 This talk will be in English, but you can also ask in German, our speaker is there flexible. So, that's the organizational one. All right. Now, we go to the talk. This talk will place in English, but you can also hear a translation if you use media CCC, then you can put the language in your browser in. The next talk is why we are addicted to lithium and how to kick the habit. Our speaker is Frank Wunderlich Pfeiffer, and he gained our about our speaker. He gained his first experience in journalism in go lamps science department in 2015. And, yeah, there, he make his first journalism experience. He studied industrial engineering. And he is an old participant of this Congress. His first stage experience he made on 32 C3 on the frighten frighten stage and on 34 C3. He also has a talk about accumulators and today he goes more special in with lithium and lithium ion battery and the history and from the history to the state of the art. So, be curious and I give over to Frank. Hello. Yeah, I had a similar talk, actually not similar. Two years ago, when we could still meet in person, I was on the stage and I had to talk about batteries. Since then, I've learned a lot more, especially about lithium ion batteries and also alternatives to lithium ion batteries, but that will be the topic of the second part of the talk. This is why we are addicted to lithium and how to kick the habit. That's the next one that will be tomorrow evening. Today, let's talk about electric cars and why I mean, you can see a couple of electric cars right here and why we need lithium to build them. At least so far and you can see, I mean, you've seen this one. This is a Babcock Electric Roadster. Babcock is more famous for building steam engines and more recently nuclear power plants, but they also build electric cars a bit over 100 years ago. And this is one of them. And as you can see, it wasn't very modern, at least not in our terms. Back then, it was among the best electric vehicles you could get. And around 1900, there was a bit of a craze of cars when they were completely new and everybody who had a lot of money wanted to have a car. And electric cars were very popular with a lot of people. In fact, about half of all cars were electric. And at least around 1900, this one was 10 years later. At that time, it was a luxury item, very clearly. And as I said, half cars were electric. Of the rest, about one quarter was a steam engine powered and another quarter was by internal combustion engines. And this changed. Electric cars were, of course, quite comfortable, at least as long as you could have somebody else maintain them. You could just sit in there and start driving slowly. 25 kilometers per hour that this one reached were quite fast for electric cars of the era. Usually, they were quite slow. Electric cars were not a fast thing at all. The range of such a car with lead-acid batteries was limited. 160 kilometers, I actually doubt if that was correct. There is a letter that was sent to the company and the company said, yes, we verify that was the case. And we are very sure that nobody recharged the car along the way. But there were no independent tests of any kind. So nobody quite knows. In any case, at the speed of 25 kilometers per hour, it was an ordeal just to get from A to B. It was very similar to the future. And at the same time, of course, other cars like the Ford Model T around 1910 were much more popular. And in later years, more than 100 times as many Ford Model T were built than the most popular electric cars. And at that time, electric cars were pretty much out. Using an electric car at the time was very difficult, much more difficult than it would be today, because there was no such thing as modern electronics. So you could have your electric car and charge it overnight, but you would wake up the next day. And if you were unlucky and you overcharged the battery, the battery would be gone. It would be destroyed. So charging the battery really required somebody to watch over the car at all times. And, well, that didn't make it very comfortable experience the way we would have it these days. It also took a long time and the energy capacity of the battery wasn't as good as it is today. Also, lifetime was very limited. These days, let's say at the end of the 20th century, you could expect about 500 charge cycles from a lead-acid battery. Back then, it was less. Nobody quite says how many, but it was fewer than that. There were other technologies available. Yeah. At the end of the 20th century, you had cars like the EV1. The EV1 also used lead-acid batteries, and you see range was about 90 kilometers. Even though at the time they said it was 126, or later they used nickel metal hydride batteries, about 228 kilometers, as they said. But the standards testing regime changed in later years, and it was by modern standards. It's about 90 to 170 kilometers. EV1 was a very expensive car. Nobody quite says how expensive exactly it was, but it seems there have been much more than $100,000 per car for the simple reason that not a lot of them were built, but 500 were built with lead-acid batteries and another 500 with the nickel metal hydride batteries. When you build something in such small numbers, it will always be extremely expensive. These days, things changed. Just compare these numbers. You have a bit more than 100 kilometers realistically, and now you have 400 or 500 kilometers by the same standards. This is the model of 2022, actually. This is Tesla Model 3 standard range plus in the newest model. I think you cannot quite buy this one yet, but new models will be delivered with that kind of range. Something changed very drastically, and that was, of course, lithium and lithium ion batteries becoming affordable, at least much less expensive than