 Stanford University. So let's continue our conversation to pick it back the last topic we discussed regarding the innovation, the battery, etc. As we heard this morning, California is leading the country in all different kind of matrix regarding the zero emission vehicles, including the largest market share of electrical vehicle percentage, the most extensive charging infrastructure. But Sally Benson mentioned that we have a single point of failure, which is critical material supply chain, because of many reasons. So next panel, we are going to discuss battery manufacturing and the supply chain. The panel will be led by Professor Yi Chui, the first director of Stanford Sustainability Accelerator, and also the former Pre-Call Institute director. And I have to give the credit to Yi, because what we have today for this conference is all because about 10 or 11 months ago, when Yi, a room, met with a chairhouse child and the commissioner Monaghan, we kind of brainstorming how academic and government can work together, bringing the folks from industry, from investment communities, from entrepreneurs really come together to discuss the energy transition. Without further ado, let's welcome Professor Yi Chui. Good afternoon. It's my great pleasure to moderate the battery panel. Let me welcome all the panelists to sit down first. I will do a quick introduction. As Liang said, this event of Stanford CEC Day, the California Day, we have been planned for about a year. I'm so happy to see the very, very exciting program so far. Throughout the day, you have seen in each panel, I was counting how many times batteries were mentioned. Long duration energy storage is mentioned. So now this is the time. Let's discuss this super important topic. Before we move on to panelists, let me share with you in the past roughly five years, at Stanford, we launched Storage X Initiative. Virtue and me, we have been building this initiative and now engaging roughly about 30 labs in the order of 200 graduate students post-doc researchers into the ecosystem. And also in the past decade, in the battery space, Stanford spin-off roughly 16 to 20 companies related to value chain or batteries. In today's panelists, we are going to see two of our own products right here as alum. They co-founded the companies and representing what Stanford has been contributing to building other California ecosystem. Now let me introduce four panelists. All the way to the left is Rod Colwell, CEO of Control Thermal Resources Holding. Next is Jiren Gopal, CTO and co-founder of MichoCam, one of our own Stanford's product. And next one is Prabhakar Vankerama, CTO of Sparts. And last but not least is Richard Wang, founder and CEO of Kilburg. Indeed, it was my great pleasure. Richard was my graduate student before. And these four people actually cover a big part of the value chain from lithium mining to the materials production to the cell making and the next generation of high-performance cell as well. With that, I'd love to give them each person five minutes to introduce what you have been working on and then we'll go into the panel discussion. Let's start with Rod, please. Thank you so much. It's really a privilege to be here again. It's been two years, so thank you so much for the kind invitation and to be associated with such an esteemed panel. Half have been alumni, so it's wonderful. I'm here to introduce you to our project. The folks that you don't know our project, we're located down in Imperial Valley in Southern California. So our vision, I've been CEO firstly for this company for the last 12 years. So believe it or not, 12 years, we achieved groundbreaking only late last week on this project, which is the first stage of a Lithium Valley campus. And what I'm talking about the campus and I think some of the subject matter here today is around, can we take green lithium in our case to the next step to CAMHS, cathode and battery cell? My colleagues obviously can hit on that. A little about the Salton Sea Geothermal Resource. It's a long-term resource that's been in existence for over 40 years, operating. It's a known mineralized resource that's been validated by DOE and others, but I guess more importantly, there are over 11 plants down there that have been operating for 42 years. So there's this huge consistency in operating history. There's nothing new and novel about that field and really what we're doing is taking geothermal power and minerals to the next level. We're developing seven stages which will produce a capacity of 170,000 tonnes per year Lithium Hydroxide, and which ultimately will produce 350 megawatts of 247 geothermal clean energy. Our total resource, the Hell's Kitchen resource, will produce 1.1 gigawatts equivalent to 300,000 tonnes per year. So it has scale and scalability and I'll talk a little bit about that. It also has the highest sustainability standards for lithium and power production in the world today. We commenced groundbreaking. This was on Friday with the White House officials, the State, the Energy Commission there. It was a very proud moment for us. I mean, 12 years to get to day one on private sector is a tough thing and I think there's a lot of jobs offered about going to public sector. I think I might be talking a few folks after this, but it's been an arduous journey. We've done the right steps through CEQA, public engagement. A lot of the conversations that were discussed today, we've done it and live and breathe this project. As you can see here, this is obviously concept. Our plans from stages 1 to 7 are pretty much set. The locations, the field is pretty much a constant. To get to capacity in this type of development, we just drill more wells. The brine is the same. We drill down about 8,000 feet. That brine is approximately 600 degrees Fahrenheit. We flash steam is how we cool the brine and then we recover lithium, pre-treatment and we recover lithium chloride, then convert that to lithium hydroxide. The infill parts are what we're here to talk about. The real opportunity per the IRA and California and the Lithium Valley Commission discussion, which I was fortunate enough to be a commissioner and leadership under the CECs. What can we do beyond just exporting bags of lithium overseas to create a carbon footprint to ship it all the way back here? We're here to produce clean green lithium for General Motors and Solanus, both of our customers. And to take that to the next level, which of course some of our colleagues are working on those stalls of projects. This is a closed-loop