Organic Flow Batteries with Nate Kirchhofer, CEO of BioZen Batteries EP 133

i The way I like to think about it is like a rising tide raises all boats. And that's where we are with battery storage right now we need so much more battery storage, but we need different types of energy storage to meet different demand niches right you know a micro grid is different than a car is different than a city is different than something that would be needed at a generation facility. And we need all of it. I want lithium ion batteries to have success, I want quantum scape and norrisville to succeed in their solid state lithium, because that helps society, see it and adopt it.

The Clean Power Hour is brought to you by the Clean Power Consulting Group, check out all of our content at Cleanpowerhour.com. Please give us a rating and review on Apple and Spotify so that others can find this content. Today, we are going to geek out on organic flow batteries for the energy transition. My guest today is Nate Kirchhofer. He is the founder and CEO of a small company called BioZen batteries based in Santa Barbara, California. Welcome to the show, Nate.

Hey, Tim, great to be here.

Really pleased to get to know you a little bit and learn about organic flow batteries. I knew nothing about this technology before we met a couple weeks ago. And so look forward to you know, bringing this content to our listeners, you know, storage is so vital as you and most of my listeners know, because solar and wind are wonderful, but they're intermittent. So we need to be able to store that excess energy. And if you are not aware of this, there is just a tremendous excess of solar and wind energy, right 1000s of times more solar and wind buffing the planet day in day out, you know, on the order of five to 10,000 times more sunlight than all of society uses, right? So we're just swimming in in energy, it's a matter of capturing that energy so that we can use it when we need it. And that's why batteries or any storage device is so useful to the energy transition coal itself, right. And oil itself are storage devices. They're just made by nature and millions of years of sitting in the ground. And now we're inventing new, better ways that don't put carbon pollution in the atmosphere because that that is going to disrupt the future, long and short of it. So give us a little background on yourself. Nate, how'd you get interested in energy storage? And what are you guys up to?

Awesome. Yeah, so I finished my PhD at UC Santa Barbara in 2016. My focus during that time was on organic and biological electrochemistry. So I was in the materials department there, which is typically very broad ranging. And so I had a lot of exposure to a lot of different I came to realise, you know, I enjoyed my research. But biology is sticky and gooey and a little bit less deterministic than I wanted. So the things that I learned in bio electrochemistry translate really well to batteries, the voltages and the currents are just a little bit different. So I kept thinking and, and seeking way to apply what I knew, and batteries are a natural fit. But I also have a lot of expertise in organics, like meaning carbon based compounds for your listeners. And so the lab I worked in in grad school, we worked on organic semiconductors. And so basically now what we're doing at bio Zahn is taking that expertise. I also have a couple other co founders that are PhD level chemists and another NBA. And we're using that to apply what we know to be early movers in the organic flow battery space. And yeah, and I'm super excited to be in this space. There's a there's a tonne of momentum and very clearly this, our society needs this sort of solution.

Yeah, it's, you know, I like to say that we already have much of the technology we need to make the clean energy transition. Mark Jacobson, who's the famous you know, energy transition academic at Stanford, has a new book called no miracles needed, where and he's just referencing that we have all the tech basically, but we need better tech when it comes to batteries. And so there's going to be a lot of evolution in the battery space. Of course, we already have EVs. We already have stationary storage at scale using mostly lithium ion technologies, or flavours thereof. And that's all well and good and I have quite a bit of content coming out on lithium ion storage and and other forms of storage. But I guess it would be very helpful if you would paint a picture of that landscape, the storage landscape, and why you believe that there's a niche moving forward for organic flow batteries. And then contrast if you would organic flow from vanadium flow, which is the dominant, you know, flow technology, I think that we see on the market and it is on the market today for stationary storage. I'll be it's still early days.

