Welcome to Unite and Heal America with Matt Matern and Corey Bennett’s Matt Matern’s under study while he’s prancing about the world right now. I’m really lucky today to be here to speak with Dr. George Crabtree. Dr. Crabtree is the director of the Joint Center for Energy Storage research at the Argonne National Laboratory. I have no idea what that means. But it sounds incredibly technical. I did take a minute to review your biography, sir.

And I saw that you had 8,000 career citations, 18,000 career citations and I immediately thought, wow, how does this guy still have a driver’s license? But then I have heard, you know, what’s actually publications, which means you are incredibly respected in your field. Welcome to the show. How are you?

Well, thanks for that very generous introduction. Corey, I’m doing fine. Thank you. Love to explain to you and your listeners what the Joint Center for Energy Storage research is. I hope we have time for that to come out during the interview.

I’d love to know why don’t we start with that? Tell us about it?

Well, energy storage refers mostly, at least art part two batteries. And of course, everyone knows lithium ion batteries, you’re probably carrying two or three in your pocket somewhere right now as I am. They power our cell phones, our laptops, our you know, everything. And that’s been since 1991. Sony brought out their lithium ion battery that long ago, it was for personal electronics.

Nowadays, and starting in the mid 2000s, maybe late 2000s. It’s been adapted lithium ion for EVs, and we’re seeing the Evie revolution unfold right now, the next few years are going to see hundreds of models coming out States, Europe, China, rest of Asia, and also for the electricity grid. So we’re seeing renewable solar and wind being deployed. They’re intermittent.

So the wind blows hard, and Gus is calm for a few minutes. You have to firm that up, smooth it out. Same with clouds passing for solar. And lithium ion is just great for that. So it’s finding new uses that the Restrict is that it can’t do everything. And I hope we’ll have time to get into some of the things that cannot do.

We will and you know EVs for listeners, obviously we’re talking about electric vehicles. It’s certainly I think, in our, in our public consciousness here in California, like I can’t throw a rock without hitting a Tesla, or something similar. Obviously, there are many hybrid vehicles out there. But let’s let’s step back, before we get into the the hard science, what led you to, to join the center and to get into this line of work?

Well, the Joint Center was launched in 2012. It was a competitive process we had to did along with five or six others from around the country. It’s actually one of the biggest research hubs that DOD funds were funded at something like close to 25 million a year, the next biggest hub, energy frontier research centers are typically 5 million a year. So we have a much bigger mandate than I think then as normal. We have a 10 year tenure. So we started in 2012.

And actually, there was a delay in our renewal of about six months. So we end in June 30. On June 30 2023, we have almost exactly one year to go for our 10 year term. And we’re looking forward to the legacies will leave and there will be a repeat. So we’re looking forward to reconvening for another 10 years. Of course, we’ll have to see what happens.

And and when does that recompute come up?

Well, Congress put the money into the 23 appropriation, but that has not yet been approved. So Congress has to act first. And that’s a delay. We don’t know exactly when that will be.

Gotcha. And so what specifically are you working on at Argonne? In the Joint Center that you feel is different from other places?

Well, I think the biggest change for us and for energy storage generally came in 2015. With the Paris Accords on climate change. That was the first time that there was international agreement that we have to solve this climate change problem. And it got quantitative. We said, We don’t want the temperature to rise more than two degrees, preferably not more than 1.5 degrees centigrade.

And we have to decarbonize everything in Thai Our economy by 2050. Those were the first internationally agreed quantitative targets. That’s really very aggressive. As it turns out, we only have about half the commercial technology that we need to decarbonize by 2050. And one of the big things that we’re missing are is battery energy storage at the at the heavy duty level.

So I think the Paris Accords really changed the game for energy storage it went from, well, it’s something that’s interesting. And yeah, maybe you could do it to, hey, how fast can you roll this out? And so it gave us a lot more, I would say, sense of urgency and a lot more purpose to getting it done quickly.

And so you and your team are working on alternatives to lithium ion batteries, right? We’re talking about solid state batteries?

