Innovation Heroes: How to solve sustainability challenges with new batteries

The need for more sustainability across all industries is greater than ever. Global leaders are making plans to ban the sale of gas-powered cars to reduce our carbon footprint and make room for electric vehicles. But battery-powered technology also comes at an environmental cost – a cost Nanoramic Laboratories is actively working to reduce.

On the latest episode of SHI’s Innovation Heroes podcast, host Ed McNamara sits down with co-founder and Chief of Product at Nanoramic Laboratories, John Cooley. The pair discuss the cutting-edge technology Cooley and his team developed to help solve some of the most pressing sustainability challenges related to energy storage and thermal management in electric vehicles and other use cases.

“The industry has identified what I consider to be a proof of concept of an electric vehicle and a battery technology that sort of meets the requirements of range, performance, rechargeability and cost,” says Cooley. “But very quickly, the industry is turning toward other issues that are very important, like ethics, safety, and the greenhouse gas emissions footprint in the manufacturing process. These are all very important considerations in the transition to electric vehicles. As the industry focuses on those things at a certain volume of manufacturing, we really can’t ignore some of these issues in the battery manufacturing process.”

Founded in 2009, Nanoramic Laboratories developed Neocarbonix electrode technology that substitutes the costly and wasteful parts of lithium-ion batteries for nano tech carbon – a more efficient material that reduces manufacturing costs and is easier to produce. And it’s proving to be very powerful.

“There are three buckets to consider with this type of technology,” says Cooley. “Cost, performance, and sustainability. One of the things that we learned from a performance standpoint with Neocarbonix technology is that you can make very thick, active layers, especially on the cathode of the battery. And this matters because it means that you can pack more energy capacity into your battery, and the benefit of that is being able to improve power performance.”

Cooley discusses the challenges of building a lithium-ion battery tech startup from the ground up in an ever-evolving industry, and how critical feedback is in the research and development process. To learn more about the future of battery-powered vehicles and other fascinating Neocarbonix applications, listen to the full conversation.