Can nanotechnology solve our battery production problem?
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- Опубліковано 15 лют 2021
- Can nanotechnology solve our battery production problem? Get Surfshark VPN at surfshark.deals/undecided and enter promo code UNDECIDED for 83% off and 3 extra months for free! From smartphones and laptops to the rapidly growing EV market, we need an incredible amount of lithium ion batteries to make it all work. Materials like lithium are difficult and time consuming to mine and extract ... and can have a major impact on the environment. Can nanotechnology solve our lithium extraction and mining problem? And maybe even help with solid state batteries? I talk to Teague Egan from EnergyX about some interesting advancements in nanotech, metal organic frameworks, and more.
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So what do you think of MOFs and this type of tech? Also be sure to check out my video "Exploring Nanotechnology and the Future of Renewable Energy": ua-cam.com/video/-bYaFqubQDw/v-deo.html
I don't know how to report this bug to UA-cam, but there's an issue when links are cut by the "see more". Clicking the "see more" clicks on the link instead, preventing me from seeing the rest of the comment, and catapulting me to the link I didn't even wanna click.
I think you should be aware of this so you can try to place your links accordingly.
This problem happens to me all the time, not just with your channel. And I hope someone cna figure out how to report bugs to UA-cam cause this is immensely frustrating.
I’ve known for a couple of years that graphene is part of the solution to desalination, but These guys are taking it to the next level👍👍👍
MOFs are a great way of multi purpose. From energy, science, medicine or any other way of improving life. Some of biggest problems of humanity could be resolved, such as clean water and air. Problem is that any pioneer from any branch of science is let to himself. There is lack of funds which would support the research. I hope that this will be a great breakthrough and that it will be the beginning of making this planet cleaner and better place to live.
Haven't looked it up but interested to hear how it might be used pharmaceutically. For instance cystic fibrosis is a disease that results from the failure of a biologic electrolyte pore that works in a similar manner to these artificial ones. Dialysis works with filters that regulate all of the electrolytes of whole blood in place of functioning kidneys. I'm certain that if you could shorten the usual 4 hour three times weekly schedule of dialysis by any significant amount you'd have a profitable product. Thanks for the episode Matt, very cool
What if you build greenhouses over the pools where you fill Salt water and with a collector you can get fresh water and pump it away or let it flow by gravity
Never imagined that one day Macklemore would be teaching me about lithium production and nanotubes. 2021 is starting off great.
what what what what
what what what what
That’s where I know him from!!
i still thinking about nuclear energy waste reuse and recycle using nanotech
I was gonna say. I'm used to the software bros, but I've never met a nano materials scientist bro.
White Boy Summer! More efficient lithium extration methods, WOOOO!
And Moby is doing the interview
a reverse idea: partner this tech with desalination plants for retrieving lithium? since they produce huge amounts of brine as waste product?
Brine is not in short supply; it is produced after the salt (NaCl) is recovered. Most of it is used for producing Mg (magnesium). If the demand for Li goes up, surely the last part will be processed for Li.
Immediately what I thought of too.
Ocean water has about 100,000 times more sodium than lithium, so probably not a practical by-product of desalination of that...
@@markiangooley Indeed, it's probably not practical.
hm, I have a very salty well on my land maybe I should go into lithium production. and I do have a couple reves osmosis filters for my cistern water.
I guess everyone was waiting for the question "and when do you think you will be to market and with what quantities? "
Desalination plants produce fresh water and leaves half brine. The brine produces lithium and cools the area around it. Win-win.
Engineering ??
What kinda plants?
@@kylejoyce Brian 😂😂
I was thinking/wondering the same thing
Geothermal wells are, as a byproduct capable of producing Lithium from the water extracted deep in the earths crust. At this moment, there is a pilot plant in Cornwall UK next to an existing geothermal plant.
I'm so thankful that curious people are happy to devote their lives to the difficult work of research and development and that sometimes we can all benefit from it.
