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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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On Stellantis and Samsung’s factories, a new Jaguar EV, and innovative climate finance
Current conditions: Japan’s warmest autumn ever recorded has delayed the country’s vibrant foliage season • The east coast of Australia is bracing for a “rain bomb” • A Canadian storm system is bringing a blast of Arctic air to the Midwest and Northeast today through Thursday.
The Biden administration yesterday approved a $7 billion conditional loan for the joint venture between Stellantis and Samsung SDI – called StarPlus Energy – to help the companies build two EV battery plants in Kokomo, Indiana. The Department of Energy estimates the projects will create 3,200 construction jobs and 2,800 operations jobs, and the finished plants will produce 67 GWh of batteries, “enough to supply approximately 670,000 vehicles annually.” The loan isn’t finalized yet, and its fate hangs in the balance as President-elect Trump’s administration may not see it through. Though as The New York Timesnoted, “both projects are in congressional districts represented by Republicans,” and “some of them may be unwilling to get in the way of projects that bring thousands of jobs and billions of dollars to their districts.” Just two days ago, Stellantis CEO Carlos Tavares resigned, and the company has been posting sluggish U.S. sales figures. Last week the DOE announced another conditional loan for EVs: $6.6 billion for Rivian to build its Georgia manufacturing plant.
Jaguar has unveiled the first concept car of the company’s new all-electric era. The much-anticipated electric Type 00 (which apparently is pronounced “zero zero”) is a two-door coupe that comes in two colors: Miami pink and London blue. It will get up to 430 miles of range and charge 200 miles in 15 minutes. It will go on sale sometime in 2026 and cost at least $127,000. In its announcement, Jaguar called the car “an unmistakable, unexpected, and dramatic physical manifestation of Jaguar, as the brand continues its transformation.” The company has committed to going fully electric by 2025, and recently launched a rebrand complete with a new logo and a flashy but kind of weird ad campaign that hasn’t been entirely well received.
Jaguar
Barbados completed a “debt for climate resilience” swap that will free up about $125 million and enable the Caribbean island to invest in water and sewage infrastructure. So-called debt for nature swaps involve a country reducing or cancelling its debts by agreeing to preserve biodiversity or nature preservation. This is apparently the first case of a country using such a transaction to build climate resilience, and others are likely to follow Barbados’ lead. “In the face of the climate crisis, this groundbreaking transaction serves as a model for vulnerable states, delivering rapid adaptation benefits for Barbados,” said Prime Minister Mia Mottley. The government will have to meet sustainability performance targets as part of the deal.
The aviation industry is relying on “sustainable” aviation fuel – or SAF – to help it lower its carbon footprint. But a new report finds airlines aren’t using enough of the stuff to make any meaningful difference. The report, from Brussels-based advocacy group Transport and Environment, ranks 77 major global airlines and airline groups on their use of and commitment to SAF using a points scale of 0 to 100 and found that none of them scored above 61 points, “highlighting how much progress airlines still need to make.” Most airlines failed to get above 24 points. SAF makes up about 1% of global aviation fuel use, Reutersreported. It is more expensive than fossil fuel-based kerosene and there isn’t much of it to go around. The report points to a lack of investment in SAF from oil producers. Below is a graph showing oil giants’ estimated 2023 fuel production. You can just about see the SAF if you squint.
Transport and Environment
Tesla reportedly told Cybertruck workers at its factory in Austin, Texas, not to come to work today, tomorrow, or Thursday. “Given that it is a critical time for Tesla deliveries, particularly of its flagship model, the timing is suspect,” said Jameson Dow at Electrek, suggesting a sales slowdown. The company also lowered its Cybertruck leasing pricing, which might also indicate a demand slump for the electric pickup. Meanwhile, a Delaware judge yesterday rejected CEO Elon Musk’s $56 billion pay package for a second time, even after shareholders voted to reinstate it. Judge Kathaleen McCormick said the attempts to get the package approved were “creative” but “go against multiple strains of settled law.” If Tesla appeals, the case could go to the Delaware Supreme Court.
About 12,000 public EV charging ports came online in the U.S. over the last three months, bringing the total in the national charging network to more than 200,000. That’s double the number recorded in 2020.
Confidence in the United Nations’ ability to find cooperative solutions to some of humanity’s biggest threats took another walloping this weekend when negotiators left the fifth and final UN plastic pollution treaty talks in Busan, South Korea, with no deal.
