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Welcome back to Current Climate. For years, the U.S. has lacked the domestic infrastructure to make all the key parts of advanced batteries used in EVs, consumer electronics and energy storage, allowing China to reign as the planet’s dominant supplier. But that’s beginning to change.

Last week, Silicon Valley startup Anthro Energy broke ground on a factory in Kentucky that, when it begins operating in 2027, will be the first U.S. owned and operated maker of electrolytes, an essential chemical additive for lithium-ion and other battery chemistries to function. Unlike conventional battery electrolytes, which can be highly flammable, Anthro believes its new liquid polymer electrolyte will bring substantial benefits to safety, power density and usable life for battery cells.

“Today's batteries are based on liquids that are volatile, flammable, toxic and corrosive. And inside every battery, there's this kind of continued degradation of the electrolyte that ultimately leads to performance trade-offs,” said CEO David Mackanic. “More energetic materials kind of degrade the electrolyte quicker, and then can cause safety issues.”

That’s led to a push for solid-state electrolytes, which “are great in terms of enabling higher energy density, safer, longer-lasting batteries, but they have a lot of manufacturing challenges,” he said. Anthro’s tech combines elements of both types of electrolyte, but is designed to be a drop-in solution for existing battery cell lines.

“We call it a phase-change electrolyte that combines the best of both worlds. This is a material that gets injected into the battery like a liquid. … And then once it's inside the battery, we solidify it inside that cell, converting it into this elastomeric material. What that does is it protects all of the interfaces in the batteries so you can remove a lot of this uncontrolled, unwanted degradation. This is important for safety, for cycle life, but it's particularly important for the next generation of battery materials that have more energy.”

The Alameda, California-based company, spun out of research begun at Stanford University, currently is able to produce about 200 kilograms a day of its electrolyte on a small-scale production line at its headquarters, but the new factory will be a game-changer for Anthro, said CTO Joe Papp.

“We just broke ground on our facility in Louisville, Kentucky, and at full production will be able to produce up to 12,000 metric tons of electrolytes – enough for about 25 gigawatt hours of battery at full production tilt,” Papp said. That would be........

© Forbes