QuantumScape Bets on Iron to Ease Battery Supply Chain Squeeze

(Bloomberg) -- QuantumScape Corp., the  solid-state battery startup backed by Volkswagen AG and Bill Gates, said its ability to use iron-based chemistries instead of nickel for battery components could help it mitigate soaring costs for raw materials as it tries to scale its technology.

Prices for key battery metals like nickel and lithium have surged in the past year, threatening to reverse a long-term trend that has helped boost electric-vehicle adoption around the world. Higher raw material costs could push the average price of a lithium-ion battery pack to $135 per kilowatt-hour this year, the first increase in prices in over a decade, according to BloombergNEF, a clean energy research group. 

San Jose, California-based QuantumScape is in the process of scaling production of its prototype cells, which start with no anode material and use a ceramic separator to help move ions back and forth to charge and discharge the battery. Batteries have three major components: two electrodes —  an anode and a cathode — and an electrolyte that helps shuttle the charge between them. The materials used to make them determine how much energy batteries can store and at what cost.

“On the cathode, we’re subject to the same supply chain constraints that everybody else is,” Jagdeep Singh, QuantumScape’s chief executive officer, said in an interview at the Bloomberg Green Summit in New York on Wednesday. “However we’re cathode-agnostic with our architecture, so we can switch from nickel to iron,’’ he said. “When you couple iron-based cathodes with our lithium-metal anode, you get a 50% increase’’ in energy density, he added, so that makes them a “viable alternative” to nickel.

While its technology is promising, QuantumScape still has to demonstrate it can manufacture its new battery on a mass scale. 

The company went public in a reverse merger in late 2020. It’s since rocketed to a valuation of almost $50 billion on the promise of its next-generation technology, which could dramatically speed EV adoption by providing automakers with a safer, cheaper alternative to lithium-ion batteries. It has since come under pressure from short-sellers questioning its prospects, with shares plunging 89% from their peak in December 2020. The stock was up 2.6% at $14.74 at 1:16 p.m. in New York.

Singh says despite the social media “trolls” and short-seller attacks, he doesn’t regret taking the company public because he’s been able to raise more than $1 billion to fund his efforts.

“It’s absolutely been a positive, because we have access to much greater pools of capital than are available in private markets,” he said. “Battery production is capital intensive, building factories is not cheap.”

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