they used to be. That's not to say that the Tesla is a cheap car. It's not at all. It's like 45,000 US dollars or euros, whatever you want, and it's still not cheap. We still have a ways to go to get affordable cars. Of course, they're cheaper cars than Tesla's. But yeah, even getting here is a tremendous amount of progress, and a lot of things had to be done. One of the origins that I didn't even know that this was among the origins, but two years ago, John Goodenough got the Nobel Prize for his discovery of his help in building lithium ion batteries, and he said that this was an important step. It was inventing the sodium sulfur battery. Sodium sulfur was an important technology at the time, even though it didn't really translate into building electric cars with new battery technology. It was the first time that new battery used, didn't use hydrogen ions to go back and forth, but instead the chemistry was based in this case on sodium. The original patent said alkali sulfur battery because they hoped they could use lithium, because lithium has higher voltage and it's much lighter. And because it's much lighter, you can get much higher energy density. But it turns out that if you want to use this exact setup for lithium, you'll run into trouble because this is a high temperature battery. This runs with sodium at about 300 to 350 degrees Celsius. It's very hot because you want to have liquid sodium and liquid sulfur, and in between you have a solid ceramic through which sodium ions can go. The electrons take the other way, they go around the battery, and that's how you get the energy out of the battery. And that was invented in 1966 and people were inspired by this. They were inspired that you could use these ions, you could use alkali ions like lithium or sodium to build batteries. And yeah, just a little bit on lithium and sodium. If you look at it, it's about three times as heavy as lithium. It's bigger, it has one angstrom diameter, and the voltage direct to chemical potential is minus 2.7 volts. For lithium, essentially everything's better. It's lighter and it has more potential, so you get about 0.3 volts more in the battery. And that makes a lithium pretty much a perfect material. Except for one thing, there is not a lot of lithium on earth. I mean, there is a lot if you just count it in terms of tons, but if you look at lithium, lithium ores have about 0.1% concentration of lithium. And where as sodium you can get like 40% or something like that. The next step was to get it at room temperature and an important invention here was by Stanley Whittingham. And Stanley Whittingham was actually working on electric superconductors. And he was using tantalum sulphide, and he found out that he could change the properties of tantalum sulphide by intercalating. I mean, as you can see, there are several layers here, and you could just put some other atoms in between to change the properties of the material to get a different superconductor and maybe a better superconductor. At some point he had the idea, hey, we could use this to build a battery because the ions in these layers also chemically react with the atoms in the layer. And yeah, that was the first step. It was not a perfect material at all. The batteries that he built were in terms of energy density and not much better than lead-acid batteries, but at least they worked kind of for about five cycles. So they were not too good. But there was a guy who was good enough to build batteries. And that was John Benister, good enough. He has a brilliant name. And he was not a hero. He was just a guy who worked and he worked a lot. He was a meteorologist in World War II. In the 1950s, he was a chemist, he had become a chemist. And he was supposed to invent a ceramic that is magnetic and could store information for the computers that were just coming up in the 50s. And he invented the ferrite course that you might have heard of and at least the material for the ferrite course. And then for the next 10 years, he was doing research in the lab on properties of ceramics, especially electrical and magnetic properties of ceramics. And that helped him later on, though not at the time. He was just doing fundamental research. At the beginning of the 70s, he had to get out of his lab. His university wasn't funding him anymore. And so he was forced to go into industry. And he said he was forced to do it, but it was not a bad idea. And he had the idea that instead of titanium disulfide, which was Whittingham was using, he could use something else, namely cobalt oxide. He was doing a lot of work with oxides and cobalt oxide was one of them. And you can see that titanium sulfide, because of the sulfur, is quite heavy, actually. And titanium is not a perfect material to react with lithium. And so what you get is a voltage of about 1.8 volts for the battery. And he said, okay, let's use cobalt. And he knew how to get the right structures out of material. He knew the correct reaction conditions and everything because he had worked for 10 years on that sort of stuff. And so he could create a cobalt oxide that was built up in layers and you could put the lithium into the layers where they could react with the cobalt. And that way he could build lithium ion battery. That was much better. It had more voltage. I think 3.8 is bit too low. It's 3.9. And the material has low mass and that way you could get a much higher energy density from it. You also needed a much smaller anode because the amount of energy you get out of one lithium atom depends on the voltage. And when you have lower voltage, when you have half the voltage, that means you need twice as many lithium atoms to get the same amount of energy. And yeah, so you need anodes. The problem with anodes is, and Whittingham didn't have a good