For Michael Metzger, a typical day at the office starts by checking the mass spectrometer. The machine has been busy most nights testing batteries created by graduate students in his lab at Dalhousie University in Halifax.
To make a battery, a student may start with a chemical concoction the consistency of honey that is spread onto a metal foil and dried. The foil is then punched out into circular discs like coins that are then stacked with other materials to create the separate and alternating layers. It is the properties of these layers, when connected in a circuit and bathed in a solution called an electrolyte, which facilitates the movement of positive charges, that allow the homemade battery to produce an electric current.
All of this goes into the mass spectrometer, a hefty piece of scientific gear that can measure any gases the battery may be releasing as it discharges and recharges, over and over again.
Researcher Michael Metzger holds a prototype battery cell at the Dalhousie University battery testing lab.Darren Calabrese /The Globe and Mail
“If a battery cell produces gas, it’s a bad thing,” said Dr. Metzger, who specializes in this form of analysis. Once a test has run for two to three days, the data can be used to alter the ingredients going into the battery in order to eliminate potential hazards, while also tracking the effect on performance.
When things are going well, an experiment can be a thing of beauty, Dr. Metzger added. “With a little bit of experience you can tell which material it is just by looking at the voltage curve.”
Such experiments are small scale but they capture the essence of a science that is widely seen as crucial for averting the worst effects of climate change and is well on its way to becoming a keystone of the future global economy. The dilemma for researchers and for companies trying to develop battery technology in Canada is how to keep a foothold in a fast-moving and increasingly competitive global endeavour.
Today, battery research is all about the future, yet the science retains a whiff of medieval alchemy. There are hidden affinities and properties in substances that humans have yet to discern. Students in Dr. Metzger’s lab use mortars and pestles to mix and grind powders and bake them at 1,000-degree heat. Like others who work in this field, they are betting that the right ingredients put together in the right way will lead to a more sustainable world – and to the rewards that await innovators who can deliver on such a promise.
More than a decade go, when Dr. Metzger was a student in his native Germany, he could see the growing need for precisely this sort of science. With a background in electrochemistry, he steered himself toward a PhD in lithium-ion batteries and a chance to work on something that had real-world applications.
At the same time, half a world away, Chongyin Yang was a PhD student working on photovoltaics for solar energy at the Chinese Academy of Sciences. A similar thought was growing at the back of his mind.
“We need to electrify our society,” said Dr. Yang, who now runs a complementary research program to Dr. Metzger’s at Dalhousie. “But we don’t have a solution for that unless we can build more robust batteries.”
At that point, Dr. Yang said, he decided he should commit his career to the quest. When the University of Maryland offered him a position working on a lithium-ion battery project funded by the U.S. Department of Energy, he jumped at the opportunity. Then, in 2021, he and Dr. Metzer were both attracted to Halifax to work with Jeff Dahn, a pioneer in lithium-ion batteries, as part of a $3.1-million investment from Tesla Inc. with an additional $2.9-million from the federal government.
The three scientists, along with about 25 graduate students and four postdoctoral fellows, have now become the busiest centre for battery research in Canada.
“Here we talk about blood flow,” Dr. Dahn said. “If you get excited, your blood flows and we try to maximize blood flow at all times.”
His own interest was first piqued in the 1980s, when the discovery of lithium-ion batteries opened up a new realm of possibilities with many research questions to explore. The current era – during which that technology is steadily being optimized while other options are explored and developed – is different in character but similarly engaging.
One advantage of working with Tesla, Dr. Dahn said, is that the realities of producing electric vehicles at commercial scale have made it clear where the group’s efforts are needed most.
This can be summed up in five goals, starting with increased energy density (which translates into how far an EV can drive before recharging), decreased cost, improved or maintained safety, and longer total lifetime.
A final goal is about finding ways to manufacture batteries with more sustainable materials, and that’s a big one, Dr. Dahn said, “because the electrification of everything is going to demand raw materials at volumes that are just unheard of.”
Dr. Metzger works with the mass spectrometer, which measures what gases the battery may be releasing as it discharges and then is recharged, over and over again.Darren Calabrese /The Globe and Mail
Some of the work the group has undertaken is aimed at making incremental but commercially significant improvements to the current version of lithium-ion batteries that Tesla’s vehicles run on. By and large, this is a well-understood technology that first hit the market in 1991, when it was introduced by Sony to power portable electronics and then went on to made laptops and smartphones a reality. In 2019, the three scientists most closely associated with the invention of lithium-ion batteries were awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for their world-changing discoveries.
