Key EV battery material can come from a surprising source: Methane
lithium-ion batteries that power everything from electric cars to smartphones. While China is the world’s top producer and exporter of the crystalline carbon, there’s been a push to grow a US supply chain.
Oakland-based startup Molten Industries is working to build it by relying on something that’s cheap and abundant in the US: natural gas. The company has developed a specialized technique to break methane into graphite and hydrogen, the latter of which can be used as a source of clean energy. The effort is funded in part by a $25 million Series A financing round led by Bill Gates’s Breakthrough Energy Ventures (BEV).
“This is at the intersection of two really important climate tech theme areas for us at Breakthrough: making batteries scaleable and more cost-effective to drive EV sales to grow, and on the other side, low-cost clean hydrogen,” said BEV Managing Director David Danielson.
Big automotive companies are hungry for low-cost, reliable domestic graphite due to international supply chain issues, he added. Graphite is typically mined or made synthetically from fossil fuels, and China controls about three-quarters of the world’s graphite anode supply chain, according to data from mineral intelligence firm Benchmark.
Higher freight costs like those experienced during the pandemic and China’s temporary export restrictions have raised concerns in the US and elsewhere about the risk of largely relying on one source of the valuable material. Boosting domestic production is a key priority of the Biden
