years ago because right now we are living in the great disruption. We're seeing it through our lives. I can talk in my own area which is automotive plastics. Computer chips are radically changing the automotive market. We're seeing specialty chemical shortages. Most of specialty chemicals come from India and China, a lot of them. And so just for my own company, we've had hundreds of force majeures this year because of this great disruption. We're also seeing huge labor shortages as well. And we see this in our own lives as we go into restaurants. We're also seeing it for chemists and chemical engineering talent that we are living in a very, very different dynamic. We were probably on teetering on this but COVID has really forced the world over. It's a very dynamic cost environment as well. Logistic shipping companies are really dramatically disrupted the supply chain. And so this is a really critical session and of utmost importance to the United States. So I'm really happy to introduce the team that built this wonderful program. My good buddy Gerard from Procter & Gamble and the BCSD program officer Linda Anon who's been working on it. So I'm going to pass it to Gerard. Hey, thank you, Scott. I'm doing the usual soundcheck Cincinnati. You can hear Cincinnati. Terrific. Thank you, Scott. Good afternoon all. And you said it very well, Scott. And for those who are attending externally to this board of chemical science and technology, this is a smart choice of your time. And I want to thank specifically Linda Anon from the staff. She has done a brilliant job not only with me but also with the speakers. I will come back later to prepare this session. So thank you, Linda. For the next 90 minutes, we have an exciting trio of speakers who will engage with us. Like Scott says on the topic of very high on our mind, how can the chemical enterprise in the US prepare itself for the next disruptions? How can it set itself up for success for tackling some of the considerable challenges that we know are in front of us and we'll come back to those later? While simultaneously, and this is the power engine and what makes us so up full, while capitalizing on the astounding, and I say that from an industry vantage point, the astounding pace of advancements in the fields of computational, environmental, biological, or more traditional chemistries. And like Scott said, it's an appropriate time to have this session. COVID-19, Scott said it has been a high opener. And this forces all of us and the speakers we engage with Linda to ask ourselves a lot of questions like where we prepare to protect our society against COVID-19. Most importantly, are we prepared for the next threat? And maybe we are. Maybe we are not. Where we're ready to under the acute escalation of supply chain challenges that Scott is seeing every day in his job. And so I do and so is the society. Are we prepared to see the more and more visible signs of global climate changes happening? Are we prepared for them sustainability? And are we prepared to attract and develop and retain the right diversity of the new skills and talents that we will need to be able to disrupt constructively the chemical enterprise? And finally, and you will hear that from a lot of speakers is how can we reinvent the way we are innovating in the chemical enterprise? In this context begs two major themes that I will facilitate with the help of my hours free guests. First thing, what recent or new strategies are being developed or already employed that have the potential to drive and elevate the American chemical disruption process? And I'm glad to report we have some success models that will give us some hope with us this afternoon. And importantly, for all of us after this meeting, how can we as players in the US chemistry enterprise be more effective? Were we into the industry into the governments or in the academics or coaching students? We have all the role to play. So we are delighted to have three speakers. They are not going to address all these questions, but they are going to give us some hope and they are going to give us some tips. And we may also challenge them with some tough questions. These three speakers have anticipated and I really want to say operationalized new ways to disrupt the chemical innovation process, the collaboration within the chemical enterprise, and they have been able to create value. So we are going to learn a lot of them from them. They have built also during their careers, strong partnership across the chemical enterprise, industry research institutions or government agencies. And I will present them briefly. You have their bio in the pre-reading. So let me give you some teasers. And first I will start with Mr. Ignacio Martinez. Ignacio is a senior leader with flagship pioneering currently. He has a track record of participating to some of the most disruptive and value creation institutions like Singenta Venture, which has played a very innovative role in the world of the agricultural field. And of course, flagship pioneering, creating new companies, modernize one of them, but they are more of them that have clearly challenged and changed and disrupted the health care. Ignacio is altogether a scientist, an innovator, and an entrepreneur who not only are creating a successful portfolio of innovation, but also new business models. So we are going to enjoy our talk with Ignacio. Next, we will have Dr. Jess Liber, who works for Geneco Bioworks, whose reputation I'm sure as a pioneer in synthetic biology is well known to all of you. And Jeff has over 20 years of experience and expertise as a microbiologist, molecular biologist, and metabolic engineer. So some a lot of empathy with the members of this board. And Jeff has a vast experience in the university as well as in the industry with unlocking commercial opportunities out of new scientific advancements in the field of scientific biology. Then we will have Dr. Anthony Bocan-Fuzo, and I know Anthony is well known to many of you with his enduring leadership in UIDP. And UIDP has elevated clearly, we see that from the industry, the partnership between corporate industries, small industries, government and academics to the new levels, stimulating new value creation on the way. And UIDP is obviously a poster child from the National Academy of Sciences and the NSF. Tony was recently involved into the creation of ERVA, the NSF Engineering Research Visioning Alliance, which is one of the spring board for the chemistry industry to be able to disrupt itself. So all these speakers will share their experiences and their perspectives on how to approach the disruption and the innovation process with finding solutions to big society problems. They will help us a lot, I'm sure, during the discussion, survey various strategies to drive the innovation and drive to the solutions of the problems that we are dealing with. Overall, again, the objective is to, George, is this topic of interest? So I hope there will be a discussion and further follow up. Let me start now with Ignacio from Flagship. And I would like Ignacio for you to share for 20 minutes a bit more out of Flagship pioneering and your personal experience. And then we can have a 10 minutes chat on some of the questions that we have for you. Ignacio, the floor is yours. Thank you, Gerard. Can you hear me well? Perfect. Perfect. So thank you, Gerard. And first of all, thank you, Linda as well, for the opportunity to share with you our experiences on the innovation landscape and the opportunity to interact with everybody here. Nice to meet you all. I'm going to talk, the title of my talk is pioneering innovations, opportunities and challenges. I'm going to explain first why we are obsessed with pioneering innovations. Then I will explain what Flagship does and how we do it very, very briefly. And they'll end up with us sharing the opportunities and challenges that we have at Flagship, but also that I'm sure most of you have on your respective roles. So if you go to the next slide, please. So the reason why we are obsessed with this mindset of pioneering innovation is because, as Gerard mentioned, in a different way, we don't have a lot of time left. There are two observations here. One, that we are healthier than we've ever been before, as human beings. And second is that the fact that we are more people and we are healthier and live longer is putting the resources we have on this planet at a very difficult situation. So there are on the good side, we have more life expectancy, children are living longer, are healthier, we are increasing crop yields in agriculture, population is growing. On the pressure, on the resource pressure side, there is a lot of water pollution, air pollution, there is biodiversity loss and deforestation. And there are obviously more challenges and good things happening, but we are as kind of a, we have a collective responsibility to innovate and use chemistries because as the chief scientific officer of one of our companies who used to run Syngenta Global Crop Protection Chemistry, he said chemistry is everywhere. So if there is a group who have a responsibility to address these opportunities and challenges is all of us. If you go to the next one, let me introduce you to your flagship pioneering. So we are an institution that has evolved, obviously, like all institutions over the years, but we are conceiving, creating, resourcing and developing companies in those both areas of human health and sustainability. And when we say companies, we talk about platform companies, it is not just developing companies with the idea of creating value and then sell them over philosophies to create platform companies, make them grow and make systemic changes in the different industries that we go after. As you mentioned, one of our companies is Moderna Therapeutics that we all know. And we have examples of other impactful companies in both areas of human health and sustainability. So it's life sciences broadly. I'll explain to you a little bit the process that we have to develop these pioneering companies. We believe in teamwork, we believe in process, we believe in the fact that discipline has to be applied to the company creation activity. The firm as a whole has now around $6.7 billion of committed capital. We proactively issue patents. So we have a flagship now, 250 people doing origination, protecting our inventions, doing research. And these days, we are launching between five to six new companies per year. So this is flagship in a snapshot. If you go to the next one, please, and please feel free to ask questions along the way if you want. There are four components of our platforms. The first one is the kind of the integrated business model. We are an institution where we combine capital and I mentioned the amount of capital that we are managing with the scientific research that we perform. There are majority of the organization at Flux about scientists and entrepreneurs. And the fourth, the third dimension is entrepreneurship. So usually these three domains are in different places. Could be in a university, could be the venture capital firm, could be an entrepreneur that is trying to develop new companies. In the case of Flux, if we have brought this into one single booth, we have five origination teams. Each origination team has between eight to 14 people orientating ideas and ventures as a living. And they are supported by functional groups like intellectual property, finance, human resources, etc. The process, we have a process that I will explain on the next slide, which we do systematically. Business principles is the third component. And the business principle touches both a couple of things. On the first side, as I mentioned is about building bio-platform companies. So the idea of having multiple goals and goals, there are obviously a lot of issues with regards to building platforms because at the beginning, people tend to develop a product mindset that we try to delay that product mindset to make sure that we have, that we develop the breadth of the platform. But then at some point, obviously, we have a product pipeline and a pipeline of solutions as well. And the fourth one is a pioneering culture. So here we apply kind of orthogonal thinking where we put ideas under a lot of pressure. We have what our founder calls the an immigrant mindset because we are very comfortable being uncomfortable because we don't know at the beginning if these things will be true. We don't know if they will work and we pressure test the ideas to make sure that we develop the best iteration of the ideas. But it is all the people embedded at Flagship have this mindset of trial and error. And it's okay to be wrong because we are working in multiple things in parallel. So if you go to the next one, which is a key slide at Flagship, this is the way we work in terms of phases. Phase number one, I call highly over this because this could be a long discussion and we could spend the whole day talking about this. But we start the first phase with an exploration or a what if question. For example, one of the questions that we asked was what if we could develop a set of biological products that could complement chemical pesticides to be used in agriculture? We start with nothing. Most of the cases are kind of a dream. And with the idea of these phases to develop what we call venture hypotheses. So there is a group of two or three people or four people in some cases that explore an area of interest and they know that if they reply if they can answer to this what if question could be something transformational. If we find one hypothesis that we like, we go into the phase two, which is what we call protocol. And it starts for prototyping of a company. So the same way manufacturing companies, prototype products, automotive companies, prototype cars, we prototype companies. And this phase lasts between six to 12 months. We invest between one to million dollars. We hire scientists. We lease laboratory space to do experiments. And the idea of doing this phase is to prototype the company and put it under a lot of pressure and see if it survives. And obviously during this phase there is iteration variation we learn and we see at the end of this phase we usually see if there is a platform technology. We see if there is intellectual property. We see if we have attracted the interest of people. And one thing that we do obviously in this case is talk to external people and pressurize the ideas. And we usually go outside, talk to experts in a particular field. We don't ask an open question. We explain to them what we would try to do. They tell us most of the times that will never work. And these are the reasons that that will never work. And that information serves us to come back and iterate on the idea and try to overcome the hurdles. But if we overcome some of them or think that there is a reason to believe that we could do it, we go into the phase three, which is what we call NUCO for new company. And that's when we invest between $10-20 million in some cases more and then we run. We start building the company. We give the company a name until that is a project. We have a CEO, a CSO and the C level roles filled with external people and a board of directors. And then when the company grows to 1570 or even more employees we go into the fourth phase which is like a growth cost. So this is not very dissimilar to children. You can see if the children then they need you to work. Then they are teenagers and need some money and then they kind of become more independent. So it's very similar and obviously every phase has different challenges. We've done this as I mentioned many, many times. We've learned a lot but obviously we continue to make mistakes and in every case is different. If you go to the next slide, please. The interesting thing about building platforms is that there are and the areas that we are touching both human health and sustainability in some cases the same platform conceptually could be applied to multiple fields. The things, the areas that Flagship is interested in is in human health where we have been very strong. We have a tremendous track record, both mainly on therapeutics but also on diagnostics and medical devices and other R&D platforms. But some of these platforms as I say have applications in agriculture or what we call here planet health and nutritional health. So one example for example could be gene editing, another could be microbiome, another could be other classes of chemical platforms that could be used for different things on delivery or new chemical entities discovery. And this is what we try to do and this is where we have built teams of multidisciplinary members that have expertise on these fields but sometimes it's good to bring people who are unbiased and have I don't know experiencing a lot of experience in the pharma space but never been exposed to the agricultural space and they come with great ideas and innovations and vice versa. Sometimes we start in pharma, go to agriculture, sometimes we start with agriculture and go to pharma and it's a very kind of I would say horizontal view of the world rather than vertically in silos. So for us silos are not a good thing and we try to think again with vertical expertise but more horizontally and there have been very interesting discoveries following that regime. I'll finish with the next slide and hopefully we can have a good discussion. Everything that we try to do falls into this legend of pioneering innovation. So big companies like B&G and others or Singenta have current solutions they are taking them to market they are super successful they have the go to market channels established etc. There are innovators around these kind of core solutions that try to innovate and improve the way things are done sometimes they are closer sometimes they are farther from the core. What we try to do at Flagship is to imagine different islands or different planets and try to innovate in areas where there is really no one or not very many people operating and this has obviously opportunities but has a lot of challenges. So if we start with the opportunities obviously if you are on an island that no one has discovered there is a potential to create a broad intellectual property. There is no competition or very very little this is an opportunity as well to define the field. There's one thing we talk about is that if you are kind of pioneering innovation on a systematic basis also could be an innovation supply chain for incumbents and other stakeholders and obviously if you are there first there is potential and you have all these other things that I mentioned there is a potential to capture large value tools that at the beginning seem very very unreasonable as these things are coming to reality become more tangible. But while these opportunities are true or could be true there are a lot of challenges and this is what we face at Flagship most of the times when this is something really truly disruptive of pioneering obviously contradicts dogma and it's difficult to find key opinion leaders who have been on a field for 20-30 years embracing this human nature. What we try to do on this case is learn from them because they are right in the challenges that we'll have on all the problems that we will be able to deliver and as you can imagine mRNA and modern and biotech-faced even they are facing it today is difficult to adopt because there are a lot of things that need to be proven. The other thing that is very challenging is that if we are developing platforms and they are very unique there is no playbook to follow so where do we go first which is the challenges that we have all the time is you build a platform and you need to develop a product to prove the platform where do you go first where are the opportunity costs what is the market what are the experts and sometimes we need to bring people from different expertise as well. It is also very very uncertain as I mentioned earlier there has to be conviction that something will work without proof at the beginning that the platform will deliver on the promise and obviously one challenge that I think is also an opportunity is this insurgent mindset there is no leverage because there is no brand there is no experience there is expertise but it is also provides the opportunities and the ventures that we develop with the the right to try different things because there is nothing to lose so we start with zero we're not going to lose anything if singenta or progdena or any other big company they start operating this way they would be probably they would be also kind of cost in terms of keeping the brand if things don't work etc etc so these are some opportunities and challenges that we face at flagship there is a has not been a better moment to do this activity there is a lot of collaboration as well with universities there is a collaboration with academic leaders there is a collaboration within cumbens our philosophy is that to to develop pioneering innovations you need a conservation of players in different ways but we are also very passionate about this idea of developing these technologies for different industry segments and developing really really fast because again I don't think the the world has much a lot of a lot of time to solve problems that we are we are facing today so with this alistop I've talked a lot and I've talked fast but happy to answer any questions from the audience about flagship or about the innovation pioneer innovations topic in general very good thank you Ignacio perfect just for the audience we will have two opportunities to ask questions to Ignacio first I will spend 10 minutes you know opening on some urgent question and then we will have those three speakers in a panel which will be another possibilities for the audience to engage hey Ignacio first thank you for sharing and really giving us a lot of hope that we can make a big difference and face disruption so thank you for that I hope by the way that flagship pioneering creates this new solution for the chemical enterprise to make us comfortable to be uncomfortable we certainly are all uncomfortable and we should be double comfortable but seriously I mean this is the undertaking that you have taken I'm turning to culture and for you maybe to give us some cues for the chemical enterprise not for flagship pioneering about the culture what you are sharing is not for the faint hearted you are going after opportunities that are not in the adjacencies that not in the core they are in almost no man's land and you create out of that of a platform so it's certainly something very very uncomfortable what is how can you help a culture how can you support a culture of high risk because this is a high risk development not only internally to flagship pioneering but also with your other stakeholders because none of us feel comfortable to play into an area that is not the adjacencies that is not an established market and they need to go for it from a culture standpoint is what is it you do that maybe you will advise the chemical enterprise to do more of permaculture standpoint in as you it's a very good question there I think that the the main thing is like obviously there are differences between all the stakeholders that are on on this landscape and on the chemical landscape as well I think that there are a few things that could be super super helpful one is is the definition of risk so for us risk is our friend for a big included risk is the enemy we usually talk about return on innovation because that was what we do for a living and then comes to return on investment because that is more plan full and you can do more things I think it's a question of being comfortable with the risk and ways to mitigate the risk because in our in our I think the one thing that we it could be very helpful is the mindset of of what failure means for us we don't fail because if something doesn't work we've learned something and then we can apply that knowledge to another thing so for us failure doesn't exist and risk is our friend I think the other thing that is could be super powerful is to to push for more collaboration between these different silos that exist in society and also in the chemical industry as well I mean see just to give an example Sinjenta was the the the formation I don't know you know the formation of of the two agrochemical divisions of two pharma companies Seneca and Novartis they separated the agrochemical part and they kept the pharmaceutical part and then over the years they lost this interaction where there was synergies between the different the different platforms but I think there should be a more or there should be less silos on the one hand and the other thing that is important for the chemical society or for chemical industry in general is that as we are thinking about new fields that will have an impact everywhere like artificial intelligence or machine learning that it is another extra of complexity or uncertainty or risk however you want us or opportunity depending on how you want to say it but I think there has to be an open mind to look at different fields that will have an impact because as I said AI machine learning is one example we can discover new molecular entities using a different approach that was not possible a few years ago and there would be more technology being developed over the next few years that will help to do things differently as well so it's we always say that the only thing constant is change so thank you Ignacio so as you moved into from incubation to some new businesses or experiments is there any help that you had or you wish you had from the US stakeholders whether it's government NSF agencies as they played a key role for us and can they play a key role to stimulate and help you know yourself or other companies to follow the suit on going after these high risk areas so the yes the obviously regulatory is extremely important um there are on the good side there are examples with the faster process of the vaccines and that has been obviously super careful and the support that the government has given different companies is really supportive I think the the we are working on this and starting to put more effort in on this topic of regulatory and stakeholders is the idea that if breakthrough and pioneer innovations have been developed they are disruptive in probably in less cost better performance and less time and speed so that you can develop them and take them to market faster that also needs to adjust or at least reconsider regulatory approval processes to approve new chemical entities that could be set for growers in the case of agriculture or people and the regulatory regimes are difficult to change um and difficult to or regulatory bodies are difficult to address but it's I think as we are developing pioneer innovations we should also push on that regard as a as a kind of a stakeholder management approach but it is I think there are the the two ways in the in which the government can help is the faster regulatory processes and more support for pioneer innovations to manage those risks that we were talking at the beginning as well that's a good point is um I mean obviously I have to ask it the audience will ask it with Moderna but what did it take for the regulatory experts to partner with you and to be able to move these scientific ideas from what was an idea up to you know accepting it for the market I understand obviously the COVID-19 crisis at that but there must be more to it so what is it brought them to the party is it something that you started late in the game or you brought them very very early in the early infancy of your platforms how did it work in that so so I don't I honestly haven't been closed operationally uh with the case um I know that there they were um there was an effort uh on developing a relationship with the government and that was a good because it was kind of on both sides needed uh so when the pandemic hit it was not a new player and tell me who you are they knew each other really really well and I think that is an important learning there uh they knew the companies well they knew the technologies they were already working together and that helped a lot with the rapid response to to the COVID crisis um and I think it's something that we need to do without all innovations is put it in front of people and number one educate people on the on these new technologies and second get feedback from them on what could work well what couldn't work well and be humble as well as we as we are developing this these platforms but it's again it's education uh financial support regulatory support um and if you think about it step back a little bit if if so 10 years ago if you told someone that you could develop a vaccine in 12 months no expert in the world would have told you yes you can no one and we did it and um to me the same analogy we I put with sustainability we don't have a I mean we don't have 50 years we cannot continue like we are doing it now for another 50 years and this is the COVID crisis and there is the climate change crisis um and and we have been we have shown ourselves that we can do this because we've done it under a pandemic but we should put more pressure to develop more sustainable solutions to the world thank you Ignacio I'd like to open the floor if anybody wants to have a question again we will have a chance to have Ignacio with Jess and Tony later on for half an hour but please chime in if you have any questions um I'd like to yeah uh hi Dr maybe uh you don't see her uh but I see Jen uh has her hand up um yeah thank you and this might be a question for later for everyone on the panel but um I want to thank you for that talk and thank you for highlighting the power of collaboration I was curious for your thoughts on where academia or academic industry partnerships kind of fit in this ecosystem and what you see is the strengths and the challenges there because I know you know again fast and academia often do not go together but at the same time there is so much freedom to innovate as well I think it's a super important stakeholder for sure I think we we in the case of flagship we partner with academics quite a lot of when when we develop ideas as I said and concepts sometimes we develop them together sometimes we develop them all by ourselves and then later on we go and talk to them to key opinion leaders just to get feedback and again we are we know the response we are going to get with if we get the response this is possible it's probably not a good sign uh if they say it's not possible it will never work and all these things and we engage with them in a relationship and at some point in the process they they become involved uh because this is we we have iterated and and created something so it's very I think academics are a very very important part universities are a very important part uh tech transfer offices are a very important part um and again it's it's it's better we go faster if we do this together that we go in different ways by ourselves so absolutely critical I I guess I was curious do you have thoughts based on your experiences of you know I know that there are significant barriers but are there things that we can be advocating for within our universities you know policy changes regarding tech transfer policy changes regarding grants and contracts that would overcome you know some of the hurdles or or allows to better take advantage of the strengths here you're like what are there pain points on your side where you feel like ah maybe this isn't worth it that that we could be advocating for then within academia to to change policies I think the thing that we have to work is on is to make the system the process more agile um and do it fast do it faster um and it's both it's everybody it's not just university all innovators wherever us because it usually takes a long time and can be frustrating on both sides um but I think that it is an academic there is the university there is flagship or there is the company sometimes we go we have developed relationships with with academics at a company company level uh there was obviously scientific advisory boards we have um mostly academics and industry people but to me the thing that should be improved is the agility of the system to make it faster what I like if I may and I will encourage and this is great I will encourage maybe for the rest of the audience to put some thoughts when we have the 30 minutes with the partner let me give you a bit my perspective coming from the industry in the industry we like to say let's be in love with a problem not being in love with a solution and out of that derives an activities um the way you know flagship pioneering is coming with this platform concept is very interesting because you are not locking yourself into one problem or big problem you are not locking yourself into a solution a molecule or a specific you know biological technology you are opening it you know in quite broadly and I would dare to say and maybe we can have the the the discussion with this group and I will say this should be exciting for the academics and the basic research as well as very exciting for those who want to solve a big problem or industrialize it it seems that I may be you know very hopeful with what you share with us but it looks like this could be a huge catalyst for the different constituent of the chemical enterprise to come together and I'm explaining and then we will move with Jess will give us some other insight but in Procter and Gamble when we work with the universities again it turns we need to know the problem and we need to lock ourselves into us for years research that is already into a type of solution here's a way that Ignacio is talking is you broaden it we don't know exactly what the problem is but boy there is a big problem to be faced and as Ignacio says we don't have a lot of time and we can think about what is this platform and when this platform start to take shape it can serve different problems so I'm just saying wow and I'd like to have in the 30 minutes maybe some of the you know comments or questions from the rest of the of the board and those who are joining us so Ignacio stay with us okay you have really set the expectation very high so we count on you in the in the in the last 30 minutes before three o'clock but I'd like to turn to Jess Jess and Ginko BioWorks because at least in my earlier synthetic biology is already mainstream and it has been mainstream because there were some pioneers making it so and Ginko BioWorks is one of those and Jess you are pretty well positioned to tell us a bit what you have learned and what we should learn from from the company and from you Jess the floor is yours for 10 minutes and after that you know you and I will we'll engage actually you have five minutes I believe so all right thank you Gerard and I think you've set me up very well for this talk in talking about the the benefits having a flexible approach a flexible platform and thanks as well to Linda and as well as Ignacio certainly enjoy always hearing about our fellow Boston area brethren over at flagship so I'm coming to you today from from Ginko BioWorks here in the Boston area we are the organism company and we are at the forefront of cellular engineering and synthetic biology and it's perhaps appropriate to reinforce what is the Ginko mission because this really pervades everything we do technologically and commercially and I should back up and say that I am a scientist but now on the commercial side of Ginko BioWorks where our mission is to make biology easier to engineer we are not a product company we instead function to help our partners more quickly resolve their biggest cellular engineering challenges and get their product ideas to market all the way from R&D to to commercial scale manufacturing Ginko grew out of MIT it was founded with five scientists from MIT starting in 2008 and it was really built on the premise that that we can now program cells like we program computers and that's really it in a nutshell and this is this is Tom Knight here one of the five founders of Ginko and it was four of his biological engineering PhD students and it was really the decreasing costs and DNA synthesis and sequencing combined with the decreasing costs in computing power that led to the the inception of Ginko BioWorks and and Tom was uniquely positioned in this regard and that you see him on the left back when he was a graduate student at MIT he went on to become a professor creating one of the world's first microcomputers and then he brought that same engineering mindset to the early days of Ginko BioWorks so as I said we're located here in Boston we're approximately 650 people about half as many again pieces of automation or robots with a consolidated cellular engineering platform largely under one roof but lately we've outgrown this roof quite a bit and we've also expanded out to the Bay Area into the Netherlands we've been a privately held company uh up until about a month ago and now we're finally listed on the New York Stock Exchange uh under the ticker symbol DNA which was obviously my kids are excited that they could get to go to college now so so Ginko is a horizontal technology platform really built on three layers there's the program layer at the top which includes the program teams the PhD scientists the management that performs the technical execution for each of our collaborations with a designated commercial partner there's the middle or the platform layer which includes our proprietary software and automation which serves to aggregate or organize the third layer which is really off the shelf technology you can see some of our technology providers on the bottom where we tie it together in an automation driven way allow it to be much more functional for delivering on cell engineering so our work is cell programming so like I said we program cells by programming their DNA just like software engineers code computer programs and in developing a new project for a customer on our platform we determine their specs design the program and execute that program using our two differentiating assets one is our physical foundry which is the hardware the software the automation that lets us achieve positive economies of scale on on the actual manipulations of cellular engineering and the other pillar of Ginko is that all of this work that we do leverages our our code base which is again borrowing an analogy from the software programming world code base is all of the reusable genetic parts data and know-how that we've built up across our previous 50 or 60 commercial collaborations if you're a computer programmer writing a new code you don't start from a blank page you take the appropriate parts from code you've written before and only add on what you need to to develop a new product and the output of all of this work is is a cell program for our customers so that they can make and commercialize their products Ginko has a kind of a consolidated