Yeah, that’s one of the things we look at. We’re much more of a I think, a science organization looking beyond lithium ion, instead of an engineering organization thinking how could we make it 10% Better, there’s plenty of money flowing in that direction as well.

But as I was saying earlier, there’s some things that lithium ion simply can’t do. No matter how much engineering you put into it, it’s not going to work. One of them is power, transportation, heavier duty than passenger cars.

So lithium ion is great for the 150 or so passenger car models that are going to come out in the next two years. If you talk about long haul trucking, if you talk about rail, if you talk about marine shipping, or you talk about aviation, lithium ion just can’t do it, you need an energy density that something like two or three times what lithium ion is capable of. So you have to look beyond.

That’s what we’re doing. There’s another example. And that is for the grid. If you look, historically, there’s something like 10 days in a row pretty commonly, where the wind doesn’t blow and the sun doesn’t shine.

So they’re calm, and they’re cloudy, they’re overcast, lithium ion can discharge at full power for about four hours. So to cover a 10 day gap in wind and solar is something that lithium ion captive. So these are things that we’re looking at.

So for, for me, and then those of our listeners who don’t know about this subject matter, what is energy density when we’re talking about batteries?

Great question, I should have defined that. It means how much energy you can pack into a small space. So a battery actually has a pretty heavy device, including lithium ion. And that’s one reason why they’re not so good for aviation, you have to lift the battery up along with the airplane, of course, if you were to fly it electrically from a batteries source, and you need to get that energy density up. So basically, it means you have to pack a lot more energy in a lot smaller and a lot lighter weight space.

And based on the technology that you’ve been working on now, how much greater energy density Have you been able to establish in solid states versus lithium ion?

Well, and you raise a good point, solid state is probably the next big thing to come along with solid state batteries. And it will get more energy than C, but it’s only maybe 50%, more or 75%. More, it’s not a factor of two, it’s not a factor of three. So you need to look even beyond the solid state batteries.

And there are examples out there. Lithium, sulfur, for example, and lithium oxygen are two batteries that are capable of much higher energy density, so especially lithium oxygen, it could reach a factor of three above lithium ion. So there’s a lot of attention on that. I’m just going to say there are lots of problems to be solved as well.

Sure. And are, are there are there examples right now where lithium sulfur, lithium oxygen batteries are being used?

Lithium sulfur batteries are being used, you can in fact, a special custom contractor you can you can buy a battery designed for drones, for example, big popular use for them. They don’t have a long lifetime. That’s one of the problems and there’s some technical problems too. They just just making them work, let’s say reliably for years and years at a time.

And and how is it? I understand that lithium ion battery, there’s kind of a liquid slush inside. Whereas, whereas solid state is more solid and how is it that we’re able to, you know, get that increased density?

Yeah, great question. I think one of the nicest things about solid state batteries are much safer. So what what lithium ion the the safety problem it has is called thermal runaway if the battery gets above 150 degrees for any reason this chemical reaction starts the hotter it gets the faster it goes the more heat it releases looks like you know an explosion. It’s basically a fire and this is what Tesla had.

This is what Boeing had troubles with. Solid State electrolytes eliminate that problem completely. I think that’s the biggest feature that’s appealing right now.

All right, well, let’s jump into it after the after our first break. We’re talking with Dr. George Crabtree from the Joint Center for Energy Storage research, and we’re talking about the not so contentious issue of batteries today. I’m Corey Bennett on Unite and Heal America. We’ll be right back.

As you may know, your host Matt Matern of Unite and Heal America is also the founder of Matern Law Group, their team of experienced employment, consumer and environmental attorneys are dedicated to leveling the playing field by giving everyone access to the highest quality legal representation contact 844 MLG for you, that’s 844 MLG for you, or 84465449688446544968.

We are back on Unite and Heal America talking energy storage batteries, whether you’re on the lithium side of the debate or solid, or the solid state batteries, we got something for you, Dr. George Crabtree, just before the break, we were talking about different types of batteries. You mentioned, the lithium, sulfur, and I understand there’s lithium oxygen as well, how is that different?

