Global Battery Shifts: Tech, Cost, and the Search for Better Chemistry

What we see as analysts, is that how we already posited or our kind of thesis on the industry is that to get a significant technology change, you need to have a performance benefit and an acceptable cost, whether that’s equal to the future cost of an optimised lithium-ion battery or LFP battery, for example. That’s the challenge is how do you get there and making sure you’ve got an achievable roadmap to get there.

Adam Sroka (00:44)
Hello and welcome back to the Hypercube Podcast, joined today by Edward Rackley, Head of Energy Storage for CRU.

Edward Rackley (CRU) (00:52)
Yeah, great to be here. Thanks, Adam. Thanks for the invite.

Adam Sroka (00:55)
Amazing to have you. So I guess, yeah, for those in the audience that don’t really know who you are, who CRU are, what you do, could you explain yourself, please?

Edward Rackley (CRU) (01:05)
Yeah, of course. So I’m Dr. Ed Rackley. I’m Head of Energy Storage at CRU. So CRU are a market intelligence firm based in London. We have eight offices around the world. We promote predominantly focus on metals and commodities kind of related to different major industries. The company originally made its kind of name in steel, but we also cover a lot of commodities based on batteries. And my work at the company is now looking at

battery energy storage systems. Yeah, so that’s kind of what the company do and a kind of very short background on my side.

Adam Sroka (01:41)
Nice simple quiet market, battery systems then I guess

Edward Rackley (CRU) (01:44)
Yeah,

Always, always, yeah. Yeah, there’s never a tariff or never any kind of issues on that side coming up on the horizon. So yeah, yeah, yeah, lovely and quiet, yeah.

Adam Sroka (01:50)
for what you need on market.

Well, okay, so let’s start the talk. What brought you into energy storage? Like what excites you about it? Why this particular thread?

Edward Rackley (CRU) (02:04)
Yeah, really good question. My background is actually I’m a material scientist by training, like kind of slash chemical engineer. So I’ve always been really fascinated by energy storage systems. So I’m guessing the last 10 years or so I’ve done a lot in the background prior to my role at CRU focusing either fuel cells or batteries. So it’s always been very much a type of energy storage since before uni actually.

But it’s always been something that’s really fascinated me. I’ve always loved the chemistry side of things as well. I guess my role now is a bit different in terms of how that’s changed because I’ve done a lot more of the nitty gritty, like kind of the deep, intense research side of things and then kind of doing the market analysis side is kind of seeing the bird’s eye view and the holistic view of the industry now.

Adam Sroka (02:49)
Yeah, I guess what kind of customers would come to CRU for more expertise? What am I, a developer in the space? Am I a manufacturer looking for a new technology? Who’s coming to CRU for these kinds of insights?

Edward Rackley (CRU) (03:04)
So predominantly my work focuses a lot with either investors for projects or looking at for developers of projects as you mentioned. We’ve also done a set of different types of consulting projects, that has included manufacturers and a little bit of the previous kind of stakeholders that I’d already mentioned. But the, yeah, it’s quite a broad, broad church at points for sure.

Adam Sroka (03:28)
If I’m an investor, you’re giving me certainty that my investment is safe and they’re not doing anything like bonkers and this is an investable. This is going to get the returns that the developer is going to promise me, right?

Edward Rackley (CRU) (03:44)
Yeah,

exactly. So I think one of the major things with storage has been kind of thinking about like project lifetimes. And if you’re thinking about that internal rate of return or investment return almost, that’s kind of a major thing that investors are always looking at is our technology is improving. Are we backing the right horse almost is probably best way to describe it.

Adam Sroka (04:05)
And what’s your gut-feel controversial hot take on the market? Do people fudge numbers or are most developers pretty honest?

Edward Rackley (CRU) (04:13)
I think at the moment we’ve seen quite a lot of developers being pretty, I guess, little bit bearish in what their systems can do. Actually, I think just to guarantee the return and guarantee the projects, I think we’re starting to see kind of elongated warranties, but that’s kind of linked with performance benefits and changes in technology as well.

