This Is What's Hard About Building a US Domestic Battery Industry

25:21They have to, and I think they're doing a great job, frankly, in balancing how to get public capital out the door and into the hands of companies while doing it in a diligent manner. Of course, we've seen a lot of hype in batteries over many cycles, right? From the early 2010s, where there was a big kind of VC hype cycle to, you know, the SPAC market and a lot of companies coming public on these growth aspirations. So they have to be responsible taxpayer dollars, but they also need to get it done and get it working. And that's the thing Jigar really focuses on is, you know, he wants to see these projects built, right?

25:54So one criticism of this sort of government led investment or area of concern might be a politer way of putting it. But it is the idea that, okay, you can lend money to finance these things. You can pour billions of dollars into the creation of this capacity. But if the end of that, you don't have a dependable customer for what's being produced, you haven't really solved your problem, at least in the long term. What are you seeing in terms of the government on, I guess, the demand side? Like, is there anything they can do there? Can they put in place like permanent offtake agreements? Or is that going too far?

26:37Or how do you balance like that actual side of the equation away from the initial investment, the ongoing consumption demand? Yeah, that's a really good question. Because, you know, you do see jurisdictions that have governments play a role in offtake, right? And in supply agreements, right? And so these say, you will make this product, then I promise it will be bought and therefore you can go get investment, right? There's a huge challenge with that, of course, because of something we talked about earlier and isn't that these materials are not actually commodities, right? And so for us, for example, right, we're developing materials for a lot of the leading cell manufacturers.

27:15We just signed the supply agreement with Panasonic last week, right? But that goes to Tesla ultimately, right? That's one of their EV partners. Yeah, their biggest EV partner. And so, you know, but the material that we'll make for Panasonic will look different than the material that we make for, let's say, LG or Samsung or CorePower or any of the other people that we work with. And so it's really hard for the government to come in and just say, hey, we'll buy it because graphite is graphite because that sentence doesn't hold up. You mentioned that, you know, there's numerous like battery hype cycles over the years.

27:45And I always think this can't be real. But in 1883, There's like a famous Thomas Edison quote. The storage battery is, in my opinion, a catch penny, a sensation, a mechanism for swindling the public by stock companies. So literally like 140 or 141 years ago, Thomas Edison was warning that battery companies were all frauds and it was hype. And I believe, you know, over the years, many people have lost a lot of money on the next amazing battery. OK, so you mentioned, you know, the concerns about the end buyers. But right now, and we mentioned in the intro, there's a number of near-term sources of anxiety, right?

28:21The EV, maybe EVs aren't going to sell as well in 2024 as people thought they would in 2022. There seem to be still some concerns, still some issues with commercialization, concerns about charging network. Maybe they're not going to quite take off as fast. There is the recent plunge in spot prices for a number of important commodities, although I don't know what's happening in Graphite. Maybe you'll tell me. And then, you know, there are other sources a concern, you mentioned some people believe that we'll be able to do it without graphite. And maybe we don't really know what the dominant form of technology is going to be.

28:54And then there's higher interest rates and higher interest rates affect investment decisions. You have a plunging spot, concerns about demand, higher interest rates. Talk to us about, yeah, maybe long-term is all batteries, but what do these short-term things do to the investment impulse? Sure. I'll try to hit all five or six of them there, but no, you're exactly right. All of those things play off of each other, right? And yes, are we potentially going to miss the adoption curve numbers for 2024 that were forecasted in 2022? Well, yes, right? We probably are. Does it mean that this market isn't growing with double digit growth rates for the course of this decade?

29:29No, it doesn't, because it will see that type of growth. And so in my mind, all of these come back to the customer and the product, right? Because in order to build the investment strategy, you have to show what we've been talking about these supply agreements who's going to buy these products and on what terms right because for example we need to rebuild the way some of these materials are contracted in north america so we you know you talked about lithium and nickel these spot prices that have come down those only have some impact on the actual long-term agreements that are in place for these materials because many of those have caps and collars that kind of control the adjustments because these are traded metals.