Yeah, lithium oxygen is maybe the most appealing of the, the new batteries. Why? Because it can achieve a high energy density, which as we were saying earlier means you can pack a lot of energy into a small space, enough for aviation even. It operates with two Well, one very common element oxygen, it’s everywhere.

You don’t have to worry about the supply chain, it’s inexpensive, and you can get it domestically and, and lithium, which despite the fact that we’re going to, we’re going to have a challenge meeting the need for all the EVS that are kind of going to come out in the next 10 years. I mean, Evie sales are predicted to go up by a factor of 10 by 2030. And that’s going to require a lot of lithium. So that’ll be a challenge. But there is enough lithium in the earth to do that.

And so the nice thing about lithium oxygen, very lightweight, lithium is the latest metal, oxygen, you know, it’s a gas, the and an inexpensive, so you could expect that the batteries will cost a lot less than lithium ion does now. And that’s very appealing. So for cars, for example, the lithium ion battery is maybe 30% 35% of the cost of the car. And if you could get that down by a factor of two, you would make them much more competitive against gasoline cars, that’s something that lithium oxygen could do.

So practically speaking, moving away from the lithium ion batteries for an electric vehicle, you could achieve longer distance, longer life, or it could simply just be cheaper and lighter to own an electric vehicle. All of those things that’s why it’s so appealing. I mentioned the safety issue earlier, lithium oxygen is likely to be much more safe than than lithium ion.

Right if you if you’re if you’re not completely sold by being able to drive farther have longer battery lives and for cheaper you know, the prospect of not having your car blow up is also a great selling point.

No, I thought that would so you was a softball sorry. You mentioned that there’s there’s enough of this stuff in the earth to make to meet the demand. And so let’s talk about how that’s happening. And let’s talk about the supply chain. What kind of challenges are there currently to to shift away towards these more efficient types of batteries?

Well, actually, the supply chain for lithium ion I think is one of the big drivers for both engineering research and basic science research looking at the next generation of batteries. The supply chain for lithium ion is incredibly complicated.

Comes from all over the world I think ever Everyone knows that the cobalt in the cathode of a lithium ion battery comes from the Congo, something like 40-50, maybe 60% of it comes from there to country with some human rights issues, for sure, corruption issues, rather than a deal with that country. But of course, we have to, because that’s where most of the cobalt comes from.

And the fact that the refining for the lithium ion supply chain once you’ve once you’ve mined the materials, is mostly dominated by Asia, in particular by China. So this puts the puts Europe and the US are way behind in ability to manufacture lithium ion batteries specifically for the Evie market. And we’d like to find the next generation battery, which has a much simpler, inexpensive Earth abundant domestically available supply chain.

That’s one thing that both lithium sulfur and lithium oxygen have the supply chains are incredibly simple. So I think that maybe the top driver right now for next generation batteries is getting away from this this complicated supply chain.

So so are many of these actual materials come from in the Congo, we have major human rights abuses. And then and at the refining stage, China dominates that. So it puts it puts a lot of industrialized nations have opposes a challenging issue, you know how to deal with this ethically, legally, was alright.

For sure. And but I think both Europe and the US have the resources to go after that problem and and actually win it. For example, in Europe, they started about two or three years before the US did in, in realizing they have to manufacture the battery in Europe. One thing about battery we mentioned earlier, it’s a heavy device. So you don’t want to be shipping it very far, you don’t want to ship it across the ocean from the place that it’s made to where you assemble it into a car.

And Europe has really taken a very strong lead, they have a Gigafactory called northvolt, which is in the north of Sweden. And the reason it’s in the north of Sweden, there’s lots of hydro power there. So this northvolt Gigafactory, will run completely on renewable electricity. That’s a new feature. And most of the battery, most of the Giga factories in China don’t they run on ultimately, fossil fuel, which may of course, be used to make electricity. But still it’s fossil sourced.

