[APPLAUSE]
Thank you so much it's
an enormous pleasure
to be here tonight with
you and to give you
a brief overview of some
lithium ion battery work
and just a little bit of
a history of lithium ion
batteries.
And where best to start but
with the immortal words of Julie
Andrews?
We should start at
the very beginning,
because it's a very
good place to start.
The big bang.
So this is the moment at
which the universe as we
know it was born, and the
moment at which each one of us
was connected to
each other atomically
and to the rest of the
universe atomically.
One of the fundamental
laws is the first law
of thermodynamics, and
it really thinks big,
that the amount of energy
needs to remain constant.
It says that the energy
cannot be made or destroyed,
but it can be converted
from one form to another.
And it's this idea of
conversion of energy
that brings us here tonight to
discuss devices like batteries
that allow us to store
energy in a chemical form
and then transform that chemical
energy into electrical energy
as and when we need it.
So before we delve into the
geography of battery cells,
let's take just a
short history of how
these batteries were developed.
So the term battery was first
coined by Benjamin Franklin,
and it was in the backdrop
of this US independence
that there was an
experiment carried out that
really shocked the world.
Galvani, an Italian
scientist, had long
thought that there was a
sort of link between movement
and electricity.
And in one of his
experiments, he
connected a lightning rod to
a frog's leg and then waited.
And when lightning struck
that rod, the leg moved.
And this really shook
the scientific world,
and it also influenced
Mary Shelley
at the time, who was writing
her novel, Frankenstein.
Now it was shortly
after this that Volta
started thinking
about, OK, Galvani
thinks that this electricity
is intrinsic to this frog.
What about this electricity
being intrinsic to metals?
And he started looking at
combining different metals
together, connecting them,
metals like iron and zinc
together to see if you could
elicit some electrical current.
And sure enough, he did.
And it was this discovery
of bi-metallic electricity
that formed the basis for his
innovation, the Voltaic Cell.
This is a picture
of a Voltaic pile,
and this is housed here
at the Royal Institution.
And this inspired
Michael Faraday,
who looked at voltaic piles and
started to construct his own.
And in his first experiment
that was noted here at the Royal
Institution, he
constructed a voltaic pile
from Halfpenny coins.
And in 1814, Faraday
visited Volta in Italy,
and Volta presented him
with a voltaic pile,
which is the one that's housed
here at the Royal Institution.
And it's such a
beautiful example
of shared scientific
discovery and knowledge.
Around about the
same time again at
the Royal Institution
was the first isolation
of metallic lithium.
Lithium, this is the name that
gives itself to the lithium
ion batteries that we use today.
And at the same time in
history, electromagnetism
was taking off.
And inspired by this, Faraday
looked into electromagnetism
in a bit more detail.
Conducted a lot of experiments
to try and understand
this in a bit more detail.
And in one of his experiments
which I just show here,
he had a long wire that
was sitting inside a glass
vessel that had a little bit
of mercury metal in the bottom.
And on the bottom of
that glass vessel,
there was a magnetic bar.
And by connecting this set
up to an external battery
and charging the electricity
through that wire,
that set up a magnetic
field along that wire.
And that magnetic field
interacted with that bar
magnet, and that
set up this wire
to move in a cyclical motion.
And that was the birth of
the first electric motor.
Following on from that, there
were further discoveries
in batteries from John Daniell,
a British scientist who
had made the first Daniell
cell, and then following on
from that was the discovery
of the first rechargeable led
acid battery, and
this was by Plante,
and this was used to
light lights and carriages
at the time.
And of course now in cars,
it's used for ignition as well.
It was Faraday who
had really looked
at this link between
chemistry and electricity.
And looking at the work that he
did and the work from Coulomb,
we can really start to
understand electricity
and chemistry and start
to think about things
in a quantitative way.
Here, I've just shown an
image of Faraday's lab
here at the Royal Institution,
and also a picture of Faraday
giving his Christmas
lecture in this spot,
because I thought that
was a really sweet picture
to show tonight.
So Faraday through his
laws of electrolysis
had looked at how we can
think about electricity
and think about the
mass of materials
that are involved in these
sorts of transformations
and electrolysis.
And from that, we can work
out quantitative information
about our batteries, for example
the capacity of the battery.
We can think of that as
a measure of the charge
that the battery can store.
And this really depends
on the mass of what
we call active materials.
These active materials are
things like electrodes,
and it was Faraday that gave
us those names, cathode, anode,
ions, cations, anions,
and electrolytes.
We can think of capacity as sort
of the maximum amount of energy
that can be extracted
from a battery
under certain
conditions, and we can
measure this in a number
of different ways,
and we're going to
hear about that later
in some of the next talks.
And in our own
labs today, we use
Faraday's Law of
electrolysis to work out
what the theoretical capacity
of the battery material may be,
and we strive to work
towards achieving
that theoretical capacity.