system. There are no evaporation ponds. There's no reagents. There's nothing. This is completely closed-loop. So we basically, from step 1, as you see stage 1 in here, we flash steam into a steam turbine, makes energy, cools the brine. We basically then remove silica and polymetallics, which are green, also salable products. As nothing goes into a landfill out of this project, we remove the lithium from the brine from direct lithium extraction and convert to carbonate or hydroxide or lithium metal. Those options have been a chloride base. Of course, the opportunity is on the far right here with the discussions and negotiations for battery cell, P cams, cams and other ancillary recycling and other uses that can be co-located into one campus and be fed with clean energy in the form of steam and electricity. Milestones over the years, I won't dwell on these too much. I've probably used my time up, but it's been a long, very sort of calculated process. So jobs, you know, social responsibility, the 480 construction jobs. Project labour agreements with our brothers and sisters in the California trades. An estimated 940 good-paying jobs from capacities to stages 1 to 7. Direct jobs and commitments. Quality, the whole bit. I mean, it's not just a private enterprise building a project. This has been a group effort and community effort truly over the last 12 years. So with that, thank you. Good afternoon, everyone. Very nice to be part of this esteemed panel. Thank you, E, for inviting me here and moderating the panel as well. My name is Chiru Gopal. I'm the CTO and co-founder at Mitra Chem. Mitra Chem is an iron-based lithium-ion cathode manufacturer. We are based out of Mountain View about five miles out of here. We are a startup company founded about two and a half years ago with a focus on innovating and commercializing LFP-based cathodes. We have chosen cathodes as our product roadmap with the idea that cathodes make up about 60 to 70% of the bill of materials to a cell and the way to drive cost improvements involves basically reducing the cost of a cell and a lot of that comes from reducing the cost of cathodes. So our product roadmap involves scaling a deployable technology, which is lithium-ion phosphate. It is the only cathode right now that gives you the right combination of durability, stability, cost, and supply chain resiliency. It already exists in the market today, and it can be readily scaled up. And then our intent is to be able to layer on improvements in energy density without compromising on cost and safety through introduction of next-generation cathode variants. Our customers, several of whom are strategic investors in the company, are those that value a cathode in their cells that prioritizes safety, stability, or cycle life over time and cost. So our product portfolio targets mass-market EVs, medium-duty trucking, and grid-scale energy storage. So what makes Mitrakim unique? It's our focus on building only cathodes, and specifically ion-based poly-anion cathodes that retain the safety of LFP while attempting to reach the energy density of the mid-neckle NMC622-like cathodes. What we bring as a differentiator is our speed of scaling from R&D to pilot scale, being able to commercially de-risk products, and with a focus on scale from day one. We ultimately believe that companies in deep tech space always have heavy investments in R&D, which can sometimes be very hard to scale up over time. So we have to start with a product that a customer wants today that exists in the market today. And LFP is a perfect vehicle for us to do that. In terms of, again, with the focus on scale, we have chosen a process technology that has been used to make several hundreds, thousands of kilotons of LFP in the last few years so that we can prioritize speed to market. So we use a carbothermal synthesis-based approach to go from the raw materials I've shown in the slide to a finished cathode product. And then the intent is to use the same process technology, same manufacturing equipment, and then layer on the product differentiation that we are developing currently in the lab. Scaling in the US is a very different challenge than scaling in Korea or scaling in China, which largely make up all of the cathode supply chain today. And we very much realize that what works and what is low cost in China might not necessarily be low cost or even sustainable in the US. So we are leveraging partnerships with several upstream and upstream suppliers as well to be able to make cathodes in an environmentally responsible way as well as we go along into our scale-up journey. Just a quick plug on where we are. I said we are a startup based in the Bay Area, but we have been using rented lines in several geographies to be able to demonstrate that we can make LFP at scale so that a customer that we work with can sample materials at a scale that's relevant to building an EV. So hundreds of kilograms of LFP that we are able to ship. So we have gone end to end and made several tons of LFP through rented manufacturing equipment. And we are actively in the point of doing site selection to set up our first mass production facility in the United States. So this is sort of our scale-up roadmap, and I'll leave it with that. We are targeting being able to be at the scale of about 30 kilotons per annum or so by 2028, starting with LFP as our entry product with the ability to layer on the higher energy density products as we go along. Thank you. Unfortunately, I don't have any slides, but I think my colleagues have explained the value chain very well. But I'll just briefly go over what Sparks is doing. We are also, we make LFP cathode similar to Mitrakam and also cells. We are trying to do both. And our facility is a little bit further away than Mountain View. It's in Livermore. And we are actively looking at production site near Sacramento. So we'll all be California-based. So that's kind of the short update for me. Thank you. Okay. Hello, everyone. My name is Richard Wang. I'm the founder and CEO at Kuberg. So it's very nice to be here. And I think particularly at a personal level, both because of my connection through my education with Yi as my advisor during my PhD here at Stanford and also very, very close ties to the California Energy Commission throughout our company's history, which I'll touch on a little bit in my introduction. So what is Kuberg? I started Kuberg nine years ago out of my PhD program. We're based in San Leandro, California, out in the East Bay by the Oakland Airport. And we're