But while the underlying principles are similar, car batteries store far more power than it takes to run a phone. And they must maintain their performance for many years without replacement in order for EVs to be a sensible investment. This is why a key area of focus for Dr. Dahn and his colleagues is understanding how to reliably predict the lifetime of a battery prototype without waiting several years to find out how long it can keep running.
It’s that kind of first-order question that is a good reminder of how young the field is, particularly when compared with the internal combustion engine, which has had more than a century’s worth of refinements to get to the gasoline-powered cars that roll off the assembly lines today. From Dr. Dahn’s perspective, it’s a given that batteries will get better as the technology matures.
Jillian Buriak, chemistry professor at the University of Alberta and associate editor for the research journal ACS Nano, says there is room for more fundamental discoveries to be made in the chemistry and materials that underpin how batteries work.John Ulan/The Globe and Mail
Without question, the centre of action is now in China. Last year, an International Energy Agency report found that the country is dominant in nearly every stage of the EV battery supply chain. It is a commanding position that extends beyond production to research and development.
Jillian Buriak is a professor chemistry at the University of Alberta and associate editor for the research journal ACS Nano, published by the American Chemical Society. She said that roughly four out of every five papers submitted to the journal that relate to battery research are from scientists based in China. The volume is “absolutely massive,” she added, often driven by large-scale programs funded by the Chinese government that have specific goals and metrics attached based on domestic industry objectives.
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Even so, she said, there is room for more fundamental discoveries to be made in the chemistry and materials that underpin how batteries work. Increasingly, these involve looking beyond the lithium-ion configuration to other combinations of material that could offer higher energy density or less costly approaches.
Some of these ideas are also being worked on by Dr. Dahn’s team in Halifax, including batteries that use sodium in place of lithium. The approach has its downsides. Sodium stores less energy per volume than lithium and is also a heavier element. That may not matter if the battery is used for stationary storage of electricity generated by renewable sources. And because sodium is cheaper – it can be extracted from seawater – it may even work for city cars with limited range, leaving more costly lithium supplies available for long-distance vehicles.
An even further step away from current technologies is the possibility of using batteries that contain sulphur. Linda Nazar, an inorganic chemist at the University of Waterloo who specializes in materials for energy storage, is known for her work in this area, including a highly cited design for a lithium-sulphur battery published in 2009 that would have the potential to offer close to 10 times the energy density of lithium-ion batteries in use today.
The drive for solid state
Lithium-ion batteries that power today’s electric vehicles work by exchanging electric charges between an anode and a cathode.
A liquid electrolyte is used to facilitate the movement of positive ions between the two. A solid-state battery that can eliminate the liquid offers higher efficiency and safety.
BATTERY
Negatively charged
electrons travel from
anode to cathode in a
circuit that powers a car
motor.This is balanced by
the transfer of positive
ions within
the battery.
LITHIUM-ION BATTERY
SOLID-STATE BATTERY
Electrons
Cathode (+)
Cathode (+)
Anode (-)
Anode (-)
Solid
electrolyte:
Safer and lighter.
May also perform
better in colder
weather.
Liquid or
gel electrolyte:
More prone to fire
if battery fails.
Ions
the globe and mail, Sources: graphic news; The Next Web; Nikkei Asia;
Make Tech Easier
The drive for solid state
Lithium-ion batteries that power today’s electric vehicles work by exchanging electric charges between an anode and a cathode.
A liquid electrolyte is used to facilitate the movement of positive ions between the two. A solid-state battery that can eliminate the liquid offers higher efficiency and safety.
BATTERY
Negatively charged
electrons travel from
anode to cathode in a
circuit that powers a car
motor.This is balanced by
the transfer of positive
ions within
the battery.
LITHIUM-ION BATTERY
SOLID-STATE BATTERY
Electrons
Cathode (+)
Cathode (+)
Anode (-)
Anode (-)
Solid
electrolyte:
Safer and lighter.
May also perform
better in colder
weather.
Liquid or
gel electrolyte:
More prone to fire
if battery fails.
Ions
the globe and mail, Sources: graphic news; The Next Web; Nikkei Asia;
Make Tech Easier
The drive for solid state
Lithium-ion batteries that power today’s electric vehicles work by exchanging electric charges between an anode and a cathode. A liquid electrolyte is used to facilitate the movement of positive ions between the two. A solid-state battery that can eliminate the liquid offers higher efficiency and safety.