So tonight's talks
are really focused
on lithium ion batteries and
lithium ion battery chemistry,
so we should look back over some
of the key papers that brought
about this wonderful
discovery that
powers our electric
vehicles increasingly,
our portable electronics.
And one of the first
publications here
that I'm showing is from
Lewis, a very famous chemist,
who had looked at the potential
of the lithium electrode.
And some work had been
started then in 1913
on lithium batteries, but the
first lithium ion batteries
were not commercialised
until the 1970s.
In the 1970s, there was
the first publication
of electrointercalation,
so the movement of lithium
ions into and out of a material.
This is by Stanley
Whittingham, who
looked at titanium
disulfide materials.
This was very quickly followed
by the pioneering work
of John Goodnough, who had
discovered lithium cobalt
oxide, a material that's
still used in our batteries
today which facilitates
the movement of lithium
into and out of
these structures.
He'd done this work at
the University of Oxford
at the Inorganic
Chemistry Laboratory,
which you can visit and see this
blue plaque dedicated to him.
And in the 1990s, Sony
commercialised lithium cobalt
oxide batteries.
Very quickly followed reports
of spinel type materials,
manganesium spinels
and iron based
phospho-olivine materials,
and this research area
remains extremely vibrant
and exciting even today.
So let's look at a lithium ion
battery cell in a little bit
more detail, and we can break it
down into its component parts.
So this is a picture
of a typical coin
cell, which you may have
seen in some of your devices.
It's made up of a
cathode, which is
our positive end of the
battery, an anode, which
is the negative end,
and then there's
a separator that
keeps the two apart.
And between those,
there's something
called an electrolyte.
We can understand what
each of these components
does if we start to hook this
up to an external circuit.
So this is my imaginary battery
and my cathode, my anode,
and my electrolyte.
So I have my positive cathode
and my negative anode hooked up
to an electrical
circuit, and that
permits this flow of
electrons around the circuit.
And because of the
chemical reactions
that are going on
inside this battery,
you end up getting a buildup
of electrons at that anode.
The electrolyte plays a
hugely important role.
It doesn't allow electrons
to move from that anode
across to the cathode.
So the electrons are
forced out of that cell
around this external circus.
And on that journey, they
can start to power things
that they're hooked up
to, like for example
this light bulb that we have.
So the electrons move
around that external circuit
and perform their function.
What does the
electrolyte do, then?
The electrolyte is what
permits the flow of lithium
ions in a lithium ion battery.
So it's ionically conducting
but electronically insulating.
If we look in detail at this
kind of cathode material,
this is called lithium
nickel manganese cobalt
oxide, which is a
bit of a mouthful,
so we call it NMC for short.
And the little letters that
are after its name tell you
a little bit about the
makeup of that material,
so how much nickel there is,
how much manganese there is,
and how much cobalt there is.
And this is a material
that's currently used
in electric vehicle batteries.
Each one of those elements
plays a specific role
in that battery.
The nickel increases
the capacity.
Remember, that's the charge
that a battery can store.
But when you increase
that nickel content,
there are some challenges
and complexities
in the synthesis
of these materials.
The manganese provides
structural stability,
but it does so at the expense
of the capacity of the battery.
Then finally, we've got
cobalt, which improves the rate
performance, but as we're going
to hear later on, is costly
and there are ethical
concerns with mining cobalt.
So let's look in a
little bit of detail
about how lithium ions move
in these battery materials.
So this is my NMC material.
I've just blown up the
structure a little bit more,
so you can see these layers
of transition metal oxide.
And these green dots
here are my lithium ions.
So this is my cathode
material, and then on this side
here, I've got my
anode material.
And a very typical
anode material
that's used in modern
batteries is graphite.
Graphite, again because of
that lovely layered structure,
it allows the movement
of lithium ions
in between those layers.
So during charge,
we start to see
the movement of those lithium
ions from that cathode
across to our anode.
And they move through
that electrolyte.
And then during discharge,
the lithium binds
then can move from
the anode back
across through the electrolyte,
and into our NMC structure
again.
And that movement
of lithium ions
and the movement of electrons
in that external circuit,
the electrons are moving
in the opposite direction,
these two things
are interconnected.
If you don't have one,
you can't have the other.
So for example, if
your lithium ions
stop moving because your
battery's discharged,
no more electrons in
the external circuit.
How do we know where
all these atoms are?
I've shown this beautiful
picture of all these atoms
perfectly arranged.
It's hugely beneficial
in the UK that we
have these wonderful resources
like the ISIS neutron and muon
source and the
diamond light source.
This is where we use
neutrons and high energy
x-rays to interrogate the
structure of materials,
and we can work out where
in space all of these atoms
are lying.
We can determine if atoms are
sitting in the right place,
or sometimes they may
sit-in the wrong place.
So over time,
lithium and nickel--
I didn't show this in the image,
but lithium and nickel ions
are very similar in size.
And you may have
noticed when you
buy a new device that
your battery works really,
really well.
