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Direct Current is a podcast about energy -- the kind that lights our homes, powers our lives and shapes our world. From the U.S. Department of Energy's digital team in Washington, D.C., Direct Current brings you fresh, insightful stories of how we generate and use electricity, what that means for the planet, and the cutting-edge science that's driving a global energy revolution.
SARAH HARMAN: What if you never had to worry about gas prices again?
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SARAH HARMAN: Or if you never had to go to a gas station to fill up?
SARAH HARMAN: What if you never had to get your oil changed, or your emissions checked? If you were never stuck without a ride because one of the finicky little parts that make up a combustion engine suddenly decided to go kaput?
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SARAH HARMAN: Sounds pretty good, right?
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SARAH HARMAN: If that all sounds appealing to you, you’re in good company. Millions of drivers in the U.S. are making the switch to electric vehicles. And they’re saying goodbye to the hassles and surprise costs of maintaining a gas-powered car.
SARAH HARMAN: That’s good news for the planet, since transportation accounts for 20 percent of all greenhouse gas emissions — and light duty cars and trucks account for 49% of that. So if we’re going to make a dent in the climate crisis, we’re going to need to replace a whole lot of combustion engines with non-polluting alternatives.
SARAH HARMAN: Which means tons more electric vehicles, or EVs, hitting the road in the coming years. Demand is already spiking. You’re seeing Television ads for EVs featuring big-name celebrities, and nearly every major car company is releasing scores of new electric models. In fact, some major automakers will stop producing vehicles that run on gasoline or diesel fuel over the next 14 years, replacing the field with all-electric cars. That’s not without help — In August 2023, the Department of Energy announced a 15.5 billion dollar package of funding and loans focused on retooling existing factories for the transition to electric, promoting good jobs and a just transition to EVs.
SARAH HARMAN: And due to President Biden’s Investing in America agenda, prospective EV drivers are now eligible to receive tax credits when they purchase a new or used EV. This also means a huge investment in nationwide charging infrastructure, making one thing very clear: we’re driving towards the future in an electric vehicle — powered by the batteries inside them.
SARAH HARMAN: I’m Sarah Harman. You’re listening to Direct Current – the Department of Energy’s Podcast.
SARAH HARMAN: And today, we’re going under the hood to take a look at something these EVs all share in common — a battery. Where do they come from? How do they work? And how is the U.S. working to meet the demand for millions of batteries for EVs, grid storage, and more?
SARAH HARMAN: Stick with us and find out, after the break!
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SARAH HARMAN: Batteries are all around us. In our homes, in stores and restaurants, on our desks, and in our pockets. And increasingly, they’re powering our cars.
MICHAEL BERUBE: You know, when you think about it, the improvements in batteries over the last several decades have absolutely revolutionized much of our day to day lives. Right. And a lot of that really is in the form of cell phones and computers, right, the cell phones we have today would not be possible if there hadn't been these dramatic improvements in batteries, but you know, it goes all the way to things like hearing aids and things like the batteries that are there. So there's a huge range of items.
SARAH HARMAN: That’s Michael Berube. He’s the Deputy Assistant Secretary for Sustainable Transportation and Fuels here at the Department of Energy.
MICHAEL BERUBE: What's really interesting a lot of people don't know is the batteries that are in your phones today and in your computers are pretty much largely the technology that the Department of Energy has developed and perfected. That same technology in those batteries is what we have now been developing to go into electric vehicles.
SARAH HARMAN: And electric cars and trucks are rapidly becoming the number one destination for those batteries.
MICHAEL BERUBE: Today, if you look at, go back a handful of years at where batteries are used, the vast majority were in consumer electronics — computers, phones, largely — but if you project even in another year, that will be well overtaken by electric vehicles.
SARAH HARMAN: And with some estimates projecting more than half of U.S. car sales to be electric by 2023, that means batteries are going have to keep up with the demand.
MICHAEL BERUBE: Demand for batteries, you know, has been going up and is continuing to continue to grow pretty dramatically… There are already on the order of $80 to $90 billion of announced investments in just the United States on new battery-related plants and components to make the things the battery was the batteries themselves. So there's a huge amount of investment happening in there.
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SARAH HARMAN: Let’s talk about what goes into a battery.
SARAH HARMAN: The vast majority of batteries in use today, from cell phones to EVs, are what we call “lithium-ion” batteries.
VENKAT SRINIVASAN: So if you think about a battery It consists of a set of materials, those materials are the ones that store the energy.
SARAH HARMAN: That’s Venkat Srinivasan, director of the Argonne Collaborative Center for Energy Storage Science at DOE’s Argonne National Laboratory.
VENKAT SRINIVASAN: And so when we use the word lithium ion battery, what we're talking about is a lithium ion that goes between the different materials, it goes between what is called a cathode and an anode. In one direction you charge the battery. In the other direction, you discharge the battery. The lithium was the one that's sort of carrying the weight, if you will, kind of move it doing all the kind of the hard work there. So yeah, we've been using lithium as the one to do the hard work for the last 30 years.
SARAH HARMAN: So, why lithium?
