The Joint Center for Energy Storage Research (JCESR) was formed in 2012 as a fundamental research and development arm of Argonne’s portfolio.
JCESR (pronounced jay cesear) is a multi-institutional partnership focused on battery technologies for next generation transportation and grid applications.
Venkat Srinivasan is the director of the Argonne Collaborative Center for Energy Storage Science (ACCESS) and deputy director of JCESR.
BEST: Can you explain the relationship between Argonne, and JCESR? What other laboratories or organisations are involved?
Srinivasan: JCESR is one of the U.S. Department of Energy’s Energy Innovation Hubs. The idea behind the hubs is to create large, multidisciplinary teams consisting of smart people of very different skill sets who can come together, work as a team in a very mission driven way so that they can solve big problems.
JCESR is the Innovation Hub focused on energy storage. We brought together the ‘Dream Team’ from across the United States: universities, National Labs, some industry people that are coming with very different backgrounds. Some of them are electrochemists, some material scientists, mechanical engineers, people who are interested in theory, some more interested in experiments. Bring them all together and create an exciting atmosphere where we are all working towards a big mission, and the mission was ‘lets create the battery of the future’.
We do that by constantly looking to see how much progress we’ve made— what is working, what is not working— so that we can sort of tighten up our research, and be mission-oriented; not to do research for the sake of research, but do research towards an ultimate outcome.
That was kind of the premise of how JCESR began. Argonne leads JCESR but we have partners all across the country in the endeavour.
How are the organisations chosen, and is it an ongoing situation whereby you might have a new partner next year, for example?
The original team is different from the team we have today, not completely, but it’s been changing and evolving and morphing as the needs have changed.
An example of this is, around three years into the hub, we realised the importance of discovering new molecules for flow batteries. We’ve always been doing that. But we realised that, if you want to really ramp-up discovery, you need some new tools, and this was the time where there were new mathematical tools coming to the forefront. We realised that for us to take advantage of that, we had to add a partner. In that particular case it was the University of Utah. There were two professors there who are world renowned for new ways of discovering materials, they came on board to the team, and ever since have become an integral part of our effort.
Three years ago, we went through a renewal of JCESR; we went back and evaluated what is it that we need in terms of skill sets. What is it that we have already in the partner set, what is missing that requires adding new people into the team?
An example of an addition at the time was the Army research lab because it has some tremendous capability around electrolytes for lithium, magnesium and zinc batteries, both from an experimental perspective and a theoretical perspective. This area was very important for us, so we added the Army Research Lab as a partner.
So they are examples of how we continuously evaluate to see where the needs are, and then change the partner set as the needs change.
You talk of JCESR being a hub in the wheel with the other activities at Argonne being the spokes. Can you explain how that works?
JCESR is a very important part of the Argonne portfolio but the Argonne energy storage portfolio is bigger than JCESR.
JCESR represents the fundamental arm of the batteries effort, focussed on inventing the next-generation beyond lithium-ion batteries and developing foundational tools that can be used across the board. Argonne also has a large batteries effort focussed on areas such as high energy anodes and cathodes for next generation lithium-ion, solid state batteries, enabling fast charging, recycling of batteries etcetera. These efforts utilise the fundamental tools developed by JCESR to ensure rapid progress.
We have a lot of scale-up facilities at the lab where we can go from milligrams of anode, cathode and electrolyte materials and make them go all the way to kilograms and learn about how the process ought to be to scale it up and what kind of environment impacts could those processes have.
Ultimately the idea behind the scale-up facilities is to work with the industry, so that comes out of a different part of the DOE where we get the funding to do that.
And then we actually have a very large and sizable interaction with industry to move technology to market and to utilise our tools to help industry solve problems.
All these facilities gain tremendously from the knowledge and tools developed in JCESR. This is why I view JCESR as the hub with the other activities as spokes in the wheel.
What are the goals of Argonne moving forward, say the next 5-10 years? What are your KPIs for that period?
In terms of our overall energy storage programme at Argonne we have a vision, which is to really use energy storage as the linchpin to enable deep decarbonisation of transportation of the grid and of other sectors— like heavy industry, where you might be deciding to go with solar generation but you need storage as a means of buffering the intermittency of supply.
So deep decarbonisation of these different sectors, we think, requires energy storage, which is far beyond the kinds of storage we have today. Argonne wants to discover those future materials for those future battery chemistries so that we can enable deep decarbonisation.
But we don’t just want to stop at discovery, we want to scale them up, we want to integrate them into devices, and ultimately we want to work with industry and translate them so that they’re going from our labs to the market, so they have an impact in terms of the real world.
So, that’s the vision that we have: we really want to ensure that we are doing the fundamental and applied R&D and work closely with industry to move our technologies to the marketplace so that we can enable the decarbonisation of transportation, grid, and heavy industry.
But we don’t want to wait for a decade before we have an impact. We want to continuously push things to industry
And so the way we think about our R&D is as a portfolio. We want to make the things that we have today better. We also want to dream big and invent things that nobody’s even thought about— so that 10 years from today we provide storage options for aviation, shipping and rail, for example.
And so we want to have that sort of a portfolio approach.
Are you looking at new technologies that navigate the issue of materials supply chain, because obviously China, and Asia in general, have probably got the monopoly on the material supply chain at the moment?
Absolutely. I’ll take an example of how we are doing this. So lithium batteries are here to stay, it’s fantastic; it’s doing a great job. But much of the supply chain for lithium-ion batteries is not in the US.
Argonne is taking a holistic approach to solve the problem. We are developing new ways to convert raw minerals to useful battery materials. We want to do this using environmentally friendly means, using less energy and at lower cost.
Second, very importantly, we want to enable recycling, and make it cost effective, so that we can start to diversify the supply of materials by not just pulling them from the ground but also recycling the batteries that we have.
Third, which is a very big part of our portfolio, we want to look for substitutes in the lithium battery world to minimise and ultimately eliminate cobalt and nickel; we have a portfolio to see if we can move away from lithium.
That is why in our programmes, like JCESR, we think about variety and diverse sets of materials, which ultimately could be made into a battery— so that we can provide an opportunity for battery chemistries that don’t rely on any one metal or any one mineral. So we are providing the opportunity for the marketplace to go in different directions. We believe that the role of a national lab is to provide an opportunity for a diversity of solutions to emerge.
What industry commercialises is up to them, but we think we want to provide them with the options.
So we work on all of it: how do we pull more minerals from the ground, how do we recycle, and how do we ultimately substitute the elements that we have with the ones that are more sustainable, so that we don’t have this problem in the first place.
The way I think about it is, we absolutely want to make the lithium battery more sustainable. We have to do that, because that’s the one that has carried us and will continue to have an impact for decades to come. But we also, simultaneously, want to provide opportunities for diversification in the marketplace so that we don’t get too dependant on any one technology.
- Read the second part of the interview below
- Read the story Argonne, from how it all began to how it continues to push the boundaries of battery development today HERE
Creating the future: understanding the battery industry’s needs