30:10So they can have influence from speculation in the market, not actually just basic supply demand dynamics, right? Graphite's not a traded metal. And therefore, it's really contracted in China, battery graphite on a quarterly basis or an annual basis at longest. So we're having to rethink how we do commercial contracts so they're financeable. So as an example, and then it's back to customer and longevity of technology. So So LG invested in us last year, LG Energy Solution, signed a joint development agreement that essentially marches out the qualification schedule for their product. And then it's intended to trigger an offtake with a 10-year term, right?

30:47So you want to talk about is this technology here are the big companies, the LGs, the Panasonics of the world, you know, they need these materials for the long haul. But if those don't translate to agreements, you know, firm offtakes for us, then the financing is hard. And this is why the government can't just throw money to solve building production capacity, because before you can build production capacity, you have to develop the tech and the products. And those, unfortunately, they take a long time to develop and qualify in this sector. And you've seen that through these hype cycles. And I love that Edison quote.

31:23How much does price feed into the financing side? So the idea that, you know, at the moment, there is a limit on processing capacity. there is some scarcity. So we can have prices be relatively high, and that might be attractive for private capital. But on the other hand, the more you build out processing capacity, the more efficient you get at this, you would expect prices to come down. Although I'm also thinking out loud here, but Joe, do you remember the conversation we had with Bob Brackett? Of course. Yeah, absolutely. One of my favorites. Yeah, this conversation is actually reminding me a lot of that discussion.

31:59But he mentioned this thing called Jevons paradox, which is that the more efficient you get at producing a commodity, the more you end up using it. So the market kind of grows along with your capacity. So that's a very long winded way of saying I'm curious about how price is actually interacting with investment at the moment. Well, the price has to underpin the investment, right? You have to be able to demonstrate the returns in these projects. And that's why it's taking time to build structures that allow us price mechanisms for security over the long term. Because when you think about this competing dynamic of, OK, there's scarcity of materials, so costs can go up.

32:37There's efficiency in production and scale, so costs can come down. And what you just talked about there is certainly the case is you use more of a commodity. And lithium ion batteries is a great example. They used to be over$1 ,000 a kilowatt hour. Now they're$100 on the order of per kilowatt hour because we've gotten more and more adoption. And now that's opened up new markets like vehicles and energy storage systems, which is going to drive more and more adoption, right? But I think it goes back to how to balance that paradox with the customers. Because let's take, for example, this proposed 10-year term with LG.

33:09Neither of us want to be out of market, right, in 2035, where we're pricing graphite. But what's the market price of graphite going to be in 2035? So the way we think about this is when you can develop, improve your process technology and your products, these are not simple customer transactions. These are long-term partnerships. We need to work with these companies. If their goal is to have localized supply, they know they need to be in partnership with us, not simply look at us like an auto supply chain where there's 10 companies and you can drive eight of them bankrupt as long as you keep two alive, right?

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35:34Member FINRA and SIPC. Crypto trading provided by ZeroHash. Complete disclosures available at public.com slash disclosures. Let me ask you about another source of uncertainty. I was listing all these things about near-term EV takeoff and rates and all this stuff. In China, you could have the government announce a five-year plan, and then five years later, it's still Xi Jinping in office, and he can announce a continuation of the five-year plan, and probably five years later, he'll still be in office and it can continue. This is not a political question, but the U.S., obviously, political system does not work with that sort of consistency, and it is not entirely implausible that a year from now we have a different president who has a different view, different energy goals.

36:19The loan program itself has expanded like a puffer fish under Biden. It was sort of this backwater for many years because of the Solyndra problems, and then now it's gigantic, but it's certainly conceivable that its own lending capacity could be curtailed dramatically again. How does policy see uncertainty over the medium term affect investment decisions in the short term? Yeah, uncertainty is the enemy of investment, right? And so it does put questions on the table of how reliant are you on these potential government programs, right? So for example, we talked a little bit earlier about some of the tax credit opportunities like 45X.

36:58If the ability to get 10 % of your cost back is the difference between you being an investable project and a not investable project, then an investor may sit on the sidelines and wait to make sure that that program is, you know, not going to be altered, let's say. But I think, you know, when you take a step back from kind of that level of detail, I think regardless of, you know, the upcoming election, the long term goal is has much similarity between the parties, right? We want to reduce our reliance on China, maybe there'll be a difference on whether the electric vehicles get the incentives that they do now specifically.

