Hype for the next big thing. Same as solid state battery companies. The performance numbers may sound good and they work in a lab or in high performance/niche applications where cost or battery life isn't as much of a consideration, but how commercialy or practically viable are they for mass scale up to meet the sheer demand.
The battery factories are being built now, and will need supply for existing battery chemistries in order to secure supply chains away from China and reduce emissions.
I hate to keep refrencing Talga here (I'm a shareholder of both companies and both are leaders in the ex-china graphite anode space), but this topic been done to death on the forum there and their MD is constantly asked these questions.
In a recent panel discussion Talga's MD Mark Thompson was asked about emerging technologies and someone trandcribed some of his comments:
Most silicon particles will collapse under the pressure so… that you make this very complex form and it looks great and it can suck hundreds of millions of dollars of investor money and will be backed over billions of dollars, and not pointing the finger at anyone - that's I would do it if that's all I had. But then when they give it to a commercial customer and they squeeze it the way that their machinery actually works, not in the lab but on the line and they go “the results aren’t the same!” Why is that? That is because the pressure on the particle - if its too complex,...has to be tough enough to survive. And that's where the reality comes in, from the new technologies, right, to production. That's the world we try and live in. Our people have worked in commercial settings and so they understand; we start from those challenges: knowing that's where the material is heading. And so we live in the world of the practical - try to make innovative improvements but very practical commercially, to really be in the market soon, and getting good increases but not huge differences in economics...
I think the problem the battery world has got at the moment is that the exciting tech gets picked up by the media and the hype of it drags investment capital away from realistic, practical, needed things; things that will not only affect the cleanliness of your battery but the costs of your EV or your scooter or whatever.
So the rate of electrification is, in my opinion, getting slowed down by the inefficient placement of capital into technologies that are just hopelessly uncommercial - and a lot of people in our industry, we know what isn't gonna work, like just never work, on the fundamentals- but should they stop doing the science of that, probably not. And it's just our opinion that it won't work. Could it work well maybe, but they're the things that suck billions and billions of dollars away from someone trying to build something that is gonna really have a serious impact in the short term, but because it's a little more boring, it's a bit more of a struggle.
So, obviously, that sounds like a personal complaint of mine, which may be why you brought it up, because you could tell from my face that this is the way of the world. But other people have been publishing on this recently, a really good technical paper was published the other day actually by someone that works for rho motion Orico and James Frith. They lay this out in a technical paper published in Nature and it is exactly that: The misallocation of capital into hype-driven technologies is actually slowing down the electrification of the world, which is a bad thing.So that's why I objectively think it's a bad thing. I love science, no limit to exploration, everyone should do what they passionately believe in, but at some point, it has to be made physically real. There is no point doing something that can only be produced in a -80°C dry room where robots would have to go in to grease the nipples on the rollers and things like that, or the fundamentals of shipping materials around the world, that if you look at the whole production process of some of these technologies, you can see barriers that make them hopelessly uneconomic.
If you go back a few years to Lithium air technology. Almost everything actually discussed in this room has actually been known about for over 40 years. That the test work on lithium metal - actually the beginnings of lithium ion were in lithium metal, for example. But the problem has always been the economics and that compounding problems with commercialisation, and it doesn't mean that they ever get solved like lithium air for example, now it could be 50 years, 10 years, 5 years -you don't know- but it was the hottest thing in the world, 10-15 years ago, and everyone was investing millions and millions into it; millions of PhD's; but it didn't happen because it just can't commercially make it - physically make it.
(20min delay)