Adam Sroka (04:33)
I guess, for CRU, what makes your approach to measuring the market so successful? Why have you built such a strong offering, such a big name in the space?

Edward Rackley (CRU) (04:46)
So we predominantly focused on techno-economic analysis. So that has a lot of different definitions depending on which sources you look at. I’ve always described it as using the acronym TEA. Spilling the TEA is how I’ve always called it, kind of a reference to an old colleague actually. But the techno economic analysis for us, we really focus on cost and performance fundamentals. So when you’re thinking of different types of battery or lithium-ion battery, for example,

Nickel Magnet Cobalt, NMC otherwise called with the acronym, or lithium-ion phosphate, LFP. It’s been comparing where those battery cell costs could get to or system costs could get to and then seeing how that performance could change that fundamental and whether there’d be a change at that or an inflection point where one technology effect offers a performance benefit and is cheaper or

at the same cost as the market incumbent, then that’s when we expect to see market transitions primarily.

Adam Sroka (05:47)
And how often does that happen? Is that once a lifetime, once every few months? What’s the sort of timescales for those changes to occur?

Edward Rackley (CRU) (05:58)
So at the moment it seems to be probably once every, I’d say between 5 or 10 years depending on the technology. I think we’ve seen the kind of a major shift to LFP in the last 4 years or so from NMC as I’d already mentioned. But that’s, it’s kind of now we’re at an optimisation phase for LFP at the moment.

Adam Sroka (06:18)
What’s your thoughts on sodium and some of the stuff BYD are doing? Is that real? I asked someone else this and they were like, no, it is very real. What do you think?

Edward Rackley (CRU) (06:29)
Yeah, so BYD are a huge innovator in the space, both for sodium actually and for LFP. So one of the major kind of transitions that we’ve seen, not just in battery storage, but in like EVs has been the blade cell. BYD is kind of a proprietary long lithium-ion battery cell. So when we’re thinking, just to give a bit of an idea of context of size, we’re talking about blade cells roughly two times the length of a laptop.

So you’re kind of talking very large long cells that can be used structurally in an EV. And one of those benefits is that storing more energy in the container. But also you’re having to kind of do away with components such as modules. And that kind of gives you a performance benefit. So BYD, huge innovators in the space. And obviously, have just announced the sodium ion utility scale system just late last year, actually.

Adam Sroka (07:21)
I had a really deep conversation with a load of wizards from a company that did structural energy storage technologies for space applications. And it felt very sci-fi, but yeah, okay. And you can totally see the benefits if you can get there with that kind of thing, because it just simplifies set up and stuff. But I think this was a while ago, so I think it was quite an expensive solution back then, but it’s interesting to

Edward Rackley (CRU) (07:35)
Awesome.

Yeah,

Adam Sroka (07:50)
that make its way

Edward Rackley (CRU) (07:51)
think, Yeah, definitely. I think with space as well, I think the element of there’s a lot more onus on what the performance will be and cost, obviously you’d prefer it to be as cost effective as possible, but there’s an element of you’re probably not making multiple or let’s say thousands of trips with this particular device or battery, for example. So I think that’s kind of the, it’s very context dependent as well in terms of what technologies suddenly become viable on that curve.

Adam Sroka (08:09)
you

Edward Rackley (CRU) (08:16)
Yeah, that’s right.

Adam Sroka (08:17)
So, yeah, We’re seeing innovation from BYD and stuff sort of coming out of China. What other global regions do you think are like the most promising, I guess for more grid scale like storage as well?

Edward Rackley (CRU) (08:30)
Yeah, so we’ve seen a lot of growth, predominantly in the Gulf states. Saudi Arabia is kind of shifting a lot of its renewables targets and the Kingdom’s got a large amount of renewables aimed for 2030. So we’ve kind of seen there is almost a blend of kind of big buying power, for example, blended with kind of really good off takes with tier one manufacturers and obviously a lot of ambition in terms of changing that,

that kind of view I guess. We’ve always thought of Saudi Arabia or the Gulf states predominantly with oil but a lot of the world’s biggest projects in the next 2 or 3 years are going to be in the Gulf. So it’s a big change coming on that part of the world.