37:35But when you think about the things that have happened in this sector, the Section 301 tariffs were put in to price the Chinese products coming to the U.S. differently to incentivize U.S. production. Under Biden, you know, we went into a capital investment cycle of stimulus spending. So I think we, you know, unfortunately, we do need to take a view on this industry that's outside of the political cycle, but that's challenging. But I think there's a lot of synergy in the mission between the parties. There's just a difference in the tools and the toolbox that they choose to use to get the work done.

38:09I want to, I guess, fact check one thing or get your view on this. But whenever we talk to Jigar Shah over at the DOE, he always talks about how when it comes to private investment of, you know, new and wacky technology in some respects. There is a reluctance on the part of banks, for instance, to gamble on this or to take a big risk on technology that they're probably not experts in. Whereas something like the loan programs office, they have a bunch of people with a lot of scientific background, a lot of experience who I guess have the expertise to be evaluating whether or not these things are realistic or promising.

38:53Has that been your experience or what is the difference between working with something like the DOE, the Loan Programs Office, versus working with private investors? Do you get different types of questions? Do they show different types of concerns or interests when they talk to you? I think at the end of the day, the LPO is still a commercial financing vehicle, right? And so the diligence process looks similar to that of the banks, but they do bring in a lot of great experts to make sure they are comfortable with the technology, the customers, the engineering reports, the site plans, all of those level of details.

39:31I think the fundamental difference is kind of simplistic. They are not in it simply for the return profiles, right, that the banks or private capital are looking for, which are much higher. They're in it because they have, let's say, kind of mandates and strategies around certain sectors that they want to see be successful. Doesn't mean that they can go put a loan behind any project because they have to go through that commercial diligence. But their goal is to bring that, let's say, first slug of capital in at a lower cost of capital and de-risk it for the other private forms of capital to come in alongside of it in the project.

40:08Out of curiosity, what does the application look like? I don't know. In my mind, I imagine like a college application. You have to write a personal essay. What graphite means to me. Yeah, but what is that like the actual, what is in practice, what does it look like applying for all these loans? It's really just an enormous process. It's an undertaking from the pre-application phase, working with the team to understand the project, the site, the engineering, right, the pre-diligence on what the project can bring. And then really where things ramp up is in the diligence phase, right? Before you get to this kind of infamous conditional commitment where they put terms in front of you, this is when they start bringing in all the external advisors and going through all of the engineering reports, customer offtake.

40:50And so, you know, yes, there's the personal essay component, of course, but it's more commercial. But it's more commercial diligence of let's see the data room and let's understand every inch and every corner of this project so we know what we're getting involved in, and the team does a great job to do that. So we've been very focused on the U.S. market for obvious reasons. I know we talked about China initially, but what are we seeing from other countries in terms of response? Are other countries trying to build out the same capacity or similar capacities that the U.S. seems to be doing? I think you're seeing this idea of shifting all of our, let's talk at the cell manufacturing level first, right?

41:33You're seeing the idea that we need to move our cell manufacturing globally outside of just China, right? And whether that's expansion in countries like Korea and Japan, or also into Europe, for example, similar to the US. But I think the reality is right now, we're in a time where, again, these are all capital heavy investment programs. So people have to go where the incentives are strong, right? And so for cell manufacturing, specifically, the 45X credits offer a huge amount of money per kilowatt hour relative to the cost structure, of the battery if you're building in the United States. So if you had to make a decision to build your next multi-billion dollar plant in the US or in Germany, let's say, or somewhere in Europe, that incentive is a big difference between the economics of those plants.

42:17And so the policies under Biden and the investment and the incentive opportunities are pulling a lot of that investment to focus on the US first. But I think we need to see this trend continue in other jurisdictions, because everyone faces the same simple problem statement of this energy transition and the battery manufacturing and supply chain still has this huge reliance on China. And that has concerns, you know, no matter what jurisdiction you are, simply because you don't want to be so reliant on a single source. And people are so sensitive to it after watching what happened with chips. Right.