Yep, no problem. I love this question. And I think you, you hit the nail on the head, we need more energy storage, I think you're you're saying that sort of early in your intro, there's a tonne of generation available. And actually, sidenote, I think basically everything that you named sun, wind, and even the coal and gas that we see those are all stored sun energy, even wind is sun energy, because it's a thermal fluctuation. And so we need to harvest that right. But in order to harvest it and use it, we need what I would call an energy mix. Because each different type of battery has sort of an ideal use, you know, the lithium ion batteries that we see are great for mobile applications. We want those to have success in cars in your phones, maybe even on boats and things like that, where where weight is important. And this is why the incremental advances we see in lithium iron phosphate, and some of these new iron base chemistries are so important and solid state within those are, they're important because we can get lower weight, higher energy density, higher current densities, for aviation and things like that. So we want to have that see success. Now, as you may have seen, the prices of lithium skyrocketed in 2022, they're probably coming down a little bit now. But demand is really dramatically increasing. And right now, if you look at the forecast, so I think one of your prior guests, I'm not sure if this episode is legit or not. But it's quantum energy. And they're another Santa Barbara company that we know, they do a lot of forecasting and these sorts of things. But in order to get to a 90% energy generation from renewable energy, by 2023, we need to scale up our battery energy storage or energy storage, generally by 150x. So that you know right now, we're not going to keeping the lights on with renewable energy, we need to get to the point where we can manufacture renewable energy with with renewable energy. And so we need a mix of energy storage that allows us to harvest that, that the sun energy that we're collecting, and use it when we want. And so you know that that 90% renewable energy that I'm talking about is going to cost ratepayers a little bit more in the short term, but it alleviates a tonne of these other costs. And the reason I'm saying all this is because we want to siloed these different types of energy storage from each other for different applications. So lithium ion, based on its thermodynamics is actually really well suited for something like a four hour discharge. And this has to do with the fact that lithium is both the reactant and the electrode inside of a lithium ion battery. So your power and your energy density are tied together for that type of sale. Now, for something like a flow battery, we have tanks of fluid that store the energy. And then we have a central reactor where that fluid is pumped through and electrons are transferred. And that central reactors where the power conversion happens, whereas the tanks store the energy. So you can think if I make a bigger tank, I can store more energy in this battery regardless of the size or that central reactor. So this gives us flexibility in the power to energy ratio, making flow batteries tunable to different applications. And I think you alluded to it as well, that vanadium is the dominant technology. This is a technology that's been worked on for a while it's commercialised pretty heavily in China, there's a few projects as well in the United States. The way that battery works is the two tanks of fluid have vanadium dissolved in something like pure sulfuric acid, it could also be a mixed acid solution. And that acidic metal solution is pumped through the central cell. vanadium is nice because it can exist in four different redox states. So it can be plus two plus three plus four plus five and you have to have each of those on each side of the battery. And one of the down downsides to this type of battery is that the vanadium is super expensive right now it's something like 50 to 60% of the cost of the entire battery. And that right now is making the capex for a flow battery higher than for lithium ion cell which is why flow batteries are not winning contracts on the same scale that lithium ion batteries are. There's also maybe a technology maturity The thing there that contributes. But when we are talking about having these huge wind farms, huge solar farms, we need stationary batteries that are complementary to those generation facilities that aren't moving. We call those stationary because they don't need to be in your pocket. They don't need to be in a car. And so the weight of those batteries doesn't matter. And so if you look at flow batteries from a kilowatt hours per kilogramme perspective, so batteries are, are way worse on that metric. But I say worse, but it doesn't matter what the number of kilogrammes is because it's never going to move again, it's just sitting there next to the solar farm, so that we can put that energy energy into the grid when the demand is there. Okay, so that was a little bit of contrast the contrast of lithium ion and vanadium. I guess I could dive in a little deeper and just say that like the best lithium ion cells right now are probably something like 500 Watt hours per kilogramme, whereas flow batteries are probably something like 50 Watt hours per kilogramme, so it's like an order of magnitude on that specific metric. But from a footprint standpoint, like we're talking kilowatt hours per metre squared of installed batteries, I think there's an argument to be made that flow batteries are actually better, because they cannot catch on fire. And they're generally easier to instal because of that instal and permit because of that. So I think we have seen a little bit of data out of one company called sell cube, where I think it's about 150% better in terms of kilowatt hours per metre squared of installed capacity for flow batteries. And so let's take it a step further, you asked about the contrast of organic flow batteries, and vanadium flow batteries. Our whole thesis as a company is that we are making the fluid that goes inside these batteries, the electrolyte, and we're making it out of carbon based compounds. And the reason we're doing that is because carbon based compounds are cheaper than vanadium. So we see similar voltages, meaning similar power outputs out of the cell, except now we're using organic semiconducting materials that are dissolved in water, just like the vanadium is. And we can to first order directly replace the electrolyte that is inside the cells. And so our business model is we're making the fluid, which is the critical component inside this battery, but we're not remaking the battery. We want to partner with flow battery companies, to give them another option for their electrolyte. And because our electrolyte is something like 1/3 of the cost of the vanadium. Yeah, we're improving the margins on flow batteries dramatically, and bringing their capex down, which makes them economically competitive against lithium mine. So this is the whole thing. I'm an environmentalist, I want to save the planet, but our society is capitalist. And if you want to save the planet, it has to make sense economically. So that's the kind of contrast that I would say, organics scale really well, the meaning the economies of scale of production are well known, you know, we have huge polymer plants, for example, that can produce things on the metric tonne scale, and we can use that same knowledge to produce organic compounds. And it can be done globally, right. We don't need to mined vanadium at the vanadium mine. So it scales really nicely, as well.