Adam Sroka (09:11)
Yeah, and I guess from the kind of AI data side as well, the similar kind of stuff happening in the data centre space, there’s big shifts towards more of the kind of public-private cloud argument. It’s definitely an interesting place to be a techie over the next few years.

Edward Rackley (CRU) (09:28)
Definitely, definitely. I think it’s a really interesting space in terms of the amount of energy that we will need from renewables or has really changed in terms of, kind of changed the paradigm in what we’re seeing in the next kind of 10 to 15 years or so.

Adam Sroka (09:41)
And so you mentioned there that we’re seeing a move into some of the more performance improvement era with some technologies. What other kind of macro trends are you seeing across the space?

Edward Rackley (CRU) (09:52)
your calls.

In previous other industries like solar PV, for example, as well. We’ve seen kind of two major transitions. One is a cost reduction era, and then we kind of moved to performance improvement era. So if you think about drawing that on a graph, if you were continually reducing the cost of your technology,

You kind of reach a point where you can’t keep reducing costs. Materials don’t learn, for example. You’ve got economies of scale and that’s something I’ll mention in a second. Effectively if you keep going down that curve, you end up at a point where it’s almost like a cost graveyard where it’s not really commercially viable to continue to reduce cost. And what kind of happens then is you have an inflection point where with the performance improvement era, I’ve kind of mentioned almost the PIE side of things. I’ve used the acronym before.

that’s a change in technology or a change in like optimising around technology to kind of, in this case, optimise around a metric like dollars per kilowatt hour. So you’re thinking dollars is the cost side of things being reduced and then kilowatt hours is kind of performance, how much energy your battery can store. So that’s kind of very much linked with that kind of transition primarily. But just kind of mentioning on the cost side. So lithium-ion batteries

kind of commercialised in the early 1990s. Camcorders and laptops are kind of the first devices that were using those batteries. But the manufacturing scale at that point was probably 1.1 to 1.5 megawatt hours per year globally. As of last year, we kind of reached terawatt hours, so a million times that scale in 30 years. So it’s been a huge amount of change in the industry. That kind of illustrates

the economies of scale you reach from kind of going from grams and kilos for the materials and those kind of electrodes for example to going to, oh we need thousands of tonnes of these materials to get a gigafactory working is a completely different ballgame.

Adam Sroka (11:40)
That’s nuts to hear, isn’t it? Yeah. And what’s the next sort of technology on that journey? Do you think 30 years from now, 2055, what are we doing terawatt hours of that we aren’t doing today?

Edward Rackley (CRU) (11:51)
I think there’s a large amount of growth to be seen in other types of intercalation. So we’ve had lithium-ion, also moving to sodium ion, probably a little bit more on zinc ion as well. And then the other thing as well will be more flow batteries to kind of fill the gaps as well in terms of what we need for longer duration storage. I think the hardest thing for longer duration storage, and it’s even the thing that I struggle with when we’re writing our market outlooks, is that

Everyone that we talk to in the industry seems to have a slightly different definition of that technology as well as whether it’s storage that you have like intaday or intraday or like, you talking, you only use it once a month, for example, or once a quarter, it kind of gets very, very complicated to try and offer, a clean definition at points.

Adam Sroka (12:36)
What about hydrogen? Have you any thoughts on that as being the kind of the be-all-and-end-all of long duration storage and transport?

Edward Rackley (CRU) (12:44)
I think it will be… I’m not sure about transport, I still think there’s issues with efficiency and weight and carrying in terms of containers for example. So if you need like 100 kilos of a container that you have for hydrogen, about 6 kilos of that is the actual hydrogen, everything else is like the tank or whatever else you need to carry stuff with, it’s not that efficient on that side of things. I think it has key kind of

uses for when you’re over generating renewables, having an energy store there, think that’s where hydrogen will really play a significant role in the future.

Adam Sroka (13:17)
So not going to take over long duration grid storage. Because again, I was having a conversation with people saying long duration, even in the UK, it’s not that long actually. It’s not going run for multi days. You can’t store, or you won’t be storing energy over seasons in a battery and things like that. if you’re trying to do intrayear and stuff, then hydrogen’s maybe the only game in town.

