Materials in lithium-ion battery cathodes have continuously evolved since the 1990s, but anodes have stubbornly remained graphite. Now, finally, there’s some innovation on that side: silicon anodes, which engineers have struggled to master for a decade, are finally coming into wide commercialization. They enable up to five times the energy density of graphite anodes, charge many times faster, and are poised to revolutionize the battery market. In this episode, I talk with Rick Costantino, co-founder and CTO of Group14, which is selling a silicon-carbon composite material for anodes. They’re already selling to dozens of large battery manufacturers and expect silicon anodes to completely take over the market by 2030.
Lithium-ion batteries, as all you savvy Volts listeners know, are generally composed of an anode and a cathode, with an electrolyte in between them. As the battery charges and discharges, the anode and cathode exchange lithium ions — thus the name.
In the last 30 years, the cathode material in these batteries has undergone all kinds of innovation. You can find cathodes made of varying combinations of lithium, cobalt, nickel, manganese, iron, and aluminum, depending on the application. NMC, LFP, LMO — all these acronyms refer to different cathode materials.
But anodes have not seen as much innovation. Historically, they have almost always been made of graphite, 95 percent of which comes from China. In the last decade, however, a number of companies have attempted to use silicon in the anode, as silicon unlocks much greater energy density and faster charging times.
At a Pacific Northwest Climate Week event held by Canary Media on Tuesday, July 14, I spoke with Rick Costantino, the CTO of Group14 — one of the leading companies involved in this effort and one of the first to reach real scale. We discussed the challenges of working with silicon, the solution his company has patented, where silicon anode batteries are showing up today, where they might be tomorrow, and the enormous performance boost they promise.
Timestamps
00:00 – Introduction and the graphite anode problem
01:54 – Why silicon, and why it kept failing
06:26 – From pharma to batteries: Rick's path
09:24 – How SCC55 works: silicon in a carbon scaffold
14:38 – The payoff: energy density and charge speed
18:59 – A drop-in material, and scaling in South Korea
21:11 – Where the batteries go: phones, EVs, drones
24:29 – Cost versus graphite
26:20 – Cycle life, calendar life, and safety
31:26 – Supply chain and the silane bottleneck
36:26 – Pairing with LFP, DOE support, and phones
40:30 – Bringing the cost down, and competitors
43:27 – The five-year outlook
Resources
People & Organizations
David Roberts (Substack - Bluesky)
Volts (Website - Podcast - Apple Podcasts - Spotify - YouTube)
Rick Costantino
Company & Industry News
Group14 opens factory to produce battery materials for flash charging EVs
Group14, the Washington company at the center of the EV lithium battery revolution
White Paper: Sionic Energy and Group14 Whitepaper on Life Cycle
Text Transcript
David Roberts: All right. Hello, first of all, Rick Costantino from Group14, welcome to Volts. Thank you so much for coming.
Rick Costantino: Thank you very much.
David Roberts: And, thanks to all of you for coming. I’m excited for this. So if you listen to Volts at all, or if you follow clean energy at all, you probably know that batteries are everything. Everything is batteries. If you have a problem, throw a battery at it. That is practically the slogan of my podcast. And so we’re gonna talk about batteries today, a battery innovation, a very exciting battery innovation. So I think the place to start is, I think most people know batteries these days, or batteries typically are an anode and a cathode, and an electrolyte in between them. They’re sending ions back and forth. When you charge and discharge, you’re sending ions back and forth from the anode to the cathode. And I’ve been following battery chemistry innovations for a while now. I’ve written about a bunch of ‘em. I’ve done podcasts on a bunch of ‘em. Maybe you’ve heard, you know, they started, like Tesla is using nickel magnesium cobalt. There’s lithium ion, there’s lithium iron phosphate. Lot of different chemistries you may have heard about flying around. But what you may not know is that all of that innovation, all of those varieties, are cathodes. Those are all cathode materials. The anode, basically since lithium ion batteries were invented back in the early 1990s, have been made of graphite, and that is, that was true then, it’s true today. So to start with, Rick, why don’t you just tell us what is the role of the anode, and why has it been so resistant to change and innovation?
Rick Costantino: Okay, great. That’s a great setup. And yes, batteries are, a lot of our joy and a lot of our frustrations, and we’re trying to improve them. And so like you said, last 50 years, lithium ion batteries have really been using that same, you know, anode, that graphite anode. And, the bottom line is that it, that it works. It’s what was started originally. It’s a very ubiquitous material, and it works, it works very, very reliably. And at the time it seemed like a very logical choice, you know, to pair. And over the last, you know, about 50 years or so, there’s been lots and lots of advancements in the battery except for that anode. We’ve been using that same graphite chemistry, you know, for this whole time. For this whole while though there’s been an interest in developing, you know, new anode materials, and particularly silicon, which is, which is basically the new, the new material that Group14 and other companies are developing as this, as the anode. it’s quite difficult. Those challenges have been met recently with technology. But until now, it really hasn’t been possible to commercialize those types of batteries.
David Roberts: Yeah, so silicon has been... People have been talking about silicon anodes for a decade now. I’ve followed on and off. There have been lots of attempts that have not really gone anywhere. Maybe start by talking about the challenges of making silicon work, why it’s been so hard to make it work.