footprint where this is not unfamiliar to the engineers here where we have design build and test all under one roof for for close iteration cycles but because we're dealing with engineered cells we also have in-house fermentation at the end which is how our programs get scaled up and commercialized we're a horizontal technology platform company we work across many different industries flavors fragrances industrial chemicals bio agriculture food and nutrition increasingly and and finally now pharma and and biotech as well and i'm just going to spend you know brief vignettes on a few of these we're working with a Cambridge area biotech company synlogic for living medicines or engineered probiotics that deliver metabolic payloads to patients with metabolic deficiencies we're working with canadian cannabis company the cronos group who no longer wants to grow cannabis under led lights in Ontario why grow the biomass when all you want is the active molecule which we're now making through engineered yeast cells bear crop sciences this is one of our first forays into bio agriculture with bear going after the moonshot idea of what if corn could fix nitrogen at its roots with colonizing microbes instead of just leaving that fund to soybeans and this opportunity would displace the the the global nitrogen fertilizer market and now finally touching on some of the recent problems that Ignacio has highlighted we've recently spun off a company called alonia which uses using engineered cells and enzymes for for environmental remediation for contaminated water and soils and the last one would be entering into the the non-animal food space where we're using our engineered cells to make all of the proteins and other molecules that you could get from animals but now you instead you get them from engineered microbes as well to create the next generation of plant-based foods so interestingly and I'll end here you know in in 2019 the economists predicted that biology was going to be the most important manufacturing technology of the 21st century and then one year later biology shut down the globe but but ginkgo pivoted right and and why were we able to to pivot so quickly we did this because we're a we're not a pandemic preparedness company but we're a bioeconomy company with a flexible platform it's just as easy for us to help Moderna optimize their production processes to increase the production of a critical vaccine component as it is to make a new flavor and fragrance ingredient and the way that we can make proteins can just as easily be applied to making say new antibodies with our partner partner Toshient and so with the flexibility of this platform we're industry agnostic and it's really just leveraging our scale economics and cellular engineering applying it to different partner problems that they select that they tell us are the most important problems to help them solve and I've gone past my my five minutes so I'll end there and thank you and happy to take any questions hey Jess yes we will have 10 minutes for question and again we hope that you participate to the last 30 minutes thank you it looks like happy Friday to me right you are bringing to the body of evidence that the U.S. chemical enterprise should be able to disrupt itself and really this is a telling example also congratulations for managing to become a public company just one month before engaging the board I'm sure you were trying to do so just before showing it to us so this is really really important could you elaborate on data and digital it is very clear obviously that biology is core competency of ginkgo bio works but could you comment on the data science artificial intelligence and modeling and simulation is it the competencies that you have embedded in your biologist or is it something that you were very intentional in the early days of ginkgo bio I would say it's very intentional but it's certainly grown over the year and has as more outsized importance now than it did 10 years ago and that's largely driven by the the decreasing cost and computing power certainly I think we've all seen some of the recent work out of deep mind where they're now able to make a de novo protein predictions with with abundant computational power so certainly something that we're leveraging but while ginkgo is a biology company we're certainly a data company first and foremost and and really one of the benefits of having this horizontal data driven platform is that that every new program we execute every new commercial collaboration feeds data back into the platform that makes us that much better positioned to execute on the next program so what we learn on a collaboration with a genomoto creates ginkgo's data architecture that creates certain economies of scale our ability to predict certain cellular programming outcomes that makes us that much better positioned to to execute on our next on our next project so it's really the ability to generate cost effectively vast quantities of data and interpret that data to inform the next iteration on experimental design that's really led to the explosive growth of ginkgo thank you Jeff could you share with the group and I put you a bit on the spot and if you think about the past 10 years like 2008 was the beginning of ginkgo and now we are almost 20 years later and you guys are fiving I would say 15 years later is there any when you think about the support or the ad wins from the chemical enterprise around you by the chemical enterprise we can mean the regulatory agencies we can mean you know the incumbent of the industry or the universities what was the most helpful help the best help you got from this enterprise or maybe the setbacks any comments on this one yeah I would say certainly the biggest support that ginkgo had especially in the early years was US governmental funding no ginkgo took no pardon to flagship and other venture capitalists but we took no venture capital money for I think approximately the first five or six years for the technology to really prove its capabilities before we settled on an eventual technological level of preparedness and commercial model before we started that explosive growth phase so it was really government support for there's first few years that enabled ginkgo to grow at the appropriate pace to incubate ginkgo I think currently we are certainly engaged in a number of different commercial partnerships with the chemical enterprise where we are looking to now more sustainably produce a number of the the environmentally degrading products or replace certain processes I think as we look to to combating global climate change people really need to look to the chemical enterprise as an ally rather than a foe they are going to be the solution they are not going to be part of the problem anymore they are the ones who have vast experience in deploying capital to to build new facilities to fund new lines of work and and they're really already at the forefront of using technology such as ginkgo's to more environmentally responsibly solve some of their challenges so I think the the the close partnership with the chemical enterprise is going to be essential for tackling some of these global global problems and as you discussed with the chemical enterprise like the question of infrastructure it's very easy to say the chemical industry is you know used to invest in capitals but I think the situation will be there is existing capitals that may not be usable and we need to move to the new era which is based on synthetic biology so any insight about how can the U.S. enterprise including government could help on setting the infrastructure that can really take advantage of the technologies of the one you develop and scaling up because it's the other thing to do specialty chemicals to do all the surfactants polymers resin that's a lot of million tons Jess any observation about what what what what help could look like for moving from where you are into scaling up synthetic biology to solve the sustainability issues we have yeah I think you hit the nail on the head Gerard I think right now globally there's there's 61 million leaders of fermentation capacity to make products setting aside bioethanol the the global demand is already outpacing that and as we've seen during the the supply shocks of the COVID pandemic and the desire to to reshore production of say certain critical antibiotics there simply isn't going to be enough fermentation capacity in the world to allow this cost effective shift over to fermentation based production so having support from not only the chemical industry but from the say the U.S. security interests for building out a domestic fermentation supply chain is going to be critical for allowing scaled production of many of these these critical components not just antibiotics or vaccines but as we look to replace certain chemistries that are derived from petro uh petrochemical sources currently there's going to need be the need for significant support to allow the commercial scale up of those products thank you Jess uh I do not see any raised and a new pass his hand sorry Gerard sorry thank you do I still have a couple of minutes you do okay thank you a great presentation uh both of you actually so I'm going to ask a question so you know so you are building a lot of databases but that they are proprietary right so now on the other side you have lots of university professors right and others who are also building databases which are public what how do you see and now you can access them but they can't or their databases so you can build on you know the failures right this is what I'm talking about most of the synthetic biology you know designs fail and and and how do we learn from that as a society to address you know lots of problems we have you have any thoughts on how you can feed into you know the larger research ecosystem that can get from some of your data if you are willing to share so that's a great question mistakes it's a great question that we normally think of in an international context but we should also apply to a domestic context as well so ginkgo certainly benefits quite considerably from the publicly available and publicly funded genomic databases when we go to design a new organism we we dig deeply and using proprietary algorithms into those you know deposited genetic sequences so we look for inspiration for our cell programming designs when we work with with international partners where we might be accessing say agricultural samples found in a foreign country we need to be very compliant with the relevant UN treaties and agreements like the Nagoya protocol on on maintaining the integrity of biodiversity ownership and so we are very actively working say with the UN again more on international basis to to provide that information that we that that knowledge we glean from other people's databases back to the country of origin so they're benefiting as well you know it's a challenge of course working with with commercial partners who are looking to protect their patent positions on the underlying genetic parts but we do have very robust relationships with a number of U.S. governmental agencies not only in cell programming but also in biosecurity and biosurveillance to to make that information flowing backwards as well but but it is challenging I will admit but it is something that we very much want to to participate in because Ginkgo has really benefited from all of the public financing in this in this area and we are actively looking for ways to give back as well. Thank you Jeff thank you and your great question and let's continue to for the audience to prepare you know the engagement in the last 30 minutes we'd like to turn now to Tony we have had two great vantage points and we have started to hear how important has been the collaboration and the collaboration did not start with Ginkgo and flagship pioneering just two years ago it started far away so I think it's very timely Tony that with your vantage point you tell us how this collaboration can be made put to the next level to help the chemical enterprise in the U.S. to disrupt itself which we need to do Tony the floor is yours. Okay great well thank you so much and if my colleagues need help getting the slides I can do it myself if you can't put it in the slide show. Is it not in slideshow? It doesn't appear to be but let me just let me just keep going here so I just want to thank Gerard and thank you all for giving me the opportunity to speak with you all today I'm going to give just a quick overview of this organization the UIDP that I represent and that P&G and many of you on the phone are in organizations that are members of our group and then I look forward to a robust question and answer and dialogue that we'll have at the end so if we can just go through these slides I'm going to try to get through these fairly quickly so yes next slide please yeah so we are an organization that actually started as an activity the national academies in 2006 we were set up because a bunch of companies and universities and government agencies like the national science foundation thought that much needed to be done from a process perspective in terms of advancing university industry partnerships there was a lot of concern around contracting and we were tasked with trying to look at that in and really address some of the challenges and so we stood up like I said in 2006 we've expanded our portfolio which I'll tell you about in a little in a few minutes we actually left the national academies in 2015 we're a 501c3 organization now and at that time we also invited non-us universities and I'll talk about that in a few minutes next slide okay so as an organization we really have a singular focus and that's on strengthening university industry partnerships we have a great membership of large multinational companies and large universities from throughout the world and we look at common problems and so you know the problems that we look at are not technical problems they're business improvement problems and I'll talk a little bit more about that in a few minutes but as was alluded to earlier I think Jen talked about contracting and intellectual property issues there are a myriad of issues that add weight to collaborations between the two sectors and we try to find ways to optimize the process to make the ROI better between companies and universities we crowdsource our solutions by working together with really smart people like Gerard and others to address these challenges and then ultimately we want these collaborations to provide societal benefit and there's a lot of things that we can do to do that companies can improve profits hopefully universities can improve their standing produce more research results prepare for better students but at the end of the game we have to have a societal benefit to what we're doing next slide okay so we have a long history of working in the triple helix space as I mentioned NSF helped get us started and I think you know Dave Berkowitz is on the call from the chemistry division at NSF you all you have to do is read what's going on in the press and in the trade journals but there's a tremendous amount of interest right now around how we take use inspired research and translate it to products services those could be materials that could be algorithms whatever but just this translational aspect next slide okay so just a couple of things about our group I'll tell you talk very briefly about our membership our projects and our events kind of the next slide so as I mentioned we have top tier companies and world-class universities can you go to the next slide please and here's just an illustrative list and so for example I know surely from UCSD they're not on this list and I apologize for that but there's certainly a great member of our group I made sure the P&G was on here because there's Gerard but this is just an illustrative list we have about 175 members from throughout the world and the neat part about our group and I think what makes our group unique is we have company representation from totally different sectors so you know Gerard's colleagues and Gerard can interact with people from Facebook or Apple or Boeing or other consumer product companies chemical companies in a non antitrust environment so that's I think a real asset of our group next slide please so like I said we're a sharing group we do a lot of crowdsourcing on solutions and that's how people gain benefit and you know we have a we tackle challenges people have issues and I'll just give a one illustration and I don't really have time to go in a great depth but when the COVID crisis hit back in March of 2020 companies were trying to decide what to do with their internships and I got a phone call Franic from one of our industry member representatives he was going into a meeting the next day and they were trying to decide whether or not to keep the internship program or cancel it and we sent out a query to our industry members and asked what are you guys doing we got a response back 80% of the companies were keeping them and of those 85% were keeping them remote and we shared that with that company and they decided to keep their internship program so that's the kind of stuff that we do to help people with their day jobs next slide okay we do projects as I mentioned you know the next slide please our projects fall into these various buckets they don't you know there's nothing magical about these but these are the ones that we use contracting and compliance partnership management government engagement and then workforce development and student engagement so talent basically the last one next slide okay so at the end of the day we produce tools and resources to help our members aren't a greater ROI next slide so here's just an example this is a resource that we put together to help faculty members and industry researchers understand better what it's like to work at the university industry interface this project was funded by the national science foundation and Ditra at the department of defense this is publicly available we've literally had hundreds of thousands of downloads of this pdf and it's a great resource so you know if you have an assistant professor who's at emory or at pittsburgh and they were approached by a company and they don't know anything about working with industry this is a great starting point for them and so this is an example of the kind of practical stuff that we do next slide we will on occasion do technology specific projects when they're around university industry partnerships this is a report that we did after a workshop in 2018 on quantum quantum research opportunities for areas of collaboration we look not just at computing but quantum sensing quantum communications we had as many companies represented in that room as there were universities and this report actually has been cited many times and has actually now led to some new funding for university industry collaborations through a program called iucrc next slide okay we do lots of conferences and i don't really have a lot of time to go into detail on this but there's lots of information on our website can go to the next slide i did want to mention something we're doing now which should be of interest to this group we are leading a series of workshops around the bio economy we've done three to date and we are going to do two or three more if you are interested in learning more about this just email me at tony at uidp.net this is an effort that was really looking at translational opportunities to take use inspired research to agile translation to products and services and we've done three to date we've done one on feeding the planet we've done one on circular economy and we just did one on climate change all right next slide all right so events are great because they allow us to do corporate team building exercises and people get to know each other and we think that leads to stronger trust and relationships uh i don't know about you all but i'm starting to travel in fact i'm in a hotel room right now in salt lake city at a conference and um people are yearning to get back together because one of the things we've lost is this interconnectivity that we have with people zoom is great but to be honest with you i'd much rather be uh at constitution avenue with you all sitting in a room and having gerard by me dinner tonight it would be a much more enjoyable much more productive use of our time next slide all right just quickly i just want to mention we were recently asked to lead something called erva which is the engineering research visioning alliance which is an opportunity to look at future research directions for where investments from the private public sector uh could lead to substantial benefit and this is an opportunity this is a program that we just launched six months ago there's a lot more information um at ervacommunity.org that email is actually wrong it's ervacommunity.org or you can just email me or just google erva okay i think that's the last of my slides and i think i got through in about eight minutes so i apologize for running a little bit over my five minutes but i'll be pleased to answer any question about uidp but i know the heart of what we're going to do is this dialogue with some q and a going back and forth so i'll be pleased to answer any questions right now and i once again want to thank the uh the academies for inviting me to be part of this uh this important discussion. Thank you tony and the way we are going to proceed i would like to ask you a question and then we will transition to um the four of us i think that's yo jess and you and me uh to answer and facilitate the question that hopefully the audience will have one question tony first you know congratulations and thanks for the progress made in the u.s since uh you know the nsf and the nas created uidp to bring at least the industry and some of the industries my side of the industry not to be oil and water but to become more co-creation and yet a lot to do i think you know i shared many times with tony for the sake of the audience to say from our company it has been easy to work with universities in europe because the collaboration and the facilitation was there uh the beauty in the u.s astounding competitive advantage on sciences but sometimes the value creation and business model is opposite and i think tony you know with usd us ids is a lot of progress with your vantage point is there one thing that you wish we do more or we start to do to really realize your aspiration to the next level so things are working but you know what are the one or two things that you will really like this enterprise to be a bit more committed to to continue progress yeah so so thank you that's a that's a great question and you know i think there's going to be a theme and a thread that we talk about throughout all of this but you know if there was one one thing that i could do to change the the paradigm a little bit in in the u.s but even even outside the u.s that is that the leadership of organizations clearly articulate the importance of collaborations between the sectors not just universities and and companies but government as well and and increasingly nonprofits because then the people that are in the trenches the trans actors you know the people that are managing intellectual property management the people that are doing contract negotiation the you know the associate chair of a department who's asked about letting a student do an industry internship they'll feel empowered to to be able to do that so i don't think from a leadership perspective we do a good enough job communicating the importance of collaborations to solve big problems and i know we're going to get into you know some of those examples downstream but if you asked most people that work at a university in the transactional in an office an administrative office or even a faculty member and said what is the university's vision for solving societal problems they're they're not going to have much of a of a response and even within companies i think it's i think companies do a little bit better job but i don't necessarily think that it's as well communicated as it could be and so you know the ability to effectively communicate that so that everybody's kind of rowing in the same direction i think is extremely important and so you know there are some examples of i think universities in the u.s where they clearly articulate their approaches to external engagement to commercialization to innovation they have that kind of in their dna but at a lot of campuses it's not that way and so i think if you really want to have change that will matter i think leadership needs to clearly articulate that importance and i don't think we do a good enough job doing that very good tony so if i take it the leaders and we have a lot of leaders of the different constituents here today right okay we have a job to do the materials seems to be there and i want to invite linda to have the four of us on the screen so as oh i can pick question yeah i think shelly has a question and then den is after shelly yes so you brought up that it's not just university and industry and you brought up government but but today it's been mostly kind of talking about the government but not really the national labs um so so where do you see the role of the national labs um in um in this disruption so i assume you're in a national lab correct no i'm not okay great all right i'm just up the hill from where you are right now okay great so um let's talk about national labs so first of all i think it's important to say that all national labs are not the same just like all companies aren't the same you know they have different missions right some are national security labs some are department you know office science some are defense so you know so i think we need to be a little careful about saying national labs i think if we look at the innovation ecosystem as a mosaic the national labs have a really important role to play you know uh i think ideally national labs would play a a better role of overcoming kind of the translational aspects um you know they have tremendous resources facilities uh there's some unique you know aspects of things that they have that companies shouldn't invest in universities can invest in right so you know you think about synchrotrons and the ability to do molecular structures you know right i mean the national labs are perfect for that there is and by the way everything i'm saying are my personal opinions okay so i'm gonna start by saying that but you know i think on the national lab front there is um a disconnect every company that i know of at the uidp or even outside the uidp and every university wants to do more with national labs the national labs will say that they are open and ready for business and yet to work with them is incredibly difficult and so you know they'll say oh we want to work with you oh by the way though you have to do it through our mechanisms and through this approach and we have this one narrow lane and if you don't do it this way then we're not going to do it with you and i think until there's a financial uh incentive for the labs to work collaboratively outside the gates it's not going to happen so you know based on whether you're an optimist or a pessimist and i think you can take a various point if you're a pessimist you would say that actually working externally is more work for them because they have to do things you know if my salary is covered and i have access to this equipment and i have to work with shelly well actually that's a little bit more work for me right whereas like if i just do my own experiments so that's kind of a pessimistic view and i don't i don't want to be a pessimist i'm not naturally a pessimist but i think we need to incentivize the people within labs and the leadership to say okay you're going to do more with companies and universities to solve these big problems and i think some labs do it better than others to be honest with you so i think they're part of the solution i think they could be a bigger piece i think everybody would like them to be a fraunhofer you know kind of model and they're not but they could take on some qualities and aspects of the fraunhofer thank you tony i realize we have 15 minutes jen has a question realize that ignazio jess and tony are all together so feel free to engage in our questions that can be relevant for the three of them or ignazio or jess uh jen you have a question i think you're on this late yeah and mine might be a broad one as well so i appreciate tony that you brought up internships because i think there's obviously a huge space for collaboration on the research itself but also a huge um untapped space for collaboration on workforce development and i was especially thinking about this has just talked about platform technologies that um you know i think the engineers are much better at training students to think that you know it's really a mindset of how you think about solving research problems and i see that on the engineering side but i think in the sciences you know it's in some places like i i run my lab that way i call it mercenary one of my friends calls it omnivorous so i'm i'm using that now um but how you do you see space you know all of you for for partnerships and in thinking about how we innovate in uh in education because we're you know the mindset that we're instilling in our science students in our chemistry students is going to be the mindset of the researchers that you then get when they come out of academia and are entering industry spaces and and what do you think are the kind of biggest lovers or or the areas where where the biggest impact can be have had there yeah so there's a lot there i'm gonna just make one comment and then i'll let jess and ignacio talk because they're actually you know they're out in the trenches on you know um um i think in the abstract everybody thinks it's a good idea for students to have more engagement with companies faculty members think about it is being a good thing but when you get to specifics and i'll use industry phd internships as a specific example in the abstract that sounds great but if i'm your grad student and i'm in my third year and jess wants me to come work at ginko by works for six months and do a chapter on my phd you're gonna go wait a second tony you i train you now for three years you're just getting productive and now you're going to go work at ginko by works how's that going to work for me what do i get out of it now i can make a good argument that in the long term it is going to benefit you because then if jess likes me i'm smart i do good things he'll hire me and then five years later hopefully i'll be a lab lead and then what am i going to do i'm going to support jen's lab because jen does great work right because i graduated from jen's lab but it's very hard so if you did a poll of your year of emory correct if you did a poll of the chemistry department faculty members and said how many of you are okay with your third or fourth year phd students spending six months at a company doing an internship they'd be like not not too enthused about that so i think those are the kinds of things that we have to talk about i'll jump in next perhaps so i'd say that where we see ourselves working with universities is very complimentary but a bit more of a clean handoff so we don't have an internship program per se where where phd students come and spend part of their thesis work with us but but you know a lot of the the cutting edge of cellular engineering metabolic engineering is clearly happening in universities and they're the ones who show the proof of concept you know elucidation of a biosynthetic pathway for important therapeutic molecule and so you know a very significant portion of the phd researchers here at ginkgo are straight out of their phd's are straight out of postdoctoral work because they come in with that cutting edge academic viewpoint we then find that we almost to have to give them a supplemental education in the different ways that you can do that kind of science at ginkgo you know a scientist coming from a their phd work they're going to discover a new enzyme they they might you know after their literature research try 20 variations and that's what they can do with their budget and their their equipment at ginkgo we need to almost re-educate them and say you know don't think 20 think a thousand you know that's that's the kind of resources or brute force approach that that is necessary for commercialization but but the combination of that top tier thinking given all of the tools that we have with our automation and resources you know ginkgo is built by and run by scientists and you know send your scientists to us we promise to give them a good home and we'll do great things with some of the work that they might have started in universities. I just paid to be to finish on my unit we'll say two things one Anthony if someone tells you that he or she want to go to ginkgo say no no no go to flagship. Seriously we have a we at flagship have actually a fellows program that we do every summer and then where we bring between 25 and 30 phd candidates they are finishing they are thinking about what to do with their lives next and they spend three months with us and we kind of go through the process that I explained earlier they do explorations then they spend they are free cycles and they work in different teams in different areas and we kind of try to teach them the flexing methodology and I mean the reviews that we are getting we end up hiding most of them at some point when they finish maybe they have to come back and spend another year and they we hire them and it's been super super successful in because when they come back at least they know us and we may hire them for flagship or for the companies that we we are growing and developing but I think it's at least from our perspective these these are I mean depends on the individual and what I want when they want to do next and and some of them have clear mindset of going to industry or going to a big company like ginkgo or going to a startup company I don't know much about the real estate. Yes, I see that Jody and David are there and raised I will just my takeaway is Tony you call for action the leaders the leaders can remove barriers and talk together university national labs and the industry in order to remove the barriers and create momentum I like what Jesse is saying let's the company be led by scientists I will make not of that for for the industry. Jody you raise your hand and then David for the answer. I wanted to follow up on the discussion of graduate internships. Graduate internships are growing more and more in the chemical engineering discipline not so much as I see in the chemistry discipline and my my group has a very strong tradition of graduate students doing internships right in the middle of their thesis so I have three students right now at Dow, Lamb and Tesla and then they've also interned at like Ascend and other Polymer type places. There's a lot of myths about graduate student internships one is that the students it will take them longer to graduate that is not true they come back totally trained more efficient with their time they're they don't graduate any any later than they would have already they're just more professional and it's such a great experience for these students because it is essential to workforce development the company gets a look at the student the student gets a look at the company almost always they're offered a job as soon as they graduate and it can be in a completely different related field it doesn't have to be what they trained in my lab in so it gives them that extra edge or angle to pivot right out of graduate school. Yeah so I think I think it's a fantastic thing and we need to be doing more of it I think there I've seen two barriers one is faculty think their students are not going to graduate on time the students are going to walk away from the phd or their project that's never the case then there's another myth on the other side to be honest a lot of a lot of our students here are international many companies do not want to take international students for internships but most universities have a mechanism to do this where there's they register for the internship as a class and there's no there's no visa problems and so once you realize that you could take any graduate student as an internship whether they're domestic or international it's really helpful for the international students because they get that first toehold into um American industry and then we can retain them in the workforce. Thanks for sharing Judy I want to make space we have a few minutes. I know thank you and I'd like David and then Karen David you are your thank you Judy hi David yeah yeah thank you good afternoon. Yeah thank you very much for hosting this session and thanks to all the speakers this was really great and I really identify with the comments that Tony just made this little conversation about how do we better interface the student training experience with with industry what Tony said we experience a lot in in chemistry we actually as you probably know have a mechanism called intern at NSF which allows a PI to get a supplement to send that student to industry and it's it's highly underused it's quite you know and the NSF would pay for that internship and the reason I think is very much what what Tony gave and at least in chemistry it's there's a it's a labor intensive enterprise and people really want to make sure their students are on the right scientific path to both their graduation and moving the project forward for the entire team. So I think you know making partnerships that are in the interest of both the the academic lab and the industry is great and among those mechanisms we have goalie where there's a problem that the academic lab is working on that the industry really cares about and it's highly undersubscribed and that really you know that can bring things more into the PI's wheelhouse so if we can get somehow get more drum up more interest in the community for that mechanism that would be helpful also the mechanism that Tony mentioned the industry university collaborative research centers again undersubscribed and that's a where a mechanism for industry to really have skin in the game so I am I am open to ideas on how to sort of light a fire under the community on both sides of the equation for these mechanisms or talk about other mechanisms and just one plug for new mechanisms would be things like institutes such as the AI institutes at NSF where industry can come in a pre-competitively and offer up funds for a theme that they're interested in we at the national science foundation are would welcome discussions with you on areas of interest as we think especially if this new tip directorate comes our way of which Congress is debating right now that translation innovation and partnership directorate