Superbatteries, Electric Cars, and the New Lithium Economy

What makes lithium, the lightest metal on earth, our best bet for beating oil? If the world is turning to electric cars with lithium-based batteries, will Bolivia (and its massive deposits of the metal), become the next Saudi Arabia? Why has the Chevy Volt taken so much flak while the Nissan Leaf has gotten such a friendly welcome? Seth Fletcher is a senior editor at Popular Science; his new book, Bottled Lightning: Superbatteries, Electric Cars, and the New Lithium Economy, takes an inside-out look at these amazing new power packs and the geo-political issues that will make them live or die.

TreeHugger: Seth, you talk about lithium-based batteries as the best way to beat gasoline. What is it about lithium batteries that makes them such a big deal?

Seth Fletcher: Well, the idea of beating gasoline is tricky because it’s, of course, going to be very, very difficult to beat gasoline on a pure energy-density basis. In fact, it might not even be possible. Gasoline is 13,000 watt hours per kilogram, today’s lithium-ion batteries are about 200, and lithium-air (another really far-horizon but still lithium-based battery) has a theoretical maximum capacity of 11,000 watt hours per kilogram. And that’s never going to be reached-the question is, what percentage of that can we get?

Batteries are hard. But lithium is the best basis we’ve found so far, because of two intrinsic properties. One is that it’s the lightest metal: it’s the third element on the periodic table. And it’s also highly reactive, so reactive that it doesn’t exist in nature in its pure form. And those two things mean that you can build a battery-which is just a chemical system-that is more dense with energy and lighter than those based on just about any other element.

So there’s a whole spectrum of things you can do with lithium. Some of them we’re doing today. Some of them are maybe decades into the future. But in terms of electrochemical energy storage, it doesn’t really get any better than using lithium because of those two intrinsic properties.

TH: What would the perfect battery look like to you?

Fletcher: Think about it in terms of what you want your car to do. Right now, a Nissan Leaf can go about 100 miles, and then it takes eight hours or so to charge. What you want, really, is something that can go 500 miles on a charge, at highway speeds, and then recharge in 15 minutes. That’s the ultimate goal, so the ultimate battery would look like that.

What would go into that is unclear. With something like a lithium-air battery-if we can ever get them to work-you might get the charge density that it takes to go 500 miles. But one of the problems with them is that they’re really hard to recharge, and they actually discharge very slowly, too. So, what other kinds of things can you build into the system to make it a highway-worthy car? How are you going to recharge it in 15 minutes? That’s super challenging. And it might involve building in ultracapacitors. It might involve pairing a bunch of different technologies together. It probably will involve something we haven’t even really thought of quite yet, or some clever new approach.

But that’s the goal. The ultimate goal for the battery is to match the energy density of gasoline. And by that I mean the usable energy density, because with a gas car you’re only getting a fraction of the energy that’s in that gas.

TH: Where does lithium come from, and what are the issues associated with getting it?

Fletcher: The majority of the lithium today that’s used in batteries comes from a series of salt flats in the high-altitude deserts of a region nicknamed the “lithium triangle,” because so much lithium comes from there. It’s where Chile, Bolivia, and Argentina meet. The Andes mountains sort of splits this region. And in the high-altitude Atacama Desert in Chile there’s a salt flat called the Salar de Atacama. That’s the world’s richest single source. “Fruitful” would be a better term, actually.

There are two companies with operations on that salt flat. Together, they provide about half of the lithium carbonate in the world market every year. One of them is called SQM; one of them is called Chemetall. There are some deposits in Argentina. There is a giant deposit in Bolivia that are undeveloped and don’t look like they’re going to be developed anytime soon. But then there are a lot of other places around the world where you can get it, too. There are North American deposits. There’s a lot in Australia and China. There’s some on every continent, in fact. There’s no shortage of lithium. It’s just that it hasn’t been developed. It hasn’t been used very much in the past.

Lithium has historically been pretty comprehensively ignored by mining companies, who are more interested in really valuable stuff like gold and silver and uranium. It’s just within the past few years that mining companies and trading houses and large corporations have started looking at it as something that they might want to really tap into. And what they’ve found is that there’s a lot of it around the world, but building the mines to get it out is going to take some work. But there’s actually a lot of it available right now, and for the foreseeable future there’s plenty.

TH: We read in the media about how we will become beholden to the major lithium-holding countries the way that we are to Middle Eastern countries that hold a lot of the oil. Is that not really as scary as some people would make it sound?

Fletcher: It’s not. It’s not even remotely as scary as people make it sound. The big scare for a while was Bolivia; how Bolivia’s going to be the new Saudi Arabia. Well, Bolivia has a massive deposit, but the large-scale roll-out of electric cars, even if we’re talking about millions of cars, just does not require their deposit. It just doesn’t.