Very good, very good. I want to talk a little bit more about how this machine works. And you say you're working on the electrolyte, which I think of as the fuel a in a way, right? It's it's these tanks of fluid. And then what is the what is the component call that is going to actually generate electricity?

Yeah, so I think you alluded to something that is very astute, and in a lot of ways a flow battery is a fuel cell. And you see that because the power and energy are decoupled just like a fuel cell. And we're storing, we're storing these things in fluid. So the component that is storing the energy is actually the liquid. So when you think, yeah, this is a good, a good point to disambiguate, right? When you hear the word electrolyte, you probably think of something like Gatorade. And what electrolyte really means is, it's an ionic conductor. But what we're making is a redox active ionic conductor. So we're making a redox active electrolyte. I like to use the word redox, a light, which isn't a real word, but it's a word that I made up that I think describes it really well. So what we have is compounds that can accept electrons and give up electrons and they are ionic, so they're, they're soluble in water on their own in their own right and they can accept electrons without degrading or forming bonds or things like that. And we're inventing those. And that is actually where the electrons are stored. So it's these tanks of fluid at high concentration. And as those fluids come into the central reactor, so we have something like graphite electrodes in there, and electrons are pulled out of one side and pushed into the other, or vice versa, depending on if you're charging or discharging. And it can sit nearly indefinitely, there's always a little bit of capacity fade for various reasons, with the charge actually in the fluid. So that's where the energy is stored,

and it will not discharge if it's just sitting.

It will take a long time, because the only place where that discharge happens is inside that central cell. And you have these huge reservoirs of fluid that basically don't have, you know, shrunk current pathways to be seen, I mean, I'm speaking sort of generally. So there's always there's always calendar fade and capacity fade pathways in batteries. So it's never 100%. Right. But

these reactors, can you buy them off the shelf?

I think you can probably buy some low level things. We I mean, for example, our test cells that we use in our lab are from a company called Scrivener, they manufacture like tests. So that's about the size of a pair of headphones, like noise cancelling headphones, or something like that.

But if somebody made an industrial sized reactor for fuel for flow batteries, oh,

yeah, definitely. There's several companies that are commercialising that so the the word that they typically keep typically used for this is like the flow stacks. So there's stacks, there's pumps, there's pipes, there's power electronics, there's the battery management system. So all of that has to be integrated. And so the the companies that are manufacturing this that immediately come to mind or sell Q, bolt storage infinity with a V, because of vanadium. There's Sumitomo in Japan. I know I'm forgetting another one. There's another one in Dalian China, creating that's like the big one that

but so do you do you become a simply a chemical factory at the end of the day, because somebody else can take this box, put a reactor in it, make it talk to the grid? And because that's not necessarily new technology, really what's new is this substance that's going to feed that and allow you to harvest electrons to store energy or discharge energy, right?

I think that's a great business model. I would love to be a chemical manufacturer, I would love for us to have IP and maybe licence it out to these companies that made me want to use it. I think the reason that we're not pursuing the whole flow cell is just because reinventing something like that is extremely capital and time intensive. For sure, we can make a difference in this technology by focusing on a component which is strategically good for us from like, you know, a resource perspective. But also, you know, these, these companies have been optimising their flow stacks for decades in some cases, right? Why Why try to redo something that they have perfected? So yes, I think being a chemical manufacturer is an absolutely good outcome. And I could see it going that way for us. Yeah.

And can this be done at scale, in a environmentally friendly way?

It can. So a lot of the reactions that we're using, can so we explore a lot of different synthetic pathways. And by that, I mean like the actual chemical transformations on the atomic scale that we're doing in the in the chemical reactors in our fume hoods. A lot of times these compounds that we're making are accessible through different reactions. So some of them can be more extreme and less environmentally friendly. But there's often ways of using so called green solvents that don't harm the environment, in their production or in their emission. And those things always translate to the industrial scale. So at industrial scale, I mean, it's kind of shocking the sorts of things that you can do, you can inject spontaneously explosive compounds from a tanker truck into a big reactor and there's no issue right so it's it's really well controlled from a an environmental damage perspective. Because these, these organic chemistry reactions that we need are already being done on the industrial scale.