that should open up more of these types of opportunities so just a few thoughts we're very interested in this space thanks David for the call for action we take notes the materials are here up to us to to to engage so thank you David Karen hi I had to miss a little bit of today's session but one aspect I was wondering about and part that I attended was it's great on all this innovation happening at the start of companies and these companies that are growing public what about the big companies that are already there I mean we've lost things like DuPont Central Research are these big companies that out of the innovation game I don't know maybe Scott can can also comment on this but but I wonder is are we saying that innovation is in the hands of these smaller startup companies and no no no no Scott do you have a great question it's a great question because I think it's a challenge to the incumbents right and the incumbents have to play a role so I really like what Karen is saying like what Tony was saying the leaders need to be there Scott can I pick on you on maybe you know a hint about this small and medium company maybe the panelists right is there a role for the big companies to be able to leverage the disruption do you see hope or do you think they are a barrier maybe I should start with Jess and and Tony and then Scott you can chime in or our colleague from from Merck and also chime in any observations yes and I would say our experience is mixed you know certainly as Ginkgo moves more and more into the human therapeutic space and working with pharma and biotech there is more of the trend on on outsourcing innovation down into biotechs where you know you can acquire a pipeline product I'd say over on the the kind of industrial and specialty chemicals area there are certainly industries that have adopted biological engineering or biological production processes very early on and I would say you know there was certainly an initial wave of that self-disruption coming from large companies but in more and more it is coming from the startups and the startups then being acquired or growing up into the big companies you know I would say other industries are starting in our experience to follow more of the pharma model so I don't know that I have much I don't know that I have much to add I would say that one one thing that I have seen some experiments with are companies like EMD which support accelerators or incubators like evo nexus which is a program right where they they bring in companies and you know they're startups to look at the technologies that are emanating from universities or national labs or whatever as kind of a you know it's it's very common in the biotech space it's been less common in the chemical space look I think they're all pieces of the mosaic I think there's a role for large companies small companies mid-sized companies universities national labs we haven't even really talked about the incredible amount of capital that's in the in the private foundation space that tackle these big societal problems that exist now so you know I think there's a lot of roles for everybody there's a seat for everybody in the room but I'll defer to my larger multinational colleagues to weigh in on on the specific question so Scott I'll leave it for you to or Ignacio to take that on for Gerard oh Anthony I actually think it's a continuum and I see it's a space for everybody it's not a one-size-fits-all innovation is different in all kinds of different sectors and what I am seeing is that we're going to have to do things differently and more unique more partnership so like the days of Dupont central research that invented amazing things not super easy to do today in a publicly traded company so what is easier to do is really fast moving partnerships we absolutely have to do that type of thing well said Scott I have to be the bad boy Scott you said it well and I think Karen's question may be worse at the end of our two days to reflect on that okay because if the income don't pay we're not going we don't have time like Ignacio is saying so sorry to be the bad boy it is 3 or 2 p.m. I really want I don't know about the group but I mean amazing moment of truth to have Ignacio, Jess and Tony together at a moment where we have some opportunities the NSF and the government is putting new systems in place up to us to leverage them and we have a mission in front of us there are big problems where the chemical enterprise need to raise to the next level so I leave it to Linda Scott and Jennifer if they want to have the final world the final world not the final world excuse my friends right but thank you so much Ignacio Linda thank you for getting Jess Tony and Ignacio with us I really appreciate what she has done for us so thank you Linda thank you so much Anthony Jess and Ignacio for working with me and Gerard and developing this session you guys have really brought a lot of good insight and perspective I mean got people excited I think Leanna has a few I think housekeeping um sure I'm happy to let Scott and Jennifer close out before I touch on the housekeeping also you want us Scott and Jen to go up first and then the housekeeping stuff I didn't have any final comments but I just wanted to remind everyone that we begin at 10 a.m. Eastern time 7 a.m. for those in California and we have two great sessions tomorrow and I look forward to your attendance and participation thank you so let me introduce myself I'm VJ Swarup our and vice president of research and development for Exxon Mobile and it's a real pleasure and honor to be here to talk about something that I have a lot of passion for which is life cycle assessment in fact when I was honored enough to be asked to join this committee the first discussion I had with the members was how do we talk about life cycle assessment and one of the speakers today Bob Armstrong who's a dear friend of mine one of the first discussions I had with him about five years ago was we've got to get our heads around life cycle assessment and we've got to make sure we have a systems and measurements tool to be able to understand what the impact of our various choices are towards decarbonization towards lower co2 footprint so what is life cycle assessments and why does where we draw the box why is that important so life cycle assessments are widely but inconsistently is tool to account for the carbon footprint of a product or a process from well to wheels from beginning to end but even when we say carbon footprint of a product or process the question begins where do you begin and where do you end and that's the where do we draw the box and that is where a major source of variation between applications of lca comes it comes from the choice of the boundary assessment is it cradle to gate is it cradle to grave is it just the is it just the car you'll hear people say zero emission vehicles but where did the fuel that's burning that's that's being used by the zero emission vehicle come from all of those questions need to be contemplated as we're thinking about how we understand the choices we're making in our in our energy system so consistent standards for drawing this box will contribute to a more accurate and effective accounting and more importantly an effective system to do cross comparisons so that we can do system wide comparisons this session is going to frame a discussion around an example of decision making when performing an lca and why it's important to long product value chains or full energy pathways and some of the things that the speakers are going to talk about are what issues are what are the issues preventing lca's from being useful being and being used across the chemist chemical industry what resources are needed to facilitate use along product value chains or full energy pathways what level of detail is needed for reasonable completeness versus ease of ease of use and are there other industry wide accounting standards that can be used as a guide for forming or for improving lca practices such as calories for instance we every time you go to a store you see what the calories are so what would that what's the equivalent for energy is it is it is it co2 per mile what is it so we'll get into that as we get into this discussion i'm really excited to introduce the two speakers who will go in order the first will be uh francis fedezanan from uh from dupont but more importantly he shares the same alma mater as i do so he's a Purdue grad of go boilers uh francis is a mechanical engineer from Purdue university with an mba from Delaware he has 29 years with dupont so he obviously was at Purdue a little while after me the 29 years with dupont in a variety of technical and marketing roles he is a real champion for sustainability he's one of dupont's life cycle engineers and works with dupont's engineering polymers customers all around the world in the areas of lca he's a member of the ac lca the american center for life cycle assessment the leading organization for life cycle assessments he's going to share with us some details about the rising need for industry for lca data and then bob will come up after him professor robert armstrong uh directs the mit energy initiative an institute wide effort at mit linking science technology and policy to transform the world's energy systems bob's been a member of the mit faculty since 1973 he served as the head of the department of chemical engineering from 96 to 07 and his research is focused on pathways to a lower carbon energy future how topical bob's been elected into the american academy of arts and sciences the national academy of engineering he received the founders award for outstanding contributions to the field of chemical engineering the warner k lewis award for your target bob rich i keep going and the professional progress award uh all from the american institute of chemical engineers he's also he also received the 2006 bingo medal from the society of rheology he is super accomplished he's a great speaker and he's a really good friend of mine so bob welcome is to you and uh francis i'm going to turn it over to you to get us going thank you uh vj um so liana will you be projecting that's branna oh i'm sorry yes okay great i see it um thank you so um yeah first of all thanks for allowing me to speak to this group this morning um as vj mentioned i am a lca consultant practitioner within dupont's mobility and materials business so you know the day in life of my work is to respond to our customers on carbon footprint requests and conduct lca studies both internally and externally um within uh our business so i'm here to talk about life cycle assessments or lca's and how we at dupont are using lca data to serve our customers and meet the needs of our markets i'll also share some trends opportunities and challenges we see when we engage our customers on life cycle assessments and provide this sort of carbon footprint information on our products next slide please yep so um let me just start out um what you see on the screen is an excerpt from an lca study conducted by toyota uh this lca compares toyota's morai fuel cell electric vehicle to a hybrid vehicle and a traditional gasoline car the visuals on the right are our contribution graphs making comparative assertions of the vehicle life stages and material constructions to its carbon footprint with global warming potential we refer to that as gwp the comparison values are unitless and scaled to the gas vehicle set to a value of one the two graphs at the top shows the different life cycle stages of the vehicle and how it contributes to its gwp there are some insights that we can draw here as the mobility industry is evolving in alternative propulsion systems the use of the use phase or the driving phase of the car which is shown in blue is contributing less to the vehicle carbon footprint while the manufacturing and material construction is contributing more to the footprint of an electric vehicle so how we manufacture the vehicle choose the materials design the subsystems and parts is becoming more significant when addressing the sustainability of a car the graph at the bottom left shows material construction of the three types of vehicles and its contribution to the car's mass worth noting is that the electric vehicle construction includes carbon fiber and precious metals those unique materials have large gwp values and other as well as other impact categories if we look at the graph on the lower right this shows the gwp contributions of the materials that make up the car as you can see the non-metallic materials used for the vehicle use for vehicle light weighting make up a minority of the car mass yet is a large portion of the car's carbon footprint so vehicle manufacturers are seeing the importance of reducing carbon emissions in the production phases even for the new technology as completely completely new materials and new processes may be added some can reduce vehicle weight with better efficiency in the driving phase but the trade-off can also occur in many cases lightweight materials needing additional production processes which emit more gases compared to reduction emissions during the driving phase of the car so as a car manufacturer what would i be asking my material suppliers why are these lightweight materials which can reduce tailpipe emissions contributing more to the carbon footprint when i produce the car right from a lifecycle perspective how do i get my supplier base to lower co2 emissions for these electric cars if i were a materials manufacturing company such as department how do i further reduce the carbon footprint of my products down through my value chain next slide please yeah so vj mentioned it or kind of gave an overview of lca's and again for those that are not familiar as mentioned lca is a method to quantify the environmental impacts of a product or process through its lifecycle all products and services have lifecycle phases where the materials are consumed energy is consumed and where emissions and waste are created so lca measures these activities the slide shows a conceptual view of what an lca investigates and what it delivers much of my work is centered around global warming potential which in essence is the carbon footprint of the product's lifecycle however like the toyota example lca is about making comparisons and tradeoffs so there are other environmental impacts that are assessed as you see here and compared so that users can make informative decisions and avoid burden shifting such as investing in programs or products that may reduce the gwp or carbon footprint of the product but may have an adverse effect on land occupation or human toxicity next slide please um yeah so as mentioned lca is a method to evaluate environmental impacts of a product its practices are governed by a set of iso standards which guides the user but there are many approaches one can take in this analysis it's common that two lca practitioners working on the same product or lifecycle will have different gwp results because the assumptions and methods can be different so it's critical to have a story behind the numbers often when we deal with customers you know we're very hesitant to just email them a carbon footprint number because it lends to a lot of interpretation so we have to engage with our customers and explain what the meaning or the value is we show our lca data under confidentiality so with that we know our customers are making comparative assessments of our materials versus competition but we want to make sure we take the time and explain the values and the story behind the values when we present the data to the customers so this slide shows a high high level schematic of a product system for an lca the arrows point to the different inputs and outputs which are measured and modeled in each of the stages it also incorporates reuse recycle and remanufacturer loops if they are present the data collection takes place for these inputs and characterize and model with an lca software package that contains environmental data on many of the materials and processes from their models can be run and compiled to generate the environmental impacts it's a bit more complicated but at a high level in essence that's what i've been doing a lot of lately we follow iso guidelines as vj mentioned it increases credibility provides a frame rate for the instance you follow lca is voluntary voluntary voluntary there there's no legislation that requires companies conduct lca's but lca's are proven are proving their legitimacy over the past three decades worth noting is when companies want to make public or marketing claims with their products using lca data the study should go through a third party critical review in accordance with the iso standard next slide please so just some key points to make just within my experience and reflections you know it's it's holistic it's a holistic rigorous overview lca on product interactions with the environment it's governed by an iso standards to avoid burden shifting intended for comparisons we use it to assess global warming potential or carbon footprint as well as other environmental impacts of our products and again it's it's highly interpretive because of the varying approaches educations and assumptions must come with the numbers and to vj's point earlier um yes there are iso standards in place my experience is um there's a lot of interpretation autonomy on how an lca analyst can approach a study relative to its products within the company um its application can be in product development strategic park planning and marketing next slide please yep so at dupont how do we use lca's um one is we establish benchmarks um relative to the products that we have foundational data that will be the groundwork on making future improvements of our processes and products identify key contributors how do our products um how do our factories behave perform relative to environmental performance we use lca as a measure of that or at least a way to model that to see any changes support our sustainability strategy so like many companies there's a push to go carbon neutral lca is a vehicle to to readily assess and provide for the metrics to see how far along we are going along on our strategy uh customer requests um again there's just within the last 18 months a lot of dynamic as our customers are coming to us particularly non motive industry and say hey you know what's the gwp of your nylon products what's the gwp of your particular acetal resin so it's a very engaging discussion um and it's a discussion we look forward to to get closer with our customers then obviously analyze products and sites consistently uh some lca studies we do actually try to monitor and detect the perform the environmental performance of certain of our factories and we'll use it for justification of some capital investments um almost as a tool to uh uh say you know what is the environmental payback associated with putting this equipment in um especially for large capital projects next slide please yep so i'll talk a little bit about our markets depart as a whole serves a wide breadth of markets each with its own approaches to sustainability uh in the mobility and materials business we provide material solutions to polymer chemistry and manufacturing so mobility and automotive is our platform name we also thrive in these other markets electrical industrial consumer and renewable energy space so our customers in each of these spaces have been coming to us requesting mostly gwp values so that they can assess their own footprints uh compare around materials purchased uh used for their products uh and they too also have customers which they respond to next slide please so just some market market sensing reflections um you know in the engagements we've had with customers i've had with customers the last 12 to 18 months many of the firms are are developing plans for carbon neutrality it's in their strategy um but they're asking us questions they're asking us questions around lca's uh material suppliers are actively engaged in lca practices so within the the space of dupont and other firms that supply materials um just through our work with the lca there's a lot of um knowledge and capabilities that are building within the material manufacturers around lca uh so that they can provide and analyze and improve upon the carbon footprints using these methodologies our experience is industries leading the use of lca is primarily driven from the consumer markets electronics um from my experience apparel uh cosmetic packaging um my sense is is is automotive is lagging um but it's just within the last year it's gotten a little bit more dynamic uh customers are seeking transparency and guarantee of carbon footprint reduction and improvement so um there's a lot of discussion around certifiable green products echo labeling uh some of the discussions we had with customers is just having that transparency between firms along the value chain um also industry specific standardization of lca data uh yes so to vg's point lca data can be highly interpretive one study may be different than the others but some markets that we're engaged with are using some standardization practices the apparel industry has what's called a Higgs index tool firms can submit their lca data uh which is reviewed and it's given a standard score within the cosmetic packaging there's a like a similar type tool that isn't as prevalent but it seems to be gaining ground uh through one particular customer that that actually developed a tool for the industry uh esg performance and echo labeling um again it points to the need for quantifiable product level environmental performance and um the need for this particularly within the consumer electronics markets that i've experienced is driving the need to for for firms to conduct lca studies uh so yeah i had a discussion with a fellow sustainability practitioner with defined you know we said well what's different today versus you know 10 years 20 years ago lca's have been around for over over three decades one thing that they noted is that the investor community is now heavily committed um to sustainability um and and these are um causing firms to to to behave in a different way knowing that these are the objectives what's important in regards to their strategy um regarding the investor community and then when i've talked to particularly automotive uh many of the sub tiers are um actively engaged in lca's um they they have formidable sustainability strategies um you know the ability to carbon neutral but they are still in the planning stage so they know what they need to do um i think they're just working on the house more or less on how's it how are they going to approach it um and again lca's are a vehicle to help that to point out the hot spots in their process in their supply chain to make those sort of decisions okay next slide please so i'll talk a little bit about automotive um it's it's been a more engaging environment with our customers as i mentioned these last these last 18 12 to 18 months um so for for them it's more than that it's now more than just tailpipe emissions um as i showed from the Toyota example from lca perspective you're looking at the entire product lifecycle of the vehicle but also the the industry itself assess itself is evolving to alternative powertrains um and the driving phase of the vehicle um um it's not as influential in these new technologies as say the material construction or the construction or the production of the vehicle uh increased pressure at the supplier level to perform lca's as oems and tier suppliers actively requesting carbon footprints i mentioned that i mean as you can see on the left kind of the schematic of the uh automotive manufacturing supply chain um we as depart and most material suppliers are at the tier three level but as you can see there's a trickle down effect to to to use lca data to improve and provide environmental performance of the products to the next tier up firm or customer uh the other thing is increased recycle content of the vehicle um some of the discussion i had is not necessarily around carbon footprint in terms of the manufacturing of the vehicle but customers are asking is we've got a goal on the percent of recycled content in the car um and i can only deduce that that that in itself will have a direct impact on the carbon footprint but when it comes to non metallics uh your your polymers your performance carbon fiber type products um i get a sense or just in discussions with customers the questions are being asked is do you have a recyclable type material uh again the hybrid the the the the move to hybrid and electric vehicle technologies um materials are getting more attention in terms of carbon footprint um so that impacts the material manufacturers and then on occasion for a select few uh sub tiers tier one and two tier two customers that we've engaged with they now require for any new product programs r&d programs they conduct an lca um to assess the the um the sustainability performance of either uh you know a new new exhaust system new interior system and with that the requiring material manufacturers and suppliers to supply them with lca data next slide please yeah so um i thought i'd just highlight this um it's important to note the influence of lca results and sharing of lca data across the value chain for a certain market depending on how how willing a firm is willing to participate in the sharing so this is a value chain of a plastics manufacturer depending on the degree of backward or forward integration of that manufacturer will result in what lca data can be attained and shared to generate the carbon emission values why is this important well the first thing is to determine how to improve you need to know what your base base level cases of uh environmental performance is so i i get the impression we're kind of at the beginning now though some companies might be a little bit ahead of others of how this manufacturing supply chain the dynamics of it is is is willing to work and coordinate for the overall product lifecycle of um of say a material and or a car um our experience in the chemicals and plastics market is is the monitors and raw materials that make up Palmer products is the largest contributor to the carbon footprint of that material so supplier sharing of data is critical to improve to make those improvements across the value chain um but often suppliers cannot or not willing to share the information due to lack of resources um there's confidentiality of information lca data can disclose a lot about how a company makes products um it can also disclose uh you know the cost associated with making those products um also some suppliers and firms just have a different strategy all together um some just are experienced they're not utilizing lca at least and not not at this time so there's a uh there's a timeliness around it next slide please yeah vj mentioned about decarbonization um and so i i thought i highlighted about this it's it's it's not necessarily lca but it is very much tied to what's called scope three emissions um so as you can see in the diagram right it's uh the emissions as as established by ghc protocol a firm has scope one emissions which are direct emissions within its fence line scope two which are emissions associated with indirectly purchasing electricity or energy and then scope three are the value chain emissions which is is mostly supplied by your supplier of the raw material and or service um so what are we seeing is a drive by our customers coming to us and saying can you give us your scope three data so their scope three data would actually be our scope one data which we translate to in essence some of our lca carbon footprint emissions um so when they ask that they provide a surveys they're asking us you know what are your future expectations on reducing um and it's almost a trickle down effect because um as i mentioned the contribution based on the raw materials is significant enough enough where we um we too have to go to our suppliers and then as i show in the next slide please yeah um this is another excerpt from an lca study uh conducted by an epoxy resin manufacturer uh but but it's it's it's it kind of paints a story of um many chemical polymer type businesses and um if you can see by the environmental impacts in the blue the epoxy backbone contributes heavily to the climate change potential and the water consumption of this particular resin this is not unlike many of the things that that we produce within the chemicals and plastics um manufacturing industry uh that polymer backbone is based upon raw materials if it's if the company is not as backward integrated that that that must be purchased by suppliers so in essence the um the the the blue portions of the graph are kind of your scope three if you're looking at climate change so um this is kind of paints the the the challenge is associated with some manufacturers is um you know if your carbon footprint is heavily dependent on what your suppliers provide what is this is the biggest and it's the biggest lever how do you work with your suppliers or folks further down the value chain to to further reduce as you can see here electricity energy waste uh they do contribute but it's not as big of a lever or what we call a critical x regarding the carbon footprint of the product um next slide please so I do want to talk a little bit about renewable energy credits and the practice that's used with lca another trend we are seeing first in talking to other practitioners it's it's been around for well over five years is the use of renewable energy credits or purchasing power agreements as firms strive to go carbon neutral my experience is within the lca community it's it's not and across the board practice in fact the chart that you see here was a a survey that uh we depend in in coordination with the american center of life cycle assessment conducted among 86 lca practitioners on how real is the practice of using what we call these virtual contractual instruments in lca practice uh and as you can see um it's not it's not privately used but um 33 of the population that we we surveyed do actively use them 44 44 percent or 45 percent believe that it should be incorporated into lca practices so the the question was raised is how do you use a a a virtual form of energy renewable energy uh to represent your product in in lca there's other things other aspects of the survey that we came about but one of the challenges was um just the proper accounting in doing such instruments but also just the lack of understanding uh of how these instruments are used uh within the context of an lca uh next slide please yeah so um just wanted to uh end here I think highlighting the trends and challenges of lca data sharing again as we mentioned it's um uh explaining the the data the story that goes along with the data um what we've also seen is that customers many of our customers are still trying to understand how to use the data uh and don't get me wrong we've got some very astute customers that have armies of lca practitioners that often educate us um but I've I've sit in meetings with um some automotive oems um on their powertrain divisions asking us how are you using this data right what are the types of lca's that you reuse so I just get the sense they they know what they need to do they're just trying to figure out how they can use the lca's to do it um the other aspect is is confidentiality of the lca data unless the the the study is not peer reviewed most of the manufacturers or firms within our market space share lca data with their customers under confidentiality um that that can prevent prevent present its own issues especially if uh you know there's a lot of time involved um and um some customers may not be willing to do that I mentioned renewable energy credits the other one is renewable energy appropriation the practice of you know if you install a wind farm solar farm in your factory um some firms I I I've seen in some literature are appropriating that renewable energy to specialty products or strategic products within the product line that would gain more value as a sustainable material in the marketplace versus the more commodity fossil-based products at times might might adhere to higher costs of those products um the practice of renew carbon credits within lca another trend is recycling but also chemical recycling of plastic products and the utilization of lca a big open space regarding biobased raw materials used for polymer type products in the practice of sequestering the carbon to reduce its footprint um also the lack of data from uh our raw material suppliers it just again how far along are they in this progression in understanding uh the sustainability of their products and in some customers where some some suppliers are are not as far along yeah as vj mentioned standardization of lca data uh varies for very varies from market to market um so again the interpretation I call causes some churn and with that churn it takes some time and understanding to do lca use in scope one scope two and scope three emissions which I mentioned and then um customers are still trying to learn about lca's um so I I think many are far along in their journey others I would say are are doing the follower rule versus leader rule and trying to see where the industry is doing with is it with the lca data and um I think yeah I think that's my last chart yeah well Francis that was fantastic and um leads us back to the title of this talk which is where do you draw the box huh so there are uh but that's fantastic and and I think you did a it is not easy to do what you just did because you took a very it starts it starts off as such a simple concept right it's a material balance it's the first class you take in chemical engineering right in minus it's a material balance how hard can this be and I think as you as you overlaid your slides you showed how the complexity comes so we've got questions in the chat room that I'll go through but as I get to those I wanted to ask you one first which is so how do you draw the box how do you decide oh the box well so it's it's as material manufacture what we see it's it's been kind of stand the standard to use cradle to gate values um so what does that mean so really it's it's it's the the extraction of aromatics all the way and I tell this to our salespeople to a DuPont product packaged at the factory gate before shipment um that's where our analysis in because that's what our customers are asking and then they conduct their own LCA we would love to do end of life which means continuing our product our resin our materials all the way to the vehicle use all the way to where the vehicle is recycled but it goes back to the confidentiality of the data if customers are willing to share their use and their inputs their technical inputs to conduct that study we know that companies and firms are actively doing that but for right now just to respond to the marketplace yeah it's it's more yeah I just need I need you I need you to create those gate values yeah that makes sense Francis and of course if you're in a combustion value chain it's a little bit easier because you know the the the grave if you will is combustion but for a catapult or a plastics it's much harder so that was actually one of the questions in the chat room how do you handle end of life and I think it depends on the value chain as you said let me ask you another question though um you if you had a bunch of references there and I was kind of staring on my screen trying to look at them so you had greed and you had some other things so do you have a model of models or how do you how do you integrate all these various inputs into a single model um yeah it's a good question so uh you know we use what's called we use Simipro for those of you that that are lca practitioners we are familiar with lca and within that within that software package it houses environmental data of many materials and processes and then when we do the lca we will create custom models we'll do the model of models some of our lca's they contain foreground or very rich primary data of direct measurement from our factories um and then we combine that with the background data uh to to to create the lca and what you mentioned is they can be very time and resource incentive so uh you know there's different levels of lca high level lca's single attribute lca's that we do um but from time to time to characterize an entire business product line which if you have done um we'll we'll do what you said we'll we'll we'll build those models and models um yeah so that's one of the questions in the in the box here is is the transparency of suppliers um and marketers on their lca not an unavoidable issue that at some point it's going to have to be tackled right so um so you know what you know and quite frankly you know what you don't know and so you I know what we do we estimate what we don't know because that's all you can do um but but the trend let me ask you let me ask this question so this transparency is important so um it will be tackled at one point in time but do you see a trend to where there's more harmonization or are we still in the entropic stage where things are getting more disorganized and organized how do you see this evolving right now yeah I do see a trend I see a heavier trend in Europe um but coupled with the trend I I I don't know how else um this can be done unless there's harmonization um part of me says when you know we're looking at suppliers this customer is very good they know lca very well they're very astute they're educating us on how to do it other customers within the same raw material line just they're they're not there yet um and the small I I I I struggle with the smaller companies that don't have the resources to staff lca capability um or make it a priority how do you get these suppliers to thrive and if they supply a strategic material you know you don't want them to fall by the wayside but definitely you know part of me thinks you know as we're working with them can we partner um how do we work together I've seen in some comments by lca practitioners that other companies say hey you know this supplier is struggling we we decided to purchase renewable energy credits for them so that the products that we obtain do have a lower gwp in in spite of the practice of renewable energy credits but yes um we've all got to work because the it's all interconnected as I showed that chart there and I always look at that chart it's all connect interconnected in some manner and one firm influences the other all the way up to the car manufacturer and the person that buys the vehicle so you've got to be I guess you got to be at the table willing to show your cards so that kind of everybody wins the game I don't know how I don't know how it's best I totally agree with you let me let me go to another topic here which I think is a segue to what you just said which is you've shown the math you've shown