After Lithium… More Lithium? Inside 24M’s Semi-Solid Battery Play

on March 26, 2019
Energy-Storage-News

24M, a US company developing novel lithium battery technology based on semi-solid materials, argues that the remaining runway for lithium batteries – the time during which the technology will continue its rollout as the mainstream choice for both EVs and stationary storage – is plentiful. In other words, the dominant technology of today will likely still be the dominant technology of tomorrow – only better.

Last week Energy-Storage.news reported that by separating the compositional materials used for the catholytes and anolytes of a lithium cell, the team at 24M had achieved an energy density exceeding 350Wh per kg, with a view to establishing a 100MW production line for pilot projects “by the end of this year”.

While admitting that commercialisation remains an estimated two to three years away, 24M, spun out of an MIT laboratory by founder Yet Ming Chiang to investigate solid state and now semi-solid lithium battery materials, claims its latest ‘breakthrough’, Dual Electrolyte Technology, heralds a new era to come for advanced lithium batteries. Andy Colthorpe spoke to some of the company’s leadership team to find out more.

According to Rick Feldt, 24M president and CEO, Rich Chelbowski, CFO, and to senior director of products Joe Adiletta, the Dual Electrolyte tech is one of the “layers of improvements” that the company’s battery manufacturing platforms could add to both LFP (lithium iron phosphate) batteries for stationary storage applications and NMC (nickel manganese cobalt) for mobility applications.

Advanced energy storage projects, mainly using lithium batteries, began to take off after a fairly extended period of demonstrations and pilot projects. Will it be a similar run-in towards commercialisation for semi-solid batteries?

Rich Chlebowski, CFO: For the grid storage space, we’re working on this through one of our partners… they have been in discussion with a number of customers to leverage this output [from our forthcoming 100MW production line]. We have a number of customers that have expressed a lot of interest because of the approach and the potential for very low-cost, high-performance lithium batteries with the semi-solid approach. They have a strong interest in procuring and buying, but more on the demonstration level.

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Fractal Energy Storage ConsultantsAfter Lithium… More Lithium? Inside 24M’s Semi-Solid Battery Play