By the time the Swedish battery giant Northvolt declared bankruptcy last month, a well-funded U.S. startup, Lyten, had already swooped in to snatch up the company’s previously shuttered Bay Area factory. With China flooding the market with its cheap lithium-ion tech, Lyten is betting that creating a fully domestic battery supply chain will require alternate chemistries — like, say, lithium-sulfur, Lyten’s recipe of choice.
Lithium-sulfur has long been a promising contender, as in theory, these batteries can have a much higher energy density — the amount of energy that can be stored in a given space — than traditional lithium-ion. They also rely primarily on cheap, abundant, and easy to access materials. “We don’t use nickel, we don’t use manganese, we don’t use cobalt, we don’t use graphite,” Keith Norman, Lyten’s chief sustainability officer, told me — all markets where China plays a leading role. Scaling up standard lithium-ion battery production to meet forecasted global demand would require opening nearly 400 new mines by 2035, according to Benchmark Mineral Intelligence. “We believe if you could snap your fingers and change that to lithium-sulfur, that mining requirement will be reduced somewhere between 80% and 90%,” Norman said.
Lyten’s customers, Norman said, want these batteries as soon as possible, and acquiring Northvolt’s old 200-megawatt plant will allow the company to begin commercial production there next year. Lyten also recently announced plans for a Reno-based gigafactory, which is scheduled to come online in 2027. Zeta Energy, a Houston-based lithium-sulfur startup, also aims to commercialize in 2025, and is set to announce the opening of its 100-megawatt plant in the coming weeks.
The Battery Startups Trying to Win Where Northvolt Lost – Heatmap News