And I think that’s one huge change for the Giga factories of the future, both in Europe and states, they’re going to be run by renewable power. And that gives them I would say, an enormous advantage over the Chinese Giga factories, simply because many buyers customers will like to reduce their carbon footprint and that will these renewable power Giga factories will go a long way towards doing that.

Do we have advantages here in the United States or in North America in terms of it, you know, getting access to the source material or the or developing the factories? That maybe China doesn’t have?

You know, it’s a good question. And a lot of the stuff that’s going on both in China, well, Europe and US all three places, tends to be a little bit business sensitive and not talked about a lot. But in principle, yes, we do have both European states have plenty of power. I think it’s innovation power. Things like Silicon Valley, don’t exist in Europe or China. But they do exist here.

And a great example of that is Tesla. It’s the most successful Evie company in the world. And it grew out of the United States out of culture here. So it was it got no government subsidies as other both Europe and China do give government government subsidies for battery manufacturing and Evie. And here it went through a 10 years.

So nobody knew if it would succeed or not. It was losing money hand over fist. Now. It’s a huge success. So I think that’s an example of what can be done. And it depends really on ingenuity and no thinking out of the box being extremely creative. There’s plenty of room for that.

And while we certainly have the technological infrastructure and the brainpower and the innovation, here is it the case that you know, the this industry from for the United States is still going to depend on getting the material reels from abroad or having them refract or find elsewhere and then bringing them here.

That will be the case probably four or five years, it takes that long to develop enough gigafactories to really make a difference. But both Europe and states are on that path here. As I said, Europe’s may be a couple of years, couple of years ahead of the states.

But the states is getting there. everyone realizes you’d have to manufacture ideally right next door to where you assemble the car. And it’s just a standard business paradigm. So we will get there. It’s just a question of wind, and is talking about batteries and electric vehicles? is hydrogen a viable alternative energy source?

Well, that’s a great question. And of course, hydrogen is getting a lot of attention. Now, you may know that the DOE has something called Earth shops, which is the analog of a moonshot, except it’s for the earth. And the first Earth shot is making green hydrogen that is without any carbon emissions at a price that’s competitive with, say, natural gas, and that means getting the price down by a factor of four.

So lots of people are talking about especially for heavy duty transportation, why not use hydrogen? It’s interesting, you could either burn it, as you know, fossil fuels are usually burned. But with hydrogen, you can have a fuel cell which reacts it electrochemically at a, you know, a slow down pace. It’s not a fire. And it’s very efficient, 60% efficiency.

So that’s a popular solution for let’s say, long haul trucks, even for some aircraft, and people talk about hybrids, maybe it’s jet fuel to take off a fuel cell to, to cruise at altitude, and jet fuel to land, which is really an interesting opportunity. But I think we don’t know what’s going to win. We have to try a lot of stuff too. To figure out, you know, who’s gonna win this race?

All right, well, we’re here talking with Dr. George Crabtree at the Argonne National Laboratory. We’re gonna go into our second break. I’m Corey Bennett with Unite and Heal America.

As you may know, your host Matt Matern of United heal America is also the founder of Matern Law Group, their team of experienced employment, consumer and environmental attorneys are dedicated to leveling the playing field by giving everyone access to the highest quality legal representation, contact 844 MLG for you, that’s 844 MLG for you, or 84465449688446544968.

We are back on Unite and Heal America talking with Dr. George Crabtree. And we put a pin on that last conversation talking about hydrogen as a possible alternative energy source. But that’s not the end of the conversation. You mentioned combustion as well.

Yeah, and especially fossil fuels, you know, fossil fuels, they’ve been around for a couple of centuries. They are so versatile, so convenient, so cheap, so uniformly available, that we’ve never thought at any other power source. And until the climate change came along, and we realized, oh, fossil fuels produce carbon dioxide. That’s what’s warming the earth.

