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Two U.S.-based companies are betting on lithium-sulfur to compete with China.
By the time the Swedish battery giant Northvolt declared bankruptcy last month, a well-funded U.S. startup, Lyten, had already swooped in to snatch up the company’s previously shuttered Bay Area factory. With China flooding the market with its cheap lithium-ion tech, Lyten is betting that creating a fully domestic battery supply chain will require alternate chemistries — like, say, lithium-sulfur, Lyten’s recipe of choice.
Lithium-sulfur has long been a promising contender, as in theory, these batteries can have a much higher energy density — the amount of energy that can be stored in a given space — than traditional lithium-ion. They also rely primarily on cheap, abundant, and easy to access materials. “We don’t use nickel, we don’t use manganese, we don’t use cobalt, we don’t use graphite,” Keith Norman, Lyten’s chief sustainability officer, told me — all markets where China plays a leading role. Scaling up standard lithium-ion battery production to meet forecasted global demand would require opening nearly 400 new mines by 2035, according to Benchmark Mineral Intelligence. “We believe if you could snap your fingers and change that to lithium-sulfur, that mining requirement will be reduced somewhere between 80% and 90%,” Norman said.
Lyten’s customers, Norman said, want these batteries as soon as possible, and acquiring Northvolt’s old 200-megawatt plant will allow the company to begin commercial production there next year. Lyten also recently announced plans for a Reno-based gigafactory, which is scheduled to come online in 2027. Zeta Energy, a Houston-based lithium-sulfur startup, also aims to commercialize in 2025, and is set to announce the opening of its 100-megawatt plant in the coming weeks.
While both companies have dreams of enabling more efficient, lightweight, and cost-effective electric vehicles and energy storage systems, there are reasons why lithium-sulfur has yet to be commercialized.
For one, sulfur is generally a poor conductor of lithium ions, and therefore requires extra conductive material to compensate, increasing the battery’s weight. Lithium-sulfur batteries also have notoriously short cycle lives due to the “polysulfide shuttle effect,” which causes the sulfur in the cathode to dissolve in the liquid electrolyte, damaging the anode and — you guessed it — decreasing the battery’s capacity and cycle life.
“It could be solved,” Arumugam Manthiram, an engineering professor and battery researcher at the University of Texas at Austin, told me. After being involved in the initial lithium-ion battery breakthroughs of the 1980s, Manthiram said he’s seen traditional battery tech continue to improve year after year. He thinks lithium-sulfur will follow the same trajectory, only quicker. “Can it be solved in five years, 10 years? I’m optimistic.” he told me. He’s currently working with Lyten on a Department of Energy-funded grant to accelerate the commercialization of lithium-sulfur batteries for use in EVs.
Zeta thinks it’s already found the ticket, though. It claims to offer three times the energy density of traditional lithium-ion at less than half the price. While Melissa Schilling, Zeta’s head of strategic marketing and innovation, couldn’t reveal much about Zeta’s proprietary cathode, she did tell me that it’s made of a sulfur-carbon polymer that eliminates the dreaded polysulfide shuttle effect (a claim that’s been externally verified) and allows for greater electrical conductivity. The company’s lithium-metal anode is made of carbon nanotubes, a.k.a. tiny cylinders composed of carbon atoms. The nanotubes help improve the anode’s stability, thus increasing energy density compared with traditional graphite anodes while also preventing the formation of dendrites, tiny projections on the anode that can cause the battery to break down.
Zeta’s batteries can go through about eight times more charge/discharge cycles than traditional lithium-sulfur batteries, according to the company’s figures and Manthiram’s estimation of a typical life cycle. Optimizing these batteries for EVs, though, will likely mean a much shorter cycle life, which may not be on par with what lithium-ion can do. Even so, Schilling told me, “what we’re going to beat lithium-ion on is density and cost.” The company has raised $30 million to date, and is in the midst of raising its Series B round. While Schilling couldn’t reveal the names of Zeta’s initial customers, she told me that the company is collaborating with a large automaker and heavy equipment manufacturer. Zeta has also received the same commercialization grant from the DOE as Lyten.