But a year or two
later, the performance
isn't as good as it used to be.
And that's because over
time, those electrodes
start to degrade a little bit.
Atoms start moving into
the wrong positions.
Your electrode materials
start to crack.
You start to just
get the breakdown
of your material over time.
So what can we do
to try and mitigate
these degradation processes?
Well, when we look towards the
next generation of lithium ion
battery materials and when we
look at cathodes in particular,
where are we moving to?
We can increase the nickel
content of these battery
materials to try and
up that capacity,
try and reduce the cobalt, maybe
even completely eliminate it.
We can try to discover
even new materials,
and we can do that
by combining things
like computational
insights from calculations
with some synthetic
design procedures
and try and come up with
a new family of materials.
We can design
strategies and develop
strategies that avoid
degradation and prolong
battery life.
And how do we do that?
Well, sometimes we can
form a protective coating
around our NMC
material, and that
will protect it from
some harmful species that
might erode it over time.
Or we can start as crystal
chemistry engineers,
we can start to mess around
with atoms that are present,
take one or two out,
and replace them
with an element that
might keep that framework
structure nice and stable
over multiple cycles.
We could also look at
making our batteries safer.
These electrolytes that I've
talked about up to now are
liquid based
electrolytes, and that's
what's in your mobile
phones and your laptops.
We could maybe move from
liquid electrolyte systems
to solid electrolytes
and ceramics that
provide greater
safety and allow you
to operate at higher voltages.
So as we're moving to these
next generation of lithium ion
cathodes, we have
to start to think
about where we're
going to source
these raw materials from.
And I think this
is the perfect time
to start handing
over to Simon, who's
going to discuss the source of
materials in a bit more detail.
Thank you.
[APPLAUSE]
Thank you very much.
[APPLAUSE]
I'm going to talk about the rise
of the battery megafactories.
It sounds grandiose,
but it's been
a trend that has kind of
been unbelievable to watch
the last four years
for benchmark.
And that's where as
a publishing company,
we spend all of our
time in the supply chain
from the mine to
the battery cell,
collecting data and
advising these companies.
So big statement number one--
we are in the midst of a
global battery arms race.
Again, sounds over the
top, but it doesn't even
begin to start to scratch
the surface of what's
been happening with the build
out of global lithium ion
battery capacity in the wake
of what people call the energy
storage revolution,
which really is
pure electric vehicles and
energy storage systems,
off grid energy storage systems.
For this, I'll take you
back to 2012, actually.
Show of hands, how many people
here know the name Elon Musk?
Hands up.
Five years ago, that
would be 10 people.
I guarantee it.
So Elon Musk, who is the
CEO of Tesla, back in 2012
got on a plane to
go to Japan to see
the world's biggest lithium ion
battery producer, Panasonic.
And he went to very conservative
Japan, very conservative
battery company,
to ask them nicely
to expand their capacity
by fourfold in three years
just so he has enough batteries
to make electric vehicles
that no one buys yet.
What he wanted to do was sell.
He tried to convince
them he would
sell pure electric vehicles
in the hundreds of thousands
a year when they were being
sold in single digit thousands
back then.
Really, it was only the
Nissan LEAF back in 2012.
He came back, he wasn't
successful, surprise surprise,
and he devised a plan called
the Tesla Gigafactory, which
is essentially
building the world's
entire supply of batteries
under one roof just for Tesla
back in 2013, 2012.
Well, in Q1, the
plan was underway,
and that sparked what we
call this battery arms
race, this race to build
out enough capacity
for this next generation
of vehicles and storage.
Well today, we've
got 72 mega factories
in the pipeline, that's in
a three and 1/2 year period
really, and that equates
to 1.59 gigawatt hours.
I'll go into a bit
more detail on that.
In a chart form, this
is what's happening now.
You've got gigawatt
hours on the left.
And gigawatt hours is a
way of quantifying really--
it's energy storage,
but it's a way
of quantifying how many
batteries these plants can
produce.
It's important to
know of the 72,
about 40 already
are in production
at multi gigawatt hours scale.
That is an order of magnitude
bigger than their predecessors.
So these battery plants
are significantly bigger
than what was being built just
for your mobile phones, which
makes sense really
when you think a car is
much bigger than a phone.
This is where we're
going by 2023.
This is where we're going by
2028, and more of these plants
are being announced as we speak.
One last week was
announced in India, which
we haven't got on this chart.
So that will intensify as the
world needs more batteries.
How many electric cars,
pure electric vehicles
does that equate to?
It's about 22 to 24 million.
So when you look at
these big announcements--
VW this morning
announced that they
want to build 70 now
pure electric vehicle
models by 2028--
you realise that that
isn't a lot of batteries.
We're going to need a lot more.
So this is the
Tesla Gigafactory.
You've got on the right is
a picture-- we were there
last week, actually.
So the picture on the
right is actually Casper.
I don't know where he is.
He's here today somewhere.