And it’s getting to, you know, let’s say monumental proportions, growing more every year and every decade. So what’s the alternative? And, of course, burning hydrogen. That’s, that’s one alternative, very popular now getting looked into, not as versatile as fossil fuels. So with fossil fuels, you can have gasoline, you can have diesel, you can have propane, you can have jet fuel. You can have natural gas, all coming basically from the same car set of carbon compounds.

Hydrogen doesn’t have that flexibility. It’s basically one fuel. So it won’t be as versatile. And it may be that we need to keep burning fossil fuels, at least for the near term. And by near term, I mean up till let’s call it 2040 or 2050. In order to keep the economy going. So what’s the what’s the alternative? You capture the CO2?

You read my mind. I was gonna ask you, how do we survive until 2040 or 50?

Yeah, and there’s lots of ways you can capture the carbon dioxide. In fact, we mentioned Earth that’s in the last segment, that’s one of the three or is shots now is carbon capture as it’s called. And you can capture it from, say, the output of a of a, of a natural gas generation plant for electricity from the tailpipe of a car, although that’s pretty difficult.

Or you can capture it right out of the air. And that’s called direct air capture just from the atmosphere. The problem is, it’s very dilute in the atmosphere, so find a way to concentrate it as you capture it. But once you do that, you’ve got some options. So you could put it underground. And it reacts actually, with the rocks underground, certain rocks like basalt, and over a number of years, it gets converted into what are called carbonates, which are absolutely stapled, they’re not going to go anywhere.

All the all the rocks in the world are basically carbonate. So they’ve been there for 60 million years. So that’s a great way to get a sense to sequester it. But there’s another way to and that is to take a carbon dioxide use it as a fuel as a feedstock. So you reacted, for example, with water to make fuels, what would be fossil fuels, but of course, they’re artificial person fossil fuels. And remarkably, that’s exactly what plants do.

Photosynthesis is nothing but sunlight, water and carbon dioxide. That’s how we grow our crops. That’s how we grow our trees. So there’s plenty of precedent for that. It’s a question of discovering how to do it cheaply. And I would say over the last two or three years, that’s become a huge, basic science challenge. How do you do it when the building will take the next step of commercializing it, you know, later once we understand it, but that’s really a fascinating direction.

So the way so the way we get to 2040, or 50, is to consider these other carbon capture options and to stop cutting down the Amazon.

That’s, yes, absolutely. Dawn is a great, a great way of capturing CO2 from the air. So we do need to stop cutting it down. And we need to look at our agricultural practices to they actually give us something like 15, or 20% of the carbon emissions come from agriculture. And that’s not from burning fossil fuels, but it’s from growing things in the soil. So and mainly the decay of things in the soil. So there are lots of options there.

Shifting gears, given the current state of technology, and where we are with shifting away from lithium ion batteries, is it is it better for the environment to just use an electric vehicle or hybrid fuel cells, in some cases better for the environment.

From a CO2 emissions point of view, there’s no doubt about it. Even if you include the emissions in making the battery, there’s a payback time, it’s a few years, till you’re ahead of the game. And of course, if you made the battery with renewable electricity didn’t produce any CO2, it would be a lot shorter time. And that’s that’s the direction we’re going.

But there’s no doubt about that, from climate change point of view, switching to EVs and later, the heavy duty transportation decarbonizing that it’s the top of everyone’s list. That’s one of the easiest things we can do.

And what’s your sense of the timeline for getting these, these more efficient batteries into consumer vehicles?

Well, the solid state electrolyte is probably the next big thing that will happen. And of course, it depends on research, it’s a little hard to predict. But most people would say five to seven, maybe 10 years is plenty of time to solve the problems and commercialize and we’re getting very close. And they could start to appear on the commercial market in let’s say, the five to 10 year period, doesn’t mean they would dominate at that time, but they would be out there kind of like lithium ion is now a clear vehicle alternative.

Some of the other batteries. If you talk about lithium, sulfur or lithium oxygen, there are more problems to solve. And it might be and I’ll be optimistic here and of course, the one thing you know about every prediction quarry is definitely wrong. So I don’t mind predicting because I know something that I say will definitely be wrong.