42:52So actually, I realized we haven't actually asked this question, but what are you building right now specifically? specifically. And can you sort of give an overview or sort of like a simple penciled out version of like, what are the costs of your investment? What kind of refining plants do you have or planning to build? And I don't know, do this sort of like we're at a bar and you're explaining it to me on a napkin. What are you building right now? Sure. So we have a 400 ,000 square foot mass production site in Chattanooga, Tennessee. We bought it. It was a former GE facility where they were building nuclear turbines.

43:24So in that facility, we will bring in petroleum coke by rail or by barge or by truck. And we'll go through what we talked about earlier. We'll change its size, its shape, we'll grind it up, we'll change its structure, we'll heat it up in our proprietary high temperature furnace systems. And then we'll bag it and ship it off to, you know, folks like Panasonic. And so it is, you know, a manufacturing plant with heavy equipment inside to process these powders, right? And so graphite is a fine powder, like a 20 micron particle size, so very small. And at the end of the day, we're selling these materials, let's say in the price range of$7 ,000 to$10 ,000 per ton.

44:06So you hear about some of the spot prices in lithium and nickel and tens of thousands of dollars per ton. So these materials sell on the order of$7 ,000 to 10 ,000 per ton. We can make them on the order of six to eight, depending on the cost and the specification targets. Like I said, everybody wants a different material. But this first plant is going to cost us another three or$400 million to build up, right? And that's plant number one for 20 ,000 tons. And to put things in perspective, about 1000 tons of graphite produces about a gigawatt hour of batteries. So you start hearing 40 gigawatt hour plants.

44:41If those use all graphite, They need about 40 ,000 tons. So LG has announced 200 gigawatt hours to build in the US. Panasonic has announced 200 gigawatt hours to build in the US. Tesla has talked about going to terawatt hours of scale. So these are million plus tons of demand. And it's taking us this amount of time, this amount of capital to get the first 20 ,000 tons out of the gate. And that's the scale challenge. it's one of the reasons you do see so many former tesla people kind of at the helm of different companies in the supply chain now because back in let's say the 2012 to 2015 16 17 era as reno was coming online tesla was one of the only places you could be in the u.s that really understood that scale issue right and therefore everybody got to look at some little problem statement quote-unquote little problem statement like graphite and it's a huge business opportunity And so people went out and chased all of these different problems because, kind of to your question earlier, Tesla couldn't play whack-a-mole with that many.

45:47Just in terms of scale and capacity, I'm kind of curious, hearing you lay out the description of the plant, is labor a constricting factor for you at all or for other processors? Because I take the point about this isn't necessarily a commodity in the traditional sense. But when we're talking about using, you know, Coke to heat it up and process it and do things like that, it sounds a lot like a sort of heavy, difficult industry. But on the other hand, we are talking about making something that is quite sophisticated and is intended to help with the clean energy transition and is obviously very closely linked to battery technology and things like that.

46:28What's the recruitment process like for you right now? And what's the pitch to people for working in this particular industry? So I think there's phases of the recruitment challenge, right? The first is in the technology development and then in the scale and then in the ops, right? Because again, when you think about this idea of onshoring, not just production capacity, but technology development, there are not people in this country who have run battery graphite plants. Yeah. They only really exist in China. So you can't just go out and hire people who have done this before, right? So you have to home grow a lot of that IP, a lot of that knowledge.

47:05And that takes time, right? And that's why, again, people chasing the idea that the government's going to give me $100 million and I can go build a plant. That's only a solution to one tiny little sliver of the problem statement of technology development. But then now we're into kind of that scale out phase where we need more engineering resources and we can tap on a lot of great industries that we have built in this country. and kind of redeploy assets. And then in operations, you know, we do see, you know, labor restrictions, if you look across the market, and it all comes back to what these growth curves are.

47:36But I think there's a lot of opportunity to reskill labor from other industries into these, because at the end of the day, there is, you know, a huge operating and strong labor base in places like Tennessee, where, where we operate. What industries do you draw on? Yeah, we had the same question. But in terms of engineering, and then also like production, Where are the overlaps? Sure. So, you know, specialty chemicals is a big one, right? Because we are talking about how are we going to optimize large scale processing of specialized material with very exact parameters, right? So it's really incredible when you think about it.