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Great question. Yeah. So like you said, we are participants in the California nanosystems Institute, incubator, which is in healings Hall on University of California, Santa Barbara, campus. And that's been amazing. Because it's a fully stocked facility for us. You know, we have fume hoods, we have analytical tools, with all the spectroscopy measurements, you know, NMR, mass spec, things that that you need in order to do these chemical transformations. And it allows us to maintain that academic relationship. But importantly, the university does not have any claim on our IP. So we're, we're tenants in the university, we still support the university, but we're independent as a company. So that's been great, because you know, there's, there's a huge network of resources and researchers that we can leverage there. And, you know, from, like, where we are, as a company, I like to be conservative about claims, I would say that we are at something like TRL, three, you know, we're still doing r&d, we're early in this, we're inventing new compounds, we're going to be submitting a provisional patent in the next six weeks or so, to date, we've basically done pre seed funding. So it's a lot of friends and family and small angels that we know, I am working on raising a seed round right now and have about 400k of a million dollars that I'm looking for committed. So wanted to get a shout that out into the ether that we are raising money, you know, if there's some VCs or angels out there that are listening, love to have a conversation, see if it's a mutual fit. But yeah, in terms of scaling, you know, we have to start at these tiny little reactions to make sure that the transformations that we're doing are working. And when we make a compound, we tested electro chemically, if it's got the right redox potential and the right, you know, electron transfer kinetic properties, we scale it up, we try it in a larger device. And that's the sort of iterative testing that is enabled by organic chemistry because we can, we can literally make changes on the atomic scale, we can change a single atom on a compound and see how it affects its electronic and solubility properties, which have implications for the cell voltage and the lifetime of the battery and all these sorts of things. So the way I like to describe it is we're making a suite of compounds because our our synthetic pathway is modular. And so that gives us a lot of power over the ultimate outcome. I should also say that we, I believe we haven't signed a contract, but we have a verbal commitment for our first customer, which is a company based in Zurich. And so we're definitely starting to see some traction. I think in the next couple of months. We're going to be really starting to scale up production for that customer. or, and you know, they're working on their a unique flow cell architecture, which has some unique, like flow characteristics. And they need our expertise in designing electrolytes. So we're in a really perfect spot to serve flow battery companies with unique electrolytes that can help preserve the environment while fostering the green energy revolution.

Yeah, I, I and I want to talk about end of life. It's one thing to be able to put together a useful chemical. You know, humanity is inventing hundreds, if not 1000s of new chemicals every year. And, and it's good, bad, ugly, right? Because it's sometimes we don't know, what we're what we're putting into the environment, what the environmental and human health hazards are. So what is what is your vision? I guess, for a, you know, a, a human and environmentally friendly lifecycle for these chemicals are can they be repurposed, you know, directly into the same industry or repurposed for other uses?

Great question. And I love this question, too, because it has implications for all all sorts of energy storage, the way that I saw, I should say, we haven't done a complete lifecycle analysis, because we haven't run a battery completely. And we don't know all the things. So some of the things I'm saying are based on assumptions. But with organic compounds, we are able to use the compound for its intended purpose. So inside of this fuel cell, and at the end of the life of the battery, we, I think that we would not be able to directly reuse it in a battery because it is going to break down just like organic compounds or want to do but we would be able to distil off the water, or maybe even not necessary, and then break down the compound that we've made this organic semiconducting compound back into something like carbon dioxide or small molecule carbon compounds that can be starting materials for other useful products. And so the way I like to say it is we can participate in a circular carbon economy. And our electrolyte that we're making is actually a carbon sink when it's made, because it you know, just like green plants absorb sunlight energy and use that energy to build carbon bonds. We're doing the same thing in making our organic semiconductors to create these redox active electrolytes. And so this is in contrast to lithium ion cells, which last I checked, you know, about 5% of them are being recycled, I'm not sure what's happening to the rest of them. vanadium flow batteries are, are an interesting one, because on the one hand, the vanadium ions, which are basically just vanadium atoms with some charge around them, are, in a lot of ways, kind of like a fundamental unit, you can't break down a vanadium mine, I guess, unless you're inside a star or something, like you were saying earlier, but because of that, they also persist in the environment for a really long time. So you can't you both cannot remediate them if they spill into the environment well, but they have the benefit of lasting for a long time. The medium was also pretty toxic, and it's usually dissolved in pure acid. So decommissioning vanadium flow batteries is actually really painful. There's one in Hawaii that I know of, from a company called uni energy technology that nobody will sign off on, they've tried to decommission it, it's just stuck there. And it's literally just a vat of transition metal acid that can't be moved even though it's non operational. So there's, there's considerations like that where, yes, the electrolyte lasts forever, but is it actually recyclable? I'm not sure it really comes down to the final use. But yeah, from from a perspective of sustainability, we really need things that can be put back into a circular economy. And you know, organic chemistry is literally everywhere i i love to talk about the way that that nature works if you if you compare the biomass of green plants, which use the same strategies that we're using, which is this organic semiconductor, energy conversion, they are something like 450 Giga tonnes of carbon globally. And if you compare that to say humans we are point 06 gigatons we don't even show we show up as the line on the graph like the the axis on the graph compared to green Plants, even bacteria pale in comparison to green plants. And there's a reason for that organic semiconductors are doing this energy conversion are the most efficient, and most globally scalable. And we should take a lesson from that. And that's what we're trying to do at BioZen.