anode. That's why his batteries only lasted for five cycles. That changed with Rachid Yatzami. I hope that name is correct. He is from Morocco and I don't speak the Berber language. I'm sorry. He thought, hey, we could use graphite. And in graphite you can put lithium ions in between layers. Because, I mean, that was the top, that was the view from the top. And you can see graphite is built up of layers just like cobalt oxide. And in between these layers, you get the lithium ions. And I'm sorry, I didn't have enough time to animate it like here and just put them in between the layers. But you can imagine how that works. Every lithium ion needs six carbon atoms to be stored. And that is quite heavy. The carbon weighs about 10 times as much as the lithium. So that is kind of limiting, but it's still very good. And you can do it thousands of times without destroying the graphite. The important step here was actually to find an electrolyte where the ions could move in. So the ions could move in it, but the electrolyte wouldn't get between the layers and destroy the graphite. And something similar was also needed for all the other layered materials. And eventually that was found and it worked out. And yeah, these days things have changed. Cobalt, lithium cobalt oxide is no longer the main material for a long time it was and it was very important. The problem is the cobalt is a very rare material and you have all heard about how it is mined. And so people want to get away from it. But primary motivation was not getting away from cobalt mines in Congo. The primary motivation was to get better batteries. And the batteries that they had was you could exchange the cobalt for nickel. And NMC materials is nickel manganese cobalt. And the idea is to get as much nickel inside the battery as you can. Without getting the nickel, I mean if you have nickel, if you have only nickel the problem is that the nickel has about the same diameter as the lithium atoms and it gets into the layer where the lithium is supposed to be. And you don't want that. And so you need manganese and cobalt to stabilize the entire structure. Eventually that worked out. It was a bit of a challenge to make that work. But it worked out and about 20 years ago people started to figure out how to make such materials. And NMC 111 was the first. The numbers just say how much nickel manganese and cobalt is. So 111 means it's equal parts. 811 means it's eight parts nickel, one part manganese, one part cobalt. And you see it's just making everything better. The problem with cobalt is that you cannot get all the lithium out. And with NMC 811 there's essentially per gram of the material there's the same amount of lithium but you can get much more of the lithium out and that's why you have a higher energy density. It really seems to make everything better. You get more energy from a cheaper material and it's more compact. It's just almost everything is better except it's not as resistant to heat. When you heat it up it tends to release the oxygen. I mean it's an oxide so there's oxygen in there and it releases oxygen and unfortunately it's inside of an environment with an electrolyte that is a hydrocarbon and hydrocarbons burn. And when you release oxygen into hydrocarbons it starts to burn and they start to heat up the battery. And now you have a hot battery in confined space and you have it in an electric car the entire car can start to burn and sometimes that has happened. And so you need to put a lot of effort into making sure that there's always enough coolant and that if one battery heats up it doesn't heat up other batteries that will start heating up themselves and so on. That is a major problem. Regardless, what we have seen in the last 10 years is that we can build batteries much cheaper. One of the main reasons was building much bigger factories. It's the same as with the early electric vehicles or the EV1 where we only built like a few hundreds of them. And the small number of batteries or the small number of cars means that each car or each battery was very expensive. If you go on YouTube and you look for videos from battery factories in around 2010 or so or 2011 you will see a lot of hand manual labor being done. I mean, every battery in those factories got touched by people and manipulated multiple times. It's very slow, it's very expensive and that's why prices were extraordinarily high. You paid over $1,000 for a kilowatt hour and now it's about $130 per kilowatt hour in the battery pack. But you can get below that, you can get below $100 if you use different materials because things have changed. The factories have become much more efficient, much bigger, much more efficient, production is much cheaper and the cheaper production means that now these days materials start playing a role. It used to be the case for a very long time that the price of lithium had no bearing on the cost of a battery or the cost of cobalt. It didn't matter. I mean, when you pay $1,000 just to make the battery who cares if your cobalt costs $10 more or less? Nobody cares. When your battery costs about $100 or so, you care a lot whether something inside the battery suddenly costs $10 more or less or $20 or $30. And that has changed. And these days, as you can see at the end of the graph, at the end of the graph I put lithium iron phosphate batteries for comparison and they were much cheaper. You can get at least 10 kilowatt hours for $1,000 in a battery pack. On sale level it's even cheaper. And that is because there is no nickel in there. There's no manganese in there. There is no cobalt in there. The mining companies hate it. They absolutely hate it. But the battery companies, of course, they like it a lot because it's much cheaper and you can offer a battery that can drive a car for a much