For its part, Lyten currently provides 25% greater energy density than top-of-the-line lithium-ion batteries, Norman told me. The company expects that soon, it will be able to offer twice the energy density at half the material cost. Lyten’s tech relies upon a so-called supermaterial, three-dimensional graphene, which it’s developing in-house. This gets combined with sulfur in the cathode to form a more conductive and stable composite material.
Norman said you can think of 3D graphene like a sponge with pore sizes “perfectly designed to hold sulfur atoms.” The graphene “gives [the sulfur] conductivity and gives it a rigid structure that doesn’t allow it to break down as easily,” he told me, meaning the battery is less likely to succumb to the polysulfide shuttle effect. Lyten’s anode is also made of energy dense lithium-metal.
Lyten hasn’t publicly revealed its battery’s cycle life, however, and in a follow-up email, Norman told me that when it comes to EV batteries, Lyten is “not yet at the cycle life we need,” though the company is “seeing 20-30% improvement in lithium-sulfur battery performance each year.” For customers using lithium-sulfur for earlier-stage applications such as drones, satellites, and two- and three-wheelers, Norman wrote that Lyten’s current cycle life “meets or very nearly meets their requirements.”
The company seems to have the money to work towards these improvements. Lyten achieved “unicorn” status last year, recording a valuation over $1 billion after closing a $200 million Series B round. It counts Stellantis and FedEx among its backers, and the Department of Defense is even funding a demonstration of Lyten’s battery tech aboard the International Space Station, where lithium-sulfur cells will be tested for use in everything from satellites to space suits.
Norman told me the company’s recent purchase of Northvolt’s old Bay Area facility represents an important step in Lyten’s path to scale. The California plant was originally designed to produce lithium-metal batteries for Cuberg, a startup Northvolt acquired in 2021 and closed down this summer. Like Lyten’s and Zeta’s, Cuberg’s batteries used a pure lithium-metal anode, while its cathode was the same old nickel-manganese-cobalt chemistry that conventional lithium-ion batteries use. With this kind of chemistry, Norman told me, it would be “very difficult to ever compete on costs.”
One of the main ways that Northvolt ultimately went wrong, Norman and Schilling agreed, is that it tried to scale standard lithium-ion tech too quickly in a price-sensitive environment. “They kind of went right to these 10, 20, 30 gigawatt-hour facilities,” Norman told me. “As they tried to scale those, they ran into a lot of manufacturing challenges and just the cost and time of trying to learn that on these huge facilities kind of bit them.” Schilling told me she thinks QuantumScape, a manufacturer of solid-state batteries for EVs, is running the same risk.
To compete with the low-cost Chinese batteries flooding the market, Norman told me domestic tech has to be demonstrably better — incremental improvements in efficiency, cost, or sustainability will not be enough. “Fundamentally, you’ve got to have a differentiated battery that customers are really dying to get their hands on,” Norman told me. But he knows that if Lyten successfully commercializes lithium-sulfur, other companies and countries will quickly get into the game.
After all, major battery giants such as LG, Samsung, SK, and Panasonic are well aware of what’s going on in the lithium-sulfur space, Manthiram told me, even if they’ve yet to make any noise about it. “They are quietly doing some work, R&D. They don’t hype it because they have a product already made,” Manthiram said, referring to the company’s widely available lithium-ion batteries. “They are also watching what academic labs are doing, what Lyten is doing, what others are doing.”
These behemoths are sure to pounce when and if the timing is right. Yet Lyten and Zeta still have the opportunity to pioneer a novel battery technology that can be fully made in America — something thus far unheard of in the battery universe.
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Especially with carbon capture tax incentives on the verge of disappearing, perhaps At One Ventures founder Tom Chi is onto something.
Technology to suck carbon dioxide out of the air — a.k.a. direct air capture — has always had boosters who say it’s necessary to reach net zero, and detractors who view it as an expensive fig leaf for the fossil fuel industry. But when the typical venture capitalist looks at the tech, all they see is dollar signs. Because while the carbon removal market is still in its early stages, if you look decades down the line, a technology that can permanently remove residual emissions in a highly measurable fashion has got to be worth a whole lot, right? Right?