Rick Costantino: Sure. One thing I should mention is that the cathode is what brings in your amount of energy, brings in lithium ions, right? And as you mentioned, you’re sort of bringing the cathodes, bringing that lithium from the cathode to the anode back and forth again, and of course, electrons are going the other way. So your energy density of your battery depends on how much cathode you can bring and how much lithium you can get in the cathode. And so the reason people are interested in silicon as a new anode material is because you can store a lot more of the cathode. So basically, you know, in your battery, your anode takes up a lot of the volume. So if you can have a more powerful anode that has a much higher capacity for absorbing, you know, the lithium atoms, you can shrink, you know, your anode. So imagine shrinking your anode, so now you can make your cathode bigger, so you can bring in more lithium into the battery. So people are interested in silicon and other, you know, anodes that have a higher energy density that can actually store more lithium than the, you know, than graphite can.
David Roberts: 10 times, as I, as I understand it. Graphite’s made of carbon. I think it’s like 1 atom of silicon can hold 4 lithium ions, where it takes, like, 6 carbon atoms to hold a single lithium ion, something like that. You can hold a lot more lithium ions with a single atom of silicon.
Rick Costantino: That’s right. It’s about 10 times the capacity on a mass basis. And, you know, the way that graphite works, if you kinda remember your old carbon, structures, you know, you know, graphite is carbon, and it’s a particular form of carbon where it’s in layers. And the way that graphite takes up lithium is that it can intercalate between those layers. And so but there’s only so much lithium that you can store. It’s very, it’s a very reliable way to store it, but it’s a very limited way that you can store it. But with silicon, it actually forms an alloy with the lithium, so it’s, so not only does it store more, about 10 times on a gravimetric basis or also volumetric basis, but it also can, it can absorb and give up that lithium much more rapidly. Now it’s basically thermodynamic. It wants to exist in that alloy state, so it’s not really a matter of kinetics and sort of pushing carbon layers out of the way. It’s about forming an alloy that nature naturally wants to form.
David Roberts: But when silicon absorbs lithium, it swells. This is, as I understand it, the big problem, and if you have an anode that’s swelling, you’re eventually cracking your battery, you’re ruining your electrolyte, et cetera. This has been the challenge, right?
Rick Costantino: That’s right. That’s been the key challenge, for silicon for a long time. It does, expand quite a bit, about 400, about 4 times its, you know, volume when it absorbs lithium ‘cause it forms this new phase. Lithium, it has to go somewhere, it has to form this form, this lithium silicon alloy. And so every time that it absorbs that lithium, it decreases the volume. The consequence of that is that it has a bigger interface. And so, you know, there’s something around that material called the solid electrolyte interphase, or SEI, and you want that to be very stable. And if that’s constantly growing and shrinking, it can actually, you know, crack over time, and it can, it can form separate kind of particles, and that could absorb more and more lithium irreversibly that you can’t exchange back and forth each time. And this can also, you know, cause shorts in your battery. So silicon has been a great material to, you know, charge and discharge once, but to have it in a recycled battery has been, has been quite a challenge.
David Roberts: So let’s talk about then how you solved this problem, and this, I think, gets, interestingly to your origin story. You’re not an electrochemistry guy. You’re not a battery guy originally. You have been thinking about how to deliver silicon in a completely different context. So talk about where you came from and sort of what transferred over.
Rick Costantino: Yeah. So, you know, despite, being CTO and co-founder of a battery materials company, I am not a battery guy. So I hire really good electric chemists that teach me, you know, about batteries every day. And often I find that not knowing what’s supposed to work or not work has been really helpful to invent new ways of looking at things, but as long as you’re careful. So, you know, so my background as a chemical engineer, I actually worked in the pharma industry for more than a decade and, you know, worked in the heyday. I worked for a company called Genentech, which was one of the first, you know, biotechs on the planet, and it was all exciting and, uh... But in 2009, I ended up, doing some, consulting work. My company at that time was doing drug delivery and at that point, because we didn’t own the actual active pharmaceutical ingredients but a delivery technology, when all those companies downsized their departments looking at sort of new ways to market their pharmaceuticals, they decided they didn’t want our delivery technology anymore, so I ended up consulting.
David Roberts: But when, and when you say deliver, you mean like getting the drug to where it needs to be in the body?
Rick Costantino: Yeah. Actually, I-- So the technology I invented was, biodegradable microspheres where so instead of sort of injecting a solution of your, let’s say, your peptide or protein once a day, you can inject it inside a microparticle, which, you know, in a way is not too dissimilar to thinking about a, an energy storage particle, and that particle in your body would degrade over say days or weeks or even months. So we, for example, had a growth hormone product that instead of injecting it once or multiple times per day, you could inject it once a week. Or for indications like schizophrenia, Risperdal, instead of injecting, you know, every day, you can inject once even a month. This is very, very important for some of these kind of disease states. So that was a very interesting technology. We also were developing vaccine technologies, and one of my expertise was freeze-drying with the way to, you know, freeze and then, you know, remove that solvent, by under vacuum, and it’s a great way to, you know, take a pharmaceutical preparation and make it stable, like, for example, for third world storage and things like this. So that was my expertise. So I was consulting, and one day I got a call from Rick Luebbe who was the CEO of a company called EnerG2 at the time. And he said, “I heard that, you know, you’re expert in freeze-drying. I saw that you’re consulting. I saw you wrote this book on freeze-drying. I’d like to hire you know, for your help.” And I said, “Oh, great. What pharmaceutical are you working in?” He’s like, “Oh, no.” He’s like, “I’m working on a battery material.” And I said, “That’s a really dumb idea.” I’m like, “Freeze-drying is really expensive and really energy intensive. It’s gotta be a better way to do what you’re doing.” So kind of long story short, you know, I helped them solve their freeze-drying problem, but I sort of quickly realized that there was a much better way to engineer that battery material using some of those same kind of principles, and we kind of reinvented the way to make the carbon as a completely solvent-free, kind of processing that we call Dryrolysis, and it’s actually the basis for making the carbon scaffold, the carbon backbone that we now make our silicon carbon, composite material. So that’s how I got into batteries.