more reasonable price. We can see this here on the graph actually because LFP is much more resistant to heat. You can build a much lighter. You don't need as much weight and structures to keep the batteries cool and to keep them safe. And that way, even though the battery cells with NMC811 have much higher energy density, the battery pack can be almost the same. The energy density of the battery pack can be almost the same simply because you can save so much weight. Chinese companies like BYD and CATL have built the blade batteries or cell to pack technologies. And those have resulted in a revolution. This year is the first year that LFP batteries is more than 50% of the total production. And it was really funny. Earlier this year, I heard an analyst from Bloomberg talk about LFP and he said, it's a mirage, this will just disappear. And yeah, in industry, there are a lot of people who essentially deny the existence of alternatives to rare materials, especially those who invest in those rare materials and stand to benefit a lot from high prices, especially from high prices and mining. We will see that change. And the same is true for lithium as well. You can avoid using lithium in batteries. And I've talked about this two years ago, that this is possible. Two years ago, I didn't know just how far the technology had progressed. I have read a lot about sodium ion batteries since then, and this will be a topic of the talk tomorrow. But for now, we can have a look at the markets and we will see that in a matter of 12 months from November 2020 to November 2021, the price of lithium has risen fivefold. It went from the lowest price that we have ever seen for lithium, or at least for a very long time, to the highest price that we definitely have ever seen. I mean, lithium has never been more expensive than today. And this is not going to stop because right now all manufacturers of cars, especially cars, start building batteries or want to buy batteries. Some of them started building their own battery factories, especially Tesla, but also others. And they didn't look where they would get their lithium from and they didn't invest in lithium mining or anything. And the big problem is you cannot just say, you cannot snap your fingers and get lithium out of the ground. It takes a long time to build the mining equipment and build up the mines so you can start mining because, I mean, you're taking dirt from the ground and then you start to invent, for each mine, you have to essentially start inventing your own process how to get clean lithium out of the dirt you've gotten out of there because that dirt you're digging out is, or stones or whatever, is mostly not lithium and you have to really get all the impurities out. And this is a very difficult process and depending on where it is, it takes five to ten years to get it right. And something similar, I mean, that's why right now we're really locked into whatever investments have been made five years ago also. And nobody quite predicted how much more demand there would be for the lithium-ion batteries. And yeah, if you want to make many more batteries than the investment allows five years ago, then you have to go look for something else, something that is not there to you. Something similar happened with nickel, but changing from NMC to lithium-ion batteries to LFP to lithium-ion phosphate really prevented that from happening. I mean, nickel is more expensive but just by 26% or so. So there will be no fast battery growth without further substitution because you cannot build lithium-ion batteries without lithium. And yeah. Yeah. Thank you. If you want to know where the 16-color pictures came from originally, where they were converted from, I can absolutely recommend Hawkins Electric Ride. You can find it on archive.org. It was published in 1914, so this should be a public domain everywhere. And I can absolutely recommend reading this how electric cars work back then. Any question, please? And if you don't want to ask in English, that's fine. Just ask in German. If you need an answer in German, please just say so. Okay. So thank you very much for this interesting talk. And first of all, if you're curious, tomorrow there is part two of this talk. And there you can see the part how we can get rid of that problem of our addiction to lithium. I'm surely there. I'm very interested. And now we have questions. First question question is, how big is the impact of lithium prices in the context of the general electronic shortage? Okay. The lithium price used to be on the order of about four to five US dollars per kilowatt hour. That was last year. This year it's more like $20 or something like that. And when you look at the cheaper end of the batteries, which is on the cell level, that is when you have a battery, you first have to have the actual battery cell, and then you have to take your battery cell and build big battery packs so you can put it into your car. Those are more expensive, but on the cell level, the individual cells, the cheapest cost something like 60 or 70 US dollars per kilowatt hour is something on that order. And when you have to add like 15 or 20 US dollars to this kind of price, that's quite a lot. It's not just lithium that got more expensive, also some other components of the battery, but this is certainly most prominent. And most of the price increases hasn't really gotten through yet. The price that is referred to there is really the spot market. So if you just want to go and buy a thousand tons of lithium or whatever or lithium carbonate, that's one thing, but most of the lithium is bought in fixed contracts and the new contracts are not yet negotiated. So these contracts will be made like in the next few weeks, next few weeks or months, and they will demand much higher