Ambri: The Antimony Battery
While Ambri itself is not directly related to MOLT in any way, their success will have massive consequences for the antimony market.
As I mentioned in my previous post, Donald R. Sadoway is curiously listed as being a part of MOLT’s Strategic Advisory Board with this short introduction:
Donald R. Sadoway, Founder of AMBRI Inc. and inventor of the liquid metal battery for large-scale stationary storage. He is the founder of five companies, all electrochemistry-intensive and is Professor Emeritus in the Department of Materials Science and Engineering, Massachusetts Institute of Technology ("MIT"). His TED talk has been viewed over 2.4 million times and in 2012 he was named by Time Magazine as one of the 100 Most Influential People in the World.
Right off the bat, we get a concise summary of Ambri and their ultimate goal: developing batteries for large-scale stationary storage. Instead of trying to go through the details myself to explain what the battery actually is, I defer it to people who know what they are talking about. First, the TED talk Sadoway held himself is a must watch:
Second, Ambri’s webpage has a great overview of their technology. For us dummies, there is also this excellent article written by Ecclestone (CEO at MOLT) at Hallgarten & co that explains the underlying battery tech in layman terms. Additionally, MOLT themselves have a primer on the molten salt batteries on their website. Finally, for those who really wish to dig deep into the actual science, then nothing will top the research paper itself.
But for people like myself, that do not have an academic or professional background in chemistry or electric metallurgy, we can’t really opinionate whether their tech is actually feasible at all. Indeed, I could write plenty of paragraphs on why this tech is amazing and will save the world, but it would all be pure speculation from someone who lacks the understanding to determine in any real shape or form whether this will actually work. All I am able to do is either trust Sadoway and the impressive list of backers he got or hire consultants with said expertise and ask them, which I or retail investors in general obviously won’t have the funds to do. Instead, I’ll take a different approach. So please enjoy a walkthrough of Ambri’s history, how they got to where they are and what challenges they’ve faced along the way.
Curiously they’ve decided to not save any piece of news or articles on their website prior to 2017, making my work far more difficult than it had to be.
I wonder why…
A treacherous road
The road to success and the road to failure are almost exactly the same
Observant readers might have noted that Sadoway’s “famous” Ted Talk about Ambri was in 2012, a whole decade ago. In fact, the founding of his company in 2010 was bankrolled with seed funding from Bill Gates (and others), who has been part of this journey from the very beginning. Looking back through Ambri’s history, they’ve been very successful at raising money, from $35M in 2014 to $144M in 2021. On their webpage they exclaim proudly that they’ve managed to raise over $200 M throughout the years. Not bad at all! But the natural question is what do they have to show for it and why haven’t they managed to reach commercial success yet?
As written in 2014 during their financing round, they looked to deploy prototypes already back then and had made plans on developing their initial plant for commercial-scale success:
This latest funding round will enable Ambri to deliver commercial systems to customers, build its initial commercial-scale manufacturing plant, and continue technology development. Ambri has recently been awarded projects to deploy prototype systems in Massachusetts, Hawaii, New York and Alaska, alongside project partners that include First Wind, Joint Base Cape Cod, Con Edison, Energy Excelerator (Hawaii), Alaska Center for Energy and Power, and Raytheon. Ambri announced the opening of its prototype cell manufacturing facility in Marlborough, MA in the fall of 2013.
But like many of these battery technologies that we hear constantly pop up in the news, they often fade quickly into obscurity as real world problems appear. Ambri was sadly no exception, as just one year later they were forced to cut a large amount of staff. Must have been humiliating and humbling, especially when they just so recently raised tens of millions.
Some call it the “MIT curse”, as bright ideas from even brighter people often end up in the dumps due to various real world complications. It is after all rather difficult to set up new supply chains, create customized manufacturing tools at scale for brand new technology at scale, things that academics probably have little to no experience in. The main concern in this case was the seal of the initial design:
The CEO continued, "Our reduction in staff and slowed commercialization path will provide us more time to solve the engineering challenges ahead of us before we re-engage in committing to commercial deployment schedules. Specifically, we are acutely focused on developing a robust high-temperature seal for our liquid metal battery. Our primary design of this component demonstrated promising results last fall and this spring, but did not perform sufficiently well under rigorous verification testing protocols which we ran this summer. We are now pursuing other seal designs that show initial promise, but it will take more time to confirm their viability."
We spoke with the CEO today. He emphasized that "the basic science that's been demonstrated continues to look phenomenal, with an extremely low fade rate." According to the company, "Cells have cycled thousands of times in in-house tests with negligible fade on full depth of discharge cycling, extrapolating that after 10,000 charge/discharge cycles the batteries will retain 98 percent capacity availability.
For many companies this would have been the end, a big problem too costly to solve and reluctance from backers to inject additional liquidity to continue costly R&D. That had after all been the fate for Aquion, which was another hyped up startup focusing on providing grid scale batteries. The similarities didn’t end there, as it was also a tech invented by an acclaimed professor with an impressive background and partly backed by Bill Gates. This highlights the point I made earlier, that it is incredibly difficult to determine beforehand whether or not a technology is actually feasible, even if you’re a professional in the sector. So don’t even bother trying to do it yourself, you will not succeed or worse, get a false confidence in tech you don’t actually understand. This is how fortunes are ruined.
Failure had sadly become the norm by 2017 as can be read here.