David Roberts: And so you have this scaffold, as you say, a scaffold made of carbon. And so the idea, as I understand it, this is I’m sure very simplified, is that you absorb, you put silicon inside the scaffold and so that when it swells, when it absorbs the lithium ions, it does that inside the scaffold rather than bumping up against other stuff. Is that roughly correct?
Rick Costantino: Yeah, that is correct. And so we, you know, at the time, had this carbon technology, and we were developing this for a different kind of battery called a ultracapacitor. And so this is a sp- very special batteries that are, that are very important. They’re niche batteries. At the time, we thought they were all gonna make us rich and famous, but we were, we were wrong. But they’re a very interesting technology where you have a lot of surface area, a lot of volume inside of that carbon material so it can, it can absorb different ions in this mechanism. So these ultracapacitors have a very, very, fast charge and discharge, but they don’t, can’t hold very much energy. So they’re used for things like regenerative braking to kind of store energy in very, very short timeframes. So that was our technology and, but we realized that that wasn’t gonna make us rich and famous, so we had to pivot to something else, and we got very interested in lithium ion. And we, you know, we were using hard carbon as a kind of an alternative for replacing graphite. And of course, everybody wanted to, you know, work on silicon, like you said. And everybody had this challenge of this silicon expansion issue. And so at the time, there were many companies that were making different types of silicons, and they came to us and said, “Hey, can you take your carbon and coat it, like, around our silicon material?” That was kind of gen one idea, was, “Okay, let’s just protect the, you know, silicon with a coating of carbon,” like a little magic shell, like the ice cream with the chocolate kinda coating. And that worked pretty well. It improved the silicon quite a bit. You know, it didn’t really keep it from expanding completely, but it sorta helped, you know, keep it a little bit more stable. it improved it a little bit, but it really didn’t look like a game changer, and it really wasn’t a great sort of business kind of opportunity for us, just, you know, improving other people’s materials. So we pivoted to, “Okay, how could we make it-- how could we make that material better?” Kinda still use this equation of silicon plus carbon. So kind of our gen two approach, I’ll get to the gen... the final gen three in a second. The gen two approach was we took a, an existing alloy of silicon aluminum alloy and etched away that aluminum to create a porous silicon, and then we put that inside a carbon, and that worked really well because now we had this sort of nano-sized, kind of silicon features en-encased in carbon, and that worked pretty well. The problem was we created this enormous amount of byproduct, this aluminum alloy, aluminum salt, and we said we had to help create a whole nother business to sell that, and we said, “That doesn’t make any sense either.” So then we came up-- we literally, you know, went through a period where we went kind of the drawing board and said, “Let’s kinda rethink this whole thing.” And it’s, you know, it’s kinda hard to convince your CEO to go in a new direction after you’ve invested all this time and money. But we went a new direction, and we thought of the problem of a different angle and said, “Look, we know how to make carbon. We know how to engineer it. Instead of thinking about, like, adding carbon to the silicon, let’s figure out a way to make a silicon scaffold, a place to grow the silicon inside.” And that was kind of our a-ha moment where we said, “Okay, let’s create a porous carbon.” So think of kind of a sponge of... We created a carbon, and we’re growing the silicon inside of that, of that carbon material. So we have kind of a, think of a micron-sized, you know, porous carbon particle sponge, and inside of that we’re growing nano-sized amorphous domains of silicon. So now the silicon, has the freedom of kind of being inside of that carbon scaffold. So you can think of the Group14 material, it’s, by weight it’s about half and half, carbon and silicon, but by volume it’s about one-third silicon carbon and one-third void. So every time that particle kind of absorbs the lithium, you know, can sort of help, you know, maintain that expansion within the particle so we can get the best of both worlds. We can get the high capacity, of the silicon but get the good stability and surface, features of the carbon itself.
David Roberts: And so this material you’ve made, it’s called SCC55. If you haven’t thought to think of a cleverer name for your material than the-
Rick Costantino: That’s also kind of a funny story. You know, when you’re only five employees, you know, you only have so many, big marketing team. So- So you know, marketing team came up to me and is like, “Okay, we gotta figure out what to call the material.” And I said, “Well,” I said, “We call it SCC55. That’s Silicon Carbon Composite 55.” And they’re like, “That’s a great name. I’m gonna use that one.” I’m like, “Okay.” You know, but you know, it does speak to kind of the simplicity and the novelty of it. It literally took us like fif- 55 iterations. And you know, some of our competitors, you know, advertise they’ve done thousands of combinatorial things, and you know, while I think that’s great, I’m also quite proud that, you know, we just, you know..
David Roberts: you don’t, it only took you 55
Rick Costantino: We gotta figure out the next one. I wanna call it, you know, fif- do we go 55BCD or do we do 56, 57? But you know, so I gotta figure out what the next generation’s gonna be.
David Roberts: As I, again, as I understand it, you, it’s not a s- it’s not a set ratio of silicon to carbon. You can vary that ratio. You can use more silicon relative to carbon, and as I understand it, the more silicon you use relative to carbon, the better your energy density, et cetera, the more performance you get out of it. But presumably there are trade-offs. Sort of what’s the trade-off when you increase the percentage of silicon relative to carbon?
