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Lithium-ion batteries are falling in cost so rapidly that any new process being ramped up is risky business. Form is way further along than this landing page an
by conradev 1y ago
Lithium-ion batteries are falling in cost so rapidly that any new process being ramped up is risky business. Form is way further along than this landing page and yet has a long way to go:
https://www.latitudemedia.com/news/form-energy-brings-in-more-cash-as-it-prepares-for-mass-battery-deployment/ https://www.latitudemedia.com/news/form-energy-brings-in-mor...
The scale of investment required makes it quite hard for new companies to compete on cost:
https://www.theinformation.com/articles/battery-industry-scavenger-lyten-hit-cash-crunch https://www.theinformation.com/articles/battery-industry-sca...
- barbazoo 1y agoWhat about from an environmental standpoint if we think about that these Lithium--Ion batteries will have to be replaced and recycled every (as the article says, not sure if true) <12 years. We have a history of not pricing in negative externalities, did we do that this time?
- ysofunny 1y ago> We have a history of not pricing in negative externalities, did we do that this time? I worry the answering that question requires answering this question: whose negative externalities?
- fragmede 1y agoHumanity's. We've only got one Earth, and if my factory can just dump toxic waste down the drain which flows right to the bay and kills all the fish, for free, why would I pay for it when I could be spending that money on a yacht?
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- brandonagr2 1y agoWhat is the negative externality of recycling batteries? That is way better than having to mine minerals out of the ground, eventually there won't need to be any significant mining and all the battery minerals will be in a constant cycle of being used then recycled
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- barbazoo 1y agoI know very little of chemistry and how batteries are produced, so from that level I'm imagining that once a battery is deemed to have reached end-of-life, it will have to get shipped somewhere, be recycled/refurbished for which presumably we will need some new material which needs to be mined, shipped, etc. All that requires water, produces waste that may or may not be toxic, the metals may come from places lacking human rights, and takes energy which may or may not be clean [1]. So all this could in the end have a considerable amount of negative externality somewhere. What I like that I'm hearing about this CO2 battery, whether true will have to be seen, is that it might rely on off the shelf components, that's great, means the supply chain can be simple, and has longer life in the first place. And that while potentially even cheaper? [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GSzh8D8Of0k https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GSzh8D8Of0k
- tehjoker 1y agoThis is cool, but one thing to consider is that you're not going to be getting that CO2 from the atmosphere, but from captured emissions. When that plant is decomissioned, the path of least resistance is to just vent it.
- SoftTalker 1y agoIf you've already got pure CO2 in a tank, sequestering it is a much easier problem. The hard part is capturing it out of smokestack emissions or (especially) directly from the atmosphere as it's much more diffuse.
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- ziga 1y agoI think 12 years is an underestimate. Lithium-ion batteries will degrade, but they still have usable capacity. There are Tesla Roadsters still going strong, 15 years in. And the battery cell chemistry has since shifted to LFP, which has longer cycle life.
- 0cf8612b2e1e 1y agoFurthermore, I would expect that an industrial battery is treated better than an EV. Optimal cooling/charging/discharge rates likely have a large impact on longevity.
- jillesvangurp 1y agoSome LFP batteries now get rated for 5000 or more cycles or more. Even if you cycle them fully every day, that's 14 years. And that's unlikely to be needed or happening. These might last decades. At which point, battery tech might be massively better. Also, even better batteries might be on the way. E.g. Sodium Ion would be a bit less energy dense and have a similarly long life. It doesn't contain any lithium and could be cheap to manufacture in a few years. The biggest driver here would be cost and other properties (like how quickly can it deliver the power and at what capacity).
- XorNot 1y agoIt's irrelevant how long they last unless is starts to substantially exceed human lifespans though. 10 years or 20, eventually every product you put out there is replaced and you enter the steadystate waste phase of X tons per year. Personally of course, I don't think this matters at all: old lithium batteries degrade into salt and don't contain harmful chemicals. There's no real indication we'd ever have a problem dealing with them, even if it was just throwing them all into a big hole till the hole looks enough like a natural lithium source to mine again.
- tonyedgecombe 1y ago>It's irrelevant how long they last unless is starts to substantially exceed human lifespans though If a product has twice the lifetime then you are going to have half the waste. I'm not sure how that is irrelevant.
- XorNot 1y agoOr you'll have twice the product in circulation because you might be far below satisfying actual demand. For batteries this is definitely true: we're not even close to storing weeks worth of every yet, and the more you can store the more flexible and useful they become.
- leptons 1y agoLithium batteries last as long as one battery out of thousands decides to thermal runaway, and then you have to replace all of them (as well as the facility they were all housed in).
- epistasis 1y ago> environmental standpoint if we think about that these Lithium--Ion batteries will have to be replaced and recycled every I am very interested in this question, but those who raise it never have answers about the negative impacts of mining lithium. For example, the amount of lithium needed for an EV is an order of magnitude less than the amount of steel needed. What is so bad about lithium mining that it's 10x worse than iron mining, pound for pound? Nobody has ever answered my request for environmental concerns with a concrete environmental lithium mining concern, such as acidification that can sometimes happen with iron mining. I've researched and researched, found nothing, which leaves me thinking that the worst case scenario for lithium is no worse than the worst case for iron. Meanwhile, we have such immense documented harms from fossil fuel extraction that nobody ever questions again, or with the same intensity that's reserved for supposedly toxic lithium batteries. The apparent benefit is massive, so any delay seems to cause massive harm to the environment. I think we need to flip the question: where is the proof that coal/oil/iron is better for the environment than mining and recycling batteries? (BTW, it's at least 20 years now for grid batteries, with lifetime going up all the time...)