On March 8, after failing to raise additional funding, Aquion filed for bankruptcy protection, cut 80 percent of its staff, and halted manufacturing. It was the latest of several stumbles for venture-backed storage startups. EnerVault, which was developing what are known as flow batteries, put itself up for sale after failing to find additional investors in 2015. Later that year, liquid-metal battery startup Ambri laid off a quarter of its staff. Around that same time, LightSail Energy, which was struggling to develop technology to store energy as compressed air in carbon-fiber tanks, pivoted to selling its containers to natural-gas suppliers. Taken together, these struggles have deflated hopes for the emergence of affordable and practical grid storage anytime soon.
But unlike Aquion and many other competitors, Sadoway kept on fighting and was determined to find a solution. I found a few articles detailing their research process here, here and here in interviews and such. Sadoway gave a few different answers on what they were busy working on, given Ambri was still in the process to figure out their issues, which showcases that he & his team wasn’t sitting at home crying over spilled milk. The initial generous fundraising and the wise choice of cutting employees early on to minimize costs gave them plenty of time to find ways to solve their issue. All from changing the chemistry of the components to different type seals was tested, nothing other than the molten design was too holy to remain!
The breakthrough
Road to success is covered by thorns and it is not measured by how far climbed, but how hard you bounced when you hit the ground.
In 2018 Sadoway published a new research paper for Nature and had a brand new idea how to solve their problems. A subsequent news article from MIT explains their findings well:
“That really opened our eyes to a completely different technology,” he says. The membrane had performed its role — selectively allowing certain molecules to pass through while blocking others — in an entirely different way, using its electrical properties rather than the typical mechanical sorting based on the sizes of pores in the material.
In the end, after experimenting with various compounds, the team found that an ordinary steel mesh coated with a solution of titanium nitride could perform all the functions of the previously used ceramic membranes, but without the brittleness and fragility. The results could make possible a whole family of inexpensive and durable materials practical for large-scale rechargeable batteries.
A short video showcasing what would likely become their first commercial prototype can be seen here:
Everything looked perfect for Ambri as they finally managed to reach the beginning of commercial success with NEC ES ordering at minimum 200 MWh worth of battery in 2019. But sadly this cooperation was short-lived as NEC ES completely exited the sector just one year later due to profitability concerns, leaving Ambri hanging. The battery sector, from battery development to storage integration is a ruthless sector with razor thin margins, something to consider when investing here.
But at least this time blame wasn’t on Ambri’s technology and in 2020 they managed to reach an agreement with TerraScale for their Energos Reno project for 250 MWh worth of battery.
Currently the Energos finished their pilot phase and appear to have circa 10 MW worth of solar installed. But don’t expect anything massive happening here any time soon, as they aim to have everything built in 10 years.
Current affairs
From 2020 things really begun accelerating. They managed to raise $144 million which allowed them to finish up their new production facility, the “Innovation Hub” and even get UL-1973 safety status for their batteries, cementing the fact that their new seal solution was successful. Their current projects are the following:
Jun 2021: Ambri Selected by Earth & Wire for 300-MW, 1,200-MWh Long-Duration Energy Storage Project in South Africa
As one can note, they are predominantly scoring small contracts to begin with the potential to increase at a later date. It seems they’ve wisened up and aim to start of at a small scale with a multitude of different customers, instead of overpromising and selling hundreds of MWh worth of battery which they do not have the capability to produce nor full certainty will work without another hiccup.
Conclusion
Failure is the best teacher
So what was the point of going through their history? Well, as I tried to emphasize multiple times throughout this post is that the vast majority of us (if any) can’t determine whether a brand new tech is feasible or not, thus doing a deep dive into nitty gritty details of the battery itself is meaningless. Instead we can read up on the path they’ve been on and the challenges they’ve faced. There is far more to learn from how they dealt with them & lessons learned than try and fool yourself into becoming a self-taught expert in battery chemistry.
So far their achievements are:
Managed to get through the (Silicon) Valley of Death through a vigorous process of trial and error, where many other failed and gave up.
Found a solution to the seal that has been published in Nature and peer reviewed. They’ve gotten 3rd party to verify its safety.
Raise $144 M and scaled up production capabilities at their “Innovation Hub”, thus showcasing their confidence in the new design.
Scored plenty of contracts with high profile customers to further boost adoption rate, but are wisely starting of with small scale systems to later scale up if everything goes as planned.
So in my humble opinion, these 10 years has been transformational for Ambri. A lot of blood, sweat and tears have been put into reaching their latest design. The future looks very bright and I’m personally looking forward to see how they manage to grow from here. But as we all should know by now, anything can happen and more problems could appear as they scale up. The road to success remains thorny and treacherous.
With this written, I’ve set up the background necessary to understand antimony macro and how Ambri’s success in the coming years can turn a slight deficit into a massive one, where MOLT would love to fill the gap. A little teaser for those of you that actually read through this entire thing: 1 GWh worth of Ambri batteries consumes 1700t worth of Antimony, which is currently circa 1% of global production. Ambri are no fools and it’s no surprise that they’ve already written a supply agreement with Perpetua Resources and that Sadoway is on the advisory board of MOLT.
I really like what I have read about the long term sustainability of AMBRIs batteries. I do not recall where I heard/read it but I believe the batteries can be recycled and almost 99% of the Antimony in the batteries can be recovered and reused. I am unsure of how the other materials in the batteries are recycled though.
What broker do you use to buy MOLT?