how the accounting works and of course now we have this new entry called credits or negative emissions right so how are you incorporating carbon credits or negative emissions into the full life cycle yeah yeah we're incorporating regional renewable energy credits um and um you know we're we're using appropriations based on um you know key strategic materials or products that we feel will um because of their sustainability will bring more value to the customer um yeah we will use uh you know for our bio-based materials we use the practice of carbon sequestration but again within the context of iso the important thing is to make it all visible and transparent and let the customer know that you're doing this not all customers um in their lc practice will use renewable energy credits some customers say no we're not accepting renewable energy credits and that's fine because again our data is still our data so it's um and there's there's some some contention around it within the lca community based on the survey that that we conducted um but i don't see it going away because when part of the survey was yes renewable energy credits are of strategic importance or virtual purchasing power gains are of strategic importance to our firm it's part of our strategy and then part of me says well does lca need to evolve in in a way that would incorporate these fairly um but you know the the the jury's still out ac lca is working very rigorously around this there's a work group trying to incorporate a method guideline for using virtual purchases power power agreements in what's called environmental product declarations which are backed by lca's so uh it i guess it's i think it's coming i think um and i think in order for lca to be relevant um they we we just need to have a um uh a position on that you're doing a great job of leading the moderator because you you end each question with what the next question is okay so okay what the next question is so you're doing fantastic here you're making it so okay so you you so you've led you you in your answer one of the things you talked about well who are the regulatory bodies like who who are the lca police uh and so where do you see that standing right now so who are these lca police or which regulatory bodies oversee yeah okay well you actually have iso um and you know they form technical committees um which are governed by um regulatory bodies of governments as well as industry and academia and europe the european union has been doing a lot of that europe has a lot of influence um around a lot of these governing bodies um some other organizations are familiar with the c-tac in our business the uh plastics europe um they actually openly publish lca data of generic commodity type plastics and then in the us i don't know any other organization globally but the american center of life cycle assessment is a very strong organization um it's it's it's not that large but i think there's some very uh strong thought leaders there that are helping to to pave the way for industries on lca practices it's it represents many companies from steel consumers um and um yeah i uh i i they publish papers training just to um promote and encourage and educate the use of lca's within the context of sustainability there's certifications that you can achieve uh it's it's it's it's a it's a very good organization again i i've only joined it for the last 18 months um just coming aboard as an lca practitioner good hey leon what do we have five minutes how much time do we have about 10 minutes oh 10 minutes okay good then i've got a couple more questions i've got i've got a bonus question at the end that i'm saving okay uh so i was gonna i was gonna go to my bonus question but i'm gonna not uh so i'm gonna go back to a couple later in the chat room again building off your previous answers that are two things that you said in your previous answer one that led to like who oversees this and the others you mentioned renewable energy credits a lot and the question which i think is a very good question is okay these renewable energy credits actually have a carbon footprint themselves and so when you when you take a renewable energy credit are you accounting for the lc the lca or the or the co2 footprint of the renewable technology themselves yeah that's actually a very good question that's where the accounting comes in because um i i i served on a or a work group or at least participating in a work group with the ac lca around those discussions and what they found out was um this is where it's mixed and varied on how the analyst approaches in your methodology and um there's really no standard on how uh you know to account for the renewable energy um but you're right there is an environmental burden associated with it and i i think from discussing with other lc practitioners they may or may not be aware of it so i almost equated to say it's it's it's kind of like the wild wild west you're using logic to the best of your knowledge on what you know about renewable energy credits um but i don't think there's a um working practice on what's the right way to use renewable energy credit in an lca um you know the biggest thing is just around double counting and then within the us there's something regarding the residual grid mix and how that's accounted for as energy purchases are done throughout these states um don't know if that answered your question um i think i well i think all these questions are very hard to answer francis i think you're doing a great job of of of answering what i think are some unanswerable questions so in the spirit of unanswerable questions let me go to the next question okay um and that and that it is a very good question because um there's a lot of noise out there and it's really hard we you talked about it beautifully in terms of okay when somebody says their emissions are this or their lca footprint is this it's really hard to back calculate because you don't know the assumptions you don't know what goes behind it the transparency and even the transparency the models most of these models are not they don't show you the code that goes behind the model so you don't actually know what they're doing behind the walls of the of the matlab or the or the python or whatever whatever they're doing so is there logic to really focusing lca's on the big drivers and even though it's not a complete lca but kind of 8020ing it and you know thinking about cradle if you take it cradle to gate for instance focusing on the big drivers versus lower impact you know lower impact incremental improvements that really look good on paper and may make a part of the value chain feel really good but if the goal here is to come up with an accounting system come up with the co2 system to really address global emissions you know climate change is there something to be said about reaching consensus on how you 8020 this so that you're really working on the big ticket items not getting lost on where a lot of noise is but it really doesn't move the needle yeah no that's actually an excellent question i think the lca community the lca practitioners in industry would favor that tremendously because again we know we know the quality of the data and and we know the variability of the data we know that it's it's not so discreet it's temporal it varies it's dynamic and it changes and where i see the gap there is just educating people around the numbers what we contend with at least what i contend with is when we go to a customer and we give them that a sheet of our product and you know the physical properties such as like a tensile the the specific gravity they're all measurable and they're exact right well maybe they might have a personalized tolerance you can't if you put a lca data on there the assumption is naturally it's in the same context and it isn't right so just understanding that with the lca data so an 80-20 scenario behind the numbers i think for the most part is i recall conversations with fellow lca practitioners and steel and textiles um yeah i i i i think that would be perfectly acceptable it's just a matter of educating others that are very um that may not understand the interpretation of the numbers so well and again those could be business leaders functional managers um at times purchasing managers um and just understanding the the story behind an lca number excellent all right two more questions francis the first one i think it's a really good topical question for the chemical sector in particular because you talked about cradle to gate which again makes perfect sense for chemicals because after the gate you really don't know what happens to your product and so it's very hard to understand however there is no doubt that particularly in the chemical industry the performance of the product varies greatly so for instance a a carbon fiber which has a very large footprint to make the carbon fiber but then light weights the building or light weights something else and has huge benefits and the other benefit could be that's just last longer it lasts 10 times longer or something like that so how do you how do you credit a product when you're only looking at cradle to gate for the product benefits that it actually provides which again if the spirit here the goal here is to to lower overall emissions how do you how do you particularly in the chemical industry how do you take that factor into account yeah that's a great question because uh you know i'm just being in the automotive industry we're getting customers to ask us what are you doing to reduce the the the carbon footprint of your nylon products and often in our discussions with our marketing and customer engagement people are saying well could you imagine the car without plastics just how heavy it would be right so you're trading one for the other and you're burden shifting right you know the plastics have always been in the vehicle since the 1960s and it's it's shown that you can reduce carbon footprint of the vehicle but i get it you know from the trends i showed materials are getting more significant so um it's what's called a handprint right so what we're doing and a lot of our other supplies doing is trying to determine what the actual carbon or environmental handprint over materials are just through case by case basis in our knowledge or maybe working with consultant the the the light weighting benefit of using a plastic part versus the metal part and how much gasoline energy that it saves um and and getting the customer and car manufacturers to see that even though they may have realized it um and then getting them to look at the trade offs more closely and find out what's more important um i mean you can have a a a vehicle that has no plastics but might have a lower gwp because of manufacture but it would be heavy or it would it would not have the performance that you would have with um using lighter weight materials and you know i think the um you know the car manufacturers they're aware of that right they're some of them are just not as uh gung-ho around gwp that's the reason why they're asking is how much increase the recycling content right for somebody some car manufacturers saying if you really increase recycling content you lower the carbon footprint of your material so we two are being looked we two are being are being are looking to assess that as well yeah but you know you introduced another concept that i won't go down that rabbit hole but i will introduce it for the broader team here which is often the most important thing when you're doing an lca is the relative lca so what is it versus the alternative and you're looking for the pathways that get you to the lower overall lca which is a series of sub brackets that you have to decide along the way so um france is great job not surprising given the album otter that we both share so once again proving that perdu does train well the bonus question and i'm going to use it as a segue to our to our next speaker is there's lots of work going on out there and you you and i are both in industry and so we have an industrial view towards uh towards this challenge and how we're going about solving this problem however a big player in the whole lca space a major player in the lca space i dare i say are the universities are the academics and there's some really really fantastic models being built in academia um are you engaged does are you aware do you work with universities to help answer some of the some of the questions and do some of the fundamental modeling that quite frankly only universities uh can do and have the have the uh you know kind of sort of have the mandate to do are you in that space do you participate yeah oh no oh very much so right so um where i see uh you know uh i would also say you know we relied on the universities for the cutting edge methodologies that will evolve lca techniques so we work with uh academia through external consultants some many of our few of our external consultants are based out of academia and um but yeah we work closely with them we work closely with them through ac lca um they're they are a great resource for educating lca practitioners in industry um and um helping helping us to stay in what i would call stay in check uh around the methodologies and the the the objectivity associated with um using lca in industry um but yes um you know we we deal with them quite a bit yes or we work with them i'm sorry we work with them excellent that's great francis because you're about to transition to one of them right now okay so let me let me introduce our our next speaker i i already told you about bob and his incredibly distinguished career uh bob is bob is up at mit and bob's going to talk to us about his perspectives on lca and where you draw the box so over to you about you're on mute again i'm i'm off mute now uh so thank you vj um and that was a great talk francis um really enjoyed that so i'm going to talk about the some work we've done at mit developing uh a an lca tool um i'm going to share my screen i hope that shows up for everybody um in in doing this and i'll add as a disclaimer at the beginning i'm i'm not a Purdue graduate um at any point in my career um georgia tech and wisconsin and a career mit um so i'm i'm going to talk about uh uh systems wide lca uh ultimately which we developed in the context of of how do we understand uh alternatives and make wise decisions about changes in the energy system to to to drive the energy transition uh to to the net zero that that we aspire to so i'm i'm going to start with with a slide that everybody knows um but but just to remind you why why we're driven in this and and what uh makes us get up in the morning and and charge at this so on the one hand we see rapid growth in in energy uh demand globally particularly driven by population growth and emerging markets developing economy countries um and uh associated with that um uh we have to get to net zero uh not just in one country or two countries but but globally and uh that means uh we needed to to execute a dramatic reduction greenhouse gas emissions while we're providing uh more energy to the world um but the uh e i a just i think two weeks ago had their international energy outlook uh published and noted that without significant new policy we're going to see 25 increase uh in emissions by by mid-century so uh that will be headed the wrong way so how do you how do you inform that decision making uh but both at a government level and also individual uh company uh thinking so let me uh then frame what we're trying to allow a rational thinking about is is the increasing overlap between the different sub sectors in energy uh as we drive decarbonization forward in in the early days of of decarbonizing the power sector uh the deployment of of wind resources solar resources we've driven down costs uh for those resources uh through deployment uh make great headway in decarbonizing power but but as we make progress there we increasingly see the need to to understand the overlap between the power sub sector and other parts of the energy sector particularly industrial transportation and and building use um i illustrate some of the important overlaps that that have popped up and are already quite quite obvious in the system uh rooftop pv as that has spread in developing countries particularly developed countries particularly we see you know buildings becoming power generators as as well as power consumers you see an overlap between buildings and transportation as evs become more more prevalent uh charging uh at the residential level um industry use of hydrogen is something i think many of us are focused on uh these days that hydrogen can of course go to many different uses transportation is one that uh francis talked about i'll talk a little bit about that as as well um and then hydrogen production of course if we're going to do that electrolytically uh that will interface closely with the power sector and so there's a big opportunity for uh intersection understanding uh there so this is a kind of picture that that drives a lot of the work we're doing at mit on lca analysis um how do we approach the understanding of the emissions from different pathways uh that then get put together into an energy system uh and how are those affected by not just what we're doing in one particular application uh but but at overlaps between these different parts of the energy sector so this is a graphic looking at some of the problems we'd like to understand since as we get an increasing number of alternative technologies that could produce energy uh and the options for using that energy for a given service for example for for transportation or mobility um what what what are the relative merits in terms of emissions of those different pathways so i'll illustrate the kinds of things you might want to compare in in this slide where on the far left are different uh energy resources you might start with on the far right are different to mobility applications uh that might be the ultimate useful for those um energy resources so on the right uh just to illustrate the there there's a prototype for a spark ignition engine internal combustion engine uh a plug-in uh vehicle battery electric or plug-in hybrid um there there's heavy duty trucking um there's hydrogen fuel cell vehicles uh and and natural gas fuel vehicles on the far left uh oil is the predominant way we're fueling transportation today and we can move that resource through to the to the pump to fuel the vehicle we can use biomass coal as a starting product wind solar uh and natural gas the interesting part of this is as i go left to right through this graph you'll notice the little gray arrows on top of of the different icons and those represent the emissions carbon emissions associated with uh that step in the in the value chain here so there's there's emissions associated with producing oil uh in the movement of that oil by pipeline say to a processing facility a refinery uh refining possibly with ccs or or without uh then piping and trans transportation of that uh refined product to the pump and then to the vehicle um i could get to the pump other ways in fact today most most of what you buy at a gas station has ethanol blended in um that comes from biomass uh in the us primarily corn um so there's a carbon footprint associated with producing uh that biomass resource uh for moving it uh to a refinery uh to make ethanol uh or biodiesel and and then moving that to the pump to be part of the the fuel for the vehicle and and there are these others i'm not going to go into all of these um but but wind and solar options allow you to go through transmission directly to the pump is a charging station at this point could be at home it could be in a at your place of work or somewhere else um and each each one of these icons has an emissions associated with it and we're interested in in what's the aggregate across a pathway for mobility um and how do we choose among those to do this that's the kind of thinking that's driven us to develop what we call the sustainable energy systems analysis and modeling environment um so-called sesame is is the acronym we i don't think we had to go too far out of the way to get that acronym um it is it is to be a an open source software i think it's it's discussion uh uh included previously i think an important part of these lca analyses is transparency and and one way to provide transparency is to ensure that the methodology you use is open source so anybody can dive in and look at the various modules that we have in in this analysis and and provide comments argue with specific methods and and so on we're we're we're wide open to that and i'll say these have all been published what i'm what i'm going to show so sesame is a is a platform which allows you to to assess and compare uh technology options it allows you to perform technology and system scenario analysis so we'll see in just a moment how you can take a variety of technologies and string them together into a an energy pathway you can take a set of those pathways and string them together into a an energy system um we can use this then to explore implications of market and policy dynamics and we'll take a take a look at an example there later in the talk we can look at cross-sector comparisons as i was illustrating in the previous slide and and look at impacts of using stator versus best practices in how we how we produce products and services of different kinds well the next slide has been not so you read everything but to give you a layout of of how we've constructed sesame i think one of the really unique features of of sesame is the modular framework that's illustrated here and the modular framework allows you to swap in and out modules with as much specificity as you want and so as we learn more we can swap in new modules you you can there's a lot of interchangeable parts that you can uh can take advantage of but the basic um flow is the same as as what i showed on the the transportation slide we start on the far left with upstream resources whether those are are renewable resources a biomass of of lots of different kinds whether it's a solar photovoltaics of different kind whether it's silicon based or thin film technologies concentrated solar power wind we currently have i think in sesame maybe 17 different standard wind turbine types uh for for use uh in the analyses and and so on with fossil energy resources um ranging over the the usual categories um there um we we need to take that upstream resource that's been produced and move it to a processing set there so there's a midstream piece uh where for gas for example you might have a separation stage you might compress the gas part phase um and then pipe that to uh processing steps uh so there there's a wide variety of midstream steps depending on on what the upstream resource is and how you're going to process it now processing it includes a lot of different processes for generating power uh power and heat uh including nuclear um there are different industrial processes i think 21 refinery types that we have now but you can plug in your own and and i'll add that these boxes on processing uh that there are links to aspen so if you want to dive in and do more uh detailed modeling uh for some aspect of this you want uh that's that's always available to a user of sesame um so lots of different processes that depend on the resource and and the ultimate end use that we add in a fourth vector here uh cc us which has an optional character right now cc us not cc us is not widely used going forward we expect cc us to be increasingly important in the system certainly the national academy studies and others have shown that pointed out that uh we're going to have serious negative emissions uh deployed by mid-century if we have any hope of getting to uh to our climate goals and and so there are a variety of different uh separation technologies that are included um there and and utilization options for for the co2 you you capture and then finally take take the the result of the process either with or without cc us move that to the end user to be used as electricity or heat or some liquid product gasoline diesel ethanol and and so on now or to buildings for for use there as thermal lighting and so on so so that's the map for sesame i think that's really what makes it so valuable and unique uh is that is that it's a highly configurable uh platform for doing analyses of of lca now i'm showing examples here in the energy uh sector but but it can clearly be deployed um more broadly than that i'm gonna interesting miss francis was talking i saw a lot of similarities where we have to say so i'll try to emphasize uh different things um an obvious um observation here is is that we we are thinking about similar problems and and uh think similarly about about a lot of this now this is a study we we did uh looking at emissions uh for different vehicle powertrain combinations we did as as part of uh the energy initiative at mit's mobility of a future study and we compared um five different vehicle types we used toyotas and uh hondas so we could get for these five different vehicle types we could get vehicles of the same type these are all mid-sized vehicles either clarities or or camrys with interior volumes about 115 cubic feet and as francis pointed out the emissions from internal combustion engines or hybrid electric or plug-in hybrid or battery electric or fuel cell electric vehicles the emissions come from different parts or different parts of the value chain here the black piece at the top here on the far left is is what most people think about in terms of emissions from vehicles that's the emission from fuel consumption um so for internal combustion engines that's quite large uh for hybrid electrics it it's smaller uh but we're still consuming gasoline uh or diesel uh for plug-in hybrids uh less yet as as we're relying more on the batteries for battery electric and fuel cell electric vehicles uh no emissions associated with actually consuming the fuel but for those vehicles uh the far two right ones um that there is substantial emissions associated with fuel production uh and you'll see that it's largest for hydrogen and and i'll say that in in this particular uh bar chart the hydrogen is assumed to be made from steam methane reforming no ccs and of course you don't have to do it that way and i'll show some comparisons of of what happens to the emissions uh comparison as you change the production uh pathway for hydrogen um you'll also notice that each of these has a green piece uh francis went into a lot more detail into that but the green piece is vehicle production including uh manufacturing the batteries and and it's the batteries that give rise to the increased uh footprint and manufacturing out to be v slightly smaller again in the production of the fuel cell and and the hydrogen storage capability so that that compares uh those five types uh i mentioned the hydrogen is made from steam methane reforming reforming no ccs i should also add that we assume that the emissions from electricity is us grid average in this so when you charge the vehicle you're charging with grid average electricity and that that doesn't have to be the case either and in fact um we're going to look in in the next couple of slides at at some of the finer grain explorations you can do about the coupling between the power sector um and transportation in in order to understand the the emissions uh implications one such deep dive you could do would would be to look at what's the the greenhouse gas emissions profile on a more regional basis uh this is still fairly core so so we kind of have a decent conversation here but but you can take this down to a sub-county level if you want uh in the us but here we look at at what's the relative emissions between a battery electric vehicle and a hybrid electric vehicle across the us and and and you'll notice that in a region like the northwest part of the us uh where there's a lot of the electricity is produced from hydro the ratio is much better than the us as a whole because the footprint for that hydro electric power is is quite small in states that rely on coal fire generation to a large extent uh say the the mid-western states uh Ohio, Indiana, West Virginia um the emissions from battery electrics as compared to hybrid electric are worse uh that ratio is greater than one and and you see a mix of of ratios as you look around the uh the country um it it's also interesting to look at at temporal uh impacts for for example what difference does it make to the emissions of my vehicle when i charge it um each day and that turns out to depend on where you are in the country as as as well as what time of of day you're looking at and i illustrate that it's big two different states as an example here on the far left is california and and as i think everybody knows california's got a great solar resource um the result is that and and the solar resources obviously greatest uh in the middle of the day uh so if you look in this middle uh panel on the left side uh you'll see the percent of total generation from solar is greatest midday no surprise uh the implication of that in the little bar graph in the center bottom center is that you're better off charging a battery electric vehicle uh midday in california in new york uh the flip is true and that's true because in california a lot of the peak demand is met from natural gas in the middle of the day that goes away at night and the result is that if you look at the middle panel again the percent of generation from nuclear you know so zero emissions there is greatest in the late evening overnight hours and so in new york uh you're better off charging your electric vehicle your electric vehicle um overnight um that that's a picture now if if you migrate this out to 2050 this all changes with with time in a more macro sense so so nothing static here but with sesame you can you can move out into the to the future and look at how these charging patterns would change as you go forward i i mentioned a minute ago that with the carbon footprint of the hydrogen fuel cell vehicle uh what that footprint looks looks like depends on how you make the hydrogen um and i i we assume there that it was made with steam methane reforming no uh no carbon capture in this graph that is the dashed blue line here and and we show the the carbon footprint of that technology going out to 2050 what drives that down what drives that down is is improving efficiency of the vehicle uh and improving efficiency in the uh in the smr process itself now interestingly that is has a lower carbon footprint today uh than the um than the i c e i guess that's that's not surprising excuse me but but it has a lower carbon footprint than the hydrogen vehicle that's fueled by hydrogen made from electrolysis using grid average elect grid average emissions you see that's the worst of all today because the grid is is not all that clean but as the grid decarbonizes going out to 2050 you see that becomes becomes much better and comparable to the smr picture now better yet is if you use smr plus ccs that's the dotted line down here which is better than battery electric today and they're comparable when you get out to 2050 now best of all would be electrolysis fueled by renewable resources and and and that's the lowest of all of these over the entire span of this study so the the the method matters for making the fuel and the state of decarbonization of different parts of a system also matter as we go out into the future i mentioned in in some of the things you could do with sesame at the beginning of the talk that you could look at some of the policy implications of of pathways we did back in in september a year ago we took a look quick look at implications of Gavin Newsom's executive order to ban sales of of new gasoline cars by 2035 thought that would be interesting to see what the emissions reductions impacts of that would be and what other systems implications that might have so we looked at the the the the following model we started with as a base case eia's energy annual energy outlook from which we have projections of sales of different vehicle types and it's a business as usual scenario so you don't see dramatic growth in alternative fuel vehicle sales here the green is battery electric vehicles the the orange is is hybrid electric and so on but dominant sales are our internal combustion engine vehicles with gasoline now the fleet changes you see the the fleet size is growing as we go out to 2050 the fleet mix is somewhat damped from the sales figures because people hold on to their vehicles average 15 years fuel use we do this in terawatt hours to compare with the high electricity case fuel use goes down with time all these vehicle types are getting more efficient going forward and emissions decreases for all of these vehicle types going forward the more interesting part is is what happens in the ban we made a simple assumption just to do this analysis you can you can easily change how you how you think the ramp down would occur but we did a linear ramp down in in ice sales going out to 2035 and and assume that those would be replaced those sales would be replaced with battery electric vehicles so the the green block here so that's a pretty straightforward uh sales chart the fleet change is of course again damped because people hold on to their vehicles for a fairly long period of time so that out in 2035 for example you still have more than half of the fleet is internal combustion engines so as you ramp up charging facilities you still have to maintain a large system for fueling the older vehicles fuel use is shown here again it's damped you see the the electricity use growing and it becomes the dominant but not exclusive fueling piece out in in 2050 um and and then finally emissions uh damped uh but decreases uh dramatic you get a 50 drop by 2035 and about 85 by 2050 versus uh 2019 um it is interesting it if if you have these these results you can ask questions though about for example the fuel use um the the need is going to be for about 160 terawatt hours of new fleet power demand by 2050 that's about 80 percent of all generation in california today and so i think that poses system questions for for policy makers and and for businesses who want to supply into these markets um how is that electricity uh green electricity uh going to be supplied also large number of batteries obviously that that are going to be involved let me look next at at at that so i'm gonna five more minutes three to five more minutes i'm getting there yep thank you perfect thanks so so look at at um i'm gonna skip the the base case here and and look at the case of a band which as the sales of of internal combustion ninjas ramps down linearly and ev sales ramps up then you get a linear increase in lithium ion battery sales you can see cumulative uh distribution of those lithium mine batteries in the fleet um which becomes sizable by by 2035 lithium mine battery sales is about nine x higher uh than in 2019 or about 160 gigawatt hours it's also interesting to look at what happens to those lithium mine batteries as as people turn over their their vehicles that is damped again because people hold on to vehicles so you don't start to see sizable increases in lithium mine batteries that need to be either recycled or go into second life applications but you can see the cumulative uh number of those batteries that need to be dealt with in in a life cycle analysis i'm going to skip this piece since i just have a few minutes left and and and wrap up with with two two comments about the platform one one is is that uh sesame is is as a modular system and with an open interface allows you to pull in many different uh data sets you can pull in your own proprietary data sets uh you can link and integrate to internal lca or tea models you can link to an integrated assessment models so at mit we use the the joint programs epa model which allows you to look at at the climate science and policy on a macro level and and look at those economic uh implications you can you can bring in capacity expansion models so you look in a in a specific area like the power sector how you might build out uh systems in different parts of the world or different parts of the country uh given the regional resources uh in those different areas so so finally to end uh here's some key takeaways um what one is that i think to understand how the energy systems evolving it's going to allow uh requires to have this kind of analytical method and platform to explore the options for emissions reduction and and to identify identify the business opportunities uh in providing those i'm going to say just show the the multi-platform approach allows you to do a lot of integration um i should have said i didn't that in addition to the fact that the modules are open source all the data sets that we use are publicly available although you can put your own proprietary data set in if you want so allows you to do the kind of scenario analysis you might want to do as a as a regional or a countrywide planner and then i think this allows to do a very rational way a rational approach to how we meet climate claims joe uh gold locally uh match to regional resources i i show the user interface at at the right i i can't resist since the the idea of rpps and and uh renewable credits came up in francis's talk this is a look at what happens this was in a california energy system study this will look at what happens to natural gas plants when you pull in more and more solar and wind is not an argument shouldn't be pulling in more solar and wind but it's the same you don't get an emissions reduction that matches the the power you're bringing on from solar and wind because the gas resources you have are used much more much more inefficiently this looks at the the hours of of a natural gas i think it's a combined cycle plant if i'm right it's a natural gas no it's an ngcc plant so it is not running steady over time over a full year and you can see the orange dots are the emissions from that plant that different stages of loading uh and as it's stopping and starting and this comes from sesame has in it the the entire power fleet in california and the whole country as a matter of fact and allows you to do this so i'll stop there and thank you for your attention thanks bob that was uh that was great and again it just again go back to the theme of this meeting which is where do you draw the box and how do you get this to be standardized and i think the the two talks certainly define the problem but more more importantly to me there's optimism behind this because there's a lot of good work going on here and and the two talks do actually in my opinion do dovetail so a couple of questions in the chat box bob that that i'll get to and then i'll ask a couple as well but um you know you talked a lot about the the comparisons of the cars which i think is really good of course the batteries become one of the issues you talked about