Rick Costantino: Great question. So the core technology is, as you said, it’s flexible, so we can sort of modulate, for example, the ratio of silicon to carbon. We can modulate how much, the volume. We can modulate the particle size, to some extent the shape, et cetera. Now we’ve sort of have one particular flagship product that seemed to work pretty well across, you know, for different customers, so we kinda fixed that one design. But our manufacturing platform is quite flexible, and we actually, we’re already working on designing kinda multiple next i- you know, iteration products out of our pilot plant in Woodinville, Washington, which we’ve finally transitioned from, you know, commercial production back to what I wanted to use it for as our sandbox. So you can, you know, create different, you know, materials using the same core technology and there will be trade-offs. You know, the higher, if you want higher capacity, you have to have more silicon. So there might, you know, might be, it might be a bit, you know, more expensive to produce silicon versus the carbon, for example. And silicon, you know, has less conductivity generally than carbon ‘cause it’s a semiconductor, whereas carbon is more conductive. But you can, you can compensate for that with other, you know, kind of tricks on the particle design as well. So there are some trade-offs, but there’s also ways to mitigate, those trade-offs. But different customers want different things, so we’ll, you know, we’ll kind of tailor different products as kind of the market, demands them.
David Roberts: So let’s get to- The meat of the issue, which is if you replace a graphite anode with an anode made of SCC55, what do you gain, and how much?
Rick Costantino: Okay, you know, great question. And, you know, the key benefit that you get is the increase in energy density, you know, which is whatever was in the holy grail for the, for the silicon material. Now, we’re not getting the 10 times the density, because our material’s half silicon, half carbon, so we’re about 5 times, of the capacity. So one way that my CEO likes to describe it is every 5 tons of Chinese graphite you import, you produce 1 ton of domestically of Group14 material. So we’re kind of that equation. Uh-
David Roberts: Five, 5 times the capacity is not a, that’s not a small thing.
Rick Costantino: Still pretty good. That was kind of the big benefit that you get is the energy density. But the other benefit that you get, and we didn’t really fully honestly appreciate this as we were kind of forming the the company and exploring the technology, was the increased rate capability that you get with silicon. And, you know, this was something where, again, because, the way silicon interacts, with the lithium ions fundamentally differently than how graphite interacts with the, with the lithium ion, you can get much faster charge and discharge. So whereas your, you know, normal battery based on graphite might take tens of minutes or hours even to charge, you can charge in less than 20 minutes, less than 10 minutes. We’ve got customers that are creating batteries you can even charge in just a few minutes, even less than one minute, which is mind-boggling. So, you know, once you can start charging that rapidly, then maybe this sort of range anxiety, certainly charge time anxiety goes away, and maybe even range anxiety with you can truly go that fast. Now, to reap the benefit of that, you have to kinda rethink other parts of the battery, ‘cause the batteries haven’t been designed for 50 years to do that. So you’re gonna have to think about how to maintain, you know, how do you generate a lot of heat when you charge and discharge that quickly, for example. But once you understand and that’s what you wanna do, we have customers who are making some pretty phenomenal batteries, across different, at different industries.
David Roberts: So if I take a set battery with a set amount of cathode, the same sized anode, but made of SCC55, I get, I can store 5 times as much energy, and I can charge in minutes rather than hours.
Rick Costantino: Yes, exactly. Some of our customers are quite aggressive and wanna completely dispense with the graphite and use our material, you know, silicon-based anode instead. And for those customers, they’re able to get maybe up to 40 or even 50% higher energy density for that same, that same physical battery, that same, that same dimension of battery. Or you can make your battery smaller for the same energy, or you can make it lighter, depending on what, you know, whether it’s even taller, whatever. So those are kind of the gains you can get. Now, other customers ha- are choosing, instead of going all the way into the silicon material to start with, they decided they wanna sort of have incremental improvements. So for example, we’re see, you see this more in the cell phone arena, where there’s been a series of cell phones, and we are now in over 20 million cell phones in Asia. And materially we actually made in our plant in Woodinville, Washington, so it’s kinda fun. And-
David Roberts: And just to, and just to be clear, ‘cause I’m not sure we’ve actually said this out loud yet, but you’re making the material, selling it to battery makers, and then the battery makers are designing batteries and building batteries around the material. You’re just in the material business.
Rick Costantino: That’s right. So I like to use the analogy we’re the Intel inside, so we don’t make the computer. We, you know, we make the chip, so we don’t make the battery. We make the material to make all the batteries better. And we’ve early on, you know, decided that making batteries is really hard and lots of folks do it really well. So I aspire, you know, let’s make the world’s best materials and let’s let everyone else, you know, figure out how to make the best batteries out of it and let those end users make the best devices, the better, the better cell phones, the better cars, the better computers, the better drones, the better whatever.
David Roberts: And this gets to the scaling issue, too, ‘cause one of the things that has brought down, I think, a lot of previous efforts to make silicon anodes is they often are entirely novel technologies that would require entirely novel factories. And, no, it takes a lot to talk a battery maker into scrapping factories and building entirely new factories. Your material works in extant lithium ion manufacturing facilities. Is that, is that categorically true?
Rick Costantino: That is categorically true. So we design the material as a drop-in, so we... It’s a black powder. It looks, you know, kinda like graphite. It processes very similar to graphite. Now, if you’re completely displacing your graphite with our black powder, you may have to do things a little bit differently, but you’re using the same equipment. But you may have to change your recipe a little bit, your stir rate and so forth.
David Roberts: Yes. This was the analogy I thought of. It’s like a bakery. Like you don’t need new machinery in your bakery, but you do have to tweak the recipe of your bread if you’re using a new kind of flour, for instance.