A planet-wide agreement on curbing plastic pollution was always going to be a big ask. Lacking the existential drama that undergirds the annual climate change conference, the Intergovernmental Negotiating Committee for Plastics (or “the INC-5,” as this fifth round of meetings was seductively named) doesn’t exactly attract the same level of media attention as its parent group. For another thing, the connection of plastics to the cascading effects of global warming is less obvious than that of burning fossil fuels, though by no means less severe: Conventional plastics are made using newly extracted fossil fuels and, as such, are a last resort profit center for oil companies facing the expiration of their social license to operate. Plastic-related emissions are expected to outpace those of coal within the decade.
And yet despite fierce resistance from petrochemical-producing industries and nations (more on that later), a curious champion has emerged for a legally binding plastic treaty. Alongside the expected environmental heavyweights in Busan last week were several business coalitions pushing in tandem for more ambitious mandatory regulations.
There are plans to hold an “INC-5.2” next year to resolve the outstanding differences, and mounting pressure from business interests on the other side of the fight could potentially neutralize at least some of the influence of the countries that normally dominate such talks. “Businesses cannot solve the crisis alone,” Julia Cohen, the co-founder and managing director of Plastic Pollution Coalition, told me in an emailed statement. But they can “play a key role in shaping national positions, driving scalable solutions, and fostering emerging markets” alongside continued efforts to secure a global treaty.
Two main business coalitions are attempting to do just that. The first is Champions of Change, which works with the Plastic Pollution Coalition, Greenpeace, and Break Free From Plastic, and counts among its 350 signatories household brands like Ben & Jerry’s, Blueland, and Lush Cosmetics. The alliance is demanding a cap on plastic pollution, the phase-out of single-use plastics, greater reuse targets, and a justice-focused approach that centers the concerns of frontline communities. “Voluntary corporate pledges are no match for an international legally binding treaty that would require companies to move away from plastic,” Sybil Bullock, the senior oceans campaigner at Greenpeace, told me in an email. “We have seen past voluntary business commitments from top polluters fail time and time again to deliver meaningful reductions in plastic pollution.”
The Business Coalition for a Global Plastics Treaty, by contrast, stops short of calling for a plastic cap, focusing instead on phasing out “avoidable plastic products” and calling for a “global criteria for circular product design.” Specifically, the group — convened by the World Wildlife Fund and the Ellen MacArthur Foundation, which advocates for a circular economy — is pushing for a “treaty based on strong global rules across the full lifecycle of plastics and with a comprehensive financing mechanism.” Its signatories includebusinesses that have historically been criticized for their reliance on plastic, including Unilever, Nestle, and PepsiCo, and its softer approach has its skeptics.
“You can only downcycle plastic and currently, how plastic is recycled, it gets contaminated by other plastics that are so toxic we cannot use them for anything that is touching or even close to touching our food,” KT Morelli, a campaign organizer for Breathe Free Detroit, which successfully campaigned to shut down a local plastic incinerator, told me. “There’s no circular answer to plastics.”
Kristen McDonald, the senior director of the plastics program at Pacific Environment, an environmental group focused on the Pacific Rim, agreed that “business actions alone — voluntary steps — have not worked so far, and so I’m very skeptical that they will work in the future.” Still, she said it’s only logical that businesses are as impatient as environmentalists when deciding on plastic regulations. If an international agreement isn’t reached, it creates a “really chaotic business environment where certain plastics are restricted in some places and not in others,” leading to trade problems and an uneven playing field at a global level as different companies face different local rules. As she added, a plastic treaty “actually stabilizes things for companies” — unless, of course, the company in question happens to be in the petrochemical industry.
Even the environmentalists working with the business groups agree that there isn’t an entirely private-sector solution to the plastic crisis. “We’re not ready to give up on the treaty process,” Erin Simon, the vice president and head of plastic waste and business at WWF, told me over email. But, she pointed out, after the U.S. pulled out of the Paris Agreement in 2017, there had been a “groundswell of support from cities, states, and other non-federal actors,” including corporations that filled in the leadership void with “commitments that would help move the needle toward reaching our global climate goals.”
And yet despite the limitations of the business coalitions, Morelli told me she thinks there is still promise in the private sector. “They have more power than the government,” she stressed, noting that “small companies and large companies can choose to refuse plastic” and push their suppliers to do the same.
This is significant because, as is the case at COP, oil-rich nations (and oil-rich lobbyists) hold outsized negotiating power at the meetings. Despite more than 100 nations favoring an agreement that would have curbed plastic production — turning off the tap at the source, as plastic-reduction advocates like to say — Russia, Saudi Arabia, and the American Chemistry Council, a trade group, pushed for a treaty last week that would have focused on plastic recycling and “mismanaged waste,” instead, an insistence that led negotiations straight into an impasse. (After flip-flopping, the United States took a noncommittal middle ground of opposing mandatory production caps but otherwise agreeing that too much plastic is probably bad.)