48:11We start with, you know, let's say chunks of petroleum coke that could be on the order of sizes of marbles, right? And we have to, at the end of the day, know how to exactly control them down to the micron scale and their size and their shape and their structure and how they stick together and their perfect surface coating and all of these things, right? But these types of material science problems have been solved in other industries for other applications, right? So specialty chemicals, certainly automotive and automotive, when we talk about the manufacturing side, retooling and reskilling our workforce to these clean energy projects.

48:45And of course, you know, we do look at oil and gas and the refining industry as well from running large scale operations. So Phillips 66 is one of our, is our largest shareholder. And, you know, we look at opportunities to say, are there, you know, any displaced workers in the future of those industries that we need to reskill? Yeah, I was actually going to ask about that Phillips 66 relationship. Are there like either internal know-how from the legacy sort of oil and gas industry that can, that does get, or can sort of with some work be reapplied to some of these areas? Yeah, absolutely. And I mean, their expertise has kind of been built to a certain level.

49:22They make these very premium quality Coke products from in the UK and here in the US. And they support, they supply some of those into China for the battery market. Right. But then again, they want to work with specialized partners to help take those further. One last thing for me, I kind of mentioned it before, but I maybe got lost in one of my rambling questions. The interest rate environment, Does it affect you? Do you feel it? Does it change how things pencil out, et cetera? Yeah, it just changes the math, right? And it changes the calculus that investors are looking for in the private capital and the returns.

49:58And so again, it comes back to we need to be able to have our customers and our partners understand that we need offtakes that are going to generate the return profile that investors need, given still the risk, supply chain risk, government incentive risk, scale out risk, ops risk that these projects still have. And so that just means that we need to ensure that contracting structures meet the expectations of investors, not in a 0 % interest rate, but in our current interest rate environment. I have just one more question, and I'm thinking how to phrase it because maybe it's not that applicable to graphite per se, the forgotten commodity, as you put it earlier.

50:37But people talk a lot about technology being superseded, especially in battery production. So the idea of solid state batteries and things like that. Is there a world in which we no longer need graphite to the extent that we currently need it? And if so, is that something that factors into your business plans currently? I guess what I'm trying to ask is everyone who's in the battery making business in one way or another, are they all trying to prep for the next big technological development? Or is everyone trying to develop expertise in what is needed right now? Well, the kind of cheating answer is both, right?

51:17You know, they need to make the materials that we need today. And they also need to have a roadmap so that over 10, 20 years that the leaders in this industry is the Panasonic's, the LG's of the world, you know, are still the leaders in this industry, right? And they don't get passed by new technology. But to go back to the question of, you know, will we never need graphite? No, right, we will always need graphite because it is the only anode chemistry that can last thousands of cycles. And I think a key concept that we started focusing on, and it's relevant for vehicles, but it becomes even more relevant for grid energy storage, is the idea of not just dollars per kilowatt hour, right?

51:53How expensive is my battery to buy, but dollars per kilowatt hour per life or per cycle, right? Because why would I pay 10 % less for a battery that only lasts half as long if I need it to last longer, right? And so that differentiation in anode chemistry to be, to have the long cycle life is why there will always be applications that require graphite. And I think what we're going to see is new technologies are going to open new doors, right? So you're going to see things like solid state batteries go into, you know, military, go into aviation, go into fields that, because graphite is a little bulky relative to these other materials and these other chemistries, they are not as well suited for.

52:34So you're going to see new doors opened by new technology more than you're going to see it replace old technology. And I think, again, when you look at the first Sony cell commercialized in 91, it was a lithium cobalt oxide cathode and a carbon based graph anode, right? And today, most of the batteries are a nickel manganese cobalt. So just a little variant on that and graphite. So it's been 30 years and we haven't seen really a substantial change. We've just made all of those materials that much better. So they're cheaper, they last longer, they store a little more, and we've gotten it to now support these new industries.

53:09Dr. Chris Burns, CEO of Novonix, thank you so much for coming on Odd Locked. Great. No, thank you guys so much for having me. Yeah, that was great. That was a lot of fun. That was great. You made graphite interesting. But on a serious note, actually, I think I understand how batteries work now. So that's a plus. Yeah, that was great. End of minus. Boom. Sorry.