But it might be more like eight to 15 years before let’s say lithium oxygen becomes a commercial reality. But the momentum is there. And you know, it’s got to we got some laboratory work to do and then we need to get it out in the lab.

I was gonna say what are the biggest obstacles left Is it is it the research and development Is it regulatory? Is it something else?

Great question. And I think if you talk about transportation, it’s probably r&d Not regulatory. And you know, once you get a workable prototype in the lab, you’ve got to make the demonstration of it. And then from that demonstration actually make a commercial product. They have their own issues, which are different from the r&d issues in the lab. But once they’re overcome, at least in transportation, it’s going to be taken up very, very quickly, just as the EVs are taking up lithium ion.

Now, for the electricity grid, it’s a different story. There’s a lot of regulation. And in fact, one of the big problems is transmission lines. So in the southwest, where there’s plenty of sun, you can have big solar farms that would be very efficient, and produce electricity very cheaply from the sun, because it’s so plentiful, but that the market is not there, the market is east of the Mississippi, that’s where people live. So you need transmission transmission lines to get it to market.

Well, the transmission regulation regime is controlled by the states. So if you’re a state that’s in between Arizona, and let’s say, Illinois, so the source and the market, and the electricity is just going to go through your state, but not stop there, you won’t approve it, if you don’t get no benefit from it. And this means that there is a very long waiting time to develop transmission lines. So I think when it kind of there are many other regulatory issues as well.

And of course, historically, what have we made our electricity from fossil fuels, lots of those utilities are reluctant to take the risk and the expense of converting to say renewable and so it’s just kind of a slow process. But that’s a problem we need to solve. And it’s very different for the grid, I think, than it is for let’s say transportation.

And so is kind of in a one way to get around that regulatory challenge, or maybe even some of the political challenge of that is localizing or regionalizing the transmission lines such that, you know, everyone can get it get a get a piece of the pie.

And you know, that’s happening. Now there are lots of proposals out there about how to unblock the transmission. Challenge, and state and interstate are handled differently. So Interstate is a federal regulation and the state issues are at the state level, and how to get a balance between those two.

There are lots of proposals out there, I don’t know which one looks the most appealing right now. I think it’s a case of let’s try a lot of things and see what works, and we’re going to have to have some uniformity there. We can’t have 50 different regulatory regimes.

And I guess, finally, in the segment, you know, in the, in the shift away from lithium ion to some of these alternatives, the solid state batteries, we’re talking about, is there any real kind of industry or political opposition to to this development? Or this, you know, is this something that, that even the fossil fuel industry is kind of welcoming to an accent?

You know, that’s a really interesting question and an observation. If you look at the automobile industry, they have fully embraced EVs. And that’s happened, and maybe the last, what, three or four years? Because they’ve realized, that’s the future of business for them. You can’t be making fossil cars forever. It just won’t work. The public won’t put up with it, governments won’t.

Climate change is going to get much worse and be on everyone’s mind. And they know they have to make the switch. So they’re fully on board. And remarkably, it hasn’t taken many incentives, government incentives or government sticks to make it happen. They just see the handwriting on the wall. Not true of some of the other fossil industries.

Manufacturing is a big one, where you need a lot of heat, and you get heat by burning fossil fuel. And very often the fossil fuel is the feedstock for making cement, let’s say or petrochemicals. And it’s it’s not that they’re opposed to it. It’s just opposed to the change just that we don’t know what the change is. So it’s very, very risky. That’s where we need something.

All right. Well, we’re gonna go on to our final break. This is Corey Bennett’s talking with Dr. George Crabtree on Heal America.

As you may know your host Matt Matern of Unite and Heal America is also the founder of Matern Law Group, their team of experienced employment, consumer and environmental attorneys are dedicated to leveling the playing field by giving everyone access to the highest quality legal representation contact 844 MLG for you, that’s 844 MLG for you, or 84465449688446544968.