developing next-generation high-performance battery technologies based on lithium metal anodes and a unique nonflammable liquid electrolyte that we've developed in-house. And so this ultimately lets us make batteries that are much, much lighter weight and also much more powerful compared to existing lithium-ion battery technologies. We are focused on a go-to market that is targeted at early adopters that truly are in that high-performance realm. Electric aviation being one critical market, both vertical takeoff and conventional takeoff electric aircraft, where battery weight is absolutely critical to successfully electrifying segments of that industry, as well as the high-performance automotive and motorsports industry, racing applications, high-end premium cars. Again, areas where historically have adopted new technologies and have been that leading edge for them taking technologies through to maturity as they then get deployed to more mass market applications. And so we were acquired three years ago by Norfolk, the leading European-based battery cell manufacturer, developing their own cathodicative material based on nickel-rich high-performance cathodes, their own cell manufacturing, building out gigafactories in Sweden, in Germany, and most recently announced in the Montreal region in Canada, and then also doing systems design and manufacturing for ESS products as well as developing recycling capabilities. So full vertical integration of all the key capabilities in the battery industry and really to drive towards the fully circular battery value chain and maximum levels of sustainability. Before I get into actually telling you a little bit more about Norfolk and the company, I wanted to also just share a bit of my story and experience with the CEC in particular. So very, very grateful to everybody at the CEC and particularly so, Chair Hochschild, because the CEC has played quite a critical role in Kubrick's history. So looking back at 2019, around early-mid-2019, we were in the process of fundraising for our series A financing round. And at the time, actually the lead investor we had targeted fell through at the last minute. And at that point, that meant that we were actually only sort of at the lowest point, only about two months away from running out of money. And for anybody who has run a company, you know that it takes about one to two months just to wind down and close down a company. So literally sort of, you know, burning to that last end of the candlewick. But it was right around the same time, we're very fortuitously, we're then awarded our CEC grant. And I've shown the Chair this plot that I made back to 2019 of my financial runway. And then we're about to run out of money with the CEC. We then extended our runway because we could start billing the CEC for our development funds, extended the runway out to about eight months, which was a luxury at the time, but then use that momentum to then do some bridge funding with some small investors. And then that momentum actually ultimately led towards fortuitously the discussions with Norfolk that then led to assigning a term sheet with Norfolk for our acquisition in early 2020. And so really, I mean, we would not be here today as it is without really the strong support of CEC over the last several years. And we just wanted to express my sincere gratitude at that support. And I think a great example of both specifically the collaboration, both of course with Stanford and the CEC in successfully fostering entrepreneurial successes. So with that, let me just quickly run through the rest of my overview. So I've already described Norfolk a little bit. This slide is a few months old. They've now raised, I think, $13 billion. So truly one of the largest players in the electrification industry, the battery manufacturing industry, as we'll touch upon, is extremely scale and process and capex intensive. And that's the scale you need to be at to truly compete at scale with the highly established and efficient Asian players. Very, very strong order book, $55 billion in taker pay agreements including European automotive OEMs, now about over 5,000 people and already starting to deliver products out of their first gigafactory in northern Sweden. And so what does Kubrick do as part of Norfolk? We are fundamentally developing their long-term advanced technology roadmap. What will eventually go into mass market vehicles in that 2030 time frame and ultimately developing a disruptive technology that long-term will deliver the range and capabilities and also cost competitiveness to drive that next wave of EV adoption. But then in the short term, our commercial focus is their high-performance products unit. And so this is really where we're focusing on early adopters that are pushing the boundaries on technology innovation and energy and power density in the battery world. We're also vertically integrated, as Norfolk is, from materials development to cell manufacturing and also do module and pack manufacturing in-house so able to deliver full systems-level solutions for our premier vehicle customers. And as I mentioned, the vertical takeoff is one key segment where you need incredible amounts of both energy and power density to sustain urban air mobility with advanced battery technology, also looking at both retrofit and clean sheet designs of fully electric and hybrid electric planes, serving regional air mobility applications upwards of 500 miles of range and then the high-performance world, both in terms of premium commercial programs at the high end as well as motorsports and racing programs. We're, again, that legacy of innovation and fast-moving to adopt new technologies fits very, very well with the differentiated performance capabilities of our battery. Thank you. That's it for me. Well, this is very nice introduction to what they have been working on. I'm very excited to see the progress. Well, Richard, through your introduction, I feel like Stanford didn't teach you guys one thing. We didn't teach you how to handle it when you run out of money. That's something we didn't do teaching, but I'm glad to see Silicon Valley is really teaching you very well about this. Maybe this got to be in our curriculum. By the way, that also means as a faculty, I squeeze students away from the pressure or money when they're in the lab. But I'll tell you what, the reality is 20 years at Stanford, you never feel like you're having enough money to support students. You're constantly running into the situation. You're going to run out of