Here is Casper.
For scale, Casper is
about seven foot tall.
So you can see it's a
big plant, effectively.
But the Gigafactory right
now, and it's only a third
of its design
capacity, is bigger
than the world's entire
battery industry in 2014.
On the left is you can get
scale from the size of one floor
on the left, which is that
little computer monitor
at the bottom.
So that's the size of a floor.
There's three floors.
On the right is some nice
pictures of Tesla Model three.
This is a little video, and
it actually goes further back,
so it goes in an L shape, so you
don't see the full amount here.
This is in the middle
of the Nevada desert.
Not very far from Reno actually,
so actually a great location.
But nearly all of that, 75%
of that is battery making.
Only 25% is car and
battery pack making.
So really, the challenge
here for all gigafactories,
mega factories going
forward is getting as much
of the supply chain on
one site as possible,
reducing the logistics
between all the components
from raw materials
to battery cell.
So as you can see, this is
the ultimate plan for Tesla
is to bring all the raw
materials for the cathode
and anode as Serena
explained, and then
going into cell
manufacturing on site,
then literally making
the battery packs,
making the chassis, the
motor, putting all of that
together in one complete
unit, and then you've
just got to bolt the
metal doors on and seats
and wheels and stuff like that.
So 80% of the cars are
going to be built on site,
and this is the blueprint for
all electric vehicles going
forward.
So this is what the
UK must do, has to do.
It's what Europe
has to do, and it's
what China are pushing towards.
So why are lithium ion
batteries so important?
Well, if you think of a pure
electric vehicle-- this is not
plug-ins, it's not hybrids
in talking about these.
We don't have many on the road,
but a pure electric vehicle
where the whole chassis of
the car is a battery pack.
It's a lot of batteries
that go into it.
In fact, there's 4,000
of these 2170 cells
which Tesla produces
at the Gigafactory
go into a Tesla Model three.
Why are raw materials
so important?
Well, 79% of the cost of that
cell are minerals and metals.
So a smaller proportion
are the cathode
and anode raw materials, which
are actually not commodities,
they are chemically
engineered input materials.
A lot tougher to get
into the supply chain,
so that's something we
can talk about later.
But they're essentially
what the industry
call a jelly roll, which is
like a Swiss roll I guess
cake of minerals and metals.
Then you inject it
with electrolyte,
and then you put
it in a canister,
and that's effectively
the modern day
cylindrical cell
lithium ion battery.
I probably didn't do the
science justice there.
And as you can see in
the Tesla Model three,
25% of the cost of that
car is the battery.
So statement at the top,
the cost of batteries
are the decisive factor for the
success or failure of the EVs.
Tesla, by the way, is
now producing those
at under $100 per
kilowatt hour this year,
so that's another
barrier broken.
The bottom statement, the
price of raw materials
are the decisive factor
for the cost of batteries.
So this is why the raw
materials are so important.
Scale, quality, and cost.
So big statement number two.
The lithium ion
battery supply chain
are the oil pipelines
of tomorrow.
What are the raw
materials to watch?
We like to call them the four
horsemen of the ICE apocalypse,
so that's the Internal
Combustion Engine, ICE,
which is the cars on your
road for those who don't know.
We've got lithium
leading the charge.
We've got the dark
horse, graphite,
which doesn't get much
kudos and coverage,
but it's the anode
material of choice.
So it is so important
that graphite keeps pace
with the rest of this industry.
Cobalt doesn't have a
very good reputation,
and nickel there
trying to kill cobalt,
because there's as a trade
off with increasing nickel,
reducing cobalt. We can talk
about that a bit later as well.
You can see coal and oil are
dying there at the bottom,
and the house of ice
built being knocked down.
But the four horsemen of the ICE
apocalypse are quite like that.
So the final few slides.
Lithium supply-- I use
lithium as an example.
We can talk about
cobalt, graphite, nickel
later on in the Q&A. Most of it,
actually a decent chunk of it
is coming from Chile.
This is the Salar de Atacama.
It's actually brine mining.
So low impact, where you're
pumping brine out of the water,
evaporating the liquid
away, and extracting
the lithium and other
minerals, and then
you put it through
a processing plant.
Actually, the majority
of feed source
now comes from traditional
hard rock mining in Australia.
That's your traditional
mining, where
you can get a rock concentrate.
That gets shipped to
China, and that then
is processed into battery
lithium within China.
And again, the key
thing to understand
is lithium is a
very small industry.
Last year, 300,000 tonnes
give or take produced.
LCEs is Lithium
Carbonate Equivalent,
but all the commodities
you're used to hearing about,
coal, copper, oil,
they're in the millions
or tens of millions of tonnes.
So lithium needs to get to
well above a million tonnes
by mid 2020s to keep
pace with the demand.
Don't think it's
going to do that,
but the point is that it
has to go from the niche
to the mainstream, and
it's not a commodity,
it's a speciality
chemical, which
complicates the supply
chain a little bit more.