prices than they used to. And that's when the actual price will come through and everybody expecting something like 20%, or something like that more than it used to be. And this is very strange because in the last 20 years, batteries have essentially almost always gotten cheaper every single year. And this is not the case right now. This is the first time that battery prices are on trajectory to start getting more expensive again. Next question is, what can we as the end user do to make it a little better except for the regular things like recycling? Recycling right now actually doesn't matter to much. The problem here is that those batteries are too damn good. They last a really long time. I mean, thousands of cycles. You can actually see that the batteries will last longer than the cost themselves. So with electric cars recycling is actually, for many years to come, recycling will not be very important to alleviate any lithium or raw material shortage. This will take a lot more time until those batteries are actually finished. Right now it's done by SUVs because SUVs need much bigger batteries because they are not aerodynamics. I mean, it's a giant brick that you have to move through the air and it requires a lot of energy to get the air away. So if you buy smaller, more aerodynamic cars, they will automatically need much less energy to move forward. So that helps. In general, smaller batteries, the less battery, the less lithium. That's always the same. And I mean, it's not like we will have less lithium in the next couple of years. That's not a problem. We will always get more and more lithium in the coming years. It's just the demand, the amount of lithium that is needed by the factories and by the companies. That is rising much faster than the amount of lithium that the mining companies can provide. So there's a gap that is growing. The only thing you can do is to push for alternatives to lithium because the mining companies physically cannot provide enough lithium for the next coming years. We have two questions left. One from Northern Portugal. I'm currently in Northern Portugal, where one of potential European mining areas are located. I sense a strong opposite with the locals. How realistic is the hypothesis that there is no need to extract lithium here? In general, it's a problem to say. I mean, there is a not in my backyard problem here. Because you can always say, yeah, we need lithium, but not from here. And one of the reasons I did this talk in two parts was to say that lithium ion factories are actually important. In some applications, you absolutely need the maximum amount of energy density, and lithium is the thing that provides that. So we kind of do need lithium. That is not a question from where exactly is indeed a good question. Whether it's from Portugal or not, I cannot really say that, because I haven't actually looked at the exact circumstances of the mining area in Portugal. But you should definitely have a look at making impact as small as possible in terms of what is population density, what are local resources, what's the environment like and so on. And you really have to compare that. But you have to get it from somewhere. And you cannot just go around the world and say, but not from here everywhere. And as I said, I'm not saying Portugal is definitely, you definitely need to go mining in Portugal. I absolutely, that's not what I mean. Just have a look at this exact situation there. And if you want to argue against it, then you should provide an argument that there is a good reason not to mine here, but maybe elsewhere. In the short run, we absolutely need it. And we need sodium in addition to that. Okay, we have some new question. And this is one of the two. Do you know of any alternatives to the 18,650 batteries that can handle two A current troughs? If I knew the capacity of, if I knew the typical capacity of an 1865 battery, then I could answer that question more easily. But I don't have it on top of my head. So if you had given me a C-rate, then maybe it really depends. If you need high power, like just if the amount of energy in the battery is not quite so important. So if you could do with, let's say, half the amount of energy inside the cell, then of course there is, you just need high power for a short time. Then of course there's an alternative, the combination of high power and high energy. That's a bit more difficult. Yeah, we're running short on time unfortunately. I think there's time for one more question. Otherwise, I think there's an overflow room somewhere. Maybe you can go ask the question there. Yeah, one question. We have a short one. What, Christ, does point mining from seawater will become an opinion option? Right now, right now no price because nobody has really developed a process that is economically feasible and also scalable. As soon as that happens, you have to look at the price they offer and then you can do the math. I'm sorry, but I can only report on what has already been done and anything else is speculation and I don't know enough about the field to do speculation based on any good data. I cannot speculate intelligently, so I will spare you the dumb speculation. Short question, short answer. Very, very thank you. I hope you have as much fun as I had and I'm very curious of your part two and if your question couldn't ask today, come in tomorrow, look at the part two. One more thing, very quickly. I know that the font is not very readable. I use Pico8 to do this presentation because I just liked it. I like the aesthetics of it, but I will use a more regular presentation tomorrow because I've been told that it's not very readable, so if you find it not too readable, then come back tomorrow will be easier. Then again, thank you and see you tomorrow. See you.