Somebody's gotta use that knowledge they learnt in school at it ain't gonna be me
man i love these topics
keep going with this these fantastic video's
Thanks, will do!
Glad to see my area of research being brought to the lime light! I study the structural aspects of MOFs (how the geometry of the organic linkers and metal nodes influence the overall structure) and it really is true that the number of possible combinations is basically infinite. You could run a whole series on just the different applications that MOFs have the potential/are used for !
What is your estimation on arrival date of such tech? GL with your researches.
@@metekavruk_Alanya Thanks!
I cant say for certain I'm afraid. It really depends on which application they are being used for. The work in this video seems to be one of the most progressed to commercial that I have seen for MOFs.
There are some MOFs you can buy today from big manufactures (Sigma Aldrich etc.) but the ones they sell are the ones from the 90's. Any of the advanced MOFs you see in research papers today are still too difficult to scale up for commercial yet. Probably another 5 -10 years till you start to see them commonly used.
@@oxbowtwo I know getting something done in the Lab is like only 50% of the work. So I am reading this right now all the technical barrier are done? But trying to find ways to manufacturing it at scale, with flexibility of different MOFs at a cost effective level?
@@ksec6631 Yes that is a big part of it. The majority of MOFs require quit toxic solvents which are difficult to recycle. While there are some MOFs can use green solvents they generally aren't the "Best in class" for their applications. So there is a bit of a trade off there.
Other issues are that the organic linkers that are used are often custom made. This greatly increases the cost as now you have to make your starting materials. For an analogy its like try to make Lego but first you have to make the bricks yourself from plastic then you can build your model.
If I were to compare the progress of MOFs to electric cars. We are at roughly the same place in the early 00's. We can show it works and we know it will be the future. However, its took a lot effort to go from one concept car to the likes of Tesla or Nissan with their mass commercial product.
@@oxbowtwo Thank you for the information.
The more I’m exposed to such technologies, the more I see a coming golden age! I hope these guys can pull it off!
Just found this channel yesterday and I've binged ten videos already. The quality of your breakdown and analysis along with the editing is perfect. If this channel isn't over a million subs by next year I'll be both surprised and disappointed in the world.
when i watch these videos i feel like im watching a better version of what my science teahcer was showing me in in highschool. thanks matt, keep me on that learning cuuurve.
If John B. Goodenough is involved, it sure will be "Goodenough" 🙏😁
I see what you did there ... and I like it.
@@UndecidedMF so it wasn't good enough, else you'd have loved it. Darn it Matt!!
And since he is talking about Mr Freeman, it should be cheap
Goodenough is an understatement. The guy should have changed his name after the Nobel prize to "Excellent" or something like that.
In home storage batteries are not under the same strictures as an in a car battery. A standard very large lead acid battery, such as they use in forklifts, would make a great back up storage medium for a single home, at a fraction of the cost. Install them on an outdoor cement pad like heat pumps, easily replaced, easily recycled.
True. There are alternatives where space/weight isn't as much of a concern.
I think we could also improve the lead acid battery to make them last longer for storage
@@carholic-sz3qv They already have variations depending on usage. A fork lift battery starts out at around 3,000 lbs, and is intended for heavy draw industrial use and is good for a lot of charge cycles. You can't compare them to the battery in your car.
Alchemy for the 21st century! Awesome.
Just need a filter for gold extraction also.
@@bluemamba5317 ya we already had membrane to extract gold from sea water
@@trongphucnguyenang87 Any video on its practical working or proof?
!RemindMe 10 years
Thanks for the fascinating article Mike. I first came across organometallics in the early 70's when I was doing my chemistry degree, a lecturer held up a large flask which had seemingly been internally coated in metal. I have been fascinated every since with the idea of engineering on the nano scale though my vocation was in computing and engineering. Your point about the time between lab project and viable products is well made - OM's were being researched 50 years ago but we are now just starting to see radical products and solutions. At the time it seemed amazing products were just around the corner - but it can really take a lifetime or more to realise the benefits of research.