money. So I'm glad you're learning this. Thank you. So with that, let's now do our panel. So you mentioned scale a little bit that is some of your remarks, you're full of you. If you look at the scale of the problem for battery manufacturing and supply chain, we roughly have about 1.4 billion cars, trucks, buses running in the world. If you kind of roughly calculate, you need a 100 terawatt hour of battery pack. What does this mean, this scale? The world production of battery so far, they already built manufacturing capacity plus the planned one. It's only one terawatt hour. So you will take 100 years to build what we need, 100 years. And then you kind of convert that into the weight. This 100 terawatt hour is multi-billion tons of batteries. So how many industries know how to make billion tons of stuff? Very few. Oil and gas, cement, steel, maybe water. Very few industries know how to do that. So how does the scale guiding your business, building up your manufacturing and think about supply chain. I'd love to hear your thoughts on the scaling issue. Well, I can start on the raw material side. I mean, our approach is very similar to say the chemical industry or petrochemicals industry might take to something like this. We're dealing with Brian. We're converting it. And to get the capacity for our particular development in matching in output is replication. So for this particular development, each turbine generator sets roughly 50 megawatts. It's a single flash unit, but we've ordered seven of those with Fuji Electric. Similarly with equipment. Now there might be efficiencies by going bigger turbine, but problem is with that we have to re-engineer everything. And each stage would put us back 18 months. So scale and capacity is sort of one of those challenges. And I'll imagine our colleagues here in the same boat. If we spit out 25,000 tons per year per stage and we've got seven, we can go up to 17 stages. How quick can we do that? We know the resource can do it. So therefore it goes back from our perspective on the front-end side, raw material side is looking at it like big oil would look at this. Maybe having six drill rigs going at once and drilling 60 wells, bringing the well fields in and replicating the equipment to be able to ramp up as quick as possible. Because there's two challenges for us too is capacity with the contracts that CTR has alone for 120,000 tons per year. That's a lot of lithium we've got to produce in a relatively short period of time. So let alone getting to the numbers that you're quoting their year, that's just off the charts. So how much lithium value would have the total capacity? Is there any estimation? Well, in raw lithium, lithium hydroxide in tons, I can't give you the conversion numbers, you guys might be able to figure that out, 300,000 tons per year lithium hydroxide, right? So it's in the world scale, it's a lot, but getting to capacity again is the challenge there. Recent DOE report, I think we can serve it. The Salton Seafield can serve us up to, I think it's roughly 450 million vehicles just out of that particular resource. Sure, Anne. Absolutely. You bring up a very good point, right? The moment you're starting to talk about making kilotons or gigatons of a product, you have to think about kilotons or gigatons of raw materials as well that go into making this product, and that's far from trivial, right? So in terms of, I can take one anecdote, and I'm pretty sure Richard or Prabhakar will have other things to share. When we started the company, that very much went into deciding what the product roadmap is, right? Now when you have to make gigatons and then you need six raw materials that go into making one product, that level of supply chain that you have to deal with, that you have to source, and that's far from trivial, right? Same thing. Even if you have the raw material figured out, if you don't have a process technology which doesn't scale very well with volume, that is going to be a problem as well. So if you're both inventing a new product and a new process, by definition, you are not going to be able to meet the timeline that your customers want as well, right? So scale brings with it a very interesting set of challenges, which is physics teaches you more the ingredients you bring in, more the chance that things will go wrong. So you have to keep it simple, right? When it comes to the composition that goes in. So that very much informed. The aspect of being at scale means that you need to keep your supply chain very much in mind in front and center when it informing our product roadmap. And once that is set for us, everything else was informed in terms of what we do downstream. So I think the scale that you're talking about is really enormous. And we are, I think, in the battery industry, we are not yet thinking that you'd replace all the cars or something like that. But even on the scale of, you know, not terawatt hours, but gigawatt hours, it's still quite a significant challenge today. And it's, at least in those kind of numbers, there have been other companies which have done it in the world. So there is at least some sort of roadmap of what has been done already. But to go from gigawatt to terawatt, that's a completely separate challenge at this point. And yeah, touching on Kubrick and Norfolk. So just briefly on Kubrick, the scaling journey has been central to how I've formulated our entrepreneurial journey. The reason why we ultimately joined a company like Norfolk was to ease our ability to scale a fundamentally new and less mature battery technology. And also the reason why we're pursuing high performance markets and not, let's say, mass market EVs from the get-go is because of the difficulties of fully scaling batteries to be cost competitive at the end of the day with a very, very efficient incumbent technology. And so scale certainly at that small scale, when you talk about innovation, it really is the central challenge in new technologies making their way to market. But then also talking about the Norfolk experience, which certainly is scaling right now today, you go to the factory Norfolk has, it's a 60 gigawatt hour factory split into four blocks that they're building up in northern Sweden. That facility alone, plus the associated cathode active manufacturing and recycling, is on the order of a $10 billion capital investment, just that one factory. And Norfolk has four of these going on in Sweden, two in Sweden, one in Germany, and one in Montreal. And that's just one company, which by the end of the