Not so, says Tom Chi, founder of At One Ventures and co-founder of Google’s technological “moonshot factory,” X. Bucking the dominant attitude, he’s long vowed to stay away from DAC altogether. “If you’re trying to collect carbon dioxide in the air, it’s like trying to suck all the carbon dioxide through a tiny soda straw,” Chi told me. Given that the concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere sits at about 0.04%, “2,499 molecules out of 2,500 are not the one you’re trying to get,” Chi said. “These are deep, physical disadvantages to the approach.”
He’s obviously not the first to realize this. DAC companies and their scientists are well aware of the challenges they face. But investors are generally comfortable taking on risk across a host of different technologies and industries on the premise that at least a few of their portfolio companies will hit it big. As such, a nascent market and challenging physics are not inherent reasons to steer clear. DAC’s potential to secure cash-rich oil and gas industry buyers is pure upside.
Most prominent climate tech venture capital firms — including Lowercarbon Capital, Breakthrough Energy Ventures, Prelude Ventures, and Khosla Ventures — have at least one DAC company in their portfolios. At One Ventures itself has backed everything from producing oxygen on the moon (while also decarbonizing steel) to indoor solar cells and thorium-powered nuclear reactors, a hobbyhorse of techno-optimist nuclear bros and former presidential candidate Andrew Yang. So the fact that Chi won’t touch DAC is no small deal.
His hesitation stems from a matter of scale.To capture that 0.04% of atmospheric carbon, many DAC companies use giant fans to pull in large volumes of air from the atmosphere, which then pass through either a solid filter or a liquid solution that chemically captures the carbon dioxide. Although some companies are pursuing alternate approaches that rely on passive air contact rather than energy-intensive fans, either way, the amount of air that reaches any DAC machine’s so-called “collection aperture” is minuscule “relative to the scale of planet Earth,” Chi told me.
He views this as the core pitfall of the technology. “Half of the [operating expense] of the system is just trying to go after a technical disadvantage that you took on from day one,” Chi said. “By comparison, nature based restorations have enormous apertures,” Chi told me. “Think about the aperture of all the forests on the planet. Think about the aperture of all the soils on the planet, all the wetlands on the planet, the ocean.” His preferred methods of carbon removal are all nature-based. “In addition, their sequestration tends to be photosynthesis-powered, which means we’re not burning natural gas or using grid electricity in order to go make that thing work.”
Nature-based solutions often raise eyebrows in the carbon removal and reduction space, though, bringing to mind highly questionable carbon offsets such as those earned via “avoided deforestation.” The inherent counterfactual — would these trees really have been cut down if we didn’t buy these credits? — is difficult to measure with any certainty, and a 2023 investigation by The Guardian found that the majority of these types of credits are essentially bogus.
This same essential question around measurability plagues everything from afforestation and reforestation to soil carbon sequestration, biochar application, and wetland restoration. It’s extremely difficult to measure how much carbon is stored — and for how long — within complex, open ecosystems. On the other hand, engineered solutions such as direct air capture or bioenergy with carbon capture and storage are simple to quantify and promise permanent storage, making them attractive to large corporate buyers and easy to incentivize via mechanisms such as the federal carbon sequestration tax credit.
When I put all this to Chi, his response was simple. “It’s not an advantage to be able to measure something that can’t solve the problem,” he told me. For a moment, it seemed as if we had hit an intellectual dead end. For now, carbon removals and reductions are mainly driven by the voluntary carbon market, where prices are based on the exact tonnage of carbon removed. Reputable buyers don’t want to be burned again by investing in difficult to quantify offsets, and the current administration certainly doesn’t seem likely to step in with nature-based removal mandates or purchasing commitments anytime soon.