whereas all the lithium going to come from or all the batteries going to come from but of course on the other end of that is what happens to the battery when you're done and so uh similar to question that francis got what do you do about the end of life for a for a battery vehicle how do you guys how is that incorporated into the model so we have not put that into sesame yet we go through the end of use of the vehicle that that can easily be put in um i i think a big question right now is whether you would use those better some of those betters you may use as second life for for grid storage for example that's something we're we're looking at in the future storage study we're just wrapping up or or you might use those better recycle those so you can reclaim the the lithium or cobalt or other precious materials in those and there are quite a few businesses that are springing it up to do to do just that so so we have the the manufacturing pathway for the vehicles in in sesame now and and we we will add the end of life piece to it as well so the recycling and reuse options about this is an evergreen platform as you said you can build on it right now it's largely us it is largely us although we we we have significant work in in europe uh with the ia and we have significant work in in india looking at the energy system there particularly the industrial manufacturing sector in india so so those are our i think exciting growth areas in in the platform the the basic modules though i i i think are reusable across those different areas what's different is the is the mix of resources that you can bring to the table so for example we we have used the ibm pairs database to look at some of some regions around the world where they have very good solar wind resource data so that you you can look at the the pathways for solar and wind in different parts of the world anywhere in the world so i i think that's easily done the the bigger challenge in in and something we're working on with germany and norway for example is is how do you understand the regional state or or country-wide policies and resources for deployment and so that that's i think an interesting coupling problem across europe at the moment but we didn't talk a lot about money techno economics um what's the status of kind of taking these lca's and then obviously you have the co2 impact but there's also a cost impact which ultimately leads you to a dollar per ton co2 or some sort of cost and carbon where where are you guys in that evolution uh we have done that so so we have a this is just not just an lca tool as you pointed out but it's also a tea tool um so that it allows you to look at the uh the cost of different pathways uh that you might take for reducing emissions uh in the energy sector that that that's become increasingly important right as as we look to meet these net zero goals at minimum cost uh and and what that's going to cost depends on on where you are in in the world right so what what resources you have for example so that that's an important important piece thanks for thanks for bringing it up the theme in these talks bob is two parts right where do you draw the box and where do you get the data so francis did a really good job of saying where they get the data from because they're they're obviously a large company they have a manufacturing footprint they actually have actual numbers company like ours we know what our footprint is in our upstream in our downstream and so you can kind of kind of use actual data so for university where are you getting we get the data so as i mentioned all the data we put into sesame the open source version is publicly available available right so all these data sets are open for inspection a lot of these data sources are government the epa for example we use a lot of their emissions data sets the the specific data depend on the specific process or or technology i can supply i don't have it with me i i was anticipating a question like this so i i dug up one of our papers on on sesame but their have a table with 64 different database sources related to different parts of assessment i'm happy to share that with with the group we can maybe you can make that a pop quiz for later on bob i guess you know you do that but you know you guys you guys are awesome you answer your questions and you kind of lead me right to the next question and of course the next question is you've got this good database you've got these great publications but of course francis answered the same question which was how do you who's going to who's going to be the judge like how who's going to be the the overseer of this so so our policy makers involved are you are you trying to you've mentioned the epa you mentioned um some of the other governing bodies how do you see this playing out so so we we put it out as an open source tool uh because we want everybody to have access to it and we think that it will allow policymakers to to make comparisons in a way that's transparent to the public so in anybody that wants to use this what they come up with from sesame is easily verifiable how it was obtained and and you can have an open debate about whether that should be done differently or not and and we can put in revised modules or models to do that now we're we're in the process of of letting congressional staffers test drive this for example so we we had a congressional staff seminar not so long ago where we broke broke the group down into regions depending where they were from to let them do a test drive on new england's uh regional power and transportation markets or the southeast or or texas for example and and and play with different options you might take to understand what the emissions reductions uh achievable from that would be and and i think that they found that interesting so what what we're trying to do is get it in the hands of people who who are making decisions so that they can try it out i i think it's important to do that not just on the the government side whether it's a regional or or federal government for example but but also uh that businesses uh have a good look at this and try it out to see what what their business opportunities are i i know exxon's familiar with with this we've also worked with a variety of other industrial companies in the u.s and abroad to try it out in their market regions to see what pathways they might want to pursue and i mentioned a little earlier we're working with the i a on on how to take this tool and use it to help with country specific analyses so that we understand how best to to help different regions design their pathways so one of the one of the benefits of this tool is you're gonna you're gonna uncover insights as you as you do this and so as as you've run the tool and under different scenarios have you under have you uncovered any investment in infrastructure or any technology gaps that are either underestimated or overestimated building off one of the questions that francis got is this telling us where the 80 and where the 20 is and is it helping guide you know where we should really be focusing so so i think in one of my first slides i i i noted that what i showed for for the current sesame suite of modules we cover 90 percent of of u.s energy emissions right so so that's a good part of the total emissions and that lets you see where where you can get the biggest uh improvement in emissions for the for the investment or for the policies that that you engage in um yeah so i mean i i think there there's just lots of ways you you can go with this um in in testing out pathways right so one i'll give a specific example with hydrogen the one of the cases we've looked at is um opportunity space in texas which is a large hydrogen uh large natural gas user for industrial processes a lot of emissions associated with that um what would be implications of swapping out that natural gas uh with hydrogen um and what we did there was to look at the coupling between the electricity sector in texas and the industrial sector uh and look at the test case where i'm going to produce hydrogen electrolytically uh from the grid in texas i'm going to take that hydrogen and either send it back to it straight to industry for use in in process heat or or i vector it to storage we did a broadband storage cavern storage is obviously a cheaper way to do this and then when we need the hydrogen you could pull it out for industry you can pull it out for for use in in makeup energy for power production um what what's interesting in that analysis over the full range of displacements uh if i go from 10 displacement of gas with natural gas with hydrogen all the way to 100 displacement the the the system cost of electricity goes down the more hydrogen you add in the system um and and we found that very interesting and it's a result of the coupling of sectors so something you wouldn't get if you look at the power sector with hydrogen alone or the industry sector alone but but the the result of getting better asset utilization from electrolyzers and from intermittent intermittent renewable resources is what drives that overall uh reductions i think that's a sort of coupling that that you can tease out with uh with sesame to to find uh where you can get big big uh impacts that's great bob coupling another subset of where do you draw the box right so so with that listen bob francis thanks we're going to open it up now to the general uh discussion i must say that liana is quite the director behind the scene so she's pointing me to all this so i really appreciate liana guiding me through the first time i've ever done this and appreciate the patience with everyone as i've tried to to moderate this but now we're up to into the open uh discussion correct liana okay yes absolutely and as jennifer said earlier it'd be great if we could think about how to um turn this into a potential bcst activity so the virtual floor the boxes are open scott go ahead got great so i i i had to come late but i caught the tail end of francis's uh great job francis thank you bob fantastic job um i wanted to hear your guys's comments uh obviously you're approaching it from a little bit different perspective i'm seeing that europe is really moving ahead and going to full carbon disclosure they're putting it into the green new deal and i want to get your perspective on this whole concept and it's almost like truth and labeling around foods and packaging right where you have to list calories and things like that do you do you see that if governments kind of put together some standards that that would help because i like as francis said it's it's kind of the wild wild west and i just want to get your perspectives are are you seeing differences between the regions and you know maybe some guidance on what we might need in the united states i'm happy to start um so i i i think europe is is a great case study in what could possibly go wrong right so you have all the right ambitions and all the right um uh goals for for the future but but but unless you recognize that the system still needs to deliver services to to consumers whether those are individuals want electricity for their homes or or industries who need uh both power and heat for for heavy industries germany in particular um then you can run into um i i'll say their unexpected consequences i i think they could have been expected um so so in germany what what what they're finding actually in europe more generally is wind resources have been lower than uh typical this year so the energy generation from wind is is low and and the result has has been extra coal combustion in europe germany and in particular there's a severe natural gas shortage in europe i think you're familiar with and and so that's causing emissions headaches but but but it's also causing supply chain problems for industry uh as they try to meet their their product needs for customers right so that that's where i think having a platform that lets you go across the whole pathway put all those pathways together to see what the whole system looks like and then perturb it right and see what happens if i have less or more wind uh or less or more solar uh than i expected uh how do you make up that difference that's the sort of study we've done in great detail in california uh where we have lots of good data on on i illustrated in in that one picture of a user interface uh looking at stops and starts and the partial loading and so on what what happens there but but in the spirit if things could be worse um that's what's happening in in europe yeah so it like i'll add and i'll ask francis to comment on it like i i do think that this if if the world moves to full carbon disclosure it actually creates an advantage like france is a heavily nuclear so they're uh you know their calorie counts for their products made in france so a german or a french cheese could be wildly different than wisconsin cheese if they actually started putting carbon content on on labeling right there you go scott now we've covered cheese which is something i never thought we ever cover but yeah well they gotta get into the agmas but but i'll i'll i'll say that um france is as this large nuclear fleet but but they plan to phase it out right or phase down they plan to go from their current 75 to 80 percent nuclear down to 50 percent right which is not working well for germany gerard you had your uh thank you first terrific talk really uh eye-opening and actually if i may brings me confidence that the tools for being able to measure and assess lca is they are there okay so my question is more i'm trying to uh it's more common for the board and please francis and professor armstrong feel feel good feel free to comment which is um how can we bring it to the chemistry side so i'm just trying to say i see a lot on the energy side got that that's important that's chemistry but i'm looking also at the chemistry whether it's a new nylon whether it's a new detergent whether what we heard yesterday where synthetic biology is going so just trying to make sure we don't forget the chemistry by going back to too much of energy i will propose to the board that standardization can be helpful but my mind will be on the half of our enterprise is are the choices that are being made in where the research goes the strategic choices by the industry the infrastructure investments hopefully nsf by then you are going to help us here are put into the right the the highest you know rate of return for what we try to do which is to you know fix the problem of the planet and i'd like to this discussion to continue to open because we can standardize and there is some value of it and there is a lot of headaches that could be avoided i have to say for me drawing the box you can draw the box you have to look from cradle to grave okay i'm in the business of selling detergents and i will tell you the washing machine the the temperature by which you use you know your detergents whether you do an auto dishwasher and they show us a huge humongous you know impact on to the lca from our vantage point right so the key thing for us is is are the investments put into the right bucket considering the insight that we start to have from lca to grave if we feel it is good then we can move to the next level of standardize but let's make sure we don't feel that in five years we forgot to identify these buckets that could have a bigger buck for the planet and for the chemical enterprise so that's a bit my comments and i don't know how to answer this one you know my business is on biodegradation i know that if i do biodegradation material okay there will be some trade-off at the upstream but so bit we can have you know a discussion with the stakeholders that it's still worth doing i would not like biodegradation scientific research to stop because we say ah we are going to create more co2 so i'm a bit maybe confusing but i just want to make sure you know as a board we want to make sure that we feel good that the investment by congress by the universities are in the right pot and we're not just driven by some rules that have been written in no in carbon credits or thing like that that's a really good comment jordan thank you for bringing us back to the primary purpose of this discussion which is what should our body be doing with this information so i think bob and francis did a fantastic job of kind of describing the state of the science the state of the technology but as you said jarard you know there's a there's a perspective that you have from your you know i being a large energy company we have a different perspective and at the end of the day you have policy makers in washington that that have an objective of lowering the emissions of a country but i'm not always convinced that they have all the data needed and all of the analysis needed to know that what they're doing is actually moving in the right direction i think bob's example of the california vehicle mandate illustrates how policy and systems and analysis can actually go together so so jen you've got your hand up i'm finally fear now with this little gold hand thank you yeah i had a thought actually coming out of the discussion um after francis is talking you you know in thinking about um end of life challenges and impacts you mentioned that the unknowns are unknown and i wonder if there's space to bring people together to think about well what are those what are those future unknowns can we can we start you know yesterday we're talking about horizon skin like are there for example horizon scanning approaches that could help illuminate what some of those might be you know that at 50 years ago we weren't thinking you know so much about greenhouse gases and 20 years ago we weren't thinking about microplastics and and PFAS and so what's the thing that we're not thinking about right now that 20 30 years from now is going to be a huge part of that end of life cost in the life cycle assessment and are there ways to bring people together to maybe you know start start seeing where those things might crop up you know is there evidence out there is there knowledge out there that could be used to make predictions about those things okay leona how do we bring this how do we land this airplane i can i i offer an observation on on the last question just to say that i think one of the i mean one of our design goals for sesame must have a highly configurable tool right so we don't know what needs to be in there yet there's a lot of stuff that francis has done fantastic work on that would be very helpful to an overall analysis that you could plug into a tool like sesame to get that so i think the configurability is is important given that we don't know what's going to happen down the road and be able to pop modules in and out as you go right yeah i think i think i was just saying about like what you know are there ways to to think about bring bring people together with expertise that might not be talking to each other to be able to predict what some of these challenges might be in the future and maybe that's a that's a big huge lift but it's it's a question i've been thinking about as we said as we've been through these discussions yeah maybe jen i could comment just from some of the things i see um in engagement with our customers car manufacturers the ones that we've engaged with you know they're looking at it closely from a recycling perspective right at the end of the life of a vehicle what parts are recyclable they would know but what do we need to do to make to increase the recyclability of the vehicle break it down and from a plastics perspective you know a lot of those parts are plastics that have been compounded with other plastics that are integrated with metallic components and then you've got a system in place say a battery system that incorporates these multi-material parts using sophisticated manufacturing operations and now you've got a battery component that's okay what do we do with this right so oems are looking at you know how do you break this apart how do you simplify it but i i don't think it's too different than say you know the electronics business is doing the same with highly integrated multi-material components in their products and and i do i do see pockets of oh this car manufacturer is doing this and you can see it in in published news um i don't know if they're talking to each other and that's that raises a really good question or if there's associations i think of sae on other forums where where they they look at this stuff while holding hands right um there's common technological platforms in these markets that share the same same product attributes um as i mentioned a lot of this is kind of i wouldn't say is it's an infancy but we're learning and are the they are they there yet in order to do the the sharing or is you know are there opportunities to enable the sharing and and have those sort of forums and and talk deeply and technologically around that um so yeah i um you know i quite about and this is maybe a bad example is how they develop the the the vaccine for the virus right you got companies together and just for lack of a better word science the crap out of it right and and and how do you get that sort of critical mass and motivation technologically within these companies to to do the do the similar thing and in one in cases how do you make a vehicle completely recyclable so i'll add that i mean those i agree with everything you said francis great comments um i'll add that i think another way to scan this for potential problems down the road is to look at the scale issues i think that's something we we often forget about it you know fossil fuels weren't much of a problem if back in in the pre industrial days right they weren't using very much or or none um co2 on its own old combustion lectures you would say you get co2 and water out of combusting a hydrocarbon what could possibly go wrong right that's already in the atmosphere scale right so i so i i think these system analyses let you look at as you as you post postulate alternative technologies what what would those scale up to you know for example uh in the simple example i gave for the evs 2700 gigawatt hours of of with my batteries in the fleet in california right in 2050 um what what could what problems could come from that right yeah so i i think that's a very useful piece of this of course there's the the so anything at too large a scale might cause a problem uh but but there are some some chemicals that even at very small scales can be a problem and that's that's a different different sort of analysis okay john right this is fascinating fascinating talks and discussion i'll admit uh these are not my areas but i think about um things in terms of thermodynamics a lot especially in big environmental systems and i'm just curious again it's not my area have there been sort of thermodynamic principles applied to this lca analysis i think a lot of this is actually entropy driven right in terms of order and disorder going up and down sort of the chains it makes sense in terms of a co2 perspective uh to to use that in global warming but overall you know it's it's really an energy question right sort of this free energy question and how that sort of created right and then applied to to to create order right with products and how to take that apart and then at some point you know it's probably a bare minimum right a sort of heat given off in this whole process with a certain amount of energy that we need uh to to survive right the quality of life and what that might be in terms of you know a global minimum just for the transfer of of processes up and down the the life cycle assessment analysis for for all things that we do i'm just i'm just curious well the i mean certainly the entropic consideration are deeply buried in in the technology pathways right so so you you can't do a modeling of one of those uh technology steps and pathways without without considering that um it a particular problem of course is is that as you as you get to to lower and lower useful energy and in heat right so very low grade heat um then you end up just discharging that um but but these analyses let you try to minimize that certainly that's fascinating yeah Francis sorry Gerard sorry sorry sorry Francis i mean scary there we get the wrong square it's Gerard kvj and i'm continuing about for the board right what could be the things yeah it could be action neighbor or we would not like not to do and then feel sorry in five years number one i'd pick on what scott and others are saying in europe there is clearly a very very proactive approach as you know it could be good to say what kind of research or investments and again i'm trying to move from energy if i may or solid buildings into more the chemistry side although they are overlapping but do we foresee some research that europe will stimulate and that we in the us we should listen to and see whether we can compete whether we should play there so that's just a kind of gap analysis i think europe will inspire us we may not like what they are doing but i think they are going to change the area of research and i see that from an industry standpoint okay europe is expecting from the industry to be bolder on changing materials to a new one so that could be uh one uh one of the uh the aspect the other one is i see transpiring some traders we are worried about tradeoffs so i say mine a biodegradable material versus a low emission it looks like it's a tradeoff i think without boiling the ocean is there what will be the top three tradeoffs that will be worth doing a workshop so as maybe we don't end up with black and white you are biodegradable you are bad because you increase the emission or you find something that has a low emission but guess what you create microplastic right so this is maybe one area to focus the science and the experience to say how to deal with these traders probably it's not a choice but it could help the congress it could guide the investment it could help the research to go into the right way rather than doing this bipolar it's bad or it's good and i think that for two thoughts for the ball that's excellent thanks right karen i mean i i agree i i really enjoyed the talks this morning really illuminating for instance i particularly enjoyed that slide to just show with the different vehicles and and how much emission associated with the fuel use versus making the vehicle and and it you know as we move forward we have to be so careful that we're not creating problems that are going to be our future you know you see with these wind turbines that they're we're just having graveyards of wind turbines and it's going to be our new plastics problem so how do we you know it seems like these tools of lca really we have to find wider ways of employing them to really think about the changes that we're making as we move forward and and i don't know how the board can become a player in that area but i think it's critical because we don't want to be creating the next problem by just trying to solve the co2 one that's a great comment of course you know i scott and i had a little bit to do with getting this thing on the agenda so i'll admit my my bias here but the premise when we talk to jeremy about this uh to to get this thing on the agenda was i think i think the board i think this particular body can play a huge role because i think just just this body putting together the case for action and the implications of where you draw the box not where do you draw the box which was the topic today but the implications of where you draw the box and why you need to be thoughtful about where you draw the box because at the end of the day what we're trying to do and we didn't talk about this today but there's this huge behavioral component to climate change that we often don't talk about and i draw the analogies to food all the time that once once you walked into a pizza place in manhattan it had the calories per slice you didn't eat pizza well i'll lie pizza as you can see but most people did not eat pizza and so there there's a there's a data driven way to do policy and we're all scientists on this on this call and so we would prefer policy to be data driven but right now it's not always data driven and um you know i've been a pretty big advocate of of trying to get people to understand the role of the lca the role of a the transparent uniform methodology i i think i'm still learning you know i'm the rookie on this team still so i'm still learning what this board can do but i think this board uh and certainly you know the national academy's in general putting out a position paper that says this is why it matters this is why where you draw the box matters uh and getting that in front of people that will read this thing i think i'm obviously biased so i put that out there to begin with okay but but that's that's why i wanted to get this in front of this team because i think if this team gets behind it and we put together a readable paper okay because that's the other challenge here this is very complicated as you saw but but at the same time it's complicated yet it's really simple and i look at the food industry that how in the world can every Twinkie be 280 calories i mean how did they do it think think of the database that was needed for food and and yet it was done so it's not that this can't be done it hasn't been done and i think you know what we were hoping by getting in front of this body is that we could be the catalyst for convergence because right now we are still somebody used entropy earlier right we are right now in divergence and therefore people talk right past each other and and Gavin Newsom can have his law that he thinks he's doing the right thing but he doesn't really understand until Bob shows in the charts uh Francis can go to go to a car company and say you think you're doing the right thing but let me actually tell you what the unintended consequences of what you do it are and i think if this body can publish something that says this is what the state of the science is this is the implications of having divergence versus convergence and can can the national academies along with nsf and some others can can they help drive convergence because somebody's got to step up and drive convergence and i don't know if that's the role of this board but there's a void and i think scott and i certainly have the energy and the passion to help with this but but hopefully the board can get behind it so i guess i guess i'm secretly voting could be doing that but uh yeah but anyway that was the point here so i just i just j and scott this is where i still have some hard burns i understand the calories i'm from a business where i have seen the perverse effect of converging metrics it looks good it looks simple it makes the life easy but it has unintended consequences so i think we would i would say a paper that says here are the gaps or the things that needs to happen in order to be able to make progress could be one way the other way is to try to drive convergence but i'm just saying you know the calorie matrix i get it but i'm always worried in my business when there is one metric everybody try to beat the metric and we forgot what are the real problems that needs to be solved that's right charlie let me just say i wasn't driving towards a metric i was trying to drive towards a how do you get the number go back to the theme here where do you draw the box because right now that is the problem okay everybody's reporting a number but there's no way to understand the the the interaction between the numbers sorry scott i cut you off yeah so i love the calorie this is actually even more dynamic because twinkies 20 years ago were 200 calories and twinkies today are 200 calories what's what's also added to this is that all companies like so like the ponds we've pledged to go to 100 renewable energy so that will be phased in every year so those calorie counts will be changing every it's going to be a dynamic calorie counting and then what i'm also super afraid of is greenwashing and we see examples of this like even for example some elements of carbon credits like actually going to uh not burning down or not cutting down a forest in brazil hey that's a carbon credit so i can buy that i am not saying i do that but i'm saying it depends i think well that forest was already there dude like it's not we've not took any carbon dioxide out you're just counting for not doing a bad thing not doing a bad thing is not necessarily the same thing as doing a good thing and so i do think there is a lot of science that has to go it's wild wild west and it's going to be even wilder over the next few years and i i really do believe science is so critical for this i think i uh a lot of ideas i want to try to pull together i think in vj you use the term behavior and i think that's really key so ultimately as a new board member i guess my question is have we ever in the past generated um like a white paper or a a letter that helps guide the use of language because that seems to be the the challenging part here what i got from francis's talk is that you if you replace one material in a process or you say we're not going to use this very rare element or we're not going to use any organic solvents that it's still not okay to say it's a sustainable process if you don't actually understand all the implications and so what i got is is that this is so complex that maybe communicating this to a broader audience would require quite some skill and so i think if i'm understanding your points vj and karen's really important point about you know a knee-jerk reaction might lead us to some unintended worse problem should the focus of this board then be maybe not so much the science necessarily but um describing like a process for using correct terminology and for thinking about how interconnected these problems are and have has this board ever done that or is it typically documents or reports that are just focused on science and data and i guess then to kind of bring back um something that gen mentioned you know maybe this requires bringing some social scientists on board that can help us navigate you know how you get people to behave in a certain way which is often not data driven at all can you comment on that i can uh in that um i think i'd really like to focus our discussion on on how the academies can play and how an academy's product could play a role in this issue so you as the bcst i'm going to get into a lot of uh bureaucratic rules and academy's policies here but you as the bcst are a convening body you cannot produce a product with the national academies brand but you can like getting back to the white paper idea from amy develop a white paper about what an academy's product in this space might look like um and then we as staff maybe working with board members have to shop it around to interested stakeholders because our activities need to be funded uh to put quite bluntly um but we but it also ensures that someone's interested in the product if they're paying for it they want to hear our advice right and then we convene a separate body that is constituted for that task and that's where you get like we can do workshops or we can do consensus studies and that way the academy is ensuring that the people on that committee because you might not be the best mix of people um to be looking at this task like some subset of you might be um and then that's a separate product that's kind of convened under the bcst i don't know if that helps clarify things um so um white papers kind of um exploring the the scientific and policy issues in this space um are totally allowable and like that's what we love to use our board members for a kind of a product with consensus recommendations have to be a separately convened activity and there are all sorts of institutional checks and balances for that i realize we're down to a minute i guess karen you had your hand up do you want to make a quick comment and then somehow we'll try to hear how we conclude this okay no i was just gonna say we're in terms of the lca analysis that you know i think it's so important but then how do you get people to listen in terms of you know if you just think consider the plastic bags issue and how lca analysis was done on that issue and shown that you know plastic bags are not this horrible commodity but everyone's banned plastic bags um so i just wanted to put that in in the conversation excellent good so i guess to be continued liana is that what we do with this i mean i think this was thank you bob thank you francis for just a job well done thanks for the great discussion thanks for dealing with me as i tried to navigate my first one so thank you for for dealing with my lack of mc inability but i guess liana we continue the discussion as a board later on today or something like that is that what happens well we can absolutely have further conversations on this topic in the future um but to start we'll have the sustainability and security and battery technology session at 145 and i believe it's the same link so okay so we adjourn until then yes okay again bob francis thanks so much for your time and your expertise thanks for having me okay see you guys um thank you this session is focused on sustainability and security and battery technology with the rise of electrified transportation there is an ever increasing demand for lithium ion batteries which you heard about a little bit from bob armstrong in the last section session on life cycle analysis with this demand the um the need for strategic materials that make up some of those batteries such as cobalt nickel and lithium is um becoming more apparent these metals are not so abundant within the united states so we are dependent on other countries for sourcing and often manufacturing could the supply chain shortages that we are experiencing now hit lithium ion batteries might our economy experience disruption such as the current microchip shortage that is disrupting the automotive industry one such route um one such route around this problem is recycling or recovering the materials and batteries but is this a feasible option and could other battery chemistries address these problems could new innovations in battery design solve these future issues so on the topic we are delighted to have two highly accomplished scientists who are doing research on the cutting edge of sustainable energy joining us today to provide the board with their viewpoints on the field their remarks will jump start a board discussion about opportunities for bcst to make an impact in advancing battery technology in the united states i'll introduce our first speaker and then um with our second speaker amy will um our co-chair amy prieto will um introduce um them surely may so our first speaker is dr glab eution glab is a professor and a mifflin hood chair in the school of material science and engineering at georgia tech his transformative work in developing materials for next generation rechargeable batteries has led to numerous high