Rick Costantino: That’s a good way to think about it. Yeah. Exactly.
David Roberts: And so when you’re talking about scaling- Currently, you’ve got a factory, you’ve got this-- your Woodinville factory’s now returned to being your sandbox and your little innovation box. You’ve got a factory built now in South Korea producing the material, selling it to battery makers. It’s going into batteries. The batteries are going into phones. Where else are the batteries going?
Rick Costantino: Yeah, so I can’t talk too much about specific customers, unfortunately. You know, but we’ve been engaged with most of the world’s battery production. I think now we’ve got something like 150 customers, I think is the latest number.
David Roberts: Battery makers-
Rick Costantino: Battery makers
David Roberts: who want your material
Rick Costantino: Who want the material. We’re engaged with something like 95% of the world’s battery-making capacity has- is looking at our material at some stage or another, either commercialized already or about to commercialize. And that was, you know, by our early design. So we took a very different strategy to commercializing our material. Like from our very start, we were very interested in commercial partnerships and supply chain partners. Our very first investors were BASF, when we spun out of the EnerG2 company I mentioned, and of course the US Department of Energy was one of our early investors, our first project. Our first, Series, B was with ATL and our s- first Series C is with SK Materials in Korea, which is the company we’re now partnered in the plant we mentioned. And so we’ve been always interested in partnering with either cathode makers or other carbon makers or electrolyte or other companies or folks that produce the silane gas that is also used to make our silicon material. So we’ve always wanted to be part of that supply chain to make sure that we knew what the market, how the material would use it, and make sure that we were kind of in lockstep with where the industry was going because so many things have changed about our assumptions from when we started producing this material. But we’ve been able to kind of stay ahead of the technology and stay with the market.
David Roberts: And you have some kind of deal with Porsche, but as I understand it, there’s not a car with a battery with this stuff in it that a customer can buy yet.
Rick Costantino: not yet. Yeah, Porsche was, Porsche was one of our investors, and we were going to say Porsche. It was reminding me to say that. All right. So, otherwise I get in trouble for-
David Roberts: We’re in America here
Rick Costantino: Yeah, exactly. But, yeah, so they’re one of our investors and they’ve been, they’ve been with us, and yeah, we c- I can’t comment on any specific timelines, but certainly, you know, they have a lot of long tradition and interest, you know, in high performance vehicles and, you know, they made the realization that, you know, electric, is k- you can get some pretty darn high performing electric vehicle, so.
David Roberts: So but in theory, we are talking on some time horizon about EV batteries that hold lots more energy, get lots more range, and charge lots faster. That’s kind of the, that’s the scale, that’s the scale market, presumably. That’s the, that’s the big fish. I don’t know what the analogy is. That’s the big market you’re gonna go after eventually, presumably.
Rick Costantino: Yeah, that is the big market and that was sort of our founding market, you know, for the company, although I’ve heard some predictions that, you know, kind of either, you know, AI or other data storage could be a bigger market for silicon batteries. And again, and the performance by the way is so different from a lithium-ion standard battery that they’re, people are now calling these batteries silicon batteries, and that terminology has really caught on, so the market could even be bigger. Non-EV applications could be bigger, for silicon batteries.
David Roberts: And are you in drones now?
Rick Costantino: Oh, yes. Yeah, we’re definitely in drones. Um- And again, we’re in batteries that we are- And you know, if you think about your ability to carry payload and, you know, a lot of payload and to go long distances is very, very important for drone applications. So yeah, so drones is a b- is a big application for silicon batteries.
David Roberts: Well, let’s talk about cost ‘cause I think that’s what everybody’s interested in, and I think, you know, one way to ask about cost is how much is a pound of your material versus a pound of graphite? And then another way of thinking about it is the per energy output cost. So talk about both those. Presumably the material itself on a volumetric basis is more expensive than graphite just because it’s d- a custom manufactured as opposed to, and graphite has a very long history of scaling.
Rick Costantino: Yeah, folks have been optimizing graphite for quite a long time. You know, it’s definitely spending more, but you know, you’re paying for a high performance material, and you know, part of that is, as you said, is the sort of, you think about the cost and you know, you know, what do you charge per kilogram or per mass, right? But you know, we keep trying to convincing the procurement folks of our customers, you know, “You should be think about is how much you’re paying per energy storage unit, right? So how much you’re paying per milliamp hour, right?” So when you’re buying gas, you know, you’re not, you’re not thinking about how much per you’re paying per gallon. Well, nowadays it’s so high maybe we’re all numb, but you know, you think about like what, you’re gonna pay more for higher octane gas, right? ‘Cause, and you’re gonna get more miles for the dollar. So if you think about batteries on a sort of kilowatt hour per dollar basis, you can actually have less. You can actually have a savings even though you’re paying more money per mass for the anode material, you can make batteries that have lower cost. And I can, I can go through the spreadsh- I can’t do it in the room right now, but I c- I can go in the spreadsheet and we’ve spent many hours with the procurement people and they understand it and finally they say, “Well, we still want you to charge us less money.” So any new technology’s gonna have a premium, and then there’ll be a market for that. And so any, you know, companies that wanna be at the forefront will pay that premium. And over time, you know, as we get to larger scales and our, as our supply chain gets more mature, those costs will come down. But, you know, right now, you know, I think it’s a pretty good, kind of value proposition and I think the really savvy players in the market are seeing that, and we’re already seeing pretty good traction.