Man, your channel is an underrated treasure!
Appreciate the thought!
I love you matt. I don't get out much lately. I look forward to your videos to brighten my day.
Glad you're enjoying the videos! And I know the feeling ... I've been locked away this past year. It's getting to me. 😂
When is his company going to give us their IPO?
Or a SPAC? ;-)
Lol that's all I was thinking. Stupid greed 🤣
Actually really amazed the Mike "The Situation" knows so much about Lithium mining. Dudes come a long way.
Your videos make me more excited about the future and how technology really does make anything possible.
As a Ph.D. student (I work on membrane processes for water treatment) I realize how incredibly far from practical and real use is what you do in lab. There are millions of great ideas, but only really a few are scalable. In the end, everything is about economy. It's similar to creating a car prototype vs building mass production (as Elon often emphasises), but sometimes with even wider gap. During my Master's study (of a programme actually called Nanomaterials) I met MOFs several times. It is very cool to see somebody taking it so far with it! There is much more to them, hydrogen storage being one of it's sexiest potential applications.
Thanks for sharing! I love hearing from folks who have hands on experience/knowledge on these subjects.
Lithium mining has been a huge hullabaloo in Portugal for the past 2 years
idea: u can make a podcast of this video with only audio and upload it on spotify . Hope it helps!
Fascinating, I a world that seems to be doom and gloom, your channel brings some light and optimism to the world.
Thx
So its a "filter".
Yeah like a molecular sieve
They could have brought that word at least once :D
Sounds a lot like reverse osmosis, allow the water that you want through then use an absolute crap ton of other water to flush the surface of all the stuff that doesn't make it through so that the membrane doesn't get clogged
few questions that pops in mind : what happens to all the waste ? What is left after the filtering process ? Is it safe for the environement ? could the lithium-less water have any ill consequences on the sea fauna and flora ? are this MOF retainging magnesium ? If so, how long before they saturate and stop doing their job (like a clog up) ? can it be reseted in some way ? or at least find a second use in recycling ? at what energetic cost ?
Note that I am in no case sanctionning our current methods which are definitely environementaly bad
in places where they're desalinating water for their drinking water supply, they could potentially harvest lithium, since brine is a by-product of that work
Solid-state you said it again. I've been looking at lithium titanate, but the price point says lead acid, which I can get 20 years out off. Weight is the big difference.
I don't know enough to make a decision.yet. but weight will be the biggest aspect, price is the question tho.
Yep. I am a Chemist by training with BSc, MSc and MPhil degrees. I am aware of Dr. Omar Farha and Dr. J. B. Goodenough's Work before the Nobel Prize has been awarded. While Exceptional Work has been conducted over decades in Nanotech, I can confirm that it's extremely hard to bring these technologies into the Global Market through my experience in industry. Aside from ensuring that the science must be practical at the macroscopic scale, you also need all kinds of people, not just the technical people, trying to push forward with any product that the public is not aware of.
I learn so much through your channel!
Thank you so much for enriching my knowledge.
This technology needs to be expanded, to every materiel science university.
Heard of femtotechnology ?
@@devanshsavansha9061 Yes but i cannot see the point...lololol
You mention water purification at the end - IIRC they already use something like this in SoCal. To avoid using chemicals for water filtration, they have filters which filter water physically, letting only molecules the size of H2O or smaller through a membrane. They look like straws which get increasingly narrow, arranged in bundles of thousands. Can't remember the name of the documentary, but it was years ago so hopefully its tech that's further along now!
I love when just after coming up with a new innovative idea you are able to ask, I wonder if this thing could also do this other thing. What an awesome time to be alive and profoundly curious!
Solving the extraction of Lithium from these brine sources and industrializing it at scale would be a huge breakthrough. Sounds promising
This is the first step of the concept spelled out in the book "A young lady's illustrated primer", with filtering ocean water for all the elements to be used in 3D printing.