decade can hopefully get to about 250 gigawatt hours per gear production. But as E said, we need probably estimates are on the order of several terawatt hours per year production, which is an incredible level of scale. And you look at now touching on battery cell manufacturing, what is, you know, our CEO, Peter Carlson, likens cell manufacturing to the formula one of manufacturing, because it combines all the different elements of difficulties from all different industries. You need fundamentally the volume of goods to be at the scale of, let's say, oil and gas or cement or steel. But unlike those industries, we're working extremely complex, discrete component parts with highly, let's say, automated levels of precision from a mechanical assembly process. And then also with significant amounts of chemical sensitivities and process capabilities to manufacture those materials in the first place, all coming together in clean and dry environments that then have to be manufactured. And if you have a defect, it's not a yield file. If you have a defect, that's an actual safety risk and a fire risk that goes out into a vehicle. So both the, and then all, doing all this at extremely high levels of efficiency and cost to actually make it affordable enough for customers to put into cars. And so the combination of all of these is, as you can imagine, incredibly difficult. And I think what you see really as perhaps one real bottleneck in scaling is actually expertise and so the people that can really make it happen. And this is something where there is just a shortage, certainly in North America, but really arguably globally, the talent and experience that has the know-how to know how to design and build and ramp up a battery factory. There's incredible amounts of know-how that just can't be documented and replicated easily. And even if you look at, let's say, the world-class established manufacturers, like a CATL in China, that has incredible levels of process and factory sophistication. Even there, when they try to translate that factory to a new environment, let's say in Germany, they have found significant delays and challenges because they don't have, let's say, to translate that in terms of finding local expertise. And then as we try to scale with the IRA in the U.S., certainly the macro environment now is there and there's huge interest and investment in the U.S. But really where we have to catch up is how do we leverage all that know-how that especially Asian manufacturers have built up over the last couple of decades and deploy it efficiently to actually get these factories operational because that is really the core challenge. So, Rich, what do you just say lead to my next question? So, we are building localized supply chain here in the nation. And the infrastructure law giving a lot of subsidy and free money to invest, met a lot of them. And also, Inflation Reduction Act also provide a lot of incentive. So, so far, what has been working well? What do you expect, you hope for and how this will impact building up the local supply chain right here so far? Love to see your thoughts for all of you. I think I'll sort of go work backwards off Richard's point. We already before the IRA come in, we were in discussions with some of our customers to the big auto work off-takers that we have about, you know, the advantages of co-location. So, in our case, we have energy, water, you know, workforce, the whole bit, plenty of land, you know, 6,000 acres out there. So, we, you know, we work backwards to the bagging operation and I'll start with that. So, if we to bag, the crying shame of all this was to bag a battery grade lithium hydroxide that doesn't ship that well to export it to another country for processing into a cathode and then maybe bring the cathode back to go into a better or send it to Europe and then it goes up into a battery assembly, right? By deleting our bagging operation that's $85 million straight up just in straight capex let alone op-ex. The 24,000 kilometres of carbon footprint to ship a raw material overseas to ship it back again is that cost is the VATs and the risk, like I said, it doesn't ship that well. So, that's the fundamental we started with so straight up it made commercial sense. We had a fair bit of pushback of course, a lot of companies that are established in other areas in Asia and other places that weren't too keen on co-locating to Pearl Valley or to California those conversations have changed and the IRA is really supercharged that. You talk about high-speed cars this is something that's probably quicker. So, that conversation in the ready workforces there we are in negotiations now unfortunately I couldn't share today who we those negotiations are with PCAM and CAM and that's where we're starting PCAM makes sense whether it's we provide LFP or hydroxide makes no difference to us. We simply put the pipe through the wall and delete the bagging operations and these facilities will use 120 megawatts of clean green geothermal power and an offtake agreement suits us we don't even have to put it on the grid. So, it's starting to sort of come together and it's these visions and ideas for some years now believe it or not are really starting to come to fruition. So, localizing that but I would say that it still needs to be incognizant with partnerships with foreign nations to be able to get equipment long-lead items. I mean since the guy that tried to do a U-turn in the Suez Canal we still haven't recovered from that to get equipment in you know it's just it really is I mean it's a real challenge so collaboration and companies like Northvolt and all the others and my colleagues here are seeing the same thing but fundamentally it's starting to come together and I think fundamentally it's happening quicker and I think the things we can do to improve it is permitting process and the usual things like that but with that I'll pause. Can I add to what Rod was saying so what the IRA and the bipartisan infrastructure law grants have really helped is addressing one very critical problem I think which is putting much needed capital on projects which have a very long return on capital which historically has not been the subject of investments in the US in general but that's just one piece of it and I do think that's gone really well there's been a lot of private sector investment into companies to bring up manufacturing but there is just so much more beyond just that which is and two of those critically which Rod mentioned are equipment equipment innovation and