David Roberts: What about cycle life? This is always a question that faces any new, any new battery. There are lots of fancy new types of battery chemistries that I’ve read about over the years that sort of crash on the shore of you can only charge and discharge them a limited number of times before they burn out and everybody wants resilience in their batteries. So how does this replacing graphite with this material affect cycle life?
Rick Costantino: It’s a very good question and, you know, we’ve designed, you know, the material to keep that silicon in its best possible form that we can think of, again, which is that nano-sized amorphous form. It’s been academically studied that that’s the best form of silicon. It’s just really hard to create that in a commercializable form, and again, we do it by putting it inside the carbon scaffold. And so, you know, we have customers that can achieve the same cycle life as the graphite battery, and it may not be easy the first time. You can’t expect to use exactly the same recipe, just if you’re changing your flour, you can’t expect, you know, if you’re gonna use, you know, potato flour or whatever instead of, you know, wheat-based flour, you’re gonna make a very different cake. So you gotta change your recipe accordingly. Um- And but you can get a really good result. We’ve, we published a white paper, fairly recently, if anyone’s interested I can, you can come approach me, I can give you the link to it, where we had over 15 customers using our material across different chemistries, cathodes, and different chemistries that were able to achieve 1,500, even 2,000, even 3,000 cycles. So that’s, we’re back to the m- So we say that 1,500 cycles or 2,000 cycles is now the new normal versus 1,000 cycles. So you can get, you can get a good result, but you may have to work at it, and like I said, if you are, using kind of small amounts of our material, you know, changing for graphite, it’s easier to get a good result right away, but if you’re more aggressive, it may take more work. And one of the things that we learned is that, you know, you have to, you have to also get, you know, pretty good at making batteries yourself to show your customers sometimes. And so we’ve developed in Woodinville, we have a pouch line to make pouch batteries, the same kind of batteries in your phone, and we can make those there, and we’ve gotten pretty good at it. It’s taken us a while, but, you know, once you can make a battery that’s pretty good and show your customer, “I got a good result, you guys must be much better than we are at it, you’ve been doing it for this long time.” So if you can show the material works firsthand and show that first data and then present them a data package, say, “Look, here’s the recipe how we did it, you guys can certainly get a better result than we did,” it really helps to kind of speed the conversation.
David Roberts: I read that paper about cycle life, and it says you can, some customers have matched lithium ion cycle life, but it doesn’t say much about temperature or depth of discharge or the conditions in which that works. Is it more sensitive to heat or cold? Does it, does the depth of discharge matter? Do any of those conditions under which it’s cycling and oncyc- and recycling affect this material differently than graphite?
Rick Costantino: Yeah, all those things can matter, and all those things were kind of different in the different studies. And in that example, it was whatever data we had to beg the customer to let us present anything. So we’re, I think, on our own developing a more robust data set that when we kind of publish, get ready to publish our own white paper, we can go in more in-depth these things. But generally, you know, as you go to higher or lower temperatures, it gets more challenging for the battery. So higher temperatures, you have to worry a lot more about the kind of thermal runaway, and as you get to colder temperatures, you have to worry about the viscosity of the electrolyte and so forth.
David Roberts: But that’s, but that’s any battery. Is it, is it different for your material than graphite in these conditions?
Rick Costantino: Um, in principle, no, but you do have to keep in mind that, you know, if you have more energy to deal with... I’ll give you anecdote. So the first time one of our customers came back to me, he went, “Oh my God, we did our first nail test,” where they kind of literally shoot a nail through the battery.
David Roberts: Right, right, right.
Rick Costantino: And he said, “Man, we shot this nail through and it had this huge, you know, flame, and it’s like, man, it released, you know, 50% more energy than we’ve ever seen before.” And I’m like, “Well, how much more energy was in the battery, you know, before you shot the nail through?” And he’s like, “Oh, 50%.” Well, what do you expect, you know? And the customer solved that issue, right? So now they’ve realized that they had to redesign the electrolyte to store the energy.
David Roberts: So safety and preventing thermal runaway will be a bigger deal if you’ve got more energy packed in it.
Rick Costantino: Right. But it... Yes, yes, exactly.
David Roberts: What about, calendar life, briefly? Calendar life is the other, there’s cycle life and then there’s calendar life, which is just if you sit it on a shelf, how long does it take for it to sort of begin to degrade? This has also been a problem for silicon traditionally.
Rick Costantino: That’s a good question. So far, we haven’t heard, any sort of commercial, barriers to commercialization regarding calendar life. so our customers don’t necessarily tell us how they’ve solved the problem or whether they see it or not. And believe me, our customers, if they have a problem, they come to me as first person. And so that has not, that has not stopped them. Now I suspect there may be more challenges there, again, because you’re storing more energy, it’s a little different, maybe recipe or chemistry, you may have to, you have to redesign things a little bit. But you know, when you talk about, you know, this calendar life question, you know, if you think about buying a lead-acid battery off the shelf for your car or whatever in the old da- you know, that thing might be on the shelf for 5 or 10 years. So is a lithium-ion battery gonna really sit on the shelf for 10 years before somebody goes to grab and use it? It’s gonna be outdated by, no one’s gonna even know how to plug it into their device anymore. So I don’t know if the jury’s out on how long do we really need a calendar life and how important it is, but I think in principle, you know, there’s no reason why sol- co- should be that different. So I think, again, so far it has not been a barrier to commercialization.
David Roberts: Let’s talk about supply chain, which is a big advantage that you are promoting here. I don’t know if we mentioned this earlier, but China produces, what is it, 90, 95% of the world’s graphite and has started putting export duties on it is not just theoretically, is using it as a kind of industrial tool, weapon, pressure, whatever, counter to tariffs, whatever, you wanna call. So you, silicon is everywhere, pretty easy to get, but you are using a particular form of gas, silane gas, to create this material. So tell us a little bit about what that looks like and where you get the silane gas and who makes the silane gas. What-- Tell us about the supply chain for that.