- smithkl42 1y agoMy understanding (bowing to ChatGPT) is that you can get 1 pound of iron from <2 pounds of iron ore. But to get 1 pound of lithium, you need around 500 pounds of lithium ore. So if an electric car requires 2000 pounds of iron and 50 pounds of lithium, that works out to 4000 pounds of iron ore that needs to be mined and refined, vs 25,000 pounds of lithium ore.
- epistasis 1y agoInteresting, but tailings never seem to enter much into environmental analyses that I have seen, unless you count coal ash as "tailings" which would be a pretty broad interpretation of the idea. Lithium is also extracted via brine, as opposed to hard rock. Most of the environmental reporting has been on the brine approaches, which currently are in high elevations of South American mountains, and the problem appears to be mostly the use of land and taking that land out of the ecosystem for economic use as drying pools. But the same problem occurs with mining, too!
- conradev 1y agoWhat do you think the negative externalities actually are? Off of the top of my head: mining, landfill. Same as other metals. If the processes to extract Lithium from recycling become cheap enough to compete with the prices of mined Lithium, then that happens. Processes still need to be invented/scaled for that to happen: the only real way to deal with damaged or charged cells that I know of is to deep freeze them, shred them, and then defrost them slowly. But in either case: Lithium is going to end up as waste. Making it cheaper to make cars affordable and the grid more stable means that disposable batteries will be even cheaper. I don’t know how modern batteries fare in landfills: Most modern solar panels, for example, are relatively clean (mostly aluminum, silicon, copper, wee bits of lead). But not a waste management expert.
- epistasis 1y agoThat's very interesting about the freezing. I wonder if Redwood Materials does that? https://www.redwoodmaterials.com/news/responding-recovering-and-recycling-lithium-ion-batteries-after-accidents-and-natural-disasters/ https://www.redwoodmaterials.com/news/responding-recovering-... They've been working hard at recycling, and the biggest challenge at the moment is actually getting old batteries for the process. There's not many in-service batteries reaching end of life yet, so they mostly deal with production scrap.
- thelastgallon 1y agoYou want to price in negative externalities for lithium because we didn't price in negative externalities for fossil fuels? Am I understanding you right?
- bodyfour 1y agoThe one exception I'd make to this is Sodium-ion which does seem to have some chance of reaching manufacturing scale: https://www.batterytechonline.com/materials/5-key-takeaways-from-catl-s-naxtra-sodium-ion-battery-launch https://www.batterytechonline.com/materials/5-key-takeaways-...
- conradev 1y agoI consider sodium-ion as an extension of lithium-ion because they’re made by the same folks with similar processes. They are still early, but very much in the process of being ramped and will be incredibly useful for stationary storage: lower density, but better durability. Another real technology that Form will have to compete with.
- namibj 1y agoThough they are also poised to get iron ore refining to work. That alone could be worth a bunch (numbers assuming 20y amortization and 30% average duty cycle (using only summer surplus) suggest around 10ct/kg iron metal capex plus 3 kWh/kg iron metal electricity).
- hnaccount_rng 1y agoHow do these numbers compare with traditional methods?
- 0cf8612b2e1e 1y agoI have not seen much data on these designs, but conceptually they should be cheap. Require holding tanks and iron. No high pressures or other exotic requirements. Round trip efficiency is way worse than lithium, but that might not be meaningful for grid batteries. You just want something that cheaply scales.
- namibj 1y agoSeasonal iron as I described wouldn't be for electrical round-tripping, but for moving iron ore reduction to the summer where PV energy is abundant (assuming a PV buildout sufficient to cover winter heating heat pump demand without residual fossil fueled peaker plants) and with tricks like co-localizing these to not require the grid to be sized for the summer surplus production, thus overall enabling internationally-competitive production costs for this green-refined iron, vs. the traditional coal/coke blast furnace production. "Grid batteries" are also a wide concept, from retired electric car lithium packs to 100-hour-scale batteries like what Form is building. You need 3 types of battery, though the two fast ones may want to be unified: - grid stabilizing/synthetic inertia (1~20 C charge/discharge rate) - day/night PV energy shifting (0.15~0.3 C charge/discharge rate) - multi-day weather pattern smoothing (around the 0.01 C Form Energy is targeting) Other than that the grid stabilizing kind needing much higher security/criticality due to bugs/errors in it's behavior threatening e.g. the European super grid, they would all benefit from co-locating with large solar farms and being connected on the DC side to share AC-side current capacity of the as-built infrastructure (from the inverter/converter through the lines and nearby transformers).
- physarum_salad 1y agoLithium is a geopolitical metal and catches fire. Obviously what you are saying is true but there are always risks.
- scal4r 1y agoCompressed gas storage scales better than any battery chemistry. Energy Dome claims >75% round-trip efficiency [0], and just inked a deal with Google [1]. [0]https://www.pv-magazine-australia.com/2025/03/12/energy-dome-targets-australian-market-with-carbon-dioxide-battery-tech/ https://www.pv-magazine-australia.com/2025/03/12/energy-dome... [1]https://energydome.com/energy-dome-inks-a-strategic-commercial-agreement-with-google/ https://energydome.com/energy-dome-inks-a-strategic-commerci... Once R&D costs are covered, capacity scales with the size of the gas bag. Without competition from EVs or the volatility of resource extraction markets there's a clear path to profit here for 10hr+ grid-scale energy storage.
- dzhiurgis 1y agoAFAIK lithium isn’t used for long duration storage
- pockettanyas 1y agoRight now that's true, but it's a price limitation, not a technical limitation.