Chi’s answer to this conundrum is “financial enclosure,” essentially a fancy way of saying we need to monetize the value of nature-based systems. In many cases, he admitted, we don’t quite yet know how to do that, at least in a way that benefits the common good. “We figured out how to financially enclose a forest, clear cut it in order to go make board feed and paper and pulp,” he explained. But we don’t know how to financially enclose the benefit of preserving said forest, nor many other ecosystems such as wetlands that serve as highly effective carbon sinks.
At One Ventures has backed companies that work with a variety of buyers — from national governments to mining companies and farmers — that have a financial stake in (or are legally required to care about) ecosystem preservation and restoration. “Sometimes people break nature hard enough that it becomes that obvious. And then they have to go fix it,” Chi told me. “We’re going to invest in the companies that make it possible to go do that at incredibly low cost structures.”
One portfolio company, Dendra Systems, uses robots, drones, and other automated methods to do large scale ecosystem restoration, such as replanting mangroves in parts of the world such as Myanmar and Abu Dhabi where they’ve been cleared for property development or industrial use. The governments of both countries are paying Dendra to do this after realizing that removing mangroves had catastrophic consequences —- destroying subsistence fishing, wrecking erosion breaks — that would cost more to ameliorate than simply replanting the trees.
Then there’s Dalan Animal Health, which is developing vaccines for honeybees as hives become more vulnerable to disease. While not directly focused on carbon removal, the company has successfully “financially enclosed” pollination, as industrial farmers whose crops depend on pollinators will pay for the vaccine. This helps restore healthy ecosystems that can ultimately draw down more carbon. Chi told me that insurance companies have also shown a willingness to pay for nature-based solutions that can help lessen the impact of disasters such as floods or hurricanes.
While the carbon benefits of these companies are simply a bonus, the firm has invested in one pure play removal company, Gigablue. This startup releases engineered particles into the ocean that attract carbon-absorbing phytoplankton. As the particles accumulate more plankton, they sink to the ocean floor, where the carbon is then stored. Using onsite sampling and other advanced techniques, Chi told me that this tech is “very measurable” while also having an “aperture [that] is as wide as the ocean area that we’ve sprinkled things onto.”
Though Chi dislikes the illogical nature of the voluntary carbon market — he would much prefer a “polluter pays” system where money is directed towards nature-based sequestration — he knows that with the markets we have, precise measurability is paramount. So At One Ventures is throwing money at this, too. Portfolio company Chloris Geospatial combines satellite data and machine learning to measure biomass from space and track changes over time, helping legitimize forest-based removals. And Miraterra is focused on novel sensing tech and advanced modeling that allows farmers to calculate the amount of carbon in their soil.
But even if the carbon stored in natural ecosystems never becomes quite as measurable as engineered carbon removals, Chi thinks investors, companies, or governments should still be going all in. “When your volume is so much larger, then you can even throw big error bars around your measurability and still be miles ahead,” he told me.
Many investors say they want it all. You’ll see them funding nature-based and engineered carbon removal companies alike in an effort to take a “portfolio approach” to carbon removal. Chi, unsurprisingly, thinks that’s hogwash. “It’s weasel words to be like, it’s an important part of this portfolio,” he told me. The United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change also advocates for a diversified approach, without saying DAC itself is strictly necessary. DAC is “not going to do 1%, and it’s going to be massively more expensive than your other 99%,” Chi said. “At some point you’re going to be like, why is this in the portfolio?”
It’s certainly a more blunt assessment of the industry’s viability (or lack thereof) than I’ve heard any investor hazard before. But there may be more folks starting to come around to Chi’s perspective. With government support for DAC in question and the utility of carbon capture tax credits — which only benefit engineered removals — deeply threatened, venture funding for DAC is down over 60% from this time last year, Bloomberg reported.
Rajesh Swaminathan, a climate tech investor at Khosla Ventures told the publication that while many investors have taken bets on direct air capture, “Now, people are stepping back and saying, ‘Why didn’t I look at the economics there?’” Khosla itself is an investor in the DAC company Spiritus.
So what’s a longterm skeptic like Chi to do in this moment of doubt? As he told me, “I’m just going to keep on giving talks on it, and I know that physics is on my side.”