Rick Costantino: Sure, and this sort of, this general question of supply chain, even from our very first, inventing this material, we were very keen on understanding the complexity of the supply chain. And we realized, you know, very early that US energy dependence is not just about just this energy, you know, generation, but energy storage, and vast majority of these anode materials, vast majority of battery production, et cetera, in China and Asia. And so building that infrastructures is really important, and this sort of, this silicon kind of carbon revolution, you know, the kind of the invention in the US and protecting that has been very important. And so the, you know, so the material that we produce, we produce both the carbon and the silicon. And we produce the carbon itself we produce from essentially commodity chemicals that you could really get anywhere in the world that are not very super exotic. And the precursor that we use for the, for the silicon is silane gas, SiH4. It’s kind of the most sort of elemental, you know, kind of most simple form of that, of that, of silane, of silicon in the form of a gas. And so there’s not much production in the US, except for a company called REC Silicon that is now, kind of owned by Hanwha. It’s the long story. I don’t, I don’t even know what the latest in this, in this soap opera is. But basically, we kind of realized early on that we were gonna have to control our own destiny. So we acquired a technology, from a German company to create, silane gas, which we think is the most efficient way to do it on the planet. And so we have that technology, we have a plant to do that in Germany, and so we’re ready to deploy that technology anywhere in the world for future plants. So right now we’re kinda sourcing silane that’s already commercially made in the US, for example, out of REC Silicon in Butte, Montana, or in Korea through SK, which is, which is our partner and the Korea company. But we have the ability to actually produce our own plant from scratch and build in the silane plant in it. And really the vision is not just building the silane, but putting the whole supply chain. So for example, our battery customer, it’d be great to be next door to them, and maybe the automaker next door to them. So you have the whole kind of this, the whole supply chain kind of in the same geographical region. So we have a technology that we can meet the needs locally, whether we wanna build just a, just our standalone plant, or whether we wanna be part of a larger chain, you know, built just for that, for that region. We’re looking at both kind of options depending on where in the world.
David Roberts: So just to clarify, the manufacturing of the silane gas is somewhat of a choke point currently that you’re working on overcoming, but the materials, there are no materials choke points. You just gotta build enough production capacity.
Rick Costantino: So the material to make silane gas is metallurgical-grade silicon, which is a commodity you can buy anywhere in the world, and that’s made basically from quartz, from SiO2, so.
David Roberts: So in theory, you just said this, but I wanna run through it again. In theory, someone making EV batteries could in the same compound, on the same site, create, manufacture the gas, make the anode, make the cathode, make the battery, vertically integrate the whole supply chain in a single location.
Rick Costantino: Right. And that, and certainly that vision makes a lot of sense for some areas. Yes, exactly.
David Roberts: And, another thing I forgot to mention earlier, which is one of the things that I thought was really exciting about this, and maybe people had intuited this, but this anode works with any cathode, any lithium-based cathode chemistry, LFP, NMC, if everybody knows all the acronyms, and also solid state batteries. What’s your relation to s- the solid state world right now?
Rick Costantino: Good question. So I guess solid state as kind of the more formal definition of like, you know, not like being a solid, you know, we, there are solid, state, anode architectures that actually prefer to use silicon, and some companies that have advertised silicon works really well with that, and we have some customers that are, that have solid state architectures that look at our material as their anode active material. Now, some folks may call solid state as a kind of a pure metallic, you know, lithium anode. That’s different. That’s not really solid state. That’s really a very, very different battery. But I guess solid state is defined as being a solid phase. You know, silicon is, or even, or a silicon carbon composite is a very, suitable material for that kind of anode.
David Roberts: And just I’ll editorialize briefly here, like if people are familiar with LFP batteries, lithium iron phosphate, they are cheaper to make, and they use much more common materials. Tesla uses them in some of their cars and overseas, but mostly they’re used for grid scale storage ‘cause they’re cheaper to make and the materials are cheaper, but they lack the energy density of your NMC batteries for your high-end performance. So if you could pair this anode, which increases energy density by 5 times, with the cheapness and materials advantages of LFP, that kind of seems like the magic, the magic battery right there.
Rick Costantino: I wanna take you when I talk to procurement guys with our customers. ‘Cause the way you described this makes sense to me. Yeah. And so, you know, LFP, you know, it’s cheaper type of batteries basically, and pairing it with a premium anode material makes a lot of sense. In terms of getting improvement per dollar, it can make a lot of sense.
David Roberts: Is someone making LFP batteries with these anodes yet?
Rick Costantino: Yeah, yes. The, again, I can’t talk to any specific customer, but if you look at our, for example, some of the papers, our white paper and some other things, we’ve presented some examples of LFP chemistry that works really well with SCC55.
David Roberts: You were getting a bunch of money from the DOE back when the DOE was different. Now it’s different. Are you still getting that money from the DOE? What’s your current relationship with Department of Energy, sorry.
Rick Costantino: Good question. It’s certainly been a pretty wild ride for us, but we’ve kind of-
David Roberts: You’re not alone, my friend
Rick Costantino: But we’ve really weathered it all, right? So we’ve, we sort of ascended on a, on kind of Trump 1. We’ve raised a bunch of funds under Obama, and Trump 2, we’re, you know, here we are. We’re still have multiple awards. We have two big awards at Moses Lake, one for our commercial manufacturing plant, our 2,000 ton per year plant. We’re building two of those modules in Moses Lake, and we’ll have, we’ll have those, by middle of next year, we’ll have both of those running.