LITHIUM-ION BATTERY
SOLID-STATE BATTERY
BATTERY
Negatively charged
electrons travel from
anode to cathode in a
circuit that powers a car
motor.This is balanced by
the transfer of positive
ions within the battery.
Electrons
Cathode (+)
Cathode (+)
Anode (-)
Anode (-)
Solid
electrolyte:
Safer and lighter.
May also perform
better in colder
weather.
Liquid or
gel electrolyte:
More prone to fire
if battery fails.
Ions
the globe and mail, Sources: graphic news; The Next Web; Nikkei Asia; Make Tech Easier
A colleague at Waterloo, Micheal Pope, has now begun exploring the possibility of sodium-sulphur batteries which would have the advantage not only of eliminating the need for lithium but also cobalt, which is often used as part of the cathode material in a lithium-ion battery.
“I want dirt-cheap, abundant components” Dr. Pope said. The resulting batteries might not beat all others in terms of performance, but they would have a significantly lower impact on the environment, particularly when battery production begins a massive scale-up to meet global demand.
Meanwhile, Dr. Nazar has become interested in developing solid-state batteries, a technology that EV makers are eager to deploy, in part because it eliminates some of the hazards that are associated with the liquid electrolyte used in lithium-ion batteries and can reach higher energy densities.
But big challenges in creating such batteries remain, she said, because of the challenge of creating solid surfaces that make contact as seamlessly as a liquid electrolyte can.
“It’s easier to get a goopy liquid together with a solid than it is to push two solids together,” Dr. Nazar said, adding that intermediate versions of the technology that use a semi-solid electrolyte are likely to offer a nearer-term route to full solid-state batteries later this decade.
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One additional advantage of moving in this direction is that solid-state batteries are less affected by the kinds of low temperatures that are typical of northern winters, which can make electrolytes behave sluggishly.
“That’s really very important for countries like Canada,” said Venkataraman Thangadurai, a chemist at the University of Calgary who specializes in solid-state materials. When it comes to the cold, he said, “existing technologies are actually not very suitable.”
Dr. Thangadurai’s spinoff company, Superionics Inc., is now pursuing a cold-resistant “super-electrolyte” that aims to improve cold-weather performance for lithium-ion batteries while other solid state efforts continue to evolve. He also leads the Western Canada Battery Consortium, a research network launched in 2021 that pulls together battery science and related expertise across Alberta and other Western provinces.
Chemist Linda Nazar is known for her work exploring batteries that rely on sulfur and other unconventional ingredients to store energy.Handout
One additional piece of the country’s battery research portfolio is based in Ottawa at the National Research Council. The NRC has long maintained personnel and facilities that can aid in testing and validation of experimental battery performance. And it has an in-house research group, led by Yaser Abu-Lebdeh, that is also working on solid-state battery alternatives, among other research questions.
Dr. Lebdeh, who joined the NRC early in his career as a researcher in 2005, said the growing level of activity in the field is new, and his own group of 11 scientists is set to expand to 15 this year.
“It’a very exciting time for everybody,” Dr. Lebdeh said. “There’s a lot of things yet to be discovered.”
The mood captures what many in the field regard as an inflection point as the world shifts from EVs that are merely present to one in which they are prevalent. But plenty of questions remain about how practical and how quickly the transition may be, and how easily Canadian scientists can keep up.
Recently, Dr. Nazar and her colleagues at the Waterloo received approval for a grant from the Canada Foundation for Innovation to support their battery work. While the grant is a positive step for the scientists, it was also long delayed, while waiting for clarification on rules for working with international collaborators, particularly in China.
As a separate issue, industrial partnerships like the one Dr. Dahn’s group has arranged with Tesla mean that the intellectual property from the research will belong to a company.
Jim Hinton, a patent lawyer based in Waterloo, said Canada should be emulating countries that retain control of intellectual property to help foster a domestic industry.
“What concerns me is that Canadians have footed the bill for a lot of this research,” he said, “but no Canadian companies are going to be able to benefit.”
Dr. Dahn, who has also worked with the U.S. multinational conglomerate 3M Co., counters that companies are taking risks on research knowing that perhaps only one in 100 patents will provide value. The individuals trained as a result of the partnerships also provide returns, including some who go on to start their own businesses. The issue is likely to remain in play as more funding is committed to help grow Canada’s battery research ecosystem.
Back in his lab at Halifax, Dr. Yang said he and his students remain focused on pushing the technology forward.
“So, find some new system that works better than we thought – that’s the joy of my day every day,” he said.
Ivan Semeniuk