Breakthrough battery hinged on funding from program in Trump’s crosshairs

Abetted by the imperiled Advanced Research Projects Agency–Energy (ARPA–E), the California startup company EnZinc is now well on the way to commercializing an innovative battery technology that its backers claim will match the performance of lithium-ion cells for as little as half the cost, with none of the safety concerns inherent to lithium-ion.

Michael Burz, president of EnZinc, says the company is two years away from manufacturing a battery for electric bicycles, the first of what he expects will be many applications. Others include electric vehicles and electricity storage for grids and microgrids. The technology breakthrough, discovered and developed at the US Naval Research Laboratory in Washington, DC, with ARPA–E financing, is an anode material composed of a three-dimensional zinc sponge. The new material, described in the 27 April issue of Science, makes possible repeated discharge–recharge cycles of nickel–zinc batteries, an electrochemical technology that has mostly been limited to single-use and disposable batteries.

“In the classic sense of the ‘valley of [technology funding] death,’ ARPA–E was there for us when the venture capital community was not,” Burz says. “VC’s are not into basic research, and no battery company was willing to take the risk on a technology outside their product line or comfort zone.”

In his budget outline for fiscal year 2018, released in March, President Trump proposed to terminate funding for ARPA–E, “because the private sector is better positioned to finance disruptive energy research and development and to commercialize innovative technologies.”

Burz is alarmed that the Trump administration would zero out ARPA–E. “I completely disagree that what it does can or should be picked up by the commercial sector,” he says. “ARPA–E is a critical bridge to keeping American technology innovation leadership within the energy sector. Period.”

Congress, however, appropriated $306 million for ARPA–E for FY 2017, compared with $291 million last year. Apart from administrative costs, all of ARPA–E’s budget is distributed in grants.

Department of Energy officials announced on 18 May that they had released funding for three ARPA–E grants totaling $11.1 million, after they had concluded that the awards “applied good governance principles consistent with the new administration’s policy directives.” The disbursements had been held up for several weeks while energy secretary Rick Perry and his staff conducted a department-wide review of programs, policies, and grants. Additional ARPA–E awards are expected to be approved in the coming weeks, the DOE release said.

The announcement came after Representative Eddie Bernice Johnson (D-TX), the ranking minority member of the House Committee on Science, Space, and Technology, wrote to Perry in late April complaining that up to $40 million in appropriated ARPA–E funding was being withheld from program awardees.

In a 19 May statement, Johnson welcomed DOE’s release of the $11.1 million as “a step in the right direction,” but added, “I still have serious concerns given that at least 20 additional competitively selected awardees are still awaiting notice that contract negotiations with ARPA–E can resume.” She said she would continue to raise questions until the appropriations are fully distributed.

On 8 May, Johnson asked US comptroller general Gene Dodaro to investigate whether DOE was violating the law by not dispensing the monies as directed by appropriations measures. She noted that Dodaro has the authority to compel the executive branch to spend the funds.

“Congress has provided these monies to the Department of Energy for the expressed purpose of fulfilling ARPA–E’s mission as prescribed by law,” Johnson wrote. “Diversion or impoundment of this money would be contrary to law.”

The Trump administration’s efforts to eliminate ARPA–E without congressional authorization “would be both ill-advised and potentially illegal,” she added.

Johnson quoted an 8 March tweet by Perry saying “innovators like the ones supported by our ARPA–E program are key to advancing America’s energy economy.”

More cycles are needed

Recharging conventional nickel–zinc cells, which have powdered zinc anodes, causes stalactite-like dendrites to form on the anodes after as few as 20–30 cycles; they cause shorts and battery failure. Joseph Parker, the NRL researcher who is lead author of the Science paper on the battery advance, says the sponge material’s large surface area permits a more even distribution of electric currents to the anode and thus mitigates dendrite formation. The NRL–EnZinc team reported achieving more than 100 deep-discharge cycles in nickel–zinc cells using the 3D sponge. Burz says his company is working to achieve 500 cycles and is confident it can begin manufacturing batteries commercially in 2019.

According to Burz, a nickel–zinc battery for an electric vehicle using the 3D sponge will cost 30–50% less than a comparable lithium-ion battery pack. That comparison factors in the more extensive ancillary systems that lithium-ion technology requires, such as those to prevent cell overheating. The aqueous electrolyte of the zinc cells is inherently safer than the highly reactive and flammable lithium-ion electrolyte. Zinc is plentiful and cheap and is mined domestically, he adds; most lithium comes from outside the US.

EnZinc tried exhaustively to obtain venture funding to develop the technology, Burz says, before securing a one-year, $452 000 grant from ARPA–E’s robust affordable next generation energy storage systems (RANGE) program. The company invested $113 000. NRL performed the development work as a subcontractor, receiving $465 000 from EnZinc.

Moving away from lithium

Venkat Srinivasan, director of Argonne National Laboratory’s Collaborative Center for Energy Storage Science, says the research “provides a first step toward saying maybe there’s a different way for us to think about zinc.” But Srinivasan, who was not involved in the work, cautions that many more charge–discharge cycles are needed to prove the technology’s worth. “If you’re going to compete with lithium–ion for a Nissan Leaf, we are talking maybe 1000 cycles. Somewhere between 100 and 1000, all sorts of bad things can happen. We have beautiful pictures from the 1970s and 1980s where after a few hundred cycles you look at the electrode and all the zinc will be sitting on the edges of the electrode, with nothing in the middle.”

Debra Rolison, principal investigator of the NRL team, says the zinc sponge technology offers a safe alternative to lithium-ion for both military personnel and shipboard applications. In April the US Navy banned e-cigarettes from ships after several incidents in which the devices, which are powered by lithium-ion batteries, burst into flames. NRL is also developing silver–zinc batteries using the 3D sponge for submarine applications. Silver–zinc technology has been hindered by the same recharge limitations.

EnZinc’s exclusive license from NRL covers the nickel–zinc battery for electric-vehicle and electricity-storage applications. Included in the vehicle sector are so-called microhybrids, whose engines automatically shut off and restart whenever the vehicle stops. More commonly found in Europe, microhybrids require only around a 5% battery discharge, compared with the 40–60% discharge typical of fully electric vehicles. NRL’s stop–start prototype batteries have attained 50 000 cycles. Today’s microhybrids use a class of lead–acid batteries, which are expensive and have limited lifetimes, says Burz. Up to half of all new vehicles could be microhybrids by 2020, according to some projections.

Burz says the company has lined up investors to finance continued development once the patent for the technology has been issued. The patent application was submitted in May 2014.