53:41Tracy, I thought that was very helpful. And, you know, we talk a lot about these topics and sort of the abstract and to hear someone in the space literally having to, you know, build this big facility of hundreds of millions of dollars in Tennessee and look for offtake agreements, look for sales and think about how they're going to get the core commodities in was extremely helpful for, I think, certainly mine. I suspect both of our understanding of the space. Absolutely. It's sort of solidified a lot of stuff that I guess we've spoken about kind of theoretically in conversations with people like Chigarh Shaw.

54:16And I don't mean to suggest he only speaks theoretically, like he gives some really great examples. But it's interesting to hear it from the other perspective, from a company that is, in fact, you know, on the receiving end of some of this public support and what it actually does for them and how it gets deployed. Deployed being, you know, very much the trademark of the DOA. Yeah, no, totally. Exactly. And, you know, there are many interesting things in there, too. You know, it's interesting as you noted that, you know, 10 years ago or seven or eight years ago, it probably was only people at Tesla and a few other places that sort of appreciated the sort of raw math that we're all talking about these days of like, OK, like if we want to have a domestic battery industry, how much scale are we going to need, etc.?

55:04Probably a lot of people haven't been thinking about it that long. So it's interesting that or just the idea that, like, look, at some point people are going to start getting anxious about how much we rely on China for some of this stuff. And so that wasn't codified into law until 2022. But obviously people were talking about it and betting that there would be a sort of, you know, near shoring or domestic reshoring of batteries for several years before that. Well, this is the other thing I was thinking about, which is that we're very used to talking about the U.S. cutting off strategically important technology for China.

55:38But of course, part of the China response to that happening has been to cut off exports of rare earths. And in the context of China, we're always talking about like the potential for that to backfire, you know, like, OK, China doesn't have access to advanced semiconductor technology anymore or it has less of it than it used to. But maybe they'll just develop their own capacity faster. And I kind of think this is almost the opposite side of it where, OK, China has cut off the U.S. more or less or diminished their exports from these vital materials that are needed for the clean energy transition for batteries and EVs.

56:16Does it end up speeding up the U.S. project to build out capacity? It feels like that's kind of the direction that it's heading. And especially if supply isn't actually the limiting factor, as Chris was pointing out, but if it's actually the processing capacity. Yeah, no, it raises a lot of interest. There was also a lot of interesting questions. Also, your question about, you know, hiring talent was very interesting because, again, you know, if you don't have the industry, you don't have the people that know how to build these places. And it's a good reminder that manufacturing, maybe the initial impulse to offshore manufacturing was sort of cheap manpower, right?

56:54How much does this person get paid per hour? And regulatory shortcuts. And regulatory shortcuts, environmental, probably a big one. But then another, you know, over time, that just turns into a larger stock of people who know how to build something well, which is really hard to overcome. I suddenly had a vision of what was that conversation with like monkeys jumping from tree to tree? Right. The complexity Ricardo Hausman. Yeah, exactly. Right. The adjacency, the adjacent industries. That's why your question so good. Like what are the adjacent industries that can now where the skills can now be transferred to something more higher value add, etc.

57:31Great conversation. Yeah, that was surprisingly fun. I'm graphite pilled now. All right. Shall we leave it there? Let's leave it there. This has been another episode of the Odd Lots podcast. I'm Tracy Alloway. You can follow me at Tracy Alloway. And I'm Joe Weisenthal. You can follow me at The Stalwart. Follow our producers, Carmen Rodriguez at Carmen Armin, Dashiell Bennett at Dashbot, and Kale Brooks at Kale Brooks. Thank you to our producer, Moses Andam. For more Odd Lots content, go to Bloomberg.com slash Odd Lots, where we have transcripts, a blog, and a newsletter. And you can talk about all these topics 24-7 in the Discord.

58:07In fact, it was one of our Discord members that first suggested a Novonix episode, discord.gg. And if you enjoy Odd Lots, if you find these dives into what actually goes into batteries useful, then please leave us a positive review on your favorite podcast platform. And don't forget, if you are a Bloomberg subscriber, you can listen to all of our episodes absolutely ad free. All you need to do is connect your Bloomberg account with Apple Podcasts. Thanks for listening.

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