Chile is a friendly country. Argentina is a friendly country. Australia is a friendly country. I don’t think we have to worry about any of those becoming our new overlords anytime soon. And then, if they did-say, all those countries turned on us suddenly, which is so unlikely as to be almost comical-we have big deposits in North America, too, in particular in northern Nevada.

There are two main things to keep in mind here. One is that lithium isn’t burned when you use it. It’s a metal that goes into building a machine that stores energy. That energy is generated by other means, ideally from renewables, realistically from anything from natural gas to coal to hydro-power or nuclear.

But the other thing to keep in mind is that there has been an ulterior motive behind the spread of a lot of the scare stories about dependence on foreign lithium, I think at least. I’ve seen a quote by the chief economist for the American Petroleum Institute saying, “Well, you have to keep in mind: a lot of things that are going to go into these batteries are going to come from foreign countries, and we don’t want to trade dependence on foreign oil for something else.” It’s just a misleading argument. It’s not a scary situation.

TreeHugger: However, the manufacturing of these batteries is something that we could be doing here in the US, or it will ultimately get outsourced overseas. Do you want to see the US building these advanced batteries?

Seth Fletcher: Yeah. Because it’s a good source of jobs, and it’s smart to keep them in the country. We-not just in the US but in the West in general, Europe and the UK-have a kind of unfortunate history of inventing a lot of really interesting battery technologies, some of which are widely used today, and then never commercializing them, and leaving that to Japanese companies. And then that’s been spun out to Korean companies and Chinese companies.

If Japan, Korea, and China end up dominating the manufacture of automotive-grade lithium-ion batteries-which they currently do-if they continue to, we’ll be able to get batteries; we’ll just be buying them from overseas. That’s OK. We can still get a lot of electric cars on the road that way. But in terms of just building jobs and keeping money in the United States, it would be fantastic if we actually took advantage of it this time and stimulated the growth of a domestic lithium-ion battery industry.

The other reason to do that, just from a purely practical standpoint, is that if the cars are manufactured in America-the Nissan Leaf is going to be manufactured in Tennessee eventually-the batteries need to be manufactured close to the cars because they’re so big and they’re delicate and they’re expensive. It doesn’t make much sense to ship a 400 or 600 or 800-pound battery from Korea when we could build it in Michigan or Indianapolis or Tennessee and just truck it to the plant. Just makes a lot more sense to keep it here if we can.

TH: How good a job is our government doing right now to keep that sort of industry here in the States?

Fletcher: The Obama administration did about everything that the battery industry asked them to do. Well, let me maybe rephrase that a little bit. In the book, I talked to this guy, James Greenberger, who’s the head of NAATBatt, this industry advocacy group for North American advanced battery manufacturers. And the way he tells it is, he got a call from Rahm Emanuel’s office, and they were putting together the stimulus. They said, “How much money do you want?” And he said he was kind of joking and said, “two billion dollars.” And then, lo and behold, that was what was in the stimulus package was about $2.4 billion for advanced battery manufacturing and clean-energy cars.

So, the Obama administration did that. And that money has been spent, and it’s already being put to use. Factories are opening. A123 opened a factory in Livonia, Michigan, last fall. EnerDel is expanding. Johnson Controls is expanding. A lot of these factories are opening. But the thing is that that was just a one-time shot in the arm. I think everybody understood that from the beginning. But the situation in Washington right now is tough. It’s going to be really tough to get much more support. So it’s going to be up to that industry to crank it out and learn to exist on its own merits now.

And the government is also doing a good job of supporting electric cars through subsidies. A $7,500 tax credit. There are good state tax credits. There are charging infrastructure tax credits. But that’s not going to last forever, and I think that the domestic battery industry understands that it has to grow under its own power now that the stimulus funding has come and gone.

TH: From an environmental point of view, how many electric cars do we need on the road to make a meaningful difference?

Seth: The short answer is: a lot. And it’s going to take a long time. The Electrification Coalition, which is an advocacy group, released a report a couple years ago. And according to this report, if by 2040, 75 percent of all miles driven in the United States are powered by electricity, then oil consumption in the light-duty fleet will drop from about nine million barrels a day (that’s the levels now) to about two million. But that’s a lot of cars. There are 300 million cars on the road right now. The Obama administration’s goal is a million electric vehicles by 2015. That’s considered doable but really ambitious. So it’s going to take a long time. That doesn’t mean it’s not worth doing, of course, because if we don’t start, it’ll never happen.