Edward Rackley (CRU) (13:27)
Hmm.

Yeah, I think that’s a really good point and really interesting is that if you’re thinking about assets, especially storage assets, kind of almost like the warranties or contracts are normally based on how much you’re going to be cycling. And if you’ve got something where you’re cycling once a quarter or something, then you’re having to depreciate with a much less usage kind of view. So I think that’s where the challenge is kind of lying where maybe chemical stores such as hydrogen

make more sense economically.

Adam Sroka (14:11)
Yeah, do you have enough capital and risk appetite to hold on for that once in a lifetime price event and dump your whole hard work for three years time or whatever? I don’t know if I’ve got the guts.

Edward Rackley (CRU) (14:18)
Yeah, exactly. Yeah.

No, it’s super interesting. I think the British Geological Survey are looking at hydrogen aquifers or stores as well underground as a way to store the gas as well.

Adam Sroka (14:36)
Yeah. When you get to Subsea Store, yeah, there was someone talking to me about salt caverns, like hollowing out salt caverns off the coast and the scale of these environments you need to get access to. It’s an interesting, it’s definitely going be an interesting space to look at as it develops and matures.

Every day I speak to 3 people that have 4 opinions on the future of hydrogen, so it’s quite fun to pick up people and see who thinks what. I guess, back to more current grid scale energy technologies, just thinking, what other metrics do you think the industry is going to move to? We’re not so obsessed about dollars per kilowatt. What other metrics do think the industry is going to start exploring or prioritising?

Edward Rackley (CRU) (15:24)
Yeah, so it’s interesting with dollars per kilowatt hour has been that I think that that still has things to evolve around as well. So we’ve got dollars per kilowatt hour almost thinking about CAPEX, right? But if you’re thinking about more like, if you’ve got these assets that last a really long period of time, I think what we’re kind of moving towards more as an industry is levelised cost of storage. So thinking about that, the dollars per kilowatt hour, but across the lifetime of the asset. So thinking about what is your

CAPEX and your OPEX going to be across your, let’s say, 20 year lifetime at the moment, maybe 25 years in a couple of years with how the technology seems to be evolving and how much energy you transact in that period. When we’ve talked about when we kind of cycle and how many times you cycle, that kind of becomes very important in terms of having a metric that you can use to compare other technologies. Environmental kind of emissions and kind of embodied carbon as well will also, I think, will become a lot more

developed in the industry and think the EU are kind of looking at more policy around that too. And then obviously thinking about recyclability as well and whether there’ll be benefits to having a technology that can be easily recycled. Something that Vanadium Flow Batch have always talked about, for example.

Adam Sroka (16:38)
What about other things like safety and supply chain?

Who’s caring about that stuff? And is that like at the right level of sort of the public attention or the customer attention?

Edward Rackley (CRU) (16:51)
Yeah, it’s a really, they’re both really good points. So on the safety side, that was kind one of the major reasons why NMC was kind of being phased out the market and LFP has been taken up and kind of the chemistry in the very deep level. NMC is kind of a set of layers, right? This is like in the crystallographic structure. And LFP is kind of more of a cage structure. So the idea is that it’s effectively a lot more stable when you cycle it. So that gives you a little bit more stability in terms of the

the cycle life. And obviously energy density wise, LFP is slightly less energy dense, which kind of gives you a longer lasting system, which should be slightly safer. I think one of the things that, a misnomer that people always kind of forget is that with battery storage, predominantly lithium-ion is that you are trying to stick a lot of energy in a box. To put it crudely, the box can always go bang in some way, shape or form. You can always get thermal runaway. I think the key is always trying to control the temperature

of the systems themselves and having a clear kind of safety view in terms of you kind of mitigate against a like a thermal runaway event, for example. I think that’s one of the one of the hardest challenges for the industry at the moment, because it’s very difficult to be able to be like, “my system now can do 20 years worth of cycling.” You don’t have 20 years worth of time to test the system at the moment. So a lot of groups will either elevate temperature or

do kind of irregular cycling to try and test the limits of what these 20 foot containers, for example, would do. But I think safety is improving all the time in terms of new ways to kind of detect faults and also thinking about just monitoring systems over time as well.