On the environmental reviews, Microsoft’s emissions, and solar on farmland
Current conditions: Enormous wildfires in Manitoba, Canada, will send smoke into the Midwestern U.S. and Great Plains this weekend • Northwest England is officially experiencing a drought after receiving its third lowest rainfall since 1871 • Thunderstorms are brewing in Washington, D.C., where the Federal Court of Appeals paused an earlier ruling throwing out much of Trump’s tariff agenda.
The Supreme Court ruled Thursday that courts should show more deference to agencies when hearing lawsuits over environmental reviews.
The case concerned a proposed 88-mile train line in Utah that would connect its Uinta Basin (and its oil resources) with the national rail network. Environmental groups and local governments claimed that the environmental impact statement submitted by the federal Surface Transportation Board did not pay enough attention to the effects of increased oil drilling and refining that the rail line could induce. The D.C. Circuit agreed, vacating the EIS; the Supreme Court did not, overturning the D.C. Circuit in an 8-0 decision.
The National Environmental Policy Act, or NEPA, requires the federal government to study the environmental impact of its actions. The D.C. Circuit “failed to afford the Board the substantial judicial deference required in NEPA cases and incorrectly interpreted NEPA to require the Board to consider the environmental effects of upstream and downstream projects that are separate in time or place,” Justice Brett Kavanaugh wrote for the court.
The court’s decision could sharply limit the ability of the judicial branch to question environmental reviews by agencies under NEPA, and could pave the way for more certain and faster approvals for infrastructure projects.
At least, that’s what Kavanaugh hopes. The current NEPA process, he writes, foists “delay upon delay” on developers and agencies, so “fewer projects make it to the finish line. Indeed, fewer projects make it to the starting line.”
Map of the approved railway route.Source: Uinta Basin Railway Final Environmental Impact Statement
The Department of Agriculture is planning to retool a popular financing program, Rural Energy for America, to discourage solar development on agricultural land, Heatmap’s Jael Holzman exclusively reported.
“Farmland should be for agricultural production, not solar production,” a USDA spokesperson told Heatmap. The comments echoed a USDA report released last week criticizing the use of solar on agricultural land. The report said that the USDA will “disincentivize the use of federal funding at USDA for solar panels to be installed on productive farmland through prioritization points and regulatory action.” The USDA will also “call on state and local governments to work alongside USDA on local solutions.”
The daughter of a woman who died during the Pacific Northwest “Heat Dome” in 2021 sued seven oil and companies for wrongful death in Washington state court, The New York Times reported Thursday.
“The suit alleges that they failed to warn the public of the dangers of the planet-warming emissions produced by their products and that they funded decades-long campaigns to obscure the scientific consensus on global warming,” according to Times reporter David Gelles.
Several cities and states have brought suits making similar claims that oil and gas companies misled the public about the threat of climate change. Earlier this week, a German court threw out a suit from a Peruvian farmer against a German utility, which claimed that the utility’s commissions helped put his town at risk from glacial flooding.
The seven companies named in the lawsuit are Exxon Mobil, Chevron, Shell, BP, ConocoPhillips, Phillips 66, and Olympic Pipeline Company, a subsidiary managed by BP. None of them commented on the suit.
Tech giant Microsoft disclosed in its annual sustainability report that its carbon emissions have grown by 23.4% since 2020, even as the company has a goal to become “carbon negative” by 2030. The upside to the figures is that the growth in emissions was due to a much larger increase in energy use and business activity, not from using dirtier energy. In that same time period, Microsoft’s revenue has grown 71%, and its energy use has grown 168%.
“It has become clear that our journey towards being carbon negative is a marathon,” the report read. The company said it had contracted 34 gigawatts of non-emitting power generation and had agreements to procure 30 million metric tons of carbon removal.
The company has set out to reduce its indirect Scope 3 emissions “by more than half” by 2030 from the 11.5 million metric tons it reported in 2020, as its Scope 1 and Scope 2 emissions fall to close to zero. It will become “carbon negative,” it hopes, by purchasing carbon removal.