VENKAT SRINIVASAN: So if you go back in history, right, let's say you go back to the late 1980s, early 1990s, pretty much all of us were using a lead acid battery. We still use that today, for starting our car, we've all used nickel cadmium batteries, we've used nickel metal hydride batteries. Well, those were all great for the times that we were using those batteries to power the devices that we were powering. Then in the early 90s, the lithium battery came out. And the lithium battery had significantly more energy density compared to these previous chemistries. And energy density is king.
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SARAH HARMAN: Energy density. That’s really what it’s all about. The more energy-dense your battery is, the smaller it can be while still holding the same amount of charge. So it’s easier to fit in, say, a cell phone that’s already jam-packed with circuits.
SARAH HARMAN: Lithium is really good for that. When those first lithium batteries came out, they had more than double the energy density of their competitors. Which was huge!
SARAH HARMAN: In the decades that followed, they helped create a surge of technological development in portable electronics and, eventually, electric cars.
SARAH HARMAN: So, lithium has played a big part in this battery revolution happening around us. But it’s far from the only ingredient in a so-called lithium-ion battery.
SARAH HARMAN: There’s lots of other stuff in there — cobalt, nickel, graphite, manganese, aluminum, copper, and fluorine to name a few. Some of those aren’t exactly super abundant — at least, not in a usable form. We call those “critical minerals.”
MALLORY CLITES: So in, in general, critical minerals just mean, the minerals that you need to support the industry you're discussing, right? And you really wouldn't be able to build up the industry without them.
SARAH HARMAN: That’s Dr. Mallory Clites. She works in the Manufacturing Energy Supply Chains Office here at DOE as a supply chain deployment manager. It’s a relatively new office – at time of recording, it’s only celebrated its first birthday.
MALLORY CLITES: So for batteries, when we talk about batteries for electric vehicles, and things like that, we're really talking about these materials that are found within the batteries that are like the common, commercially ready technologies, and you really wouldn't be able to develop a large amount of batteries needed for the electric vehicle demand that we're anticipating, without having good supply of these minerals.
SARAH HARMAN: When we talk about critical minerals, which are sometimes referred to as “rare earth elements” or “critical materials,” we’re really talking about supply chains.
MALLORY CLITES: Yeah, I think that, you know, when you hear supply chain, I think you think, you know, oh, I couldn't, you know, couldn't buy a car when I wanted to at a time or oh, this, you know, wood was scarce during the pandemic, and there were supply chain issues with that. But in general, the supply chain is just the steps that these commodities go through before their final sale. And so for battery supply chains, what we're actually talking about is kind of the stages that lead to the production of that final battery that goes into an electric vehicle or into the grid.
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SARAH HARMAN: The supply chains for battery manufacturing, Mallory said, go all the way down to those raw materials, the critical minerals and other components that eventually get combined through several steps into a finished battery.
SARAH HARMAN: A shortage of critical minerals — sometimes referred to as “rare earth elements” or “critical materials” — can lead to bottlenecks in the supply chain.
SARAH HARMAN: This is kind of a problem, when you’re talking about needing to produce millions of new batteries for a growing electric vehicle industry. Here’s Venkat again.
VENKAT SRINIVASAN: So the great news in the last few years is the booming demand for batteries, right, both for electric vehicle applications, but also for grid storage. I think their estimates are kind of all over the place. But everyone will agree that we're going to see a factor of 20 to 30 increase in battery demand just in United States. And that number might be conservative.
SARAH HARMAN: That doesn’t mean they’re made entirely of lithium — quite the opposite, actually. In fact, even though lithium plays a pivotal role in the chemistry of modern batteries, it’s only a small percentage of the total materials. We’re talking minerals like cobalt, nickel, even graphite.
SARAH HARMAN: And one problem with these various materials is they’re not always very widely available. Which makes them costly, and if you need them in large quantities (for, say, a global EV revolution), you’re probably going to need to sustainably procure a sizeable amount.
SARAH HARMAN: Michael Berube again.
MICHAEL BERUBE: One of the natural things that we have to worry about then is okay, all those things that go into batteries. Where are they going to come from?
SARAH HARMAN: Michael says that battery manufacturing itself isn’t the problem; sourcing and processing the critical minerals and all those other battery components is what industry experts are focused on.
MICHAEL BERUBE: And the good news is, if you look at a battery that you need today versus one day needs six, seven years ago, it actually looks pretty different.
MICHAEL BERUBE: The amount of critical minerals inside batteries has gone down dramatically over the last six, seven years. And that's due to R&D that the Department of Energy has done and working with our industry partners.
So we've been reducing the amount of critical minerals inside of batteries. But a lot of what we're working on when it's super exciting, is all new battery chemistries.
SARAH HARMAN: New battery chemistries, recyclable battery components, and more: all on the horizon, and also in part two of our fully charged episode on batteries.
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SARAH HARMAN: That’s it for another episode of Direct Current! Thank you to our guests, Michael Berube, Venkat Srinivasan, and Mallory Clites, for lending their expertise.
SARAH HARMAN: If you want to learn more about the science behind battery production, check out our show notes. You can find those, and all of our other episodes, at energy.gov/podcast.
SARAH HARMAN: Direct Current, and our episode artwork, is produced by me, Sarah Harman, and written by Matt Dozier and Vivien Bui. Music and sound editing assistance by Conor McCabe.
SARAH HARMAN: This is a production of the U.S. Department of Energy and published from our nation’s capital in Washington, D.C. Thanks for listening!
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