equipment production like in Asia equipment uses work hand in hand with the process control folks so the iteration cycles are very very fast right and the moment you have that together with the know-how and the labor to be able to also operate this equipment then you have this like tight net ecosystem to speed up manufacturing along right so you need capital but you need investment and equipment innovation locally as well to be able to sustain and stand up that supply chain really fast because that then motivates us to not have a hostile partnership but more of a how do you learn from like I'll just rip the bandaid off right there is no hiding the fact that China does something really well which is standing up manufacturing for entire swaths of industries at a time much much faster than anyone else can do and it's just beyond just access to capital or technology development it's this ecosystem that you have to stand up and I think there is a lot one could considerably learn in a collaborative way without necessarily you know for example. Yeah so this touch upon this another important topic so last year when the Governor Newsom visited China there is a one-day dialogue called the Great War Dialogue US-China Great War Dialogue I participated in the one-day dialogue it's very clear the two countries need to think about how to work together particularly on climate issue and you just brought out this point in China now supply roughly probably about somewhere around 70% of the global battery market there's a lot of engineering capability manufacturing capability right there so instead of cutting so how the two sides can work together and how do we benefit from establishing maybe new type of working relationship I think four of you are fighting in the front line really understand the value of that so any thought on this issue this is a little bit touchy issue but I think it's very important for discussion as well I can kick that off so I think there was also a shot across the bow where in response to I think semiconductor sanctions China basically put a graphite on their own expert control list as potential and there's a truly dominant on the graphite industry where China decided to stop exporting graphite literally would stop the electrification industry globally that's the power that they have in terms of that critical supply chain I was just in China actually near Shenzhen in December visiting with a few of our key partners there and one of them was one of the top cell manufacturers in China and truly I mean when you visit and see for yourself what's happening on the ground there I mean it's enormous and this is not just let's say you know deploying low cost labor to make cheap goods I mean the amount of sophistication and process and equipment designs and factories is enormous and so when you look at localization I think there's two big aspects that we talk about and really where also the opportunities are I think on the material side certainly there's an ability and as you can see with everybody on this panelist and very much motivation to localize material supply chains that does take quite a long time and especially if you look at raw materials then in 12 years for permitting or new mines opening in the US it's an extremely slow process that will be hard to keep up in terms of electrification timelines but then moving to the factory itself really where Asia has an incredible lead as well is in that process and equipment sophistication and ecosystem and you know this is China it's also Korea and still to some extent Japan where the equipment that they can design and the people that know how to run this equipment truly is what really drives the ability to ramp up and build out a factory and so again long term there's certainly efforts to localize Norfolk for example has been partnering with the German industrial ecosystem to train a lot of these automation vendors and so forth on designing battery equipment but again all of this is very very long lead times it's not going to move fast enough necessarily for building the scale that we need to build this decade and I think that's really where figuring out how to let's say have I think collaborative relationships with Asia really allows us then go that much faster in electrification of course with all the let's say geopolitical elements layered on top but I think from a technology perspective like truly when you see what they're doing in the factories there it's incredible in terms of the level of efficiency they've driven I think it's all been well covered already but I just want to say that obviously the one thing to learn is that you need to scale manufacturing to achieve the cost level manufacturing needs to be at a certain scale it doesn't have to be at a terawatt hour scale but at least at a gigawatt hour scale and that at least we can learn from there Any other thoughts to add in? I think there's a hybrid version there I think the US needs its minerals independence back that's probably part of it I'm not going to get into the political debate here but equipment and co-location skill set it's coming and I think it's a collaborative effort I mean South Korea works well China works well there's no doubt about it coming up with a hybrid across maybe it's some of the Chinese companies equipment providers co-locate here there's good products, good design good skill sets like we're all been talking about here and that's how we're going to ramp up the reality is I think it's 1.4 million EVs sold I think if I'm correct quoted by John Podesta the other day we've got to move this is so far behind the way we do that is collaboration I think the CATL Ford project is also a good lessons learned I mean Ford itself has its own let's say challenges and electrification and it's cutting back but I think the thesis of that project is that leveraging CATL's IP and technology on process they could then build a factory in the US that much faster but you look at what actually happened to that project there was a lot of criticism in the US about the involvement of CATL and then also actually from China standing CATL itself faced quite a bit of political pressure not to engage in the project because they were afraid of their own IP and process technology then leaking to the US and then training the US on how to manufacture and so that's an example where then the geopolitical tensions ultimately outcompeted let's say the interest in building this sort of effective business together but I mean those kinds of examples are where you can