The Exchanges

Q Yeah, maybe walk through, because I think the two-dimensional, three-dimensional thing is a little bit intuitive, but it'd be useful to better understand, yeah, exactly, take cement as an example, right? What are the parts of that process for which electrochemistry does make sense, and what are the parts for which it does not?

A Yeah, so I'm referring to what we do as sublime systems, you know, as you know, and, uh, the, the key thought process there was that given low-cost electricity, uh, and, uh, how would you use that low-cost electricity to decarbonize cement production? And, uh, what we didn't think would work was simply using it for heating purposes. You can, of course, take electricity, turn into heat, and power a thermal process that way. Uh, what we The pathway we took is one that has become interesting in a few other sectors since then, which is to use that low-cost electricity to create chemical reagents that will then do the chemical work for us. And that's a device called an electrolyzer. You know, most people know an electrolyzer from, you know, middle school, high school experiments where you split water. And a, you know, what we would call a neutral water electrolyzer, starting with, you know, pH seven water. And applying a voltage in the cell, something above about one and a quarter volts will split that water and gives you hydrogen and oxygen. But chemically, if you think at the same time about what happens if you're emitting hydrogen, you're starting with H two O and you're taking off hydrogen, you're going to be left behind, uh, what you'll be leaving behind is OH, hydroxyl ions. The other end, if you're, uh, emitting oxygen, well, you should be leaving behind hydrogen. And so, uh,…

AI assessment note: “use that low-cost electricity to create chemical reagents that will then do the chemical work”

Q Okay, so, cement is a good example. Mining is another good example. What are some other areas where there's like an interesting intersection of Electrochemistry, or I guess emergent capabilities of electrochemistry up against what otherwise would have been or has been like a thermal process or a biological process?

A Well, so, um, SAFs, sustainable aviation fuels would be an example, and in particular, you know, CO₂ to fuels. Uh, that is a case where, you know, CO₂, you know, decomposing molecules is highly energetic, and that's where electrochemistry has that advantage that I referred to earlier. Dial in with voltage, a high electrical potential that can drive a reaction that otherwise thermally is very hard to make happen, or essentially impossible to make happen, right? So, uh, so transformations from gas phase to fuels, from, um, uh, liquid phase to solids even. Uh, you, you know, earlier we talked about some of the limitations. I would say that one of the Other limitations of electrochemistry, something it's not very good at, is solid, solid transformations. Okay. Uh, so, and that, so, you know, why would that be? It's that, uh, one of the things you have to have in order to make electrochemical reactions take place is that you have to have some electrical conductivity. You have to be able to move electrons around. And, uh, solid particles, especially insulating solid particles, just don't have that conductivity. And so, those transformations, when you force them to take place, that electrode, tend to be You know, even slower, more sluggish. Which isn't to say you can't make that happen. In fact, you know, we have some projects in which specifically we think we have a way around that, …

AI assessment note: “SAFs, sustainable aviation fuels would be an example, and in particular, you know, CO₂ to fuels.”

Q AI to identify better electrolytes that are well suited to particular materials you're going to use in a battery, whatever it might be. How much Do you think, I guess from what you're seeing, do those capabilities exist today? Do they actually accelerate the discovery that you'd be doing in your lab, or others are doing in their labs, and, and how much do you see that pushing the vanguard?

A Yeah, so one thing I would point out is that this, uh, line of thinking is not as recent as you might think. So back in the mid-nineties, we started to think about, you know, high-throughput computation as a way of Uh, being more efficient about the experiments that you would eventually do. I still think that, you know, in the real world, you have to do the experiment and show that you get the results that you might expect computationally. But, uh, you know, uh, so it's been, you know, uh, since then that we first looked at whether or not you could, uh, compute a number of cathode structures, for example, and limit the number of experiments you'd have to do. Uh, that then developed into, you know, machine learning. And maybe you didn't have to do it quite so specifically compound by compound, but, you know, take where you could get it, a large database, and see if there were patterns, right? So AI is just the, in a way, the natural evolution of that. If you were to look at the number of, for example, lithium-ion battery cathodes that have been discovered, truly discovered through this process, compared to those that were still developed by a You know, good solid state chemist's intuition. I think that that intuition to this point still has one. There are a few key examples where I do think that computations led to the material. Disordered rock salt cathodes, I would say, is pro…

AI assessment note: “I think that that intuition to this point still has won.”

