Secure, Domestic Production of Battery-Grade Graphite from Direct CO2 Capture and Electrochemical Conversion for Critical Defense Applications

To meet the challenging goals of 21st century air and space superiority and U.S. aerospace national security,unprecedented advancements must be made in the performance, cost, and availability of lithium-ion batteries (LIBs) for theUSAF and USSF defense needs. As stated by Miranda A.A. Ballentine, the Assistant Secretary of the Air Force for Installations,Environment, and Energy, “Energy availability and resiliency impacts all Air Force missions, from installationinfrastructure to aviation operations, at both enduring and non-enduring locations.” Furthermore, in 2021 underExecutive Order 14017, the White House identified high-energy battery materials as a critical supply chain constituent insupporting commercial and defense needs related to energy storage. The last two years have seen enormous investmentin domestic manufacturing of electric vehicles (EVs) and the LIBs that support these vehicles, with an estimated $100Binfrastructure investment in LIB manufacturing since 2017. This impressive spur of investment in the transportation sector,which is still the major driver for innovation in the LIB industry, can be effectively leveraged to support the USAF and USSFenergy storage needs ranging from grid-independent bases, aircraft instrument power supply, vehicle guidance systems,satellites, and many more.However, the US currently relies almost entirely on foreign countries to supply the raw materials that arerequired for production of LIBs, which poses many challenges that could disrupt the production of these cells andthe ability of the USAF and USSF to execute national security missions. Specifically, geopolitical concerns cloud many ofthe main materials that make up the LIB chemistries we rely on today, such as our reliance on China for key battery rawmaterials (China controls over 90% of processed battery-ready graphite today). Approaches to mitigating this risk includedevelopment of novel chemistries using domestically abundant elements (such as Fe-rich and sulfur cathode chemistries, etc.)have the potential to be significantly impactful in the long-term, but near-term solutions to boost the domestic production ofcritical materials is essential due to the longer-term technological horizon of many of these new chemistries. Even so, withmany alternative cathode materials being commercialized into the marketplace today (LFP, nickel-rich NMC, etc.), they all relyon traditional graphite-based anodes. Often these graphite anodes are blended with Si to enhance capacity, but much of theanode composition will remain graphite (40-85 wt%) for the foreseeable future. Therefore, to meet the exploding demandfor domestically produced LIBs supplied with domestically derived raw materials, we must develop a domesticbattery-grade graphite supply chain, which will also immediately enable mission critical energy storagerequirements for the USAF and USSF.