really then think about how do you start learning and leveraging technologies that have already been developed there to build factories much faster I think this you all point out the I will say opportunities we can explore the mechanism how to work together before I open up to the floor for the questions let me ask you just briefly each one of you very briefly what are the pain parts you are facing one or two and your company you can share with us and so maybe the audience can help you come up solutions maybe I think we're still in the US in California we're getting there we haven't caught up to this new age think about it the new age of oil if you like this is white oil it's coming on but we're all still referring to the 1940s handbook how to build an industrial building and how to permit a project that's to improve the environment and the process and time for permitting each stage by each stage there needs to be a more programmatic approach I would applaud chair host child's leadership I think AB 205 and other pieces of legislation that really stream that but you know we're still caught up in some archaic policy power generation over 49.9 megawatts all these sorts of things that really have been designed for a very maybe a very credible purpose in the 70s or 80s or whenever but they have no place right now it's yeah time and timing if we're going to be competitive at speed to market you know we're still everyone we still follow sequel we do the stringent environmental reviews and EIRs on the planet I believe but the time the take and intras they sit there and it just kills ultimately time kills projects that's the reality no matter what it is highly appreciate that through my own startup I also learn about this process is very slow yeah that needs to be improved I can go keep stealing my points right I think that the aspect about permitting and regulations one one aspect is again in countries that are used to commercializing technologies very quickly you have blueprints to go from lab scale to like production scale very fast something which startups like us could benefit could benefit from is some support for also pre-commercial scale like pilot scale demonstration whether it's a shared pilot scale facility or what not that is it's like the classic value of death where you can develop a technology but you don't make it at a relevant level you don't have the ability for someone to say I will sponsor your plan for example building a plan right but that takes money to build as well right so I think having the ability to have these intermediate scale demonstration facilities which are and this is very common once again we understand in Korea and China which allows you to like incrementally get to the scale very fast so that to me is like one area where government support could be super beneficial I think I mean but I think also there is I mean traditionally in the US there's been a lack of patient capital I mean but that's I don't think that's something that the government can do much about although I think the IRA and infrastructure act is definitely helping and essentially I think the VCs tend not to go for a how should I say a project that has a gestation of 12 years or whatever even even five years so that's something but I don't have a real solution for that I'll touch on the financing topic as well I think especially with interest rates being where they are this year financing is much more difficult than it was two years ago and at the end of the day how do you build these absurd terawatt hour levels of battery capacity it's with absurd amounts of financing at the end of the day and from the private markets they're of course fickle dependent on interest rates but also I think touching upon government policy I mean certainly both CEC and DOE in their own rights have been very forward-leading CEC in particular and you have the IRA but you know just sharing one experience I had is I was also leading the site selection process for Norfolk in North America and ultimately Norfolk did not end up building a factory in the US they ended up building in Canada and the reasons for that are complex certainly not only about money you know Canada has other benefits in terms of sustainable power and access to raw materials but in terms of how you engage at different levels of government there was a incredibly coordinated sort of approach between federal and provincial and municipal levels in Canada and how they put together incentive packages how they think about permitting and so forth whereas in the US it's fairly fractured at all different levels and in general especially federally other than let's say opportunistic space that might come you know once in a time there isn't really an economic development mechanism at the federal level in the US and to how tie it together with the states and so if you look at just the competitiveness the US has blunt force instruments during you know hundreds of billions of dollars with the IRA and certainly that is very effective and compelling on its own but it doesn't have let's say the finessed ability to work with companies in the way that other countries do. Now let me open the floor for the question this question here from the lady thank you panelists I think we would be remiss today to not address one of the elephants in the room which is over half of our attendees will be retired by 2045 certainly by 2050 I'm going to do a shameless and proud plug that the state treasurer's office is hiring as well as LBNO and I worked at the Berkeley lab and I want to thank them because of them I went back to grad school completed it got a public policy internship in DC and once you get that bug the policy the research the government bug you can never get rid of it you always come back so I wanted to ask the panelists about their social responsibility internships I wanted to read the control thermal resources social responsibility slide because it covered all those points really really well so they create up to 480 construction jobs over 940 are direct good-paying jobs 90% are community residents and a lot of them are 60% women and people of color now in California latinas are only 20% of the population yet they comprise 50% of the mothers in the state so what plan do you have to ensure that you are incorporating all those good things that will provide us with the workforce of the future and that their great high-road high-paying jobs and their careers of the future thank you great question thank you so after 12 years of community engagement I