The race to sodium-ion battery tech

BOULDER STARTUP

Mana battery team has Tesla ties

By Sharon Dunn

BizWest / Prairie Mountain Media

A team born out of a University of Colorado mechanical engineering laboratory is on track to win the race to provide low-cost batteries with longer lifespans than the market offers today. Though it could take up to 10 years for the solution to become scalable and mass-produced, all good ideas have to start somewhere.

Mana Battery Inc. is a startup company founded in CU professor Chunmei Ban’s lab. Company principal Tyler Evans left Tesla Inc. (Nasdaq: TSLA) a few years ago to be involved in the pioneering effort to replace lithium-ion batteries with locally sourced sodium-ion batteries. In 2023, Mana Battery was born.

Lithium-ion batteries are the most common rechargeable batteries in use today, powering everything from cell phones to electric vehicles. But they are expensive, mainly because they are produced mostly in China, with components shipped in from other parts of the world.

“Batteries could cost roughly 40% less than they do today,” said Evans, one of three founders of Mana Battery. “Utilities could install more batteries on the electricity grid to enable more stable infrastructure and more renewable energy resources, and we could see a sub-$25,000 electric vehicle.

“So, at Mana, we’re making low-cost batteries using sodium, which is much more earth abundant, environmentally friendly, and domestically available compared to lithium in the batteries we know and use today,” he said.

Mana Battery has come up with sodium-battery technology, sourced from soda ash found in Wyoming, by delivering a “proprietary low-cost, safe material and battery cell design platform, providing similar energy to lithium-ion battery cells at 35%-75% of the cost,” according to company documents.

Mana is prototyping its first-generation technology, and to date is operating on mostly government grants, its latest being a $1.5 million grant from the U.S. Department of Energy.

Sodium-ion energy is being studied globally; in fact that DOE grant also provided funding for five other companies working on sodium-ion technology. It’s now a foot race to see which company comes out ahead.

“We’re starting to see a boom in efforts in sodium-ion, especially outside of Asia, like in the U.S.,” Evans explained. “We’ve positioned ourselves as a technology company that’s an enabler for the entire sodium-ion industry. We have to scale quickly so that we can actually enable the sodium-ion industry as it scales. … Sodium-ion batteries were commercialized in China over the last two years for the first time, and most of the sodium-ion battery manufacturing, just like Lithium ion batteries, is currently happening in China.

“That presents some geopolitical risk and a national security risk,” Evans said. “If we can build a domestic supply chain for energy storage technologies, there’s a lot of benefits to that for a number of reasons. So, it definitely is a race, and it’s mostly a race to scale in low-cost.”

Understanding the difficulties they face in scaling this technology could take an engineering degree in itself, but the ultimate goal is to see battery manufacturing facilities throughout the U.S., and use of the cheaper, longer-life battery storage on the electric grid.

“If you could put batteries on the electricity grid and store the energy during the day, like charge up your batteries during the day, using solar or wind, or the existing power plants, then you could discharge the batteries during those peak hours when energy is traditionally really expensive and dirty to produce,” Evans explained. “If you could have a battery that is low-cost enough to do that and do that for, say, four to eight hours during peak energy use, there’s a lot of value in that, not just from an economic standpoint, but from an environmental sustainability standpoint.”

The company is working on a small budget to get started, Evans said. “We’ve taken a very deliberate capital-light strategy where we are going after grant funding to start, which is important for us in the battery world because battery materials development takes a while, like, you have to prove that the material or the technology you’re making can charge and discharge a bunch of times and that just takes time.

“So we’re starting off with grant funding and we raised a small seed round last summer with participation from BuffGold ventures and Climate Capital. And then we’ve received a number of government grants, and in total, we’ve brought in a little bit over $4 million to the project.”

While Mana Battery may be leading the charge to create efficient and cheaper sodium-ion battery life, being a pioneer is both exciting and soul-sucking.

“To be starting a company in a space that is really nascent, like sodium ion, is quite fun because there’s a lot of white space and you could go in a lot of different directions,” Evans said. “It also makes it difficult because you don’t want to run in the wrong direction.”

For now, the team at Mana is working toward selling their battery component to battery manufacturers.

“We have multiple battery manufacturers who are interested in offtake of material in the 2029 to 2030 time frame, Evans said. “We believe that we can meet that at least at small volumes through manufacturing partnerships. But the battery world requires massive amounts of material and getting up to scale what we would call a giga scale, we believe will take somewhere in the five-to-10-year time frame.”

That will give the company the time it takes to ensure its technology lasts in the long-term.

“Part of the reason why we’re not why we’ve delayed raising venture capital for the first couple of years is to give us the time and space that the technology needs for us to understand how it’s the most valuable and who it’s the most valuable too,” Evans said. “I think we’re about at that point now that we’re in prototypes and starting to sign (memoranda of understanding) with customers that see the value in what we’re doing … to enable the sodium ion cell manufacturing industry as a whole.”