For mining applications, just dissolve in water and filter.
It boggles my mind thinking how the demand for lithium has grown and continues to grow.
Really its only limited by the price of batteries, for example as things get cheaper there is incentive to install battery backups in homes even without solar as it would let you take better advantage of time of use electricity costs.
In anticipation of ocean water being used for drinking water in the future, I wonder what we will do with all that brine. Finding out that we can extract lithium from it really cheered me up today.
For non-mobile applications, Lithium IRON phosphate works well. The density doesn't matter as it's not moving. And there is a lot of Iron and it is cheap. So we're not going to change the price of iron making it into batteries. We get rid of the need for cobalt and nickel. Heck Tesla just showed that you can even use it in EVs. The only application where it wouldn't work well is phones. We can use Lithium Cobalt nickel for that.
Sounds like very promising and useful technology. I think he touches on an important thing there, which also applies in a lot of other contexts, scale. Just because you can do something in the lab 1 time, or 10 times, or 100 times, doesn't mean you can do the same to scale it to thousands, millions, billions, or even trillions of instances. Each 10^3 scale level both in size of the thing but also in volume of things change the problem quite fundamentally. And the technology needed for 10^9 items per year may depend on the preceding power levels and insights from developing them. In the case of nano-tech where you talk about tonnes of material, you're probably in the 10^12-15 range of things per year. Such scaling challenges are very hard but also interesting problems to solve, and is one of the reasons why very smart people get involved in things that seem at a high level dull, dry or boring. There are some concepts of scale and scaling, like linear, exponential and power scaling that end up dominating what kind of solutions make sense to solve problems of certain scales in an economic way, and what works in one scale range may become impractical at other scale levels. Things with exponential and power scaling usually have high investment requirements and pay off at large scales, but things that scale linearly work better in small markets with low capex and TAM.
You could fix global warming and super volcano eruptions with the same solution:
Releasing the pressure from a super volcano would create enough energy to get us off fossil fuels.
I thought of a way to release the pressure.
The two main limitations to releasing the pressure from super volcanoes is that if you release the pressure in the center you could cause it to explode the way around that problem is to release the pressure further out, like a balloon if you release further out and slowly work your way in it can deflate without popping.
The second limitation is that you can't dig down to a super volcano without the equipment getting too hot to dig the way around that problem is instead of digging melt your way down to the lava.
Giant mirror fields create molten salt power plants, instead of pointing them at salt point the mirrors at a magnifying glass that melts the ground down to the lava and releases the pressure from the volcano while simultaneously using the released pressure to create power and get us off fossil fuels.
Another great interview Matt! Exciting stuff :)
Glad you enjoyed it!
There are so many applications for these and for zeolites! Exciting to see--thank you for great content!
10:21 he looks like he is ready to punch every lithium whos out there from the magnesium by hand
lmfao, did him dirty
MOF’s sound like something I better keep an eye out for. I’m going to have to re-watch the video and make a few notes. Thanks for all the educational videos, congratulations on your subscriber increase and I’m going to miss Vice Versa.
I've been binge-watching your videos in my free time for the last week, I can't believe that you don't have more subscribers! You've got awesome videos! Keep it up!
This is fantastic stuff. Molecular sieves of some sort are potentially very very useful. It's like the fella said in your video though, going from small lab' proof of concept scale, up to gigantic industrial production scale is very challenging. Good luck to these guys though. Hopefully they can improve both Li recovery rates and battery tech'.
I love hearing about technology advancements and your videos are excellent.
Awesome research Matt!
6:20 did I understand him correct if you have different types of membrane you let the water flow through and get separate different elemtents which comes as salts.
I had to check if this video was current, because Dr. Goodenough dropped out of sight, after a flurry of reports about his new battery technology. I am very interested to learn the results of attempting to combine Dr. Goodenough & Maria Helena Bragas' battery, with the MOF filter as a solid state separator.