So this is lithium demand.
This is a big boy Andy Miller.
I put this in because
his mum's here tonight.
Andy Miller isn't with us.
He's over in the
US, but I thought
Katherine would like that.
Again from a demand perspective,
look at the right hand portion
of this pie chart.
Lithium ion battery, 51%.
It's important to note that
now with these raw materials,
it's the same for cobalt,
it's similar for graphite,
the battery end use is now
taking over the majority
of the supply chain.
So once you go
past that 50% mark
of this mineral being used in
batteries, then the industry,
the producers, the supply chain
recalibrate everything they do
towards lithium ion batteries.
That wasn't the case
before, so that's
something to bear in mind.
Then, they take the chemical
out the ground on the left.
They turn it into a white
powder, effectively.
That's what lithium
carbonate looks like.
On the right they
bag it, and then they
will send it to the
Tesla Gigafactory,
for example, in this
form where they mix it
with the other cathodes,
the NCM or the NCA material,
and then it goes into a battery.
Final two slides.
The reason it's
complex and difficult
is there are five stages.
More important,
there are 15 steps
to get lithium out of the ground
and into an electric vehicle.
So that's 15 steps
for it to go wrong,
15 ways to qualify that
material against hurdles
it has to go over, so
it's not straightforward.
As a result, price
volatility is now the norm.
Lithium's price has
increased four x.
It's come off since, but
it still remains high.
And that's the same for
cobolt and other raw materials
going into the battery.
There's a lot to talk about.
Thank you for your time.
[APPLAUSE]
So really picking up from where
Serena left off is then all
of that wonderful
electrochemistry that drives
the storage and the release of
energy takes place in the form
of a rather dull looking
particle about five microns
across that's kind
of black or grey.
I've got some examples here.
It's really nothing
special to look
at if you're not looking
at it through a microscope.
And if you wanted to try and
get some power out of that,
attaching leads and crocodile
clips to those tiny particles
is a bit tricky.
So what we need to do
is turn it into a format
that we can actually get
electricity in and out.
And what we do is we coat
those powders onto foils.
We call the foils
current collectors,
because that's what they do.
And inside that coating
that we put onto the foil,
you can see on the
micrograph behind me,
lots of tiny little particles.
Those particles are about
five microns across.
That's about a hundredth of
the width of a human hair.
And they're packed into a
matrix of bits of carbon
and some adhesives
and some solvents
that we use to be
able to deposit them.
And the purpose
of those additives
is to connect all of those
little electrochemically
active particles together
and to connect them
to the metal foil
that sits at the back,
because that metal foil is
something that we can connect
a wire or a light to in order to
take some performance from it.
And that structure is
incredibly carefully engineered.
If you think about the journey
that Serena talked about,
where the lithium ion has to
travel across the separator,
it then has to combine with
some of those anode or cathode
materials, it's a little
bit analogous to trying
to park cars in a car park.
If you think of those particles,
those electrochemically active
material particles as being
a little bit like car park
spaces, I can have
a battery which
stores lots and lots
of energy by having
lots and lots of spaces, so
I can pack as much material
into it as I possibly can.
But the challenge
is to do that, I'm
sacrificing all of the
roads and the channels
through which the
lithium particles are
going to have to travel to
find their parking spot.
And so what I need to do
is engineer this electrode
to get just the right
balance of accessibility
of those particles
with the total density
and availability of them.
And there's some
really great technology
that goes into preparing
the what we call inks
and printing those
inks to do that.
So what we do first
is we take our powder,
and we mix it into an ink.
And we mix it with carbon
black typically, which
is nice conductive additive.
That links the electrical
current all the way
from the particle to the foil.
And we'll mix in some
binders, and that's basically
an adhesive that makes the
carbon stick to the foil.
And then we use a solvent,
which makes it liquid so
that we can start to
print it, and we're
going to dry off that solvent.
And as we dry the
solvent off, it's
going to leave
porosity behind it,
and that gives us that
beautiful micro structure
that you saw earlier.
So we coat, and I'll
show you a video
of that in a moment on
a reel to reel coater.
To make the kinds of volumes
that we're talking about,
this is something that has
to happen at very high speed.
I'll show you some more
details in a minute.
But this is something that has
to run on a continuous process
line.
It's about 120
metres a minute to be
able to make the quantities
of batteries that we need.
And then we have to
dry off the solvent,
and that actually takes a
tremendously large amount
of energy.
The solvents that
we use for our anode
are typically things like water.
They're quite benign,
but at the moment
we don't really have any
good solvents for cathodes
that aren't fairly unpleasant.
We use a substance called
N-Methyl-pyrrolidone.
Brilliant solvent, really
horrible for health.
So we have to be very
careful how we control that
in an industrial environment.
And then, we do something
called calendaring.
We run that very carefully
coated micro structure
through the world's
biggest mangle.
