Lithium metal to make traditional batteries obsolete, Pure Lithium CEO says | Hotter Commodities

In fact, Emilie Bodoin, who co-founded battery technology firm Pure Lithium in 2020 and is also its chair, forecasts that lithium-ion batteries will eventually become obsolete.

“Everything evolves and changes. In my short lifetime, I remember the tape cassette, the CD, the iPod and the iPhone,” she told Fastmarkets in a recent interview.

“Today’s lithium-ion batteries can’t meet the world’s energy demands and were never meant to – they were really invented for a handheld Sony camcorder with just 100 Wh per kilogram in it,” she said.

So for the past several years, Bodoin’s goal has been to make rechargeable, non-flammable battery-ready lithium metal at a fraction of the cost and with energy density over 400 Wh per kg. The end-result is a battery without nickel, cobalt or graphite, with a lithium metal anode and a vanadium cathode.

Pure Lithium has nonetheless faced multiple challenges to achieve this, Bodoin said.

For starters, the present-day procedure to make lithium metal, which uses lithium chloride as a precursor, requires extremely high temperatures of 500-700°C and generates chlorine gas and halide salts. The end-result is an extruded foil which then needs to be mechanically fused to a substrate.

Bodoin noted that the lithium is coated with mineral oil after being exposed to air, a feature which severely compromises the integrity of the lithium, and it is not sufficient for rechargeable batteries. At the same time, the price of metal is a whopping $160,000-$180,000 per tonne, another key reason why so little is made today, she said.

“Lithium metal is a mere 1% of the lithium market, and lithium chloride, the current precursor to extruded foils, is 3%. The absence of a supply chain is a barrier for companies attempting to commercialize lithium metal batteries,” she added.

Use of vanadium in cathode

Working from its laboratory in Boston, the Pure Lithium team looked at pairing the lithium metal anode with a titanium disulfide cathode, just as Sir Stanley Whittingham did when he invented the lithium metal battery in the 1970s. Eventually, and after consultations with Whittingham to discuss the conundrum, the company opted to use vanadium in the cathode instead.

“Vanadium won’t go into thermal runaway; it doesn’t release oxygen; and has double the energy density of traditional batteries right off the bat,” Bodoin said. “By replacing graphite with lithium metal, you get a battery half the size which lasts a lot longer and is $50 per kWh on a materials level,” she added.

The potential new application has excited vanadium producers, whose experience with batteries has typically been vanadium redox flow batteries in large-scale energy storage. Bodoin said the production process is completely different; Pure Lithium takes vanadium pentoxide (V205) and synthesizes it, eliminating the purity needs of flow batteries.

The technology has been heavily patented, although Bodoin said the company wants to eventually license it to others as well as use it as proprietary technology at its own future sites in locations like North America, Australia and other friendly nations.

“The dream is to deploy it ubiquitously. There’s no way one company can build 50,000 battery factories all over the world and do it overnight. We’d rather partner with all the battery companies for ubiquitous licensing. We just have to demonstrate it first,” she added.

Financing and partners

The initial move to raise capital for the company was started by Bodoin and her business partner, Professor Donald Sadoway, at the end of 2019. A $2.0 million financing round followed in the summer of 2020, the height of the Covid-19 pandemic.

Metals and mining entrepreneur Robert Friedland, who is also on the Pure Lithium board, was an early investor. Later, Oxy Low Carbon Ventures, a unit of oil firm Occidental Petroleum, acted as the lead investor in Pure Lithium’s Series A $15 million equity financing.

According to Bodoin, that partnership has opened the potential for Pure Lithium to be a recipient of brines produced at Occidental’s joint venture with a unit of Berkshire Hathaway in California’s Imperial Valley. Pure Lithium also currently uses brine supplied by Canada’s E3 Lithium.

The company even considered buying a lithium mine, Bodoin noted, but decided against it.

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