We’re back for our final segment here on Unite and Heal America Radio. I’m Corey Bennett talking with Dr. George Crabtree, the Argonne National Laboratory, the Joint Center for Energy Storage research. We’ve talked a lot today about about these change technologies, these innovations to shift away from from fossil fuels and about the importance of of doing so before. It’s too late. We talked about 2040 and 2050. And I’m curious Dr. Crabtree. What else is there that we should be focusing on to you know, to advance these technologies?

Yeah, it’s a it’s a wide open field, you talk about decarbonisation, which is the word everyone applies to getting rid of the carbon dioxide emissions, and poor transportation we sort of know where they come from. And we know that EVs at least passenger cars by 2040, some people say 2045 will be largely through the transition, they’re going to be mostly EVs. That’s about half the transportation emissions. The other half comes from heavy duty, things like long haul trucks, and rail, shipping and aviation.

We don’t quite know what to do about that I mentioned earlier, we have about half the commercial technology we need to decarbonize and in transportation is said heavy duty stuff that we don’t have the commercial technology. So what did we do? Fortunately, there’s time. So 2040 2050, that’s a long way away 30 years. And there’s, there’s, there’s time to innovate. So I think that’s what we need to do. I’ll give you another example. Actually, from the electricity grid side.

This is a company that the Joint Center spun off in 2017. to specifically look at long what’s called long duration storage, that means batteries that can discharge for many days at a time, instead of just four hours. That’s what lithium ion can do. So we spun off a company called form energy, they were very good at raising money, they raised much more money than Jaycees or has or will ever have. And they were able to look at lots of chemistries. And they discovered one, it’s based on iron and oxygen, you can’t think of two more available materials such as simple supply chain.

There’s iron, it’s it’s the most abundant element in the Earth’s crust. So every country has it virtually and of course, oxygen right out of the air. And they’re they’re making a battery, they’re going to deliver it next year 2023. That can discharge for four days in a row at full power, way better than it’s about 20 times better than what lithium ion can do. They did that. So 2017. This is 2022. That was five years. And that shows you what innovation can do when you put your mind to it. And of course, they raised a lot of money, as I said, and that gave him the means.

But that’s the kind of effort and the kind of entrepreneurial effort that we need to solve the decarbonisation problem in the other areas. So we mentioned heavy industry. I think that’s a big one, we don’t really know how to decarbonize that yet hydrogen could play a role. But very likely, it’s going to be things like cite to use this word electrochemistry, which can actually replace what’s called thermo chemistry. So instead of burning fossil fuels, you electrochemically convert them into electricity or into other products. You do it at room temperature.

And you do it with electric fields, you put a volt on something like that into the cell. So very modest requirements. And they don’t, if you do things electrochemically they don’t produce any CO2. The problem is, of course, it’s a brand new science that you have to kind of invent. And then you have to take that science to technology. So it might be five or 10 years out. But there’s time for those kinds of innovations to take place. I think that’s one of the nicest, let’s say most appealing things about climate change the timescale

You know, with any of these developments in the manufacturing side, is there any sense yet? How scaling this technology might impact consumers? Is there resistance to higher costs to the consumer? Or, you know, the government’s are gonna have to heavily subsidized to scale this in a significant way?

Boy, that is a great question. You look historically 10 years ago, at the cost of solar cells, and wind turbines and batteries, those three things, the prices of, of solar, wind and batteries that come down by about a factor of 10 in the last 10 years, and that’s due to government as well due to market demand. But government incentives kind of modest ones.

Back in the, let’s say, late 2000s, early two to 2000 teens, minus government incentives created a market, the market took off, and now we don’t need the incentives at all. And that’s to the point, I think, much lower cost than anyone would have predicted 10 years ago, that EVs are actually competitive with, with fossil cars, fossil fuel cars, so we need that to happen again. And I’ve men tioned the price of hydrogen, there’s a nurse shot doe or shot to get the price down by a factor of four.