love that analogy? Yeah, plants are chemical factories, they take photons, they take co2 from the atmosphere, and they make wood and fibre and all the stuff for plant life and food. Right? We are eating electrons when we eat food.

Eating sunlight energy. Yep.

Everything runs on the sun. And we're woefully ignorant of this in society. It's It boggles the mind that we've lost touch with how dependent we are on the sun. And how, you know how voluminous it is, it is it's off the charts, you know, not occurred to me, Nate, though, that we have a lot of infrastructure for moving fluids around in our environment, gasoline to power cars, ethanol, to power, a lot of different things, including powering cars, 40% of our corn in the US is converted to ethanol, hugely inefficient, it's 100 times more efficient to take that land and harvest the photons directly in photovoltaics than it is to convert it to ethanol. But nonetheless, we have this economy that we ramped up with massive government subsidies. And now it's cranking and and those those ethanol companies don't want to let go of that. Right. That's their business. But we are we are very familiar with moving fluids around and storing them in tanks and tankers. And so there's no reason why we can't segue that technology and infrastructure to flow batteries. You know, you could have a flow battery gasoline station, right. And and you need to store both the, the fresh fuel and the used fuel. So you need two sets of tanks. But heck, we have many sets of tanks, because we have at least three grades of fuel, maybe four with diesel, at most gas stations, right? So there's lots of infrastructure for these fluids, no need to store them in containers. That is how sell cube is going to market with containerized containerized solution. And there is a selkie project now in Chicago that I'll be bringing on the show later this hopefully this quarter, but if not, maybe the summer. It's a project by Continental energy solutions, the EPC I used to work with, but

so I love this out you people there. I've been in touch with them quite a bit. They're fantastic.

Yeah, I'm glad you have a connection there. And look forward to bringing that onto the show. In our last few minutes here, Nate, what else should our listeners know? I'm glad that you mentioned you're raising money. You're in the middle of a seed round, raising a million dollars. So if you're an investor, just we will put Nate's info in the show notes, you can reach out to BioZen batteries. And it's it's a memorable name, so he won't be hard to find. But what should our listeners know? And how can they more directly contact you?

Yeah, I mean, if you want to send me an email directly, it's Nate@biozenbatteries.com. Also, if you go to our website, BioZen batteries.com you can input your info and your email, and it'll email you our deck from last year, and a white paper that we put together. So that's a great place to start. Yeah, like you said, you know, raising money. I I love having these conversations, just because there's so much to learn. And there's so many moving parts. Right. You know, you've mentioned hydrogen, which I think is a super interesting technology. I hope it comes online, you know, I I, the way I like to think about it is like a rising tide raises all boats. And that's where we are with battery storage right now, we need so much more battery storage, but we need different types of energy storage to meet different demand niches right, you know, a micro grid is different than a car is different than a city is different than something that would be needed at a generation facility. And we need all of it. I want lithium ion batteries to have success. I want quantum state and norrisville to succeed in their solid state lithium, because that helps society see it and adopt it. And I think this ties back into what you were saying, you know, there's a tonne of government subsidies for our current infrastructure. We have the capacity to do the same thing with renewable energy. We just need to invest in it. So yeah, there are players there that you know, maybe are in power, but there's enough to go round to support society. Right. So that's, that's what I want to say is, you know, it's I'm encouraged, I think, sure that the climate scenario is dire. But we like you said, at some point, we have the technology to do it, we just need to invest in it. And our approach at BioZen in we're taking inspiration from green plants and using organic semiconductors, because we've seen that already. scale globally. They it is huge. And that is that is the path forward in my view. I want these batteries to outlive me, and outlive everyone that's alive right now. If we can make it that we know it's sustainable, we know that we're supporting society. So that's my vision.

Well said, check out all of our content at Cleanpowerhour.com. Please reach out to me. Tim Montague on LinkedIn. I love to hear from my listeners. You can also make comments at clean power hour.com Give us a rating and a review on Apple and Spotify to help others find this content and speed the energy transition. I want to thank Nate Kirchhofer the CEO and founder of BioZen Batteries for coming on the show. I'm Tim Montague. Let's grow solar and storage.