Adam Sroka (18:35)
Yeah. I think a great point, I saw a really good demo of some safety testing that was done on like, I think they have a 5 megawatt battery containers and they were like setting fire to them, testing temperature between them. But they were basically trying to figure out how close you could put them together, which I thought was really interesting thing to do. And it’s the kind of testing you can only do if you’ve got a lot of money to spend setting fire to great big batteries.

Edward Rackley (CRU) (18:54)
Yep.

Yeah, yeah, definitely.

Adam Sroka (19:03)
It’s interesting to see. The chemistry is super important, but so is the rest of the structure, the rest of the unit that the thing’s living in. Crystallographic structures might be 15 years since my last inorganic chemistry class. It’s been a bit of a while and I wasn’t the best at it then.

Edward Rackley (CRU) (19:20)
Yeah,

Adam Sroka (19:26)
That definitely is such a fun, like techie place to think about and to see all the new technologies come online. And it’s like, no one’s going to win this game because we’re always going to want more power. There’s always going to be more demand. It’s smaller, lighter, cheaper, faster, reusable, safer. and actually, yeah, the bulk of the cost in the consumer electronics product still like the bulk of the weight is still

Edward Rackley (CRU) (19:45)
Hmm.

Adam Sroka (19:53)
the power store, So we’re still orders of magnitude away from having perfect solutions and long may the game continue.

Edward Rackley (CRU) (19:54)
Yeah.

Yeah, no, it’s a super interesting point. I do always feel like there isn’t a perfect solution, but like we’re trying our best to get as close as possible. I think it’s the best thing to say. I think the industry itself has kind of gone through a period of not flux, but like just so much improvement in terms of the how much energy we can store in these containers and how you even transport the containers, all these kind of metrics as well. We think about it as well as like you’re thinking about energy and how much you need to store, but there’s also the balance of

How do you actually translate that into real life? How do you actually ship it and truck it and all the other things you have to do to get it onto a site safely connected as well as just the physics and the chemistry behind the batteries themselves as well.

Adam Sroka (20:42)
Yeah, 100%. And it’s a big intractable problem. Organisations like CRU are really good at helping unpick and have a look at some of the deep dive of the analysis and help you explore the wider part of the challenge like supply chain, et cetera, not just technology for technology’s sake.

Edward Rackley (CRU) (21:00)
Yeah, definitely. Definitely. I think that’s one of the coolest things for working at CRU has been to kind of see that end to end kind of view and looking across the supply chain and seeing how bottlenecks can really impact our clients’ potential products or what are maybe their pipelines going out into the future before we go to policy or tariffs as well. So it’s also been a big part of the industry. ⁓ a big talking point.

Adam Sroka (21:24)
They’re all off now, it’s

fine. The World Trade War has ended so don’t worry about it.

What about, so you mentioned BYD innovations, any other form factors that are interesting or weird that some battery nerds might get excited about?

Edward Rackley (CRU) (21:40)
Yeah, so it’s something we’ve been talking around for probably the last 18 months or so is that we’ve seen, you mentioned 5 megawatt hour container earlier, right? So these 20 foot shipping containers full of batteries. So we’re talking probably 4 to 6,000 depending on your kind of capacity, right? We’ve kind of now seen a shift to where these 20 foot containers are getting too heavy to ship and to truck, especially in the US and Europe primarily. So we kind of reached this point where

our kind of modelling and seeing between 8 to 10 megawatt hours, maybe 9 to 11 megawatt hours in the US as the kind of edge of where these systems could go. We had an eight megawatt hour system announced last year from Envision and we were seeing that we were reaching this point where you can’t ship or truck these containers anymore. So the industry is going to have to start modularising, which is kind of what they were doing before they went to 20 foot containers. It’s kind of weird that we’ve kind of gone cyclic in that way.