That’s only half what happened to solar, wind and batteries. So it seems like it’s quite doable. And it can happen to other commercial innovations as well. So things that we haven’t thought of yet that are going to decarbonize, let’s say heavy duty manufacturing, steel, cement, petrochemicals, things like that. That’s on the way, we really need to incentivize that. You’re talking about government, or let’s say consumer resistance, yes, the price will be higher initially, that is true.

But I think when consumers look around them and see the effects of climate change, such as all the heat waves that are occurring this summer, and this spring, in this reading this morning, Japan, in Tokyo, they asked residents to turn off the lights, because they weren’t sure they’d have enough electricity for the air conditioning.

And which would you rather have? Well, I would take the air conditioning. So that’s a choice consumers will will have to make, and it will be on their minds. So they may not be may not mind quite so much paying a higher price for some of the decarbonized technologies.

So besides, besides calling the members of Congress and asking them to fund the Joint Center for Energy Storage research, and this was a doe, what other things can our listeners be thinking about? You know, that they can support now, or do now to help make sure that the work you are doing at the laboratory at the Joint Center, you know, can continue to bear fruit?

Yeah, great question. And I think one of the most important things is to understand the importance of innovation. We mentioned Tesla, such a great example, we mentioned the factor of 10, price decreases and solar, wind and batteries. These things have enormous power. And we tend to think, oh, the status quo is this is the best it’s ever been. Let’s not change it.

But what lies ahead can be even better. And I think having that realization, through experience, such as owning EVs, such as using renewable energy, at no cost, no cost above fossil may change consumer consumers minds, but it’s thinking of the future. To me, climate change is a signature problem of the 21st century, it’s going to take about half of the century to 2050.

To solve it, maybe it’ll take longer, but we’ve got the ingenuity to do it. And I think especially in the States with Silicon Valley, and just the spirit of invention that has, you know, historically been very strong in this country, that that’s what’s going to save and we need to look to that for the future. That’s my feeling.

So that I think tees up a great kind of closing point. You’ve said the term Earth shot a couple of times. What What should our Earth shot or shots be in the next 1020 years when it comes to developing the technology and transportation or in our in our modernized economies, you know, that will most impact the environment positively?

Well, a great question and I think do is actually considering that right now. There are three or the shots. We mentioned two of them. One of them is hydrogen, one of them is carbon capture. The third one is long duration storage, but they’re Doa saying there will be more and I would think industrial decarbonisation is up right candidate for an earshot, it’s big enough, it’s going to have a huge impact on the business community also on consumers.

So I think that’s really important. Agriculture, we don’t think too much about it, because it’s not quite as mechanistic. It’s not machines. It’s animals and crops. And it’s those animals and crops that are in the carbon cycle right now. They’re, they’re contributing emissions, instead of storing emissions, we got to figure it out, figure out how to turn that around.

But I think we’ll be seeing enormous innovation in the world in 2014. And 2050, is not going to look like the world now. Much more innovation than we’ve seen, let’s say in the last 50 years. So to me, this is we need to keep thinking and we need to keep being creative. So what I personally enjoy about my job is seeing all this creativity about me and, and helping, you know, to make it happen.

Well, Dr. Crabtree, I appreciate your time today. This was a fascinating conversation. I learned a lot I hope our listeners did. If you want to learn more about his work, you can go to the Argonne National Laboratories website www.al.gov.

You can search for solid state batteries versus lithium ion, just type it into Google and find some good materials. He is an award winning very, very decorated and respected, individual for for a good reason. And he and the folks at the Joint Center are doing really important work. I appreciate your time today, sir, and good luck.

Well, thank you, Corey. What a pleasure. Thanks for the great questions. Very, very productive interview. Thank you.

Good. Thanks, everyone for listening. This has been Unite and Heal America. I’m Corey Bennett filling in for Matt Matern. We’ll talk to you next time.

As you may know, your host Matt Matern of Unite and Heal America is also the founder of Matern Law Group, their team of experienced employment consumer and environmental attorneys are dedicated to leveling the playing field by giving everyone access to the highest quality legal representation contact 844 MLG for you, that’s 844 MLG for you or 84465449688446544968.