impact publications presentations and patents he also serves as an editor editor-in-chief of the journal materials today and is a co-founder and chief technology officer of silo nanotechnologies an advanced battery materials company that began as a georgia tech startup and is now valued at over three billion dollars we're excited to have him here today and look forward to hearing his perspectives his presentation is entitled entitled conversion electrode chemistry as the future of lithium ion batteries glab the floor is yours thank you so much for your nice introduction i'm going to share the screen and hopefully it works fine um and then i'm going to go to presentation mode do you hear me well uh yeah the phone uh so i think i can proceed so i'm going to focus today on conversion type electrode chemistries for the future of lithium ion and so i think i want to start my talk emphasizing that there have been only four commercially successful rechargeable batteries uh chemistries in history uh start starting from uh lead acid batteries then moving to nickel cadmium nickel metal hydride and eventually to um no matter what we need intercalation type lithium ion chemistries and each of this innovation accompanied by this movement of new materials enabled lighter batteries so batteries with higher specific energy as well as energy dense batteries so smaller batteries and batteries with their higher energy density and now i think we are living very special time because we see the emergence of their conversion type lithium ion batteries that can double or triple energy density characteristics but also making the batteries substantially more affordable substantially cheaper and so for those of you who have not been familiar with lithium ion battery operations i want to briefly review it so typically when you assemble the batteries you have a cathode stored in lithium ion and then during charge you move lithium ions from the cathode host to the anode host and when you allow the batteries to be discharged and do some useful work like power my laptop or something else and the lithium comes back to the cathode really likes the cathode much better and so typically if you have a higher capacity anode and and cathodes you can store more lithium in active materials you'll have high capacity at the battery level and so conventional intercalation type lithium ion have several different structures but it's kind of similar overall you have layered lithium cobalt oxide that powers all laptops all electronic devices pretty much then you have olivine lithium ion phosphate commonly it has a different structure and and that provides much higher power density but at the expense of lower energy so commonly used for lower intervies hybrid electric vehicles power tools and on grid then you have layered ncm or nca cathode materials when some of the cobalt is replaced by more abundant cobalt also nickel as well as other metals manganese aluminum magnesium and others and these are commonly used in electric vehicles and plug in hybrid electric vehicles as well as ebikes and then you also have spinel structures and lco lco for the for the anode and so the difference between those is based on the difference in charge storage mechanisms so that so there is an intercalation type lithium ion where lithium is stored in the interstitials in the crystal structure so when lithium is inserted or intercalated it doesn't change chemical bonding it doesn't change significantly the volume of the material and these kind of chemistries intercalation type chemistries can be very reversible then you have a new type of chemistry so called conversion type chemistry very broadly that can store much more lithium per unit weight or volume of the material however it has dramatic volume changes much larger volume changes and in addition it is accompanied by baking and the storage of chemical bonds so those chemistries are much harder to stabilize one another parameter to look at eponymy is to look at the devices of lithium ion battery cells and initially since introduction about 30 years ago the prices have been reducing quite dramatically but in the last decade the price reduction has slowed down and we see that for the pure intercalation type lithium ion batteries the prices stabilize are going to stabilize around 100 volts per kilowatt hour it's much harder to move substantially below that and you can also observe that if you look at the energy density of such cells that there is similar plateau and energy density that can be attained so we see that after 30 years of innovation we see stabilizing prices and minimum performance improvements but fortunately if you move to conversion type chemistries there is another bump you can move to significantly higher energy density specific energy as well as cost reduction another issue with conversion conventional intercalation type lithium ion is that for the especially for electric transportation also for electronic devices we rely on nickel and cobalt in the cathode structures and so the amount of cobalt is particularly limited and it's concentrated mostly in Africa so resources are very scarce it's not only that the resources of cobalt are outside us we just don't have enough and so we expect because of the kind of mismatch in supply and demand and much stronger demand in electric vehicles that you know they might apply a shortage of cobalt very soon and so the prices already started to increase and so this might be a problem unless you move away from from cobalt in majority of applications nickel is easier we have just more nickel overall but you also need more nickel for lithium ion batteries for those that comprise ncm or nca cathodes and so you know we do expect shortages and we see already now the price keep rising but much more substantial shortages should be expected like within a decade so by 2030-2035 that's why we expect the prices to start climbing up quite substantially and that's certainly undesirable in other issues that you know there's a price pressure and the market is expanding so rapidly so you know some countries kind of some companies shortcut on personal safety there's also misuse of child labor lots of reports in the Washington Post in other newspapers all around the world so we have to move away from from these practices so there should be other ways to reduce costs of free-to-man batteries without using pollution without endangering people and so unfortunately for us you can estimate a theoretical energy density of lithium ion batteries but considering the building blocks so if you consider lithium ion battery it consists of the current collectors or aluminum oil for the cathode typically separate anode and you know a cup of oil for the anode and you can assume certain thicknesses of the anode and cathodes that are more realistic for given kind of electrolyte conductivity you can estimate certain thicknesses of these oldest components and calculate or estimate energy density of this building block and you can see that if you move to conversion type chemistries for example silicon you know metal fluorides or others you can achieve about two wise two x improvements in volumetric energy density so it means that you need to build you know half the number of cells let's say for typical eddies of the same size and so what is even more exciting is that you can improve specific energy or electromagnetic energy density by up to three times so not only it is important for let's say you know electric planes, airplane taxis and so forth it is also important for electric trucks that have a maximum weight allowed on let's say US highways and so these chemistries become really important and fortunately for us this conversion chemistries in the cathodes is very abundant so you know those materials that I believe to be at the forefront of conversion chemistries like iron, sulfur, copper and there is also massive especially iron and sulfur and they typically offer very low prices and very broad availability all around the world including US. Now we can do some price predictions of lithium-ion battery cores depending on chemistries and depending how the world is changing and so there are multiple components in the cost structure there is electrical production here, electrode assembling, cell finishing, there is also profit sales and ROD costs certainly and certainly there are multiple contributors to each of those there was maybe more detail discussed in this paper, this publication but you can also see that nowadays the cost of manufacturing can be quite substantial compared to the cost of active and inactive materials but you notice that if you have a higher energy density cells it typically have a lower manufacturing cost and lower overall cost because you simply need to produce fewer cells that require a small amount of inactive materials you know fewer production facilities and so forth and so moving to high energy density chemistries including silicon alloy chemistries will enable a further performance reduction and in addition there is just natural maybe gradual reduction manufacturing cost that you can expect and there is a you know you can see trends and you can see how it is expected to proceed in the future but what is very promising is that essentially within a decade and probably actually it's much much sooner the cost of EV, lithium ion batteries with silicon based energy materials will be below $75 per kilowatt hour and I think my assumption is very conservative it could be below that and if you move to new chemistry in the future you will see that first of all you see the observation that the cost of the cathode materials become the dominant factor for conventional chemistry, conventional cathode chemistry and so if they move to conversion type cathodes can reduce the cost, the battery type cost or cell cost to below $40 per kilowatt hour maybe even $30 per kilowatt hour within two decades which is just super exciting so in this for example case the battery cost for the model S would be less than the engine cost for Toyota, for Toyota Corolla so silicon is the most critical milestone in my personal view, it offers about 10 times higher gravimetric capacity compared to graphite, it offers about three times higher volumetric capacity compared to graphite in the cell level it probably can give you an over 40% energy boost. Another important consideration silicon is widely available commodity precursor so there's as much silicon and earth grass as all other metals and semi-metals combined however it is very challenging to use, so people started silicon for now several decades, the early issues that people observed was polarization of large particles because of the very large volume changes, very significant stresses that take place within these large particles that make see the fracture toughness of the material that may lead to polarization and so another challenge and maybe more severe significant swelling of the anode material so silicon swells by over 300% when we fully differentiate it and this volume changes induce some mechanical issues with the battery cells but also electrochemical changes so as you know electrolytes and lithium-ion batteries they are electrochemically unstable on the anode so typically when you have convention or intercalation type graphite anode that has a small volume changes this electrolyte composition forms a stable solid electrolyte interface layer so it decomposes from this ACI that stops for the electrolyte composition but with silicon the volume changes are significant in each cycle so the ACI tends to degrade consuming lithium increasing resistance inducing all sort of side effects and also swelling swelling in the cell however so what we when I joined your tech I started to focus my efforts on understanding degradation mechanisms and how to overcome those and certainly if you go to nano-structurally silicon you pretty much overcome all the mechanical degradations you can even simply use small silicon nanoparticles we also learned that formation of composite particles when you have some sort of matrix microstructure that hosts silicon nanoparticles can prevent volume changes at the particle level so you could potentially prevent swelling in the cell level but most importantly if you have some sort of partial structures when you minimize the volume changes of the particles and allow some internal swelling so silicon swelling within this internal force you can achieve very stable solid electrolyte interface ACI and so when I realized that all these challenges could be overcome we started the company with two amazing co-founders Jean Berdychevsky and Alex Jacobs in the new experience and Jean was the seventh employee Tesla Alex joined Tesla as well very early on both of them have a lot of experience with hardware technologies and and so we gradually grew seeing from the small space in that that room in the and Georgia technology incubator to now close to 300 people working together to commercialize some of these chemistries we currently occupy three buildings in all our medical importance so we moved away from Georgia State after the Georgia Tech to Silicon Valley about now occupying about 100,000 square feet so our vision from the very start was to develop this open replacement technology so we want to replace materials without changing anything else and we demand better factories and so for the end of product we developed this silicon based material that has a minimal volume changes and also comparable size to the graphite data particle level and was very critical for us that we want to develop manufacturing techniques that will be economical at global scale so means that low cost commodity precursors minion you know large volumetric reactors and so this is was our vision from the start and we adhere to it very closely even though it also came with additional challenges but in overall I think conversion type chemistry is challenging for multiple reasons and one way I like to visualize it is that in electronic devices kind of only electrons move and atoms pretty much they put in lithium ion batteries right you have you know crystal structures they put but lithium ions move back and forth and becomes more challenging to stabilize it compared to the movement of electrons in electronic devices now in conversion type chemistry is literally every single atom moves both in lithium with lithium atoms and and the atoms of the course materials so and if you lose kind of any of these motions to a side reaction if one of the thousand even two thousand five thousand atoms changes its way the batteries become undesired unstable not stable enough so we had to take multiple steps from very different industries to produce composites to make sure this motion is fully reversible another challenge was early on that small experimental variations and can hide the signal so if you have multiple steps taken from very different industries if you have small variations in each step and if you transfer this small you kind of cannot see the signal so we had to kind of develop and produce in-house you know very high precision reactors early on when you're developing this technology and finally we also learned that hard way that we had to develop our own metrology our own sensors in order to innovate at sufficient speed and so this is two examples of the cell performance for those of you who are fans of lithium ion batteries and the same technology and this is all data because this is what I have permission to share with a broad audience this is silicon matched with high voltage LCO so the voltage goes all the way to 4.4 volts the aerial loading is pretty high it's above 4 volts sorry 4 milliampere hour per centimeter square so you know thick electrodes and the first cycle of our current product is 91 to 93 percent on the energy side and the capacity of the current product is from 1500 to 2000 per ampere hour per gram about five to six times higher compared to graphite those reported here in full cells was about in 1100 on the end of the level and so you could achieve over thousands of stable cycles in these high performance consumer cells this is data again relatively old data for but but younger for for automotive cells and so this is NCM 811 matched with silicon annals without any proliferation similar the energy material offers this high coolant efficiency almost as as high as as graphite maybe slightly lower again five times six times higher gravimetric capacity the voltage range is smaller so typically for automotive NCM cells you don't go above 4.25 4.2 volts and the loading is highest typically though up to six milliampere hour per centimeter square and you know our materials in large automotive cells so like kind of a laptop size cell for about 15 minutes charging time so not only energy density can be higher but it can also charge your vehicles much faster and operated in a very broad temperature range low temperatures you can charge it low temperatures you can charge it much higher temperatures so forth some of our particles so we can produce particles that are very spherical because we can control synthesis from the ground up and so this spherical particles also enable us to have very low tortuosity so you can have very low very fast charging discharge rates for the individual particle level the charge can be extremely fast and can be in the few few minutes but in the electric level typically it's limited to 10 to 15 minutes at the current state so our first product is silicon based standard powder so it's the same powder that you currently use you just replace graphite powder with this powder it gives about 20 percent or more improvement in the energy density at the cell level but it works today it's very compatible with lithium and battery factories in large or small new and old which is very nice and so another important consideration is that if you improve energy density at the cell level so we're producing the same number of cells you suddenly can serve you know more customers so for example if you have a giga factory and now you move to these new chemistries now you have 1.2 gigawatt hour output per year without any additional increase in overhead costs or the capital expenses so you have a reduced depreciation per hour that you produce you also have a reduced CO2 emission because it takes so much kind of energy in CO2 to produce the cells so if you have cells that have a high energy density you automatically reduce CO2 emission so moving from graphite to silicon has this lots of advantages we were lucky enough and fortunate to build strong partnerships we have two publicly announced which are with Mrs. Bands and BMW so they're going to build this amazing cars beautiful cars with the best technology and the best batteries in the market so they're going to be the first to introduce our tech and to the automotive world so I'm moving now my talk to discuss the conversion type cathode materials as I mentioned the cathodes occupy a majority of the weight in the batteries and in the future we'll contribute the majority of the cost and so there are multiple challenges they also experience some volume changes maybe not as much as silicon but still substantial but the biggest challenge is all the side reactions between the cathode materials conversion that cathode materials and electrolytes typically you have all this dissolution of the conversion that cathode materials at some stages charge or discharge and the soft products also migrate on the anode increase resistance reduce capacity and so forth and overall I would say silicon is challenging conversion type cathodes are more challenging but fortunately some of the methodologies that can be used for the product of silicon can also be used qualitatively to overcome some of the challenges with conversion type cathode materials such as formation of composites, cordial structures and so forth so there are generally multiple pathways people visualize to stabilize these chemistries there are some innovations in cell design there are some innovations in electrolytes but also innovations in active particle design so I'm going to focus mostly on those and then maybe I'll touch a little bit on electrolyte so there are several contenders for the kind of the most promising lowest cost cathode materials one of them is sulfa and so it can be produced as a pure sulfa state or as a lithium sulfide so my personal opinion that lithium sulfide rather than sulfa is likely going to be the choice of materials because it's much easier to produce batteries in a fully discharged state it's safer also lithium sulfide has a much higher thermal stability so you can do all these coatings nanostructures and so forth much more easily on the lithium sulfide and you know this nanostructure will likely be needed and protection as well but what is important is that the synthesis of these materials has to be inexpensive has to be precise you cannot have excess of force on an axis because it will reduce energy density it will reduce volumetric capacity and it's not very high because the voltage is lower for the sulfide you cannot have this too many too much of a dead weight or dead volume and another advantage is that you know people now consider the move to dry electric processing and dry electric processing will be particularly advantageous for lithium sulfide because of the reactivity in contact with with moisture and so we we start working on on sulfa lithium sulfide batteries again almost almost a decade ago you know one way you can produce a lightweight lithium sulfide cathode is by solution based processing so essentially you can dissolve lithium sulfide in many alcohols methanol methanol and you can precipitate it on different in different surfaces and you can also use protective coatings such as carbon carbon coatings or coatings with other materials and you can achieve decent stability and the problem is that even though lithium sulfide has smaller volume changes compared to silicon it still has this volume changes and so if you have some sort of protective shell it doesn't change volume during deification or dilatation it induces some stresses and the shell eventually fails and breaks apart and so once it fails then you have the solution of the sulfa lithium sulfide material and your encycling and one way to overcome it is to create composites when you kind of embed lithium sulfide in some sort of host structures and then you can think about different levels of hierarchy in this core shell architecture and so and we demonstrated long time ago that you can produce these particles by multiple pathways and it also will be expensive in this example you just have a solution of lithium sulfide in alcohol methanol for example methanol and then you dissolve some of the polymers in the same in the same solvent and then you simply evaporate the solvent you can just simply evaporate on the planar surface and you can produce particles you can produce fibers and once you do that you can carbonize it you can go to high temperatures because lithium sulfide is is thermally stable and one of the nice ways about this approach is that once you will start precipitating lithium sulfide particles and the polymer portion kind of prevents for the growth of the grains so you can control the size of the lithium sulfide if you want to control it typically you have to because because of the minimize average stresses but also because lithium sulfide is not very conductive material and so you have these structures have architectures you can achieve very high purity of the material of the components and if you look at you know TEM, SEM you can see that if you deposit uniform coatings you will see for example in this case this lithium sulfide nanocrystals of you know pretty uniform distribution sizes uniformly distributed within this within these composites and you can achieve very good stability even at high temperatures typically if you have commercial cells go to even 35-45 C you see faster degradation but if you have nice protection of the of the active material against the solution you can achieve very decent stability in fact even even the charge this charge hysteresis can be quite small which is perceived to be a really problem for many conditions that catch the materials but apparently it doesn't necessarily come from the material itself when the material itself also has a hysteresis but much smaller it also comes from the all the dissolution products that increases the resistance of the over the cells of lithium and batteries in addition to carbon there are plenty of other maybe more efficient materials that can be can be used to prevent dissolution and can minimize the solution of the polysulfides and electrolytes and their formation during the cycling one of these is layered oxides including lithium diphenium oxide initially we try to create this kind of shell structures on the surface of lithium sulfide and you know found that it was very difficult to have a perfect perfect coating solution based methods for the kind of shell formation are not as precise as as vapor deposition methods so it's difficult to create a perfect shell but surprisingly we found that even if you don't have a perfect shell somehow the solution of polysulfides gets dramatically reduced and in the end even just mix mix this lithium diphenium oxide with a lithium sulfide and found that you can even by mixing reduce the solution and so what we realize in collaboration with Oric Warding that some of these materials including a lithium diphenium oxide it cuts essentially polysulf one chain polysulfides to a much shorter chain polysulfides that have much lower suitability in electrolyte so you can create this kind of functional or smart coatings or smart nanostructures and so as a result you can stabilize different stability and different temperatures and different rates even if you don't have a perfect perfect coatings another material that is very interesting but also very challenging is a metal fluoride so when you liquidate metal fluoride for example iron fluoride iron D fluoride or iron III fluoride you produce these composites when you have a mixture of lithium fluoride and metals and typically the metal metals don't like lithium fluoride nearby so they tend to cluster over over time during cycling increasing kind of mass transfer resistance increasing resistance of the cell to quite significant levels in addition there are always some dissolution initially we thought mostly metals but we also realized that not only metals dissolve lithium fluoride also dissolves during cycling and overall just very high reactivity with electrolyte which is problematic and so you know my view on this chemistry is similar to the lithium sulfide so you know if you want to utilize it you probably have to produce it in full adherence stage so a mixture of composites lithium fluoride metal composites compared to just pure metal fluorides similar you would have to have a structure and you have to have a shelf protection for improved stability iron is probably the most likely candidate for for the metal fluoride chemistry it's very abundant it has very high capacity especially metal III fluoride and you can also harvest kind of the precursor of these materials using a waste of metallurgical industry producing enough material for millions of likely vehicles so which is which is very nice so you have effectively zero cost input materials and so you know one way to overcome the challenges we found that this you know is used this nanostructure in one way for example is to simply embed the demonstrated in this old paper you know iron fluoride particles metal fluoride particles within this porous carbon framework we use this for example for simply precipitation of the precursor into this into the force and so and we could achieve very good stability if you form a if you use certain electrolytes if you use certain electrolytes that form a very stable or more stable sci on the surface with the metal particles because certainly the surface area of these particles is very high but on the other hand you also minimize the solution because everything is embedded within this carbon structure and you don't rely on conductivity of metals or interconnected metals because carbon provides the success to electrons needed for the chemical reaction and so there are multiple pathways to produce similar structures so this is for example we use for the production of fibers you can produce spherical particles by the same way in this case you simply produce fibers by using precursors for the polymers or precursors for carbon and precursors for the metal fluorides and produce very uniform fibers comprising nanoparticles of iron fluoride embedded in this case in carbon structure it doesn't have to be carbon but in this case it's carbon and so you know again you can achieve a relatively uniform distribution of the particles and a relatively good stability of hundreds of cycles in this case and you know much higher capacities so as you remember as you might remember the sort of gravimetric capacity of intercalation type cathodes is in order from 150 to around 200 190 a mA per gram so here you have much higher capacity that could be attained in the future however the challenging challenges still persist so liquid electrolytes typically work you know kind of work at room temperature however if you go to high temperatures and typically lithium ion batteries have to be cycled at high temperatures as well and one of the safety tests is actually charging the cell to high voltage and storing it like in an ATC 90C for several days making sure that electrolyte doesn't decompose doesn't form too much gases making sure that the cells don't degrade don't explode so it becomes much more problematic because much faster reactions between much faster side reactions between liquid electrolyte and active material if it's unprotected and so for example in this case you know at room temperature this cell behave quite well but at high temperature even at 50 C and degradation this was so much faster than we expected and so the two ways to overcome it is either figure out how to produce particles that are fully protected by ways of nanostructure including formations and so forth or maybe utilize certain electrolytes including solid electrolytes potentially polymer electrolytes or ceramic electrolytes that would minimize or greatly reduce the side reactions of the solution between fluorid dissolution of iron into electrolyte during cycling and so I know that Shirley is going to cover solid electrolyte cells but I'm going to cover a little bit too so one of the ways to produce when we conventional way to produce all solid state lithium ion batteries or lithium batteries is to produce you know membranes solid state membranes and you know kind of bold meal active material with solid electrolyte and compress it sinter it and the cathode and put it together and sinter the whole stack and the problem is that this is you know relatively expensive in addition you know thin membrane is difficult to handle thick membranes reduce energy density in addition all these solid electrolytes at all that many of solid electrolytes that people consider are much heavier compared to liquid electrolytes so it adds weight to the cell and so we were driven about like much lower cost manufacture and ideally fully compatible with lithium ion batteries and to produce all solid state cells and so you know we thought about these techniques when we use much lower melting point solid electrolytes and the melting point below 300 C that can be simply melt infiltrated into the stack or into the cylindrical cells using conventional techniques so that we can produce slurry conventional way maybe use more thermo stable polymers and more thermo stable separators make a stack infiltrate with electrolyte at high temperatures elevated temperatures cool it down so it operates effectively at room temperature and what we found was that many kind of low melt melting point electrolytes solid electrolytes have also low weight low density some of them have low density lower density compared to even liquid electrolytes which is just remarkable and so we demonstrated in this more recent paper proof of concept based on two low melting point electrolytes one was anti-pirovskites and another one was lithium boron hydrant based and I'm particularly excited about lithium boron hydrant because it's in very low density and really high conductivity so we use several types of conventional or common materials I'm more common in battery research ncm cathodes we also used lids and preliminary studies on lithium sulfate cathodes conversion type cathodes and two types of two types of anode material graphite nlco lithium titanium oxide and so we found that we could achieve perfect weighting of both electrolytes and active materials however if you want to achieve perfect weighting in the electrode you also need to make sure that your electrolyte weights on the carbon additives on the polymer binder and so you know this was much more challenging and so in the end we decided that we'll simply use an atomic layer deposition for the proof of concept studies to make sure that we have a uniform and very good weighting and so we achieved that and so you can you can melt infiltrate and achieve very good weighting in the electrode and can very similar to what you can achieve with you know conventional liquid electrolytes and you can have you know thin thin separator layer you can have all solid state batteries and you know because of the low melting point another advantage is that you kind of don't have side reactions you go to high melting high high thermo sorry high thermal treatments to go to high temperatures if you want to sinter something to prevent kind of reduce remaining pores it typically induce some side reactions so limited by that sometimes you have to use very high pressures for this technology but if you have low melting point materials because of low temperatures there is no side reaction so you can utilize a variety of cathode chemistries and anode chemistries and you will be fine and so we could we made full cells by this approach they were not like perfectly stable initially I thought it's going to be amazing and it's it's much harder than I thought because one thing we kind of didn't fully predict was that even if you overcome you know we predict a little bit but not fully predict even if you overcome some of the the solutions another way to do great cells is simply mechanical degradation and so any type of materials they a little bit expanded a little bit contract during cycling even intercalation type cathode materials and so the stresses at the interface between solid state electrolyte that have much harder time accommodating volume changes and even smaller changes compared to liquid electrolytes become much more problematic so we over time we observe corrects formation and elimination at the interface between ncm cathodes and solid electrolytes on the other hand the the cathodes themselves they may be stable which is nice right so you can prevent you can prevent polarization of the cathode materials and anode materials however you have to figure out how to come at the stresses at the interface between solid state electrolyte and active materials and so the if you go to higher charging voltage right there is a much larger volume expansion contraction in ncm if you use graphite compared to lco lco has very small volume changes so it's perfectly stable graphite has much larger volume changes also the interface graphite is pretty much in north material so maintaining very stable interface free from cracks is much more much harder and so we also got some preliminary data on lithium sulfide and shardage thank you thank you so you know even though the conversion that cathode materials have much larger volume changes but you can reduce these materials in fully located state fully expanded state so if you have ncm if you extract lithium it doesn't shrink necessarily it sometimes expands and then shrinks so but if you have lithium sulfide conversion that chemistry it's only kind of shrinks during the litigation so you can overcome some of these stresses and so we demonstrated again pretty stable performance hundreds hundreds of stable cycles in this chemistry I still have to improve loading utilization of active materials and so forth but I think overall it's it's very promising and in summary I think I want to emphasize that intercalation type batteries lithium mine batteries and reaching their performance limits it has also supply limitations and cost limitations and conversion type chemistries for example silicon coupled with lithium sulfide or metal fluoride or metal lithium fluoride may overcome such limitations and now allow us to to have much lower costs silicon annals proven to be commercially viable and scale up is in progress which is very exciting and you know in principle you can utilize solid state technologies to help overcome some of the challenges with conversion type chemistries thank you so much of course I want to thank my students working on these projects and also collaborators from national labs in georgitech atinju Alex Alexeev and Oryk Borozin from army research lab and thank you very much for your attention I also have to disclose formally the conflict of interest because georgitech and myself are stockholders in the company and so thank you thank you glad that was such an engaging presentation and the the work you show begins to give us hope that there's life beyond the intercalation cathode and current lithium ion batteries so now we have now we have some brief time for questions for those of you you can type your question into the chat or you can use the raise hand feature and I see shelly has a question and so we'll do shelly's question and then Scott when it comes to sort of solid state electrolytes we start you know talking about new applications in terms of aerospace and are you going to have issues there with with being able to to sort of operate at fast enough sort of charge discharge rates in some of those applications or is that really not a concern I mean it's always a concern you know there is always a you know kind of multiple contributions to resistance some of the solely electrolytes are pretty conductive and I think the conductivity can be further improved with the borohydrates is very conductive and one of the kind of advantages of kind of combining you know solid state with conversion type cathodes is that you know the solid state electrolytes they have troubles being stable on the at low potential and at the same time at the high potential so if you can you know reduce some of its limitations so for example if you only use conversion type cathodes that don't have to go to the high voltages you can have a much more stable much more larger range also re-electrolytes that you can you can use and so the conductivity that two components of the contribution to resistance in the cells certainly bulk conductivity