But the big thing has been in the last 2 weeks or so actually is the announcement of stacked containers. So making 4 and a half megawatt hours and then stacking another 20 foot container on top. And kind of, guess in the genius part of that is that if you’re a project developer, you’re not normally constrained volumetrically. Like the height of the container isn’t the issue. It’s the area in the footprint of your site that you’re worried about. So it kind of gives you that ability to store more energy in the footprint in the area effectively. But not worry too much about the

or have that extra kind of layer going on top effectively. So I think that’s been a big change and we’ve seen 2 systems announced in the last 3 or 4 weeks or so from major manufacturers.

Adam Sroka (23:17)
Yeah, there was a couple of nines announced recently, even this week I think. And then you’ve got things like SmartStack from Fluence and others that, yeah. And I love like, I just love this industry because it’s like all this really like new chemistry. We’ve got this new thing. We’ve got all this advanced analytics, this data, and then what’s the big innovation this year? We’re sticking them on top of each other.

Edward Rackley (CRU) (23:21)
Exactly.

Yeah.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, it’s an oxymoron at points, it feels like, really big contrast, but you have to think about how you how you’re going to put the system together at the end of the day, I guess.

Adam Sroka (23:51)
We’re going to see what the first sort of storage skyscraper in New York City in the next 100 years or?

Edward Rackley (CRU) (23:58)
Don’t know, I think that may be more of flow battery side of things than a lithium-ion battery. I think one of the issues we’re going to have is that the batteries are pretty heavy, right? So last year’s cells were roughly six kilos each. So you’re talking let’s say 4,000 in containers, 24 tonnes without really blinking. Like if we get to like 11 or 12 and you’re kind of doubling that to almost 50 tonnes, I think you’re going to struggle to stack them on top of each other. That bottom container is going to really struggle, I think.

I think maybe 2, potentially 3, but I 2 is more likely at the moment from what we’ll see.

Adam Sroka (24:29)
What about any other chemistries, weird and wonderful stuff happening out there that people might not have heard of?

Edward Rackley (CRU) (24:35)
Yeah, so we’ve seen a lot of, so the kind of the intercalation family. So we’re thinking like ion, so we kind of describe it like we’ve seen sodium ion is kind of taking root as well. There’s potassium and zinc ion, aluminium ion, there’s a lot of flavours of different kind of technologies. A lot of them are kind of basing their benefits on like environmental benefits. Some of them have higher potential energy than what you’ll see for like lithium-ion part of the world. But the I think it’s just whether those can get to scale and whether

the supply chain can kind of scale up to balance that as well. I think it’s a tough challenge there.

Adam Sroka (25:08)
What about, did Europe have a great hope on any one particular form factor technology? Read the odd article here and there about parts of Europe, even Poland wanting to become a battery storage powerhouse for globally. Is that likely? What would be the

The best bet in your opinion?

Edward Rackley (CRU) (25:29)
Well, I think at the moment, possibly not a future proof bet at the minute has been that lithium-ion has been the predominant kind of technology. And I think Poland and Hungary actually, so kind of more the Eastern states in Europe, have got significant gigafactories already going in from tier one manufacturers. So think they will be kind of well placed to help supply the region and the kind of continent for those kind of batteries. I think the challenge has been, kind of as I mentioned with that techno-economic analysis is that

for us, What we see as analysts, is that how we already posited or our kind of thesis on the industry is that to get a significant technology change, you need to have a performance benefit and an acceptable cost, whether that’s equal to the future cost of an optimised lithium-ion battery or LFP battery, for example. That’s the challenge is how do you get there and making sure you’ve got an achievable roadmap to get there.

I think we’ve seen that in sodium ion as well is that

In China, there’s definitely quite a lot of bullish nature and a lot of scale up on the technology, but in India as well. Obviously, we’ve seen some parts in the US, for example, think Bedrock Materials, have returned their money they had for funding and kind of got out of the markets. They’re worried it’s going to get too commoditised too quickly. And I think that’s the challenge is that you kind of need to end up with a technology that will be cheap enough

into the future, but it’s getting there and getting that scale up is really, really difficult to kind of sell to investors in that very pain point, almost the valley of death and the TRL side of things.

Adam Sroka (26:58)
Okay.