Dr Goodenough is amazing, he is 98 years old and still contributing to science.
Love to hear more about removing salt form water for agriculture purposes. Some area in the world have loads of water but its salinity is too high
Wow that’s pretty wild, the ideas are almost limitless, basically anything on the periodic table can be effectively gathered and refined and changed more effectively… maybe even brick and cardboard and food and steel, chips and processors, medicine, stem cells, bone marrow … gosh who knows
processing the process to provide increased performance and decreased pain
From India,
Better find the right MOF soon
or my bones decay.
O_O
Drink coconut water meanwhile 😅
What you are getting at is MOF's doing "reverse osmosis" for lithium specifically? Amazing.
This stuff amazes me. I wonder if their system could break out those other elements and expand some of those mines products? They are going after the Lithium and trapping Magnesium. Now that the Magnesium is trapped, how do the separate that element for use?
And thanks for the Energysage link, so far it's working out great. We have three proposals and I'm learning a lot.
Sounds really exciting as it is. This is fantastic for batteries.
I guess molecules that have strong chemical bonds are divorced from this procedure so far but could become included as a secondary step once those bonds can be broken. To be able to purify any element for building structures that require purity or to defuse dangerous compounds from something really toxic & perhaps use them where required would be a possible next evolution.
Wow! This could be a huge break through. Thanks Matt, you hit another one outa the park!!!
Glad you liked it!
What MOFs will do for atmospheric CO2 scrubbing, is a game changer. The autotropes are now capable of massive influence of atmosperic composition and can cancel the planetary freeze/hothouse cycle. It heralds the hope we have been lacking for future generations to be able to live in a surviveable world on earth as well as habitats off planet. What we lack is a concerted effort and funding to drive the process warp speed style. Send the MOFs engineers some love and support.
@ 3:44: "... bigger than the city of Manhattan." Easy mistake to make, since Manhattan is referred to as "The City", but Manhattan is actually the most populous of the five boroughs of New York City (the others being Brooklyn, Queens, Bronx, and Staten Island).
7:00 BTW we just say the letters when we talk about CSIRO! :)
Mostly, but "sigh row" is a thing as well. But how do you teach an American to say "Monash" correctly?
Thanks for the video Matt. A thought on a potential video topic to work on is: Strides taken or developed to seriously reduce the time frame of getting from the lab to mass production. We have so many good things coming, it would be great if some could come to market faster, and I'd like to know how this might be achieved. Thanks!
Interesting thought!
When you say at the end "it goes way beyond lithium" - it absolutely does doesn't it? The possibilities!
Nanotech is awesome. Good one Matt.
Are we just going to ignore him taking a picture with J. B. Goodenough??? What a man he is! 10:00
Seriously ... He's good enough for Goodenough.
First I thought: Dude, Lithium is almost everywhere! Then came the scale of things to come. Wow.
Nobody mentions lithium battery recycling which has a very high lithium recovery rate. This sounds like the peak oil scare that was and is a huge lie.
@@trade_design23 - recycling is all well and good - but we dont have enough lithium batteries already in use. We need over 1000 times as many batteries as we currently have. If we recycle every batter we have, we dont have MORE batteries.
Lithium production is the problem. Extracting lithium is energy intensive - we save energy by making large solar evaporative fields and use the sun as the energy source.
This means giant dead zones full of brine and habitat destruction. More extraction requires more destruction and more energy - and no matter your solution the rate of production is slow so you can only scale WIDE.
we will never run out of lithium - but we may destroy huge habitats trying to extract as much as we need in time before we destroy the habitat of the earth.
@@spoonikle Beats setting the rainforests on fire just to kill more methane making & water consuming/polluting cows! Also, batteries are much less net depleting, as even before they are recycled, they are repurposed in less demanding storage roles. & before chemical harvesting, good pack cells can be repackaged for another storage lifetime. Just a tad different than burn (& pollute) once then gone forever fossil matter that should (must only?) be deployed as reusable products.