of electrolyte is important consideration but also the charge transfer resistance of the resistance of the interface between active material and and the solid state and so and so you have to do a lot of engineering can certainly when you have kind of put weight in typically the resistance is lower but doesn't have to be lower depends on the kind of reactions of the interface and chemistry of the interface in addition as you rightfully mentioned in space probably the temperature is lower and probably you have to heat it up you have to heat it up to go to high temperature and then enable much faster charging uh but on the positive side you know the car you can stop the car if it goes on fire you can stop the car and leave the car in 10 minutes right space you can't necessarily you can you can land from space in 10 minutes so safety is much higher um much higher importance Thanks Gleb we're next going to turn to a question from Scott Thanks Gleb wonderful to see you that there is a great future so I work at DuPont and we spend a lot of time working with OEMs on battery design and mostly related to thermal management and so I wanted to hear your thoughts on the robustness of a temperature profile so let cars go from minus 40C in Minnesota to 40C in Texas so you know spanning 80C so I wanted to hear about the robustness of the technology with regard to temperature both in use as well as charging so charging temperature is really critical and marriage that's right that's right I mean it's a very good comment and so I would say in the near term maybe maybe even longer term in this case you know liquid electrolytes may have a better short I mean liquid electrolytes can operate the car at minus 70C it's remarkable you know and then from minus 70 to plus 70 it's very broad range and so it's much easier to utilize compared to solid electrolytes in this you know very broad temperature range it's certainly you know silicon is also advantageous because the capacity is higher and so you can make thinner anodes and so you know the diffusion time is proportional to square diffusion distance so you can do much faster charging or the same charging at much lower temperatures so lots of advantages of moving from graphite to silicon um yeah I don't know if I will answer the question thank you um let's move on to a question from Amy yeah thank you Gleb for um highlighting the span of fundamental research to commercialization can you comment on the challenges and the timeline required to go from an innovation in a lab an exciting result to something actually being commercial ready and what you think the challenges are there yeah I think the biggest challenge is like a proper expectations takes 10 years I mean even for an intercalation type lithium-ion battery produced by sony took 10 years and US companies just simply reduced you know refused all just refused investors a long time sony did invest and then they've come up with intercalation type lithium-ion batteries which is used now every day which enable us to go to utilize renewables much more effectively right so without this long term investments is really really hard so for us for example we limited ourselves to designing materials which are dropping in the sense that you don't need to change the ways that lithium-ion batteries are made and still it took us 10 years like still right it took us 10 years it's very hard and so you know especially you know when the battery components are brought it doesn't help because you have to like iterate very very often right you have to have very close collaborations between you know in this case battery producers and us who supply materials and again everything took at least like twice as long as I initially expected and so if you are you know VC funded we're funded by investors who look for their kind of much shorter term gains it is it's very hard and so we were lucky to attract investors who have much longer horizon who can invest for like 10 20 30 years but this is not common this is I would say uncommon 10 years that's that's amazing that's about as long as it takes someone to get 10 year or full professorship so we'll do a question from Gerard next very good congratulations this is a very very tough adventure you take an valuable one I'm not an expert on battery I'm going from the industry but there are two things I would like to whether you need help or whether you feel you are on top of it number one is quality control because I look at your projects and like you say there is a surprise coming at every step of your experiment so one of the big questions will be what are the surprise when you go through a real supply chain right silicon or lithium is there any surprises that will happen when you are in the real life and do you have a plan to test for failure you see what I mean so as you can get as many surprises upstream rather than downstream and the second thing how do we think about first principle multi-scale modeling the reason I say that is you know I mean if we go public with your investors we need to make sure that the science is sufficiently robust to be able to prepare for for surprises so is it part of your radar the lab or is it something where you absolutely yeah absolutely I think it's like you know it's a challenge it's also advantage for us so we did invest very heavily into science and fundamentals and in quality control we we are kind of proud to say that you know we have one of the strictest quality standards in the industry and so you know when when your kind of system is very robust against variation on one hand is is good right is good for you on the other hand it's also bad because you competitors can can copy it so in our case it's very hard to reproduce our materials so you know it's hard for the competitors to look at our particles and reproduce them on the other hand we do have to maintain the strictest quality control in production and it's very important for us and as you rightly mentioned it's not only for the our kind of supplies but also supplies our kind of customers making sure they don't they don't screw up they don't change you know electrolyte compositions especially working with a you know smaller comp so initially when we entered the the market so our devices are now in fitness takers and other small devices you know we have to work with their small manufacturers and they have very different standards for quality compared to large manufacturers and so we have to make sure that they don't have too much more we have to literally measure everything for them don't have too much moisture and electrolytes don't do anything stupid don't like mix materials you know clean the mixers when they mix the cathode and anode in the same batch so lots of anecdotes you know why things can can go wrong but on the other hand if you go to automotive supplies there's they have amazing very high quality standards and they're very conservative conservative is bad right because they can't innovate enough but on the other hand it's very good in terms of safety and so you know by qualifying our materials in you know some of the largest producers of lithium-ion batteries and supplying to some of the kind of most concerned not when they're innovative and conservative at the same time in German manufacturing manufacturing of cars right you kind of it takes a lot of time you know honestly just to qualify material for electric vehicle so it takes seven years even if it's conventional material doesn't matter if it's new material conventional takes seven years to qualify right so like how can you come up with new invention and think about commercializing it for years if it just qualification takes seven years um and they do lots of you know safety testing videos also safety testing there's also lots of safety testing at the cell production facilities they do a lot of safety testing that become manufacturing facilities because you know all recalls you know any single recall can kill a company so it is very critical well it sounds like it sounds like a very important challenge for future innovation and to address so I'm glad thank you for your excellent talk and I think everyone for their engaging questions I'm next going to hand it over to Amy who will introduce our next speaker thank you yeah thanks a lot glove and I think your talk leads really beautifully into what I'm guessing professor mine is going to present so it's my great pleasure to introduce our next speaker Dr. Shirley mine is the zable endowed chair in energy technologies and professor of material science and nano engineering at the University of California San Diego she is the founding director of the sustainable power and energy center and the inaugural director of the materials discovery and design institute she's also the editor-in-chief of the mrs journal energy and sustainability um Shirley's won many awards so I'm just going to highlight two uh she was awarded the nsf career award in 2011 and was the finalist for the lab apnic national award in 2018 she is also a fellow of the electrochemical society and very active in the electrochemical society really highlighting advances in research but also um promoting young people um Shirley's really changed how the battery community thinks about operando characterization methods for batteries which are are critical I think what you heard in glove's talk is that batteries are very dynamic devices and so innovating new ways to um study and characterize batteries and a particular degradation processes are absolutely critical and so that's why I'm really excited about Shirley's presentation today the title of her presentation is lithium metal battery and solid state batteries um and she'll highlight opportunities and challenges so Shirley thank you in advance for your time and I will turn it over to you thank you Amy for the kind introduction it's a great pleasure to be here today I think after GLAB's presentation we can dive directly into the detailed discussions so my perspective is a little bit different from what GLAB has presented the very materials focused I think like Amy said that my passion is really on the operando characterization and I actually utilize greatly the facilities or the cutting edge tools that department of energy have built over the last many decades so I think you know before I dive deeper into the operando tools for the deep scientific understanding I do want to remind everyone that humanity has been working on batteries for over 200 years Sir Alexandra Volta is the one who invented the Volta pile even today when I'm doing outreach with high school students I still use his system and the French scientist who invented the lead acid batteries I think over 150 years old but the lead acid batteries do occupy half of the world revenues of battery sales let's not forget about that we still use lead acid batteries widely in the world and it's 99.9% or maybe in the United States it's 99.9% recycled but in some places in the world the recycling is not perfect yet. Nickel metal hydride battery by Dr. Oshinsky American inventors who has actually my first car per year is the function on lithium sorry nickel metal hydride batteries and in 1976 Professor Weitinghan who's a member of the academy so it's Dr. John Goodenough 76 Weitinghan reported the use of lithium metal and titanium disulfide as an electrochemical device after that Professor Goodenough saw the paper while he was working on superconductors when he met the materials called the lithium cobalt oxide he thought okay maybe this will be a really good leaking intercalation materials together with Yoshino Akira Yoshino they won the Nobel Prize for 2019 why we want to show you this roadmap of the battery history is because as a professor when I teach my students you know after Nobel Prize is won how can I motivate them to work harder right so the history told us every time when we invent a new batteries we did not completely replace the old ones we simply unlock new applications new applications some of them we may never have imagined I mean in my grandmother's generation I think it's harder for them to imagine we're driving with a car with 3000 batteries on the bottom of my seats right so think about the future if we do invent new types of batteries how could we enable robotics iot flying cars I don't like to use the word drones it sounds very weapon like but if we talk about the flying cars I think people who live in LA and New York are very happy to hear that and the one of the most significant impact for sector for CO2 reduction is the electrification of semi truck and the long haul you know shipping industry and ultimately of course everyone is looking for the gigawatt our terawatt our solution for deploying as much as solar and wind possible at very very low cost so I would imagine there will be another Nobel Prize will be given whoever who actually solve the holy grail energy storage problem for renewables so I hope a lot of the young scientists and the upcoming students still consider this as a very very promising and exciting career pathway and one of the things I have to apologize on behalf of my community is that we use the word watt hour it's 3600 watt second because one hour is 3600 seconds and everybody in the chemistry community are so familiar with the word jewel and the one watt second is one more so in fact one watt hour is a very big number when we talk about the gigawatt hour we're actually talking about terawatt jewel so this is so important for us to align our units so that the chemists and the battery people and the physicists that we can actually communicate well with each other because when there's like three magnitude order differences in the units we will have trouble when we dive deeper in the technical details lithium ion or lithium metal batteries fundamentally different but they also share this common platform where you have the current collector electrodes interface and then electrolyte and another interface and the castle the materials and another current collector so it is a complex living system and why I say it's a living system it's like a human body because when I actually shine x-ray when I do the experiment in the advanced photon source in our national lab I can see exactly how the device alive when I operating it what you're seeing it is the x-ray diffraction peak of all the particles inside the castle you see it moves because the volume change you see it one become two because the phase transformation and this process surprisingly is completely reversible when I discharged battery it comes back so that's what it means it's it's live living system and during the whole process if we work with liquid electrolyte now you know the first box is lithium ion batteries with liquid electrolyte because the liquid the ions can transport from anode to castle that we call this the crosstalk anything generated on the castle can travel to the anode and vice versa and this crosstalk effect is very profound for the degradation of the batteries for long-term cycling and the reason people move towards highly concentrated electrolyte or solid electrolyte is because we want to prevent as much as crosstalk as possible so one day we will have a battery last as long as the solar panel like 30 years or even 40 years the second important concept while you're seeing this volume change right I want to remind everyone who's an engineer right for inorganic materials to go through this type of volume changes it's like the airplanes taking off and landing like every time you take off and land the atmosphere pressure changes right in the high attitude that you have very low pressure so the body of the airplane goes through this kind of repeated the process landing and taking off in the battery we have the fatigue electrochemical fatigue of the materials and that is the one of the degradation mechanisms we're seeing in the batteries and one another important factors that differentiate the batteries so much from you know let's say fuel cells and other open system is that a battery is a truly thermodynamically closed system with this kind of closed system if you want long-term cycling the columbic efficiency needs to reach three nine or above and if you stay at your phone right what does closed system mean is that the matters cannot go out and replenish think about the fuel cells you have the tanks outside even you know internal combustion engine you have a tank outside the device is only a conversion device however for battery the storage and the conversion are done in the same device in a closed system so that's why the efficiency requirement is so high and when I talk to people who work in the fuel cell areas you know of course they can tolerate the 60 percent 70 percent energy efficiencies because it's an open system open system always can tolerate more inefficiencies right so the third important take-home message is really this concept of sei many of us have the experience driving the electric cars with lithium based batteries we can park our car in the airport for one month and then you come back the battery is still operating very well if you drive with the nickel metal hydride or lead acid batteries you won't have this luxury because there's no stable sei for those batteries the self discharge rate is very high so having a solid electrolyte interface particularly on the anode side that will be electronically insulating and ionically conductive that shuts down the self discharge reactions and this sei to me is the major differentiator for the life and safety of the battery technologies and so many top scientists in the world you know including asia europe and uh north america a lot of us spend our career trying to understand uh you know at atomic level what is the composition what is the distribution of this sei and uh when we do the battery research at least in my group we have the tagline saying from atom to system we'd like to take a uh bottom up approach where we design things at the atomic level understand things at atomic level and design eventually move towards the uh cell and the system level optimization so what did the battery field have achieved in the last 30 years is indeed quite amazing uh i think glab showed uh looking forward in the next few decades what could happen and my slides have been very focusing on what happened in the last 30 years at least for this part because what i think uh important to point out is that uh engineering is actually really really important you know with engineering we were able to triple the energy density in the fixed volume cells 18650 cells uh we were able to reduce the cost by 10 times we were able to able to extend the lifetime and this are all thanks to the advanced diagnosis and the characterizations that we have carried out for understanding uh matters at atomic and molecular level so this graph uh that made by aga national lab jcisa in the phase one very nicely demonstrated that you know including what uh glab have mentioned you know the future technologies can bring us two to three times in uh energy density and in order for us to achieve the similar accomplishment that the lithium-ion battery have enjoyed we really needed to focus on the fundamental understanding and now we also have an important task for the recycling of the batteries because obviously the world is going to have terawatt hour units of batteries and recycling of lithium-ion have to start now if i can remind you the lead acid batteries did not start recycling only after second world war which is long overdue because it was actually deployed to the world in the late 19th centuries but lithium-ion batteries now 30 years later is really the time for us to carefully think about the recycling science and it cannot be done the same way as lead acid battery it has to be done completely differently okay so um i will take the next a few minutes to walk you through the battery 500 consortium work it's a flagship program by department of energy uh to enable lithium-ion metal batteries um i think the lithium-ion metal batteries today is entirely different from the lithium-ion metal batteries uh back in the 1970s because the castle the materials that time has no lithium in it but now we have all these castle the materials that was liquid so if we enable lithium-ion metal batteries now ideally you do not need any lithium-ion metal on the negative electrode side you can have anode free but uh in the reality it's really difficult to achieve completely anode free so we use a very thin seed layer of the lithium metals here and the electrolyte is completely different from what we use in the lithium-ion system so the goal is to go for higher energy density of course i show you the performance data first but i'm a scientist so i'm most interested in understanding why you know back in 2017 we the performance was so poor i mean anytime we cycle these two amp hours cell by the way this is a 20-layer multi-layer cells not a laboratory scale you cannot do this kind of work in the academic institution it has to be a collaborative effort between us and the national lab um and from 2017 to 2018 we completely switch out the electrolyte which makes sense because the previous electrolyte was designed for graphite anode now we have to use lithium metal so we find a compatible electrolyte and then the second the major progress from 2018 to 2020 is what i want to tell you what happened uh you know without switching the electrolyte we only learned how to operate the cells uh and there's a reason why and i want to make a clear disclaimer here that uh you know you will see Quantonscape is already public company Solid Energy SES will go for public very soon i'm sure they enjoyed our open communication about the science but we have no connections with any of the commercial entities so um right now i think the cell is operated under certain pressure so today i'm going to talk a little bit about why as a material scientist we are very excited to see that the pressure control in the batteries actually become a very important factor to consider so lithium metal anode when you do electrochemical deposition depends on what electrolyte you use you can develop this kind of whiskers morphology or you can develop this kind of large chunky metal grates of course by intuition you can imagine we want this kind of um metal like dense metal to be deposited because the columbic efficiencies for these kind of dense metal will be much more uh uh reversible compared to the whiskers type however how to achieve that with a thousand cycles here is the question right because if you recall in the semiconductor industry when the damasin process was invented to deposit the copper in the deep trench they only need to deposit once however in our lithium metal deposition we not only need to deposit we have to strip it back we have to send this lithium back to the castle and deposit again and send it back again so it's a really long process right if you look at the achievement of the electrolyte advancement that moved us from the low 90s to close to 99.5 percent efficiency now the second thing we really start to think about the lithium metal sodium metal all these reactive metals they're very soft so can we think about ways to tune in the mechanical properties to ensure these lithium deposition and the stripping are both reversible and dense so the first challenge back in the 2017 is that we have so few tools that actually allow us to observe lithium metal without contamination of air and water and CO2 lithium at room temperature react with everything react with water react with CO2 react even with nitrogen at room temperature okay so when we do the focused ion beam cut you can actually see if you use room temperature process even your ion beam the guiding ion beam will alloy with lithium so you just get a huge mess if you do the characterization and the only way to get around with it is either you switch out your ion beam to xenon or argon if you don't have that kind of money because those machines cost two million dollars if you don't have that kind of you can use a cheap cryo stage method to cool down the stage and significantly suppress the reaction of lithium with other matters because lithium itself does not go through phase transformation until minus 186 degree Celsius so at a liquid nitrogen temperature is okay once we have this tool we also develop the similar tool in the transmission electron microscope and this tool now allow us to look at how the distribution of the interface and the lithium metal is and you can see this lithium metal almost liquid like they are distributed inside encapsulated by this SEI layer and the different morphology give you different quantities of the lithium that is encapsulated inside the SEI and this kind of advanced characterization tool typically is you know when we first see the use of this tool is to imaging zika virus right Ebola virus is in the bio field but the battery field very happily we adopted the advancement in the cryogenic imaging because it's not just the low temperature what you see here the imaging with this kind of resolution is done by only a few electrons per armstrong square so the detector is extremely sensitive and that's why we can actually capture this kind of phenomena that previously we cannot see but the disadvantage of TEM is always like the blind person touching the elephant right because you only zoom in a small area of the matter so what you want is a global information about exactly how much in lithium is trapped in the SEI so with that we invented this called the titration gas chromatography so you utilize the reactivities of these lithium and metals and when you titrated with solvent the right solvent one of the gas particularly hydrogen you know we know that there's a lot of prior knowledge accumulated about the hydrogen quantification because we had spent a lot of time on hydrogen in early 2000s but now we utilize this method to quantify what is the dead lithium trapped in the battery and with the proper calibration curve we can measure all different kinds of electrolytes what is their impact on the columbic efficiency and we found actually the different electrolytes that people use we have electrolyte from army research lab from general motors we found that the SEI amount is there's not a lot of difference but the trapped the lithium amount is so vastly different it's because of that micro structure picture I showed you a few graphs ago you know if you have this kind of micro structure you will have a large amount of lithium trapped inside the SEI but if you have this kind of large granular lithium you can have very very high columbic efficiencies not only we found this interesting phenomena I think we also went on to build what we call the pressure controlled load cells to study the impact of mechanical pressure on soft metals like lithium foil and the result is quite surprising because lithium metal bulk lithium metal does not plastically deform until five mega pasca what we're seeing is very sensitive at the low pressure such as 300 to 400 kilo pasca a magnitude less than what we would imagine that lithium metal will be impacted by the mechanical properties right so that's a big surprise for me and my students but this phenomena is repeatedly seen in all the different current density when we test this hypothesis and we can also use cryo T SEM to look at the morphology and what we found is that the densification seems to occurred around the 400 kilo pasca and this densification will be further revealed if you do the cross-section card you know it's actually the first time I'm seeing this really beautiful colander lithium metal depositions on the copper substrate and obviously something happened at nucleation of the lithium because we know the bulk lithium does not plastically deform until five mega pasca so there must be some interesting mechanical properties that are associated with the electrochemically deposited lithium when it first gets nucleated on the copper substrate the lower the pressure is the more porous your lithium metal will become so the key here is that keep the pressure on keep the pressure on during the cycling and the dynamic pressure control is very difficult I understand because you know the sickness is going to change right so how do you maintain the pressure while the sickness is changing is not an easy task in the laboratory small-scale cells we can accomplish that but in the large-scale automotive cells how to achieve that is a big question right so that leave us to this publication actually just came out yesterday from Nature Energy the simulation work that Tom with my colleague in Idaho National Lab shows actually the nucleus of the lithium metal behave fundamentally different from the bulk lithium metal and this is again you know where we see the beautiful phenomena that happen in the nano materials people always say nano is strong but I think for reactive metal what we see here is that the densification of these lithium metals can occur at a very low pressure actually so during this exercise I think we prove that using the pressure knob is a very important fact that we have to think about but you know the external pressure I think a lot of engineers just think it's so not elegant so you have to what you have to cycle your batteries when you actually keep monitoring the pressure so I think that what we see is what we see right whether the engineers can eventually implement this in the large-scale cells is a different question however I do want to mention that in UCSD my group is the original inventor of liquefied gas electrolyte so in our group we spun out this south aid technologies company also for food disclosure you know it's out from my research group but this is a cylindrical cell so what my students use is those fluorinated gas molecules the ones that used for refrigeration he was able to dissolve the salts and because this cylindrical cells is self-pressurized so the pressure is generated by the gas molecules themselves when they liquefy so these lithium metal cells can actually operate at a very very wide range from minus 60c to positive 60c with extremely beautiful morphology of dense lithium deposited at even very very low temperature so I think that gave you a good sense about how sensitive the lithium metal is towards the pressure mechanical pressure right which is non-existent in the intercalation materials because intercalation materials mostly not sensitive towards external pressure so I think I'm moving towards the end of my presentation because the professor Gleb Lusing already gave a very good talk about solid-state batteries I just want to mention that the solid-state batteries is also could potentially be the drop-in solution because we have succeeded in making very very thin you know layer of solid-state electrolyte and the very high loading of the castle and the prototypes coming from the research labs you know we sometimes allow our visitors to cut the battery or two and guarantee there will be no fires right these are the kind of batteries that excite people because of course you know if we want to put a large-scale batteries inside our house I've driven my Tesla for three years I never parked my car in the garage because I know the liquid electrolyte has issues so the solid-state does give you some kind of assurance that because the electrolyte itself is not flammable but this is not the reason me as a scientist was so excited about solid-state batteries we are excited about solid-state batteries because you know solid-state battery is not liquid so Gleb mentioned about the importance of not having the void the empty space in solid-state electrolyte I totally agree with that anytime you have a void because the solid-state cannot flow solid electrolyte is not liquid they cannot flow and fuel the void so you will create a lot more additional interfaces that you have to take care of and this is a really problem you know if we think about how solid-state batteries can compete in terms of its performance with liquid but at the same time I think if you look at the electrochemical windows of liquid versus the solid in solid we have a lot of choice we have polymers we have sulfides we have oxides it is really truly exciting to think about the solid-state ionics field it is only the very beginning but when we have sulfides that is chemically unstable is the NMC cathode companies like Toyota reported that well you can put a layer of buffer layer on the cathode and your performance will significantly improve right away so from the fundamental understanding perspective is that the solid electrolyte itself is actually electrochemically active so this is the part I think you know I guess challenge our conventional wisdom because the conventional wisdom is the solid electrolyte does not not the solid electrolyte sorry the electrolyte itself only transported the ion but does not participate in the electrochemical reactions however now you can see that the solid electrolyte the sulfides if you give it give it an electronic pathway it can be electrochemically reversible and very reversible okay so the question for electrochemists is that is the reaction good or bad if it's good I will make it happen fast because if you look at the formation of the species at the negative electrode side is li2s li3p they are both electronically insulating and ionically conductive so these are good sei layers if they form it's perfect on the cathode side we have a problem because the generation of the sulfur typically is a bad thing because sulfur will lead to very high impedance because sulfur does not conduct the lithium very well so once you understand really fully understand the plus and the minus of these interfacial reaction you can then go and design cells you know okay this is just another slide to prove my point like the negative electrode side conduct the lithium so well the positive electrode side after the formation the first decomposition impedance is through the roof so once you understand these phenomena you can just minimize the decomposition reactions by removing the carbon black from the cell so by doing this we were able to actually enable very sick loading of the cathode of the solid state batteries um Amy I think I was given 40 minutes or 30 minutes I think there may be some misunderstanding ah there may be you okay 40 minutes yes I started a little bit late yeah okay yeah I think on my clock it's 33 minutes right now so okay um I will just keep going all right so once we solve the cathode side of the problem on the anode side the lithium metal is a real big problem because the mechanical sensitivities of the lithium metal to the external pressure but the solid state batteries right now cannot operate very well unless you have external pressure so all the lithium cells lithium metal cells will immediately short if you have a pressure larger than five megapascals on the cells so what happened to the field right now is actually I think a glava will be very happy to see this because um the the use of silicon anode is now very very promising in the solid state batteries so the reason is that the solid state battery the algae diet based the sulfide based electrolyte is completely stable with silicon on the negative electrode side the interface is stable the lithium transport in the silicon is very very fast we can zip through the 8 to 10 milli amp hour percent of the square silicon at a very high critical current density and what's more exciting for us is that we're seeing again a very interesting mechanical phenomena where the lithium silicon alloy is completely densified in our solid state cells and when you take lithium back to the cathode you have a dimensionally stable silicon anode and this silicon anode has absolutely no carbon it's carbon free 99.9 percent silicon only 0.1 percent binder and if we talk about the supply chain I think silicon is the way to go because graphite is mostly controlled by the agent suppliers but silicon is something very very promising I think GLAP should so good liquid cell data and I'm showing you today very promising data on the solid state battery side so it seems like a moving towards you know silicon or lithium metal anode really is going to happen in the next few years regardless if you're using liquid electrolyte or solid electrolyte my last slide I just want to you know prepare for today's panel discussion later that I really see a need for us to have a domestic manufacturing all hands on deck I mean nobody can be left out not doing gains we need the workforce we need the ideas we need the supply chain of sustainable materials and transformative manufacturing and it is really the tasks that are so challenging that I don't think any single PI research group will be able to accomplish so I'll be happy to dive deeper in this discussion later and yeah I have been very fortunate to have the pleasure working with both industry and the government labs and really grateful for this opportunity to present today thank you thank you very much Shirley for that that was a great talk I why don't we open it up for questions we can start with targeted questions for Shirley but then also fold in the board discussion about the topic so you're welcome to either raise your hand or put the question in the chat shelly why don't I turn it over to you thanks Amy uh surely great presentation um as usual um I greatly enjoyed it um you know I guess I come from a not from the lithium ion battery community and so um in this sort of aqueous um redox slow battery community they've been talking a lot about this concept of basically renting the vanadium um right um is that there would be companies that would come out and rent um someone the vanadium to put in their redox slow battery and then come and pick it up and regenerate it and um and so you brought up recycling um which I think is really really important um what kind of I guess strategies are people thinking um in the lithium ion battery community or the sort of beyond lithium ion battery community to think about um how you um how I guess not so much how you recycle um but how you get people to um recycle and uh how you get consumers to to buy into that yeah very good question so I think that there's still a debate of who should pay for the recycling uh is that the customer or is that the um you know the car company so the battery company right so now the battery company and the car company the line is urgent so um yeah but I do want to uh kind of say that let's say there is a mandate for from government that you have to recycle the um lithium ion batteries what we need to do I think that's um probably better for the scientists to discuss that so I think that in terms of the current way of recycling so the U.S. government does have this resell center where it's kind of changing the way how battery is recycled so I I think that for the current lithium ion batteries we have these three choices called the pyro uh metallurgical or hydro metallurgical pyro and the hydro you know by the name you can think about