TreeHugger: The Chevy Volt has taken a lot of heat. Why do you think people have been so critical of this car, and why do you like it so much?

Seth Fletcher: I think the reason people have been so critical of it is mainly because it’s a General Motors product. People love to hate General Motors. Especially after the bailout, they’ve really become sort of a conservative target. Now they’re associated with the Obama administration, in ways that are not accurate.

Bob Lutz dreamed up the Volt in 2006, which was firmly during the Bush administration, before the financial collapse. He did it to chase after the Toyota Prius. And the Volt has been a really polarizing vehicle. But you don’t see this polarization of opinion about the Nissan Leaf, for example, and that’s because nobody really has any strong feelings one way or the other about Nissan. They’re just a competent Japanese company that also happens to employ a lot of people in the United States.

But GM, on the other hand. And they have made a lot of idiotic decision in their history, so there are definitely reasons to be critical of GM. But the Volt is a good car. They did a really good job on it. I think that they knew that they had to do a good job on it.

But I’ve driven it several times. It’s just a nice car. It works very well. It’s polished. The fit and finish is nice. It’s fast. I mean, not by sports car standards, but around town. It’s peppy, thanks to the fundamental nature of electric drive, which is you get all the torque immediately. And it’s just very nicely integrated. The gas mode, the backup mode, when it comes on, is almost imperceptible. It just is very well done. And then, of course, it doesn’t use any gas around town. And I think that the more people drive it, the more people will like it.

I guess I’ve caught a little bit of heat for my praise of the Volt, but not for the Leaf as much, which is telling. And it’s just because it’s such a polarizing car because it’s a General Motors product, I think.

TH: If you had to buy a Leaf or a Volt, which one would you buy?

Fletcher: That’s a tough question, because the Volt is still too expensive. I mean, it’s going down a little bit. It’s over $40,000 for this model year. Next year it’ll be a shade under $40,000. That’s without the $7,500 federal tax credit. So then it comes down to a little over $30,000.

I mean, if I had to buy one of the two cars right now, it would be the Volt, because we would be a single-car family. It’s just my wife and me. And the reason for that is, if you want to drive longer than 100 miles, which we do sometimes, you need some sort of backup.

And another thing. We live in the city, so we actually don’t own a car right now. We take public transit and borrow or rent cars when we go out of town. I’ve thought about this many times. If we were to move to the burbs and buy a car right now, what would it be? And ideally, we would do that two or three years from now, when the Volt is a little bit cheaper, and then I’d buy be a car like the Volt.

Or maybe there will be some competitor to the Volt that’s even better. I don’t have this sort of emotional attachment to the Volt-I just think it’s a good car. And ideally, somebody will come along and make an even better car than the Volt. And then hopefully GM will respond and make a better Volt, or maybe another car like the Volt that’s even better. We need competition between these companies. We need them to try to continue to one-up each other.

But that’s a long way to answer. Right now, I would want a plug-in hybrid over a pure EV, just because of the range issues. The Leaf is a great car, but we can’t drive to Vermont in it from here. We can’t drive to upstate New York in it from here. That’s a limitation if we’re only going to have one car. Now, if you had, say, your diesel wagon for long trips, and then you had a Leaf for a second car, that would be a good deal, especially if you live in a state with state credits, so that you can get the cost of the Leaf down to like 20 grand. That’s a really good deal, and that would be fun. I like the Leaf a lot.

TH: What is transportation going to look like in 50 years? Or better yet, what would you like transportation in the US to look like 50 years from now?

Seth: That’s interesting. I think that oil is going to be very, very expensive in 50 years. And, as a result, I think people are going to be making shorter trips and doing it under electric power. I think that, ideally, we would have a nationwide system of high-speed rail, and then you’d have electric cars or plug-in hybrids running on some sort of fuel other than petroleum, for local trips. Say you have a radius of 150 miles around your house, and that’s sort of car range, and if you want to go beyond that, it’s either a big car trip or you’d take rail of some kind. Hopefully we can come up with some alternative aviation fuels, but that’s a tough nut to crack as well.

But it’s tricky. That’s a tough one. I think I see, 50 years from now, the cross-country road trip being a less frequent event than it has traditionally been because oil’s going to get really expensive. And hopefully we can crack the battery problem. But it’s tough. It’s a tough problem. And I think I do see things becoming more local, in the long term. But that’s just a guess, and maybe a little bit of a pessimistic guess, too.

There’s definitely a chance that we’ll come across the breakthrough battery, the breakthrough ultracapacitor, the breakthrough biofuel, and put all those things together, and we’ll be able to just drive exactly like we do now, just using no oil. The electric car. That’s a tough one. That’s a big challenge