A lot of other people trying to win the game right it’s it’s not yeah ⁓

Edward Rackley (CRU) (27:03)
Yeah, competition

is fierce, that’s probably the best way to describe it.

Adam Sroka (27:06)
Do think the supply chain is healthy though? Does that competition mean that actually we’re kind of okay or are there big bottlenecks on the horizon?

Edward Rackley (CRU) (27:13)
So I think there are significant bottlenecks. The supply chain is very China-centric, as I’d already mentioned. A lot of people focus on gigafactories, right? And like the production to make the devices. But it’s not just that. The thing is, there’s lots of different materials around the world that go into a battery. Like you’ve got lithium from either South America or Western Australia. You’ve got petrochemicals that you need for…

Anodes, for example, like the negative electrodes. Like there’s lots of different things going around the world. It’s not that China is extremely resource rich. It’s not resource rich as a country. It’s that it refines a lot of materials and the components in the country and then exports them or puts them into devices and exports those, right? I think the challenge is trying to scale up the materials and the components together with also training people to learn how to assemble these devices, assemble these kind of components that will be required for the industry.

I think that’s the thing is that I guess there’s not been a lot of succession planning or like planning around the West that’s kind of been able to tie all those bits together and the jigsaw is quite complicated and to butcher a metaphor I think the parts sometimes don’t fit the jigsaw well or parts of a different jigsaw.

Adam Sroka (28:25)
Then again, attention moving back to natural gas and oil and drilling in recent months. I guess that’s going to throw more risk and uncertainty into an already challenging space for the West and set back some of that journey a few more years.

like in the global kind of tug of war between who’s going to be building and who’s going to win in this space over the next 20.

Edward Rackley (CRU) (28:50)
Yeah, I think it’s a really interesting kind of challenge in terms of how the supply chain scales up. I think what we’ve seen is actually a lot more a view trying to localise more of the supply chain. So I think we’re going to see kind of the rise of excluding China, other countries around the world. So we’ll see a bit more in Southeast Asia as well. Morocco is also becoming quite a hotbed for building LFP, predominantly because it’s actually got the world’s deepest phosphate reserve.

So actually really useful for one of the major precursors to be on site effectively or in country. And I think that will help with kind of, I guess, in the localisation of the supply chain. It’s a bit of an odd one to talk around. You read a lot of the articles around the world is like, we still in an age of globalisation? Are we moving to more localisation? I’m guessing we are shifting to more of that as well.

Adam Sroka (29:37)
Yeah, I’ve read some pretty depressing books on globalisation and localisation recently, and I’ve not decided on my opinions on the matter, but I’m thoroughly depressed which is quite a nice place to be. What about CRU generally? What’s next for CRU? Are you coming up with any new services or offerings or is there any exciting things on the horizon for your customers and the people that use you?

Edward Rackley (CRU) (29:51)
Yeah.

Hmm.

Yeah, so we’ve got new market outlooks that we publish quarterly. So I’ve got my new energy storage one coming out next month. We’ve also got a new kind of work in progress report coming up, actually looking at like the materials you need for automotive, like a kind of deeper dive on that side. So if anyone’s interested in kind of like giga casting or aluminium, as an example, but yeah, there’s a lot of new offerings coming from the

coming from the team and it’d be great to get in touch.

Adam Sroka (30:31)
Okay. Before we let anyone go, I always ask the same question. If anyone in the audience wants to find out more about you, the kind of work you do Edward, or CRU, or if there’s anything you want to promote or plug, where should we point them?

Edward Rackley (CRU) (30:46)
So I’m Ed Rackley on LinkedIn. Also a couple of good people to follow from the team for batch materials primarily is Martin Jackson, who’s kind of the raw materials guru in the team. And then we’ve got Sam Adham as well. But we’re always posting new bits of insights as well. I’ve just posted actually last week about those stats containers that we’ve discussed during the podcast. So yeah, if you want to see anything or you want to get in touch, yeah, happy to chat and love nerding out about batteries.

Adam Sroka (31:12)
it. Well look, it’s been an absolute pleasure to have you on and we’re sure to nerd out again in the future.

Edward Rackley (CRU) (31:19)
Cheers Adam, thank you.