And what that does is
it compacts it all down,
and it gets a bit more
density in there to give us
a bit more energy storage
before finally, we chop it
into pieces, and once
it's chopped into pieces
we can assemble it into cells.
And we can assemble those cells
in one of two typical formats.
We can cut those cells into
big sheets, rectangular sheets,
typically about the size of
maybe an A5 or an A4 book.
And we stack them
like a lasagna.
And what we're doing is trying
to get as much contact area as
possible between the
anode and cathode sheets
with those separator
layers in between.
And if I cut them as rectangles
and stack them lasagna style,
I get something I
call a pouch cell.
The other way that
we can do this is we
can print it onto very
long, thin strips,
and we can roll those
strips together.
And that makes me a cylindrical
cell of the 21700 sort
that you saw in
Simon's presentation.
Now, I brought a couple of
those along with me tonight.
So the battery industry
is not very imaginative,
so this is called an 18650 cell.
That means it's about
18 millimetres diameter,
and it's about 65 millimetre,
long and it's about circular.
All of those are actually
about for to an engineer.
A 21700 is 21 millimetres
by 70 millimetres.
You get the idea.
It's not complex.
But what we've got inside this
cell if I were to open it up
is our roll of materials
all tightly packed.
Don't do this at
home, by the way.
At home, this is full
of caustic electrolytes,
and it will do you
no end of harm.
Do do it when you make
these in the lab for fun,
and you don't put
the electrolyte in.
But what you see
in here is a roll.
And in that roll, we've got
the layers of anode and cathode
materials separated by this
white separator material,
polymer separator material.
And that simply gets
dropped into the cell can.
We weld the electrode
to the bottom,
we weld an electrode to the cap,
as Simon so eloquently put it,
we squirt in some electrolytes,
typically under vacuum,
and then we seal
the whole thing up
and we take it off and charge
it for the very first time.
And if you were to see what
those foils look like inside,
we can put about a metre
of foil, a metre of anode
and about a metre
of cathode foil
inside each of those cells.
This is actually
an anode material,
so it's just made of graphite,
which means I can handle it
and it's safe.
If I was to bring that
the cathode material which
has nickel particles
in it, I'd have
to wear some gloves and people
would get annoyed from a health
and safety perspective.
So to see what that looks like
in a lab type environment,
I have a short video here.
Ollie, if you could
just hit play for me,
that would be brilliant.
Thank you very much.
So what you can see here, starts
off with the mixing process.
This is done in a
lab environment.
This is not what a
factory looks like.
So we're mixing
up that ink, which
is a bit like a kind of
molasses type consistency.
We then pour it into
a reel to reel coater,
where we lay that coating
down onto a roller.
We draw the foil up against
it, and that draws off
the coating to give
us the coated foil
that we're looking for.
The drying actually takes
place in a closed cupboard
that you can't see, and
then we stamp the materials.
We use a robot to assemble
them, because the alignment
of those anode and
cathode foils is
absolutely critical to the
quality of the battery.
It's one of the
things that can cause
it to fail early in its life.
We then seal it into a
material, which is actually
very similar to a coffee bag.
Coffee bags resist moisture
for about three months.
That material resists
moisture for about 15 years.
And having done that
with the electrolyte,
we then take the thing
off ready to form.
Now in our laboratory, we
can make about 20 cells a day
using researchers.
If you were to walk
into a Gigafactory,
you'd see individual
lines producing something
more like 20 cells
per second, and that's
one of our challenges.
And we don't just put those
cells directly into the car.
We first of all have to put
them into sub assemblies which
are manageable.
So we take our cell,
whether it's a pouch
or whether it's a cylinder,
and we assemble them
into things called modules.
These are really
just sub assemblies.
And what we're trying
to do at this point
is to keep the voltage of
each of those sub assemblies
below about 60 volts, so it's
relatively safe to handle.
And we're trying to
keep the mass down
to about 50 kilogrammes or
so so that it can be handled
in a factory environment.
And ideally, we want
that module to be
reusable across many
different electric vehicle
types, so we can get
some economies of scale
out of its manufacture.
And then, we'll join
those modules together
to make the battery pack.
And the battery pack, you
can see the Nissan LEAF one
on the slide behind
me, typically covers
the whole of the
floor of the vehicle,
typically weighs somewhere
between 300 and 900
kilogrammes.
So it's a fairly substantial
piece of equipment.
And then that gets bolted
underneath the vehicle
typically on the production
line for the car.
And the fact that
that pack is large,
is heavy, it's
hazardous goods, means
that there's a lot of benefit
to doing the assembly of that
very close to where you do
the assembly of the car,
and that's important
for us for reasons
I'll come back to in a moment.
So as Simon said,
our Tesla Model three
has about 4,400 of those little
cylindrical cells inside it.
And Tesla has finally
reached its magic number
of about 1,000 cars
per day in manufacture.
If you want to
multiply that up, that
means that just to
produce one model of car,
that factory has to produce
50 cells every second.