Q produce ESAF. They're also biological pathways. Um, and that's true of a bunch of different categories where you have the, you know, possibility of the competition between a biological pathway and an electrochemical pathway. Do you have a heuristic for what are the types of, uh, transformations for which electrochemistry is best suited, and which are the things that, like, what is it good at? What is it bad at?

A Yes. Great question. And I, I do believe as much as I love electrochemistry that it's important to be absolutely clear about where its limitations are. If you don't, if you don't follow that kind of pathway of thinking about these problems, you end up with a hammer looking for a nail, and that's not really what you want to do, right? So, um, one of the reasons the application of electrochemistry have, you know, become much more prevalent and interesting is because of this, you know, megatrend towards low-cost electricity. Uh, you know, the lower the cost of electricity, the more attractive it is as an energy source. And that's what has driven many of these, uh, uh, innovations. Uh, you know, the, the mantra, let's electrify everything, right? That's, uh, certainly you've heard that, I've heard that. The limitation of electrochemistry is that it's a chemical reaction that takes place at an interface, right? In a way, you could say that it's a two-dimensional process, right? You know, you always need an electrode, and you need electrons being transferred out of an electrode. And, uh, that makes it a two-dimensional process, as opposed to a thermal process, which is a three-dimensional process. And that, I think, is the inherent limitation. Uh, we can take electrochemical processes and electrode. We can increase the surface area, for example. Maybe we can get things to go up by a …

AI assessment note: “The limitation of electrochemistry is that it's a chemical reaction that takes place at an interface”

Q then I think where you've Also been a pioneer is in the application of electrochemistry into other sectors. We mentioned cement is a good example of that. Um, what do you view as like the frontiers today? If you're looking out in the field and you're like seeing things that make you excited about the next five or 10 years in this space, what should we be looking out for?

A Yeah, well, um, there's, there's quite a few of them, uh, that, you know, are in my mind certainly at the moment. Uh, so first, if we go back and think about, uh, where are there examples of electrochemical processes that have scaled hugely, right? And a lot of people might say, well, isn't that hydrogen? Isn't that, you know, electrolysis? Turns out that that's not, that's not the one. It's really the chloralkali process. Yeah. In which you take a sodium chloride solution, you make sodium hydroxide at one side, chlorine gas at the other side, and hydrogen at the same time. If you want to make HCl, you just react to hydrogen and chlorine. And so there are these standing examples of, you know, very large scale, uh, uh, electrochemical processes. Uh, so, uh, and of course you need to have, uh, you know, you need to have the power supply to make all those things happen. If you look historically at, you know, where manufacturing operations that take a huge amount of electricity, not, not necessarily electrical chemistry, but things like, you know, high temperature ceramics that they, you know, Niagara Falls has been a favorite place because of the low cost electricity there, right? Um, so if I think about, you know, what are the things that today look exciting? Well, you know, I mentioned mining earlier, right? And, uh, the In general, I just think that, you know, reinventing these…

AI assessment note: “I mentioned mining earlier, right? And, uh, the In general... electrolytic iron production”

Q over-generated solar, and things like that. One of the Areas in which I think electrochemistry can shine, but does not always shine, is in the ability to operate intermittently. Can you just talk through what are the dynamics that determine whether a given electrochemical system can operate at partial capacity factor, can ramp up and down to take advantage of cheap electricity if it's only available some of the time?

A That's right. And the, of course, that's one of the roles of large scale grid storage. And what we do at Form Energy is the ability to store and buffer those variations. But, you know, this example with electrolyzers that I mentioned earlier, we initially started off that project thinking that we would do everything inside this one device called an electrolyzer. You know, split water, you know, make acid and base, or split salt actually, make acid and base, carry out the reaction. And then we realized that You know, actually storing the acid in the base made a whole lot more sense because it allowed us to, uh, to accommodate the intermittencies and have a form of storage. So I, I think that just in general is the, is the rule. We should think about, you know, how to, um, And, you know, of course, the first part of the problem is, you know, what are the implications for CapEx if your capacity factor is not, you know, close to a hundred percent? Can't really get around that. You know, it is what it is. But the ability to, you know, run processes continuously downstream of that, that is where having some form of storage, I think, is, is important. That's what you have to think about doing from, from day one.

AI assessment note: “what are the implications for CapEx if your capacity factor is not, you know, close to a hundred percent?”