it's using a lot of high temperature or high pressure or using some acid you know these methods um you know are already being implemented by companies like umicore they are very very good at leading the recycling of cobalt they can cobalt oxide particularly cobalt but direct recycling is something I think uh at least you know right now is a very popular way of thinking about how lithium ion cells if it can be safely disassembled we can actually separate out the electrode materials and because we know the degradation mechanism for instance it's leading inventory loss in the cathode so we can actually invent a method to replenish the lithium in the cathode and then recover that cathode it's called a direct recycling so my colleague Zhen Chen spent a lot of time figuring out how to do direct recycling I think that uh this way we can reduce the energy consumption and CO2 carbon footprint but you know lithium ion batteries larger scale recycling I don't think it will happen until 2025 or 2026 because um you know the first generation of the EV uh I I think it's probably yeah the timing wise is hard to um imagine it's going to be before 2025 or 2026 so it gave us a few years to really uh debate about who should pay for the recycling uh I do have a Tesla I have no idea because they don't tell me like at the end of the life what do we do with the batteries um I asked the inquiries that they don't know so um yeah I think they want to have it back for free but I don't want to give back for free I know how much value is in it yeah so I think we have a few years to publicly debate about who should be paying for the recycling cost uh but my preference is that the companies who come out with this product they should be responsible uh for the materials circular uh nature of the materials thank you thank you um thank you Shirley for your for your talk um I I'm trying to think about recycling um um and I think like for I I'm trying to think like in this liquid versus solid battery because it sounds like the future is heading towards all solid battery it seems like recycling that would be easier because you don't have to deal with solvent handling or you don't have to deal with handling liquid electrolytes so I mean it it sounds like it might be easier yeah to professor waiting hand I think that he always said that you have to get rid of all the toxic thoughts which is the pf6 yeah right now in California for lithium ion we cannot set up plans for recycling because of the pf6 I can't get past the EHS for setting up the facility but for the solid state we succeed we can succeed in doing that because the modified based um matters are completely dissolving alcohol and actually make the you know I think the professor Eugene's synthesis process already hinted that it can be completely dissolved in things um and then you can use it for other chemical synthesis so indeed yeah solid state that gave us great hope that we will be able to have the hundred percent of recyclable batteries but therefore the solid state yeah I don't know if you can ever you know I think we're talking about the 2028 2029 I'm going to challenge the view that the the future goes to solid state we have a crystal ball but you know and there might multiple challenges with recycling both solid state and and conventional batteries um yeah the future solid but the the present is fluid there's no doubt about that oh we can debate we can debate liquid electrolyte now yeah I think we need to figure out how to recycle these liquid electrolytes batteries that's very very hard let's move to John hey uh two great talks um this is in my area but I'm interested as an engineer thinking about perhaps like a 100-year horizon for a battery right instead of just one battery or an optimal sort of system and it sort of seems like yeah this this issue of recyclability is sort of taking back on what Jody brought up was it's so critical you know if you have an okay battery that can be modulated and taken apart and put back together with with ease low technology uh you could do that you know 10 000 times um and have it be okay seems like it might be an interesting way to think about it as well and I'm curious have there been funding sort of structures for to take batteries apart efficiently and put them back together efficiently right so not that the technology for the battery itself but actually have built in this this design aspect of to be recycled a thousand times to some degree efficiently I don't know the space and I'm curious if that would be something that you know funding towards would help or maybe it's already been done yeah very good question I think the design for recycling is actually the new best word in our field yeah in the past no I wouldn't say that a lot of the battery modules I mean we see like the BMW and the Nissan's older pack for secondary use on the grid that's at one time this is one of the most popular ways of thinking about the you know secondly use life of the batteries is when it retires from the cars it can come to the grid for the operation and I look at those modules I was thinking man I don't want to be the one who take them apart yeah it's very very right we both together and they're not easy to disassemble I don't think that people were thinking about you know how you can be so modular that you will switch out bad cells and then do punished new ones and then yeah so I think that's definitely an area that we should you know brainstorm and think about it but at the moment I think a lot of the battery they can they can build the modular better now I think that today's package packed and compared to the past the probably it's quite different I don't know what if the lab wants to add in because as far as I know there was no you know kind of easy solutions for how to recycle the batteries for a thousand times yet yeah all for the comments I would also only kind of expand the discussion there are like three ways you can think about sustainability in supply chain for very many batteries one is certainly recycling and lead acid batteries are being recycled was 200 percent of those because lead is dangerous because there's not enough lead available but you know there are still three pathways for if you mind one you can design batteries very long cycle at very long calendar life that could outlast you know the the life of electric vehicles you can also utilize you know very abundant material that have low cost you can utilize like iron you can utilize sulfur in the construction so you can still kind of recycle those but I think the the market pressure would be significantly reduced for these technologies so I don't want to kind of discard other other opportunities but even even if like long the cycle life sells they have to be designed slightly differently yes you can like when potentially revive some of the kind of cells if depending on degradation mechanism so if there's like electrolyte starvation if there is a you know lack of loss of lithium you can maybe inject electrolyte you can inject lithium but this is not straightforward and the cells have to be designed this way if you think about like very long cycle life cells that can be used in secondary markets you also have to think about how they degrade so sometimes cells degrade not really peacefully so the degradation goes down you know peacefully for the you know initial like 20 percent degradation 30 percent degradation and then there's a cold nose dive so when degradation happens very rapidly so those we certainly won't avoid we don't want to use them in a grid if because they induce potential dangers because they becomes not economical essentially to utilize those so those have to be thought in advance and so I think also people are thinking about all different directions Anu would you like to go next yeah thank you so great thoughts by the way learned a lot and so seems like you know Gleb that there are a lot of fundamental challenges I think both Shirley and you mentioned and you mentioned a number of times that there is a lot of pressure you know you're getting a lot of venture capital money but then there is always the time pressure to deliver deliver so I'm asking the other extreme I mean this is the future right of transportation as a country are we making enough investment in fundamental research I'm glad to see that DOE is you know just one office but you know VTO has a pretty you know a small budget Shirley you mentioned you know their funding what's your opinion compared to you know globally what other countries are doing and other I can maybe start and surely can finish what we can do the other way around I think you know you know US does invest a lot but certainly not enough and you're asking professors that tell you like of course we tell you like you know there's not enough investments compared to other countries compared to Asia this is clearly the case but I would say you know the science cannot live in isolation like you cannot produce you know a lot of students that have nowhere to go after after the graduate right you have to have jobs so they have to have you have to you know kind of move the whole supply chain otherwise you know who would go to become scientists battery scientists if they want to graduate there's nowhere to go except abroad people don't typically like going abroad so I think bringing supply chain is much more pressing issue in addition I think bringing supply chain brings all the other side benefits right so implement all these innovations you have to like work closely you have to understand the details you know of the industrial processes right to understand deeply not what you think the industry need but what it actually needs understand all these limitations and so without local supply chain you know without local discussions it's very challenging right you have to like to implement any innovations you have to work sometimes as one company so there should be a lot of trust a lot of movements a lot of open discussions it's so much easier to do it when the company is local you know and I would also say maybe in terms of investment it is important to invest more in research in R&D but you know diversify all investments you can't give all the money to one office in the government and tell them to you know to choose whatever they think is the best because everybody have their own biases right I think the best is to distribute the funds in them on different offices different offices and in DOE different offices in DOD in NASA in all those organizations so they would you know eventually it is a competition who would who would make best on best investments. Yeah Shirley I thought your last slide was very effective at showing the range it's not just academic research all the way to large scale there's a critical middle piece there that I think we might be missing. So I think I will add on what the lab just shared so think about Europe and Asia as the two competitive landscape that we're thinking about so in Europe for instance for the battery you know the German battery research center is 500 million dollar investment and the Faraday Institute is something like a 260 million pounds investment right so what happened in Europe is that their funding source is single but it's very big right and in Asia on the other hand is that the government will subsidize the company I mean they have incentives to you know encourage the supply chain to occur so unfortunately in the United States we have neither but what we do have is a very very innovative ecosystem I mean other countries don't have what we have as the VC environment right we have no like the students a lot of them really fearless right they want to do startup companies just like a grab I have done yeah I always thought it's super courageous to you know think about the building your own companies and things like that and the people here so encouraging this kind of risk-taking you know not afraid to fail and of course you know encourage unicorn companies so US has a very unique culture but like Amy said I think what's really missing is this the second death valley where you have to steal from the prototyping stuff to the actual manufacturing part that investment piece I think we we're still debating right for example if domestic manufacturing should come back to the United States you know this answer is not clear yet one of the reason is why because battery is a low profit margin business I mean if we're talking about the vaccination vaccines right the there's no profit margin should not have profit margin but we have to do it so I think we need to look at this energy critical energy technology more like the vaccination it's not a choice you have to strategically we have to do this right so if operators have to look at where they put their money on I really think that you know once the new type of batteries is invented that we will have unimaginable application come out right I think the profit will come but if you only think about what's the leading iron chemistry right now you know whether the Asian countries have done with their gigawatt factories profit margin is less than 10% honestly speaking I think it's really low profit margin however you know I think right now the EV industry is taking off and then I think the great storage if we think about every household it's going to have a electron refrigerator in the future because we need the resilience towards climate crisis then the customer will come so I think that this is really at the inflation point where you know the national academy should have strong influence on you know how we think about you know investment in terms of funding I hope that answered your question Nana. I like your answer but can I build on it a little bit you know the profit margins are indeed low but in all mature industries the profit margins are low like in the car companies in airplane companies the profit margins are even smaller airline companies have zero profit margins so you know only profit margins alone is not necessarily kind of the only thing to consider in addition when the industry is local and you can innovate you can actually improve your profit margin quite substantially right you have to produce let's say your conventional production of lithium-ion battery cells give you 10% profit margins if you can figure out how to produce twice as many cells then your profit margin will definitely improve right it's all about innovations and to innovate you have to have something local you have to learn and teach others right. Gerard. Thank you Gerard Baguilli from Procter & Gamber so I may propose a third way and it's maybe more for the board because they have attended the conversation yesterday so Professor Mangan, Galeb, excuse us if we speak a bit in code. We are talking about unicorns and startups and we are talking about incumbent industry so I'm just thinking this way who owns the battery market I do believe that it's legitimate to say why would we not have in the US a manufacturing scale so as we can be in control of our destiny looks like that it's a fair debate I mean we cannot decide here but let's take this hypothesis. Coming from Procter & Gamber I ask the question from Glebe I mean absolutely amazed by really confident about the works that the two of you are doing on the science. Now I'm looking as an industrialization and I'm saying the quality assurance the surprise will come from the supply chain now you can say it's up to the incumbent to deal with that and provide the right specification and they should pay for recycling I think it's a bit you know I pass the button to someone else to deal with it but I want you to reflect on what Ignacio Martinez shared with us yesterday the board it was not a startup but what they said is they built at the end of the day they built the science for five years thanks to investments which were not the typical VC it could be the VC but they built the science the first principle modeling the manufacturing congruent with the raw material congruent with you know the final product which is the vaccine in the case of Moderna. Now one can say the vaccine is easier than what we are dealing with the battery and I will by the way sympathize with that but I'm just wondering whether there is another business model innovation now what's the role of the National Academy of Science I don't know but I will submit we might be stronger by building how to say a platform not just one product which is a solid state battery that can do that but it seems that what you have developed the two of you and others is a platform which can have various applications okay it has a business model how can we replace the battery today so as you know we can have the cost and we can have the supply sufficiency but it seems to me to be more richness so I come back a bit I'm a bit preaching here don't be in love with your solution don't just be in love with the specific problems and that's what a bit what we heard yesterday and we certainly in Proctor and Gamble we resonate to that right we build platforms and these platforms after that have 10 years and 20 years of existence but the point I'm making and that's where I'm a bit worried okay and don't be defensive is when you go into real life with a new supply chain new raw material coming from the US call it silicone there's plenty of silicone and you have to do that surprises will happen so building the foundation helping you the two of you to be able to build this foundation which is no more than what you need to know build a model build some pilot test you know some commercialization that's maybe where where we need to think about you know whether we can provide some help have a silence because I know that that's what we say but yesterday we had this discussion right how can we help the US chemical enterprise to disruption what we see here is a disruption right and is it a unicorn playing the lottery is it the incubant industry we'll have to pay everything to make sure everything is good quality who is this incubant industry so I think the business model is probably one of the conversation we have to to make I mean absolutely and I think qualitative one of the earliest investors or companies working on green green technology failed because they didn't understand deeply the business case they didn't have a good business model so if you don't have a good business model even if you have amazing scientists even if you have amazing investors it just doesn't work right the the business have to make sense economically and so the ecosystem is definitely will be helpful the business model glad maybe there is a first generation the two of you have clearly a first generation I'm sorry I love the first slide you presented the project man where you present the story and you hope that there will be sixth generation of Nobel prizes that inspired me a lot I'm not a kid I'm not going back to school and I'm an organic chemist I'm not an organic chemist wrong with me but what I'm saying you know there may be various businesses that you could create out of your I'm very joint platform and the business model is good and I think that's great but sometimes we just look at the business model for a product and we are maybe missing there are different businesses so therefore there is a kind of business model that is not just dependent on one product replacing the current battery that can go beyond it yeah so Gerard the reason is silence because you got me really thinking so really I think your way of thinking about this is very similar as when you know semiconductor industry become mature they have a foundry right the foundry has other people come with ideas and they have a roadmap for many possibilities of different types of products serving different applications so I think that's a great idea you know there's been discussions among us you know the people who work in the labs and the academic institutions but yeah I would really love to hear from your perspective when we have this kind of foundry models right who should be the ones running it should it be the private industry or should it be the national labs I mean definitely won't be the university but we will provide all the workforces for this type of efforts but you know it's really so what fascinated me for what fascinated me and then I stopped is yesterday what we heard from flagship pioneering it's the joint investments of incumbents incumbents and disruptors on the science and maybe others coming together which is not usually the way we think about it with a startup right you can have incumbents funding a startup with maybe they are one day buying it back or getting shared but you know it's it's it's really different so they are really you know putting more players including the players who will be disrupted into the party sorry I stopped here but we can share with you obviously I mean this conversation um this conversation brings me back to thinking about SEM attack which is this consortium that was advancing the needs of the United States semiconductor industry why could you know why not have something like that for for batteries and and I I was as an undergrad I did research in semiconductors because I thought I was going to do semiconductors and then that kind of collapsed right around the time I was graduating so so here here I am now but um I mean that environment at that time was very engaging dynamic um it felt the same way silicon valley valley felt at that at that time in my life and why can't we have that here for batteries um yeah there is a question of who who runs this thing right but SEM attack um was um it's very successful um but I I bring up the devil's advocate like the other side of it which Shirley Gleb um can comment on um maybe Shelly as well but um last week I was sitting on the review panel for Jay Caesar which is this big um DOE battery hub and um we were listening to uh the evolution of Jay Caesar how in the beginning and I apologize if I portray this incorrectly it's what I perceived when I heard it but in the beginning it sounded like this this big battery hub was getting a lot of industry engagement um so it's not necessarily consortium but you could see maybe that was a direction it was headed but there was a disconnect between what the companies wanted versus the groundbreaking fundamental research because the research may give you fantastic performance and it cycles 10 times or you might give something that cycles a thousand times but doesn't have the numbers the industry wants and so I think there's a lot of friction between um kind of the fundamental boots on the ground research that academics are doing versus what industry wants they want something they want to invest in right now and um that's not always something that um that that can happen and so what happened was with Jay Caesar um it sounded like when in their second round for renewal they pivoted towards more fundamental research because they had to decide which path do we take um anyway so I guess can you can you comment about the friction between you know those really risky new battery chemistries and what industry wants and how to reconcile that that's uh I'll go first because I think uh compared to GLAP's experience I think he had a lot of support to the SELA nanotechnologies in terms of support from the government uh I mean not maybe not enough but quite a substantial for me I think I have really you know worked both with the basic energy sciences division and also the EERE energy efficiency uh site uh I think what I see is really that um your interpretation uh Jody uh is completely on the spot what happened right when we when it first started the industry were so excited they were so excited that Jay Caesar will you know form this consortium where you know we will do things to uh enable you know better batteries that you know a lot of the uh industry parties that engaged in the and then I I believe it's because that a lot of these work were perceived not fundamental because there's already a commercial device out there so this is another thing maybe the industry leaders can make comments I think it's not true right if you have a commercial product it even means that we need to do more fundamental science to enable future generation of the product so that that's I would say is what happened when we are perceived as using taxpayers money we're supposed to do fundamental science but because there's already a battery product you're not doing fundamental science you're doing things that you're right so I think I think they should be mindset change uh very strong mindset change and so um like you know one way to overcome it is you know other other governments that do um or maybe some states some state governments do essentially they provide matching funds to industry funded research let's say because the industry knows how to make money the industry knows better what you know what they need to innovate right to improve the product quality performance and cost and value and so you know matching the cost of industrial investment it should be very advantageous because at the moment go to any university or national labs if the product if the project is sponsored by industry even if local industry right in the same state you typically pay the highest of a hat and you have to deal with all this um in administration that very often don't want to make general statement but very often see any commercial activities and the premiership are something inappropriate for scientists for pure scientists right for pure teachers it takes away from this precious time for them to do fundamental science and teach and so this is very difficult right it should begin changing attitudes is probably you know what is what is needed the most um I see Gerard has his hand raised again is that a new question or um well it was a it was a response to uh shortly asking what does the industry expert think so I just wanted to offer and I'm not an expert in battery but what I think the tension you have is if you ask the industry the incumbents what they want they are going to tell you what they want with their view of the world about where batteries should be used if you take the view you have a platform and how many advantage better cheaper more storage per table I don't know I mean I'm not understanding but your vision that you can really democratize at the breakthrough disruptive cost could give this platform more influence for the industry not to say what do you want now you have something that can be better for you the losers are those who do not want to disrupt some of their products to adapt to this one right so I don't know whether that fits but I'm again saying thinking about different exploitation that could be better and cheaper than what exists can help this platform to have a more influential power to the industry because if you ask the industry what they want they are going to see to tell you what they want from their vantage point and that may be a barrier so just a thought I mean there will always be like losers and winners right you know when industry change happens right there is always half of the companies they die right because they don't make proper bets uh but you know the the government shouldn't be able to you know the government also doesn't have a crystal ball right like nobody has a crystal ball way to invest um and so I think diversification is important and some decisions will have to be we like to be bad our next question from john maybe just more of a comment um the current sort of academic model that we sort of go through from postdoc up to tenure there's a period in there that we are extremely low risk and in a lot of cases it feels like it's even not really looked favorably upon to sort of make some of these connections or take some of these risks with industrial connections or industrial funding or being vulnerable in that space because we can't really make mistakes and I don't know if it's that way everywhere I don't know but I just know that's just not maybe in this field but a lot of engineering and it seems like that's an area where we could I don't know maybe close some of these gaps um if that culture sort of changed it's just more of a comment than really really anything but I feel that you know really this isn't my area but I feel this conversation in parallel I will also maybe take this opportunity to announce that uh from February 2022 I will become the chief scientist for energy forage for Argonne National Lab and the professor of Chicago as a professor so uh all the conversation you have today is extremely helpful for me when I start a new job next year the the official news will come out next week so um you know that's why I already uh approved the the news release so I can tell you guys I'm so glad I'm here in this panel so let's please do keep in touch uh and particularly the industry leaders and you know the faculty members I think we really uh can work together to you know encourage the mindset and then to make some meaningful changes in the next a few years uh because obviously the previous model had some drawback that we have to uh fix how incredible congratulations thank you like we got you at just the right time the timing was the perfect yeah thank you yeah well I see um Amy has her hand raised so she can congratulate you and then have a comment or question yeah don't win it congratulations truly that's exciting I think you know I kind of want to tie um Jody's observation which you know Shelley you should correct me but I was also a reviewer for JC's or in the early days and now I should disclose I'm on the advisory board but my I want to tie together Jody's comment you use the word friction which I think is a very good one and then Gleb's comment on you know it took a lot longer than I thought it would 10 years to commercialize something and then I want to tie to Shirley's um work in terms of just some of these challenges with batteries you can't engineer your way out of you have to fundamentally understand what the problems are and so you know I think there's some quote from Thomas Edison about batteries making even a decent person a liar and I I am concerned by some of the rhetoric in the news um that I think many people in the battery community feel like they need to use to attract funding and attract attention and then that can lead to I think um raising expectations for results in a way that's not possible to meet and so how do we what are your thoughts about how we as a community might more effectively convey you know the desperate need for butter batteries the need for high quality work but also the patience the resources and the time required I mean do you think there's a way that we need to change how we communicate that and and is there something maybe that our board could do to enable um you know better ways to think about balancing those competing interests yeah I think like one of the observations I have is that the pop culture created these unrealistic expectations all successes like instant you will invent something and bow you have like a major breakthroughs in reality is like thousands of small innovations and it takes so much longer time so I think perception can be changed that or maybe we can invite you know pop culture influences you know people who host talk shows people who write scripts for movies for books you know visit universities visit national labs talk to scientists talk to um you know engineers talk to staff talk to students and hear about the stories hear about the dreams create something beautiful you know out of it because we do need voices of of scientists and dreamers especially like those dreamers who have like more grounded in reality you want these voices to be amplified and so you know anything that works should should be implemented yeah I think Amy I know what you mean the hype sometimes you know I think in the battery field that we actually always have somebody like Professor Stan Whittinghand who's always the person who you know like whenever somebody makes some big claims and he will you know cautious everyone to be careful and then you know be more um you know uh don't jump on right do some research and think about it so I mean my take on this is always that uh self-proclaimed things should always be taken with a grain of salt nowadays the battery industry is so matured I would say we have third party validation facilities in both the national lab and the private industry and in the academic field we do have those very highly appreciated the journals where they have the checklist and then they have yeah so I think it really takes the entire community to stay vigilant about what we promise to the public we must under promise and over deliver right if everybody follows this rule I think we will be safe and the reverse will be a disaster that's what always Professor Whittinghand have mentored me like you know you never want to over promise and under deliver I think only Elon Musk can get away with that when the timeline came and he couldn't deliver but most of us don't survive the over promise strategy so yeah I would say um I also thought the collapse company will go uh you know much earlier it was really incredible to actually the journey he took you know it's really 10 years I still remember that we were very quiet we didn't you know before we had customers and product that we are almost almost late we didn't communicate with the the press for eight years yes I I remember the time when you just formed the company and explained to me what the sila means in russia that just it's already one decade of past yeah it's amazing Kelly yeah I was just thinking um how different it is you would actually think kind of the fuel cell research community the battery research community and the super caps research community our capacitor research community um that sort of that um standardization um and those test protocols um the checklist that Shirley was talking about um that they all came about in very different ways um which I think to some extent um is uh is is great that they came about eventually but they didn't all come about um in the same way so so in the fuel cell industry you know DOE from the top down said we are going to come up with standardized protocols um and so you know if I look you know if I think about it from an editor perspective life got really easy for me not because jack's had a checklist um but because DOE had said the you know if you're a DOE funded you have to um you have to do characterization this way like right down to the kind um rotator that you had to you rotating um disk collector that you had to use um and then the rest of the world basically sort of followed along with that um but if you look at batteries and super capacitors those sort of checklists and those protocols and those third party validations uh have all came about in very um different ways and I think you know as we start to think about the future of energy storage and conversion as a whole um you know not just one uh you know not just batteries or just fuel cells or just super caps um that's probably something that we need to be thinking about yeah absolutely I think the challenge is also that you know in in universities we cannot create this automotive or collage batteries and typically right and many degradation mechanisms they happen very differently and small the coin cells with the light electrolyte compared to with like real uh densely packed cells produced by industry so this is kind of another barrier maybe it emphasizes the need of this consortium when trope battery cells could could be made because otherwise you know sometimes what people do research it's really not relevant to industry you cannot do it you will have very different results yeah I think the folks who are doing um the um you know work that not fit this checklist or the protocol just don't make those claims right just just say what you have discovered this is the phenomenon don't say I'm going to improve the battery energy by by projection from the tiny little things to the automotive battery test I think that's the only thing editor or reviewers needs to be a bit more careful but you know at the same time we don't want to shut down innovative ideas and the people who come out with other box ideas so yeah I know it's a very delicate balance but uh at the same time I think for lithium ion technology the bar is very high now uh much higher than it was 10 years ago for sure yeah much much higher yeah but for nascent technologies like sodium batteries zinc batteries I think that we will need to leave them some freedom space for developing the technology because there is really no best fit format or chemistry for those new battery chemistries I guess yeah so I think that over our yeah I'm just happy that today battery research is considered uh you know things we even within the academy of engineering academy science is considered very critical and important because when I was on the job market in 2006 you know I've interviewed in places where the academy member told me why why are you still wasting time in batteries it's such an older topic I mean literally the same the same experience somebody I respected a lot said that to me you know during the job interviews wow look look at us now yeah I think one comment I want to make I don't know before we before we conclude I don't know how much time we have is that I think it's important also to think about kind of inclusive and welcoming uh entrepreneurial environment so that the best scientists you know from all around the world you know the best engineers the best entrepreneurs come to the United States and start their businesses here and the same for investors um and I think again it has to be different mindset from the both in the federal and local government point of view that we have to be welcoming instead of being overly protective I um I want to be conscious of everyone's time um and so and Jody you should weigh in I think first you know huge thanks to Megan for helping us and supporting us and putting this together and Jody for you know you definitely started all this before I even joined the board so I think this was a pretty incredible discussion I think if if there are any final questions we can certainly take them but I know we're running a bit behind as is so I wanted just to make sure I said thank you before we wrap up yeah and thank you and I think Gleb and Shirley um your talks were very informative and and started a lot of great discussion which we can take home with us to chew on in the coming days and weeks so thank you so much and I'm going to hand it over to Megan now yeah let's wrap things up um thanks again Shirley Gleb all the speakers for this week um Jody and Amy and all of the board member facilitators for this week and I think there are some really thought-provoking sessions and thanks to the board for your engagement these CST needs you and your ideas and your insights into chemical sciences to do what we do so um the staff will be in touch with you all about scheduling our next meeting um and thanks again