David Roberts: Those, the Moses Lake plant got moved back by a year or two. It’s still on track?
Rick Costantino: Still going. It’s been delayed a little bit. We had to open up our Korea one first.
David Roberts: And that’s just for the material or for silane gas too?
Rick Costantino: That’s for making the material. We also have a, an award for silane gas production, and that one will be, will be deployed after that.
David Roberts: And you’re still getting those awards. They have not-
Rick Costantino: We’re, again, they’re, we haven’t talked specific timelines at this point, but those programs are still moving. They’re just not, they’re a little delayed.
David Roberts: Also, I forgot to ask ‘cause everybody loves their phones, um, are the batteries that they’re putting in phones with this stuff, are the batteries lasting longer? Are you, are you getting substantial increases in battery performance in phones? ‘Cause everybody loves that.
Rick Costantino: Yes. The main batteries that we’re in that we’ve-- that have been advertised has been the Honor, the Magic phone is- which is basically, which is more the AI enablement, so it’s not so much about higher energy density, but about higher c- sort of computational, capability.
David Roberts: Mm-hmm.
Rick Costantino: And about higher sort of, charging and discharging rate capability, frequency switching for those batteries. And, you know, again, I don’t really understand why frequency... And this is one of those things where, like, we had no idea how important. So, you know, you talk about rate capability, like being able to charge and discharge rapidly, but being able to change the rate at which you’re charging and discharging very rapidly-
David Roberts: Hmm
Rick Costantino: it has been huge. And I don’t understand why that’s so important, but apparently it is. And I’ll tell you another anecdote. One of our customers, he had a test where they were, they were basically charging a battery, you know, discharging it, and every second, they were kinda stopping and waiting and then, and then trying to charge again. And they could, they could only, they couldn’t do this with graphite at all, and they could do it with silicon.
David Roberts: Hmm.
Rick Costantino: And then, and then he said, “Wow, and I did it, I could do it at a millisecond.” So I said, “Well, actually, why don’t you try a microsecond?” And he said, “Well, I can’t do that. My equipment can’t do that.” I said, “Well, then change your equipment.” And he eventually figured out how to do it, and then it worked at milliseconds. So now I’ve challenged him to do nanosecond, but he hasn’t figured out how to get the equipment to do that yet. But apparently this is very, very important for AI, this frequency switching capability. And again, it’s because it’s an alloy, because it’s a different mechanism.
David Roberts: Okay, I got-- I’m running out of time. I got two questions left. One is just about cost curves. I always, I always ask of any technology, what pieces of this puzzle are-- can you work on that will bring down costs over time? Presumably scaling up the manufacturing of silane gas will be a big piece. What else is gonna bring down the cost of this material over time?
Rick Costantino: Yeah, I think, bringing down the, you know, getting the silane gas is gonna be a key piece to it, and just getting at scale, right? So of course our first, plant is the most, is the hardest one to get up and running. And I think as we get more of the plants, we’ll get more of that economy of scale. So understanding how to get more efficient, understanding how to increase the throughput through the same equipment. And, you know, we’re already working on designs to increase the throughput of our plant maybe another two or even tenfold more, with the same kind of a technology. So we’re constantly kind of challenging ourselves to get more efficient at how we can produce the material.
David Roberts: So that’s scale. That’s mostly scale. The material itself, are you gonna get... Is the, is the goal over time to increase the amount of silicon relative to carbon, ‘cause that’s kind of what you’re getting your performance out of it, is the goal over time, is there such a thing as, in the future, a 100% silicon anode? Are you always gonna need the carbon for the lattice? What’s the, what’s the theoretical maximum amount of silicon you could get in there?
Rick Costantino: Yeah, it’s a good question. So at some point there’ll be, diminishing returns where your material inside the sponge is more than the sponge itself. Sort of a 50/50 mixture seems to be kind of a nice sweet spot. We certainly, I think, can improve that to maybe a 60/40, maybe 70/30 equation or something. Getting beyond that, I think you’re going to lose this sort of nano size domain of the silicon, so it’ll be a different challenge. There may be other ways to build or grow your silicon inside the anode material, and we’re looking at some other technologies as well. But this seems to right now be a nice, a nice sweet spot for the technology.
David Roberts: And are you worried at all about competitors on your heels? Is anybody else doing this thing, and do you anticipate other people doing this thing? Do you anticipate the inevitability of China stealing this and doing this thing? Like who... How worried are you about competitors?
Rick Costantino: We are very aggressive in defending our IP. You know, you kinda mentioned China, that clearly is an issue. It’s been quite in the news right now. Uh, one of our competitors, has filed against a Chinese company actually, and we’ve published our own, opinion on that. And so I will let you guys read our opinion rather than me kind of espouse it here, but we feel quite strongly about our specific position, I- the strength of our position. We feel quite strongly about the US, needing to keep the dominance.
David Roberts: Are there other US companies trying to put silicon in a carbon lattice specifically?
Rick Costantino: there are other there are other distinct technologies where folks are looking at silicon anode materials.
David Roberts: Okay. Really final question, asking you to speculate. In 5 years, what percentage of lithium ion batteries will have this material in their anode?
Rick Costantino: I would say 80%, maybe 100.
David Roberts: All right. All right. Ambitious. Awesome. Well, Rick Costantino, thank you so much. This is absolutely fascinating. Thanks everybody for coming.