guess the lithium valley commission we're in a unique Imperial Valley is an ag area we've got south the border north the border and what we learnt that the number of 90% no one believed us on that and I'll give you one real simple example if you can operate a John Deere tractor and a pump and a pipe and work on the college tuition courses and we recently employed a few young guys that were on 34,000 a year just struggling to get through life there's one young guy that's got four kids can go to college struggling working on six ranches and he done his short course he started on 82,000 as an operator and now the kids are off to college and whatever so that's what I mean by organic growth and I think the ratio of how these operated jobs work you're talking a 24-7 operation that's one thing about geothermal as I'll say it again the sun doesn't set on geothermal and but it really it does put that in there and I'll use the other example Berkshire Hathaway are the biggest private employer in Imperial Valley they have a 300 odd jobs they've been operating a 40 odd years this is an extension of that so something that's known and new and novel so I think and the board's spectrum of jobs too you know it's not all white coats and as much as we folks in the room here that probably represents 5% you know PhDs and labs the rest is pure operators and maintenance and things like that so let me just chime in on that so definitely as Rod said most of the jobs in this kind of a scale up area are going to be for operators and technicians and actually as parts we are setting up a training center as part of the pilot line that we have and the training center is going to train you know operators and technicians like a three month kind of training course and so and then hire them at the end of that so that's kind of our planning for you know getting all these people good paying jobs and these will be good paying jobs obviously they're not going to be kind of not to say bad things about McDonald's but should be higher paying than McDonald's and you know and these will be four shifts you know because all these equipment has to operate at 24-7 so definitely there's going to be quite a lot of good paying jobs maybe adding adding a little bit but we all know a year ago Stanford started a door school of sustainability Dean Arlund was on the stage a few times speaking of developing talent educating more people in an equitable way and the door school there is this big plan how do you educate instead of only several thousand students how do you amplify education effect to develop the talent to millions so this is scalable education I would say this is deep inside the door school not only that we have now set up the sustainability accelerator as served as the funding director a faculty director of this organization is actually thinking about scaling of the impact and technology scaling processing scaling policy scaling education scaling is part of that as well financing scaling and we put scale up front eventually to go to scale you got to address the equity issue without that the scaling would not be possible we can take one more question right there Hello everybody, thank you very much I'm Leopold Paisler, PhD student from ETH Zurich and my research is on supply chains of batteries so thanks so much for your insight so far I'd like to address another elephant in the room maybe and that is recycling so I'm curious so back in Europe and also in China I understand that recycling is much more on the agenda of stakeholders in the battery value chain that's at least my personal impression and I'm wondering what are your thoughts on the role of the United States in the recycling technology because I'm wondering if maybe we should avoid the mistake of not seeing a technology that needs to be developed for various reasons but instead catching up then maybe 10 years later when you realize that is actually necessary and then you don't spare head the innovation but instead look at other players thank you very much thank you so much I was wondering who is going to ask about recycling finally I can take a stab at that from the Norfolk perspective so recycling is a technology that has matured a lot in the last 5 years and at this point you're able to recycle fairly efficiently and get 100% reclamation rates on materials like nickel and cobalt at least in the NMC based batteries so the technology works factories are being built out and capacity is being built out I would say I'm fairly optimistic on the recycling side I don't think it's a solution to all of our problems necessarily but it's moving very well and I think the reason is fundamentally the materials in the batteries are so valuable intrinsically that there is a market for recycling in the U.S. you have companies like rubberwood materials as well that has done a lot in building out recycling capabilities and it's actually a very profitable industry for the EV battery recyclers so all that is in motion the batteries are not getting thrown to landfills and they're too valuable for that to happen recycling on the other hand though doesn't solve a lot of the critical materials supply issues for probably how quickly the industry is growing because it's growing so fast and the needs are greatly accelerated you just don't have enough materials in circulation with which to recycle and supply your battery needs so we're going to be dependent on really virgin materials for probably the next couple of decades but then as you then eventually of course throughout the journey and as you get to stability that's really when recycling will be key to sort of kick things off and then eventually to then close the loop from a circular perspective on the other side of the not inside the buildings like these guys are but from a greenfield perspective the battery manufacturers that we've been talking to all incorporate the recycling in the program because they're trimming extrusions they have recycling anyway to a certain point I would say that Richard's point is that until there's sufficient capacity these batteries I think are lasting a lot longer number one people anticipated I've heard of 2013 batteries still going on these sorts of things getting core capacity to be able to justify it but I can say that the new build facility is the ones at least in our humble opinion have all incorporated recycling so our campus has that inbuilt not as a separate facility but within the actually assemblers I think we probably run out of the time with that let's thank the fantastic panel