And given that as well
as the Model three
they're also making the Model S,
the Model X, and a whole bunch
of other stuff besides, so
actually the Gigafactory
that's now doing about
20 gigawatt hours
today is doing about
125 cells per second.
The fastest mini guns that
get connected to helicopters
by the RF are shooting at
targets, the very fastest
that they've ever made
and gone to production
are about 125 cells per second.
That just gives you
a bit of an idea
of the rate that these factories
have got to be operating at.
And that's how you get to the
things like the Gigafactory.
So it takes about $4
billion of investment just
to get to the point we are
today to do 20 gigawatt hours.
And as Simon said, this
is only about a third
of what Tesla wants to be
doing in the long term.
And that's already a 200,000
square metre facility
with about 3,000 staff.
So it's a fairly significant
industrial endeavour.
It's also a massive
commercial opportunity,
whichever way you look at it.
So the reason that the UK
is interested in all of this
is the UK at the moment has
a very good industry in cars
and particularly
in making engines.
So we make about 1.7 million
vehicles and about 2.5 million
engines every year.
And the engine is
about one third
of the value of the car,
bill of materials cost.
But when we move to
an electric vehicle,
we replace the engine with an
electric motor and some power
electronics, and that costs
about the same as the engine.
Then we put a battery in
place, and that costs typically
three to five times the
cost of that engine,
and then we put the rest
of the car on top of that.
So there's two things
that you'll notice.
The first thing is the
total cost of our vehicle
has gone up significantly.
The second thing
is that nearly 50%
of the bill of materials
cost for a long range
electric vehicle is
embedded in that battery.
If we see that as a
bought in component,
that's outsourcing an enormous
amount of the value creation
that happens in the car
industry in the UK today.
So economically as
well as technically,
it's important for that
to be a component that we
have an ability to deliver.
If we look at the
kind of volumes
that Simon's slide
showed around what
we've got to get
to by 2028, 2030,
across the EU we're going to
need the equivalent of about 12
of those Gigafactories at
the size they are today.
And to support the UK industry
if we supply it domestically,
that's space for about
two to four gigafactories
of that size, actually there
are some very good arguments
that say that the
economies of scale
suggest you want smaller
factories, probably about 10
at about half of that size.
So that's a big
opportunity for the UK.
And in response to that,
the Faraday Challenge
and the Faraday
Institution, which
has sponsored today's
event, has been set up
to accelerate the UK's research
efforts, our innovation,
and our industrialization
of batteries going
from the achievements of
Good Earth in the 1980s
as the inventor of the
lithium ion battery
to try to place in the position
where we've got large scale
manufacturing and exploitation
of that technology coming
from the UK.
And that journey takes
place over an enormous range
of length scales.
So the kinds of
technology development
or scientific development
that Serena's talking about
typically happen at the scale
of milligrammes or grammes
in a laboratory.
As we look to see whether they
work in the context of a cell,
we work in laboratories like
ours at the kilogramme scale,
building 20 odd cells a day.
And by the time we get to the
scale of the far right hand
side which is our
Gigafactory, that's
a kiloton per year of materials
that we're processing.
And to make that
jump from laboratory
into full scale
factory, what you need
is the ability to trial those
manufacturing processes.
If you're going to be
making 50 cells a second,
you want to make sure
you're making them right,
because if you're losing money
off them then making more
is a really bad idea.
So what we need
here in the UK is
a facility that lets us look
at that manufacturing journey
as well as the
scientific journey.
And part of the
Faraday Challenge
is the construction of
something called the UK Battery
Industrialization Centre, and
that's being built in Coventry.
It's not very far away from
my own institution at Warwick.
That's a 20,000
square metre facility.
It's about 1/10 of the
size of a Gigafactory,
so it's still a pretty
significant endeavour.
And that will have the ability
to do about one gigawatt
hour per year
manufacturing capacity.
And that allows
material suppliers,
manufacturing
companies, car companies
to start designing cells,
designing new manufacturing
processes, and bringing new
materials forward to market.
And what we hope is
that that's going
to give us a springboard
in the UK for a large scale
manufacturer to set up
to link into the R&D
and the development
efforts here and start
to supply some of the major OEMs
that we've got based in the UK.
And that, I hope, is
a good opportunity
to hand over to one
of the major OEMs
that we have here in the UK.
[APPLAUSE]
Thank you very much.
And thank you to the
previous speakers.
In my view, it's perhaps one
of the most exciting bits
of the presentation
this evening is really
how the battery comes to life.
So we've seen the
raw materials, we've
seen what a battery is,
we've seen how it's made,
we've seen, then, what it
will take for Gigafactory
to come to the UK.
My job at Jaguar Land Rover,
I'm Global Purchase Director
for Electrification.
So my role is very much
linked to what they've just
been talking about there,
buying the batteries
from these Gigafactories
all over the world on behalf
of JLR.