Microsoft attempts to reduce emissions in its supply chain by procuring low- or no-carbon fuels and construction materials. Last week the tech giant signed a purchasing agreement with Sublime Systems for 600,000 tons of low-carbon cement.
The Nuclear Regulatory Commission announced it had approved a 77-megawatt small modular reactor design. This is the second SMR design approved by the NRC, following approval of a smaller design in 2020. Both are products of the SMR company NuScale, and neither has yet been deployed. A project to build the earlier design in Idaho was abandoned in 2023.
The NRC review was set to be completed in July of this year. Coming in ahead of scheduled demonstrates “the agency’s commitment to safely and efficiently enable new, advanced reactor technology,” the Commission said in a press release.
Congress and the Biden and Trump administrations have pushed the NRC to move faster and to encourage the development of small modular reactors. No SMR has been built in the United States, nor is there any current plan to do so that has been publicly disclosed. NuScale’s chief executive told Bloomberg that he hopes to have a deal signed by the end of the year and an operational plant by the end of the decade.
Tesla veteran Drew Baglino’s Heron Power raised a $38 million round of Series A funding for a new product designed to replace “legacy transformers and power converters by directly connecting rapidly growing megawatt-scale solar, batteries, and AI data centers to medium voltage transmission,” Baglino wrote on X.
A conversation with Mike Hall of Anza.
This week’s conversation is with Mike Hall, CEO of the solar and battery storage data company Anza. I rang him because, in my book, the more insights into the ways renewables companies are responding to the war on the Inflation Reduction Act, the better.
The following chat was lightly edited for clarity. Let’s jump in!
How much do we know about developers’ reactions to the anti-IRA bill that was passed out of the House last week?
So it’s only been a few days. What I can tell you is there’s a lot of surprise about what came out of the House. Industries mobilized in trying to improve the bill from here and I think a lot of the industry is hopeful because, for many reasons, the bill doesn’t seem to make sense for the country. Not just the renewable energy industry. There’s hope that the voices in Congress — House members and senators — who already understand the impact of this on the economy will in the coming weeks understand how bad this is.
I spoke to a tax attorney last week that her clients had been preparing for a worst case scenario like this and preparing contingency plans of some kind. Have you seen anything so far to indicate people have been preparing for a worst case scenario?
Yeah. There’s a subset of the market that has prepared and already executed plans.
In Q4 [of 2024] and Q1 [of this year] with a number of companies to procure material from projects in order to safe harbor those projects. What that means is, typically if you commence construction by a certain date, the date on which you commence construction is the date you lock in tax credit eligibility, and we worked with companies to help them meet that criteria. It hedged them on a number of fronts. I don’t think most of them thought we’d get what came out of the House but there were a lot of concerns about stepdowns for the credit.
After Trump was elected, there were also companies who wanted to hedge against tariffs so they bought equipment ahead of that, too. We were helping companies do deals the night before Liberation Day. There was a lot of activity.
We saw less after April 2nd because the trade landscape has been changing so quickly that it’s been hard for people to act but now we’re seeing people act again to try and hit that commencement milestone.
It’s not lost on me that there’s an irony here – the attempts to erode these credits might lead to a rush of projects moving faster, actually. Is that your sense?
There’s a slug of projects that would get accelerated and in fact just having this bill come out of the House is already going to accelerate a number of projects. But there’s limits to what you can do there. The bill also has a placed-in-service criteria and really problematic language with regard to the “foreign entity of concern” provisions.
Are you seeing any increase in opposition against solar projects? And is that the biggest hurdle you see to meeting that “placed-in-service” requirement?
What I have here is qualitative, not quantitative, but I was in the development business for 20 years, and what I have seen qualitatively is that it is increasingly harder to develop projects. Local opposition is one of the headwinds. Interconnection is another really big one and that’s the biggest concern I have with regards to the “placed-in-service” requirement. Most of these large projects, even if you overcome the NIMBY issues, and you get your permitting, and you do everything else you need to do, you get your permits and construction… In the end if you’re talking about projects at scale, there is a requirement that utilities do work. And there’s no requirement that utilities do that work on time [to meet that deadline]. This is a risk they need to manage.