Catching Up To Do On Critical Energy Minerals https://www.forbes.com/sites/davidblackmon/2022/08/18/the-us-has-a-lot-of-catching-up-to-do-on-critical-energy-minerals/?sh=24a867202e48
The U.S. Has A Lot Of Catching Up To Do On Critical Energy Minerals
Today, it’s time to write about another critical mineral resource that has received scant attention thus far, despite the promise it holds for a seeming step-change ahead in battery technology: Vanadium. In a truly remarkable story at NPR earlier this month, writers Laura Sullivan and Courtney Flatt detail the saga of a design developed in a U.S. government lab for a vanadium redox flow battery that appears to hold great promise in dramatically improving battery storage efficiency and longevity.
According to the NPR story, “The batteries were about the size of a refrigerator, held enough energy to power a house, and could be used for decades. The engineers pictured people plunking them down next to their air conditioners, attaching solar panels to them, and everyone living happily ever after off the grid.”
The story quotes one of those engineers, Chris Howard, as saying "It was beyond promise. We were seeing it functioning as designed, as expected." It seemed as if the proverbial great leap forward in battery technology that has always been just a few years in the future for about the last 30 years was finally within reach, and right here in the United States. But, as a result of a saga of decisions made across the last three U.S. presidential administrations, the vanadium redox flow battery is now being made not in America, but in China.
Howard was an employee of a U.S. company called UniEnergy Technologies, a company formed by the lead scientist on the government project named Gary Yang, who applied for and received a license to manufacture the batteries in the U.S. from the Obama Administration in 2012.