The picture you can see behind
me is the base of an I-pace.
If you were to
take off the body,
take off the seats,
the doors, that is
what you would see left over.
So the main bit in the
middle is the frame,
which contains 36 modules.
For those who were
listening earlier
in terms of this
style of battery,
they then contain
12 pouches, which
is then what's driving the
90 kilowatt overall battery
that you can see in there.
So just to start
with a question.
How many of you in here this
evening have ever driven
or travelled in an
electric vehicle?
OK, that's not fair.
And just anybody want to shout
out what was your experience?
What did it feel
like to be in an EV
compared to a normal
petrol or diesel?
Silent, quiet, fast.
Yep, exactly.
Those were all the words
that I would certainly
associate with driving an EV.
The silence is something
that is really noticeable,
and that sense of peace
that you can have in an EV.
There's certainly none
of that stop start
that you get particularly in
city driving at the moment.
And that sense of response.
They are incredibly
responsive due to the nature
of the design of the vehicles.
It is quite hard, as they
say, to describe that.
But I have got a
video, which hopefully
will give you a sense of
what it's like to have an EV.
[PROPELLOR AND ENGINE SOUNDS]
[DRAMATIC MUSIC PLAYING
& ENGINE REVVING]
There you go.
A very fast I-pace.
And we were delighted
last week when
the I-pace won the European
Car of the Year Award
at the Geneva Motor
Show, and it's now
being put forward
to become voted
for the world car
of the year, which
we're very high hopes for.
But how did we
get there and what
performance is in that vehicle
that you could see there?
As I mentioned before,
it's a 90 kilowatt battery.
It can do zero to
60 in 4.5 seconds.
These are not tuned vehicles.
This is the I-pace that
you could go and get.
That comes as a result of the
90 kilowatt battery packet.
It has a range of 234
miles on the EPA range,
which is the US Environmental
Protection Agency range,
or 470 kilometres on WLTP, which
is the European Union range.
It has a top speed
as you could see
in that video of 200
kilometres an hour,
which is over 120 miles an hour.
And it has all wheel
drive, and it's also
significant in terms of
the amount of roominess
that we were able to
drive into that vehicle.
And the way that
we were able to do
that, how did we
get to this point?
Really, it demanded a
significant change in the way
that we engineered this
vehicle within JLR.
We're used to
developing vehicles
that integrate internal
combustion engines,
be they petrol or
diesel, which then drive
in effect a passive drive line.
When it comes to an EV, we had
to change the entire way that
we engineered the vehicle, so
it meant that we had to have
an awful lot more interaction
between each of the centres
of excellence across
the organisation.
It meant that we had to
integrate the powertrain
into the whole vehicle.
It's no longer an engine
and individual drive trains.
We've got the battery pack that
then drives the electric drive
units that are integrated
into the front and rear axle
to be able to deliver the
performance that you could
see there.
The high voltage
batteries, again, they
are integral into
the vehicle dynamics.
And they are scalable, as
has been mentioned by some
of the earlier presentations.
And having those
standardised modules
is really going to be key
for us as we move forward
looking to how to optimise
the cost of these vehicles
in the future.
In addition, we have to be
very careful with the energy
management of these
vehicles and to make
sure that we can
optimise those and have
a fully integrated
system so the vehicle can
be primed before starting
use or dynamically
managing the battery output
throughout the entire use
of the day.
On a battery, we've
spoken earlier about what
happens to the
batteries, we've seen
that some of the materials
included in the battery pack
are particularly
challenging for us.
The battery has a standard
life that we can see here.
The first use will
be in the vehicle,
and that will last for a
particular amount of time.
In the I-Pace, we warrant them
for eight years, 100,000 miles,
whichever one comes first.
At the end of that
time, it doesn't
mean that it then has to
automatically go and be
recycled.
There is a second use
for those batteries,
whether that's in
stationary storage
such as in an x-storage
system from Tesla
or from some of the other
automotive manufacturers
that are going to wool
box systems at the moment,
or it may be reused.
We have a project
going on in rural India
at the moment with
I-Pace batteries
that are being set up for
a micro grid system in some
of the areas of the world.
And then, it gets
to the point where
there is then a
challenge in terms
of do we go for recycling?
Taking those materials with
nickel, cobalt, lithium,
the copper, the aluminium
from the buzz bars,
those materials will have
a value and the important
is to take those back in,
working with our partner
suppliers and feed them
back into the supply chain
so that we're not having to
go and get virgin materials
and we can then develop
a closed loop system.
And that is ultimately
what we're aiming to do.
So just in terms of
future opportunities,
I believe that this is the
first in a series of Faraday
Lectures at the
Royal Institution,
apologies There is a further
series of lectures which
will go on in terms of what
EVs mean in terms of driving
and challenging the way that
we are an infrastructure
for charging those vehicles
and for developing cities
and what it means for
urbanisation going forward.
So thank you very
much for listening.
[APPLAUSE]
