All cars are affected by reduced mercury, but electric cars are more sensitive than most because their heaters draw more power and batteries charge more slowly as the liquid electrolyte inside thickens. affected. Drivers in Chicago learned this the hard way last January after many Tesla cars failed to charge during deep freezes.
One startup, South 8 Technologies, says it can make charging more reliable in cold climates by filling batteries with a pressurized liquefied gas electrolyte instead of a liquid electrolyte, and in the process, it hopes to cut the cost of lithium-ion batteries by 30%.
For automakers, the savings may be too good to ignore if they work out. “The battery costs about a third of the entire car,” CEO Tom Stepien told TechCrunch.
South 8 claims its manufacturing technology can reduce the size of some of a battery factory's most expensive parts. Additionally, by injecting pressurized gas into the cell, South 8 can prevent the electrolyte from freezing down to -100 degrees Celsius, far below the temperature at which almost all other solvents become solids.
“Even at minus 40 degrees Celsius, it still retains 75 percent of its energy capacity,” Stepien says. “Everything else is bricks.”
The company recently secured new funding from Porsche Ventures in the form of a SAFE note, which will be used to fund the company's ongoing Series B round of funding. Stepien said he could not reveal the amount of Porsche's investment.
Stepien said Porsche appears to be primarily interested in South 8's low-temperature performance. “They always want to know where things are headed,” he says. LG, Anzu Partners, and Lockheed are leading investors. The startup was spun out of research at the University of California, San Diego. UC San Diego is basically his EV haven, and the last time he was frozen there was in 1963.
South 8's core technology, which the company calls LiGas, is based on the gas most commonly used as a refrigerant. (Early scientific research published by the founding team suggests it is difluoromethylene, also known as R-32.) However, getting the pressurized electrolyte into the cell presents some challenges. there is. First, this approach only works with cylindrical cells of the kind used by Teslas, Rivians, and Lucids. Currently, most car manufacturers use prismatic cells or pouch cells. Stepien said the company will consider applying this technology to prismatic batteries in the future, since prismatic batteries have a hard can, whereas pouch batteries do not.
Cylindrical cells use South 8's pressurized electrolyte and require stronger end caps. The top cap also needs to be welded and a new design is required to include a valve to inject the electrolyte.
All of this means different equipment, a hurdle to adoption given the billions of dollars battery makers are investing in gigafactories. Still, Stepien is hopeful that South 8's technology will ultimately result in savings too big to ignore.
As an example, Stepien said South 8's technology can speed up production time by shortening the formation cycle in which the battery is first charged and discharged. The process can take several days, which allows a layer to form on top of the anode and unlock the battery's potential. Stepien said South 8 can cut that time by 90%.
“Our standard protocol here has been about 100 hours for the cells we manufacture for our customers. When we tested them, we didn't see any difference in performance after 10 hours of use,” Stepien says. said. According to the IPCC, the gas inside cells is itself a powerful greenhouse gas, causing more than 600 times more global warming than the same amount of carbon dioxide. If billions of cells were manufactured using this electrolyte, battery recyclers would have to add new steps to the process to prevent gases from escaping into the atmosphere. Recyclers have similar protocols for processing air conditioner and refrigerator compressors, although on a much smaller scale. Still, the company's liquefied gas electrolyte could have a net climate benefit if South 8 can reduce the number of cells needed for cold-weather EVs while helping develop recycling solutions.