I read an article that local Chile people are trying to get the government to close down the brine pools because it's affecting the water table for freshwater. The water is pumped out, but then evaporated away, not put back. The freshwater then drains into the void.
@@spoonikle I drive an EV myself, and have PV on my roof, storing excess power in a Battery. Prior to this video and your response I have never thought of this aspect on a grand scale. "Green" isn't always only "green". Which in my mind makes it so much more important, that real "green" companies need to advertise, where they source materials and show, that it is sustainable. Similiar to the other side of the argument "where will all the power come from for all the EV Charging stations?" well, you don't need regular petrol stations anymore. And less Steel for Tankers, that were used to transport oil. It's such a complex issue. I'm thankful for insightful people like you, making me (and hopefully others) think about issues a few steps further down the supply chain.
Thank you! It is so enjoyable to watch your professional informative presentations. Keep up the great work!
I believe Standard Lithium (SLL.V) has a process similar to this already. They have just completed a polite plant and are now scaling up with one of their customers. It is a direct lithium extraction process.
There is no problem with use of seawater, because the sea level rises anyway. This way usable land is reduced (but if it is placed in deserts there is no problem either).
I want to see the next level in battery happen sooner rather than later. Engineering solid state batteries that never need replacing, or are totally 100% recyclable, is the goal to achieve.
Great video Matt! Also, Teague looks like Macklemore
Thanks! And yeah, I thought the same thing about Teague ... lol
On second viewing, I believe this may be one of the most important videos on UA-cam today. 🤔⭐🔦
I'm #500. Woohoo.
Subscribed.
Graphene and mos reminds me of Tupperware in the early fifties. To be more precise plastics.
It didn't replace everything overnight but slowly integrated into our society. When plastics came out they still had glass bottles glass IVs we were using glass a lot so it is with graphene and this technology. In 25 years will all be asking ourselves how did we live without it.
Thanks! And I agree. We're just at the beginning of this stuff right now. 20 years it'll be common place.
John B. Goodenough what a legend.
You should really take a look at Crayonano from Norway. 114 patents with UVC technology. Graphine/Nano technology.
One of the best startups from Norway atm.
I think we have gotten to use to seeing things blow up or not with SpaceX. If they could show us those failures or successes that would be cool. I really like the idea of using those to get fresh water from the sea seeing salt water is one of those things we have a lot of. Plus in using that can you get the other material that is in the saltwater? Can MOF be used as a separator so we could make new saltwater of polluted water into drinkable water?
So this makes me so happy someone is applying resources to metal-organic Frameworks. I would have put money in something like this! I can see how they could help store hydrogen gas. In a tank, it's all about the surface area. I had so much hope for mofs in the future how can I buy this stock?
Wow, this is truly exciting! It’s like being on the edge of discovering the “Holy Grail” solutions of many of our problems. 😀
Thank you!
Thanks for watching!
Love your work. Great find and share.
Thank you! Cheers!
Smart Technology, Research should be done in these sectors
Metal-Organic Framework is a nice term for it, but I'd argue a much more accessible term would be Nanofilter. It's a simple, one-word term that immediately conjures up mental images of imperceptibly tiny molecular structures being filtered out, letting you separate what you want from what you don't want. Metal-Organic Framework sounds sci-fi and cool, but tells a regular person nothing about what's actually happening. Is it like a living half-animal half-robot... machine thing? What does it do? How does it work? What's the Framework part about?
It feels a bit like the answer of the title is no, doesn't it ? As you said, there is still a huge gap to get through before relying on such breakthrough technologies in our daily life. Do you think we will manage to use them early enough, given the alarming climate situation, in operational and efficient technological systems ? As a junior physicist, on one hand passionated of nanotechnologies, and on the other hand, deeply aware of the dramatic climate situation, that's what I'm wondering.