In the absence of a treaty and with pessimism growing around INC-5.2, business-led action might be the best shot remaining for plastic-free organizers. “Having these companies step up on their own is huge and would help us all,” Morelli said.
When Donald Trump was inaugurated in 2017, millions of people participated in hundreds of marches around the country and the world to demonstrate their commitment in the new cause of resistance. No such large-scale protests are materializing for next January 20; those who hoped Trump would lose the presidential election now seem more demoralized than defiant.
That reaction is understandable. After a period of progress and optimism about the future, and even as the climate crisis grows more dire, we are in for a difficult four years. As Jesse Jenkins wrote just after the election, the outcome “dealt a devastating blow to U.S. efforts to cut climate-warming pollution.”
But for those feeling despair, there is a way forward: Embrace the fight. Sometimes politics is about compromise, sometimes it’s about patience, and sometimes it’s about righteous fury. This time, fury may be just what’s called for.
There’s no doubt that some very bad vibrations will emanate from Washington. Trump is arriving with the Project 2025 blueprint in hand, ready to undermine climate progress in every corner of government. Key agencies will be led by a veritable murderer’s row of fossil fuel enthusiasts, from the fracking executive who will helm the Department of Energy to the “all-of-the-above” enthusiast who will lead both the Department of the Interior and the new National Energy Council, the goal of which is to achieve what Trump calls, in all caps, “ENERGY DOMINANCE.”
As far as Trump is concerned, “dominance” comes not from wimpy renewables but from pounding holes in the ground and burning what comes out of them, the manly pursuit of those whose hearts beat faster at the thought of America’s foes kneeling in submission before our virile power. And it comes from reversing whatever Joe Biden did, not because Trump necessarily cares whether consumers get subsidies to buy heat pumps, but because undoing his predecessor’s legacy shows that Trump is a winner and everyone else is a loser.
As much as some would like us to believe that by giving Trump one of the narrowest presidential victories in history the voters were explicitly rejecting the Biden administration’s climate policies in favor of Trump’s fossil fuel agenda, there is no evidence that’s true. As much as we would have liked it to be otherwise, most polls showed climate change ranking low when people were asked what decided their vote. Indeed, the most persuasive explanation for the election outcome is that all over the world, voters have turned out whichever party was in power when the wave of post-pandemic inflation hit; Kamala Harris nearly overcame that anti-incumbent wave, but wasn’t able to in the end.
So while Trump may not have much of a “mandate” in general, he certainly doesn’t have one to reverse the progress the country has made on climate. That means the politics of opposing the administration’s climate efforts are in advocates’ favor. At the very least, there is plenty of room to persuade the public that the Trump administration is doing something awful on climate.
Embracing the fight will mean acknowledging that while bipartisanship is sometimes an effective tool, it isn’t an end in itself. Republicans should certainly be welcomed as allies whenever they want to join in defending climate progress or pushing back on efforts to undermine it, but the days when Nancy Pelosi and Newt Gingrich would film an ad together pledging their commitment to address climate change are long behind us. It would be nice if there was a consensus on the need to transition off of fossil fuels, but there isn’t. Instead, there’s a climate assault on its way, and while appeals to the self-interest of some Republicans (such as those politicians whose districts are benefiting enormously from clean energy investments) are possible, a battle is more likely.
That isn’t a bad thing. Conflicts are energizing — they clarify stakes, focus media attention, and motivate people to get involved. And just as many climate advocates realized that warnings of doom (even accurate ones) are often less effective than an optimistic vision of a future of abundance, we should also understand that one of the most powerful arguments in politics is that someone is trying to take something away from you. Which is exactly what Trump will likely do, and when it happens, people ought to be mad about it.
This fight will take place both in Washington and between the Trump administration on one side and states and cities on the other. Ambitious Democrats including Governor Gavin Newsom of California are looking for ways to resist the new Trump administration, not only on substantive grounds but also because standing up to Trump is good politics for them. When they do so on climate policy (as Newsom did when he proposed that his state offer tax credits for electric vehicles if Republicans eliminate the ones provided for in the Inflation Reduction Act), it will highlight climate actions Trump is taking that might otherwise have been overlooked.
In many ways, the climate story of the past few years has been an encouraging one — the passage of the IRA (the most consequential climate law ever), steadily dropping prices for renewables, innovations in energy and carbon mitigation, and more. The next few years will be characterized by conflict.
That may not be what climate advocates want, but it’s unavoidable. And no outcome is predetermined. November 5 altered the politics of climate change, but it didn’t end them; there will be plenty of opportunities to create controversies, exploit political opportunities, and get voters justifiably angry. Fighting — thoughtfully, with careful planning and energy — will be more important than ever.