Really excellent topic and video! Thanks, Matt.
Thanks for watching, Gary!
Love the videos, just noting in this one that Monash is pronounced “Mon-ash” as opposed to “Mo-nash”
Yep... a few folks have pointed that out. D’oh! 🤦♂️ appreciate the correction.
tbh I kinda liked Matt's pronunciation and Cs'ro sounds way more exotic than a bunch of letters lol
Could be neat to see these tunable MOFs integrated into the flush cycle of reverse osmosis desalination plants. Returning the water to the correct salinity and harvesting the excess salts.
I feel like we need to push for more sustainable forms of energy storage. Esp fFor non-mobile batteries (e.g. home or city batteries), we don't need the energy density of lithium considering its environmental cost. It feels like there are some major externalities that are not being factored into the cost of lithium, in much the same way as fossil fuels.
MOFs could allow hydrogen to be stored in a smaller volume, the problem with hydrogen is the low energy density by volume, Alstom the french train manufacturer claims that to store the same amount of energy as diesel the fuel tanks need to be 8x larger, this means that according to the UK rail industry hydrogen can't be used to power high speed 125 mph trains and heavy freight trains, Airbus is developing new liquid hydrogen airliners with much bigger fuel tanks which will go into production in 2035 but MOFs will mean the same amount of hydrogen can be carried in the same space as existing kerosene fuel tanks.
I thought MOFs were those things that fly around lanterns at light.
Oh and nouveau monde graphite based in Canada will be uplisting this month to the NYSE! Really great company you should check out as well!
You missed one important point. Lithium is really small percent of the batteries. Despite the name being "Lithium ion" it's mostly made of other metals like nickel/iron and others. Overall good video, but lacks numbers on how much lithium is required for an EV battery.
Fair point on the amount of lithium in each battery, but that doesn't change the fact that we still need a lot of it. And right now it's mined from a very limited number of places, and in ways that aren't great for the environment. Not needing giant brine pools would be a huge step in the right direction. I'm more excited about the possibilities of where MOFs can go in other mining applications, water purification, etc. So much potential and this is just one of the first commercial applications of it. It's cool stuff.
I don't know how it could be implemented but if nanotech actually helps solving the dendrite problem and production is scalable you got the solid state battery holy grail right there.
4:00 Whenever I hear people talking about desalination plants they always seem to focus on the super salty brine that's left over. Well isn't this the perfect thing to do with it?
What about setting up the environment with all the pieces required & basically the separation of the Li is moving it directly into a battery? Dig it up, Make it loosely usable & instead of separating Li into an avoid water climate, make the avoid water climate a direct filter into the battery composition mix whether one side or the other or even perhaps both sides.
All this keeps reminding me of how frustrated I am about the fact that saltwater batteries never caught on. They were so practical, cheap, and safe for people, and the environment. They were too big to be practical for phones or cars, but were so ideal for time shifting solar and wind, in all but the smallest of houses. It would be the size of a dishwasher, instead of the size of a television, and would cost $150, instead of $5k.
Add in the materials for grid storage
Im just amazed by this video. Thank you for sharing this!
Considering brine is used to make lithium, it's ridiculous to use evaporation pools when we produce so much brine in desalination plants and we have a problem getting rid of it. Although it's great that EnergyX are using MOFs to target this one problematic industry (and at least start improving it), the customising of MOFs can most importantly be a major help in producing highly efficient desalination processes, which can not only produce drinkable water but effectively filter out valuable salts and metals.
This kind of innovation could be critical in revolutionising a huge number of industrial filtration systems, making them far more effective and less energy-intensive - including manufacturing and recycling. Of all the potential uses of this kind of tech, with our looming (and global) fresh-water crisis this should be a huge focus of R&D investment in the years to come.
Also can't we use reverse hydrolysis to get both lithium and clean water?
Great video Matt. Keep the good work. This company need more public awareness, probably the next video is about the hydrogen fuel cell technology.