In this episode, Chris and Jeff chat with John Busbee, CEO of Xerion Advanced Battery Corp., exploring groundbreaking innovations in battery technology. They delve into Xerion's game-changing approach utilizing low-purity materials, revolutionizing the battery supply chain, and their versatile modular electroplating system. Discover how John's military background and expertise in materials research have shaped Xerion's mission to transform the battery space. From reducing the carbon footprint to fostering domestic manufacturing, this conversation unveils the bold vision shaping the future of sustainable energy solutions.
Host: Chris Sass and Jeff McAulay
Guest: John Busbee, CEO, Xerion Advanced battery Corporation
Additional Reads:
Xerion advanced Battery corp: https://xerionbattery.com/
In this episode, Chris and Jeff chat with John Busbee, CEO of Xerion Advanced Battery Corp., exploring groundbreaking innovations in battery technology. They delve into Xerion's game-changing approach utilizing low-purity materials, revolutionizing the battery supply chain, and their versatile modular electroplating system. Discover how John's military background and expertise in materials research have shaped Xerion's mission to transform the battery space. From reducing the carbon footprint to fostering domestic manufacturing, this conversation unveils the bold vision shaping the future of sustainable energy solutions.
Host: Chris Sass and Jeff McAulay
Guest: John Busbee, CEO, Xerion Advanced battery Corporation
Additional Reads:
Xerion advanced Battery corp: https://xerionbattery.com/
08:19.85
chrissass
Welcome to insiders guide to energy I'm your host Chris Sass and with me is my co-host Jeff McAulay
08:26.26
John Busbee
Sounds great.
08:36.71
chrissass
We're going to do another episode on batteries batteries are an exciting technology for me Jeff I am looking forward to getting to this because you know if we're going to hit this electrification goal. We need a lot of batteries and and watching the technology evolve is something that I've been anxious to see and this company I think promises some different story or different technology. Jeff. Welcome to the program.
08:56.34
Jeff M_
Yeah, really excited to be here as always and with us today is John Busby Ceo of Xeron Advanced Battery Corporation. John welcome to the show tell us a little bit about xerion as we jump in.
09:11.32
John Busbee
So Xerion, we've been around since ah 2011 and basically we've come up with a new way to create the manufacturing of batteries through electroplating kind of in toto. So.
09:25.88
Jeff M_
Really really fascinating. Looking forward to getting into this. So first of all, you've been in Stealth mode for over a decade So tell us a little bit about how this got started and the reason for keeping it under wraps for that period of time.
09:40.59
John Busbee
Well and we weren't trying to hide anything. It was just that when we first got started I was in the air force research labs I was the program manager of nanotechnology and you know I'd seen how much hype could really impact what people were doing. Ah, this got started. It was my ph d advisor Paul Braun who I had actually helped with some fundraise in the past who asked me to help him come commercialize this technology. And you know it was really important to us to do something that initially I wanted to do a nanotechnology company I was looking for something to exit my government service and and really make an impact outside and ah. As he started this work. They were getting some really incredible properties on the battery. So incredible that it was kind of hard to believe and so I really didn't want to be involved in trying to convince someone that we could do something we haven't demonstrated yet. Um, so we were very fortunate that when we first started fundraising. You know we got funded ah pretty well pretty quickly and ah we really just wanted to kind of sit back finish our fundamental engineering really be able to make a good battery and so when I would tell people the properties.
10:59.37
John Busbee
And they say wait I don't think that's true. That's not right? You know then I could say don't believe me just test it and hand them the battery and so it was really kind of an and anti-hype you know from Texas originally the companies in the midwest were. Very much of the vein of you know under promise and over deliver and we knew upfront that with a completely new technology to reimagine how to manufacture batteries that it was going to take a long time so we wanted to stay lean. Really do our fundamental engineering first and then get out and and with the pressure that comes with with with announcements and companies wanting to see things that you know that was when things really would take off so we we just wanted to do our homework before we took the test. Basically.
11:33.39
Jeff M_
Um, yeah.
11:45.95
Jeff M_
That's really refreshing and to be honest rare in the the hype cycle world that we live in so it's it's great to hear that you took that diligent patient approach and. So now I'm Curious. What are those metrics that matter the the ones that you were saying people didn't believe you until they tested them. What are the ones that really matter for your application and how much better can this technology be.
12:08.35
John Busbee
So You know we started out. It was the world's highest power battery and we actually had good power and good energy and I know when you say power and energy to a lot of people although those sound like the same thing but the total energy in a batteries. How much electricity it can Store. Powers. How fast can you get that Out. You know so a high power applications lot of amps Real fast. You know a car accelerating hard. A really big drill that's under load and then how much energy it has is how long can it last and there's always a fundamental tradeoff when you really are under high load. It. It doesn't last as long back in the day. Yeah, you would see that in camera flashes where a really good camera flash that was really bright would eat a battery real fast So that that combination was really what we started with was very high power and fast charge. Ah, those were the really important things we did is we started commercializing high power is much more of a niche application and as we started dealing with people like electronics companies and ev companies are like yeah the high power and fast charge is really nice, but we're moving from hivids to evs. Power where you're converting from all of a gas engine instantly to ah to an electric motor. That's high power because it's a fast transition but ah in an ev where you're really concerned about how far you can drive. That's a high energy application. So They said it would really be nice if you could do high energy and fast charge.
13:40.80
John Busbee
And so we pivoted to that and then along the way found the other things that were really important which were you know, really good safety ah that we had very high energy but we also had really good power at that energy which is very hard to do and then safety and then based on electroplating which is a refinement technique. And addition to being able to create and deposit the the materials. Ah it could refine them at the same time so we could start with low purity materials which ah, ah, the really what that gets down to is low cost.
14:12.45
Jeff M_
Great. So when you say high energy does that mean energy density. What's your what's your metric your sort of figure of merit.
14:22.80
John Busbee
Yeah, yeah, So it's ah, there's 2 ways you can look at high energy density one is by weight and one is by volume and so you know and we actually have both so in a battery of the of the same weight we can double or triple the energy density. Very similar to how other advanced battery companies are doing that We're kind of in line with the ones that are at the highest levels and the same thing by Volume. We can so put more electricity in the same box.
14:48.82
Jeff M_
Right? And so.
14:50.78
chrissass
So you've basically started with some pretty broad marketing brush strokes. It's kind of a lot of really nice to have features ah in your introduction you mentioned nanotechnology we're starting to get some of the specifics of the the energy capabilities. What are some of the innovations that are changing. Yeah I think you mentioned 1 you said something about plating and and materials what are some of the innovations you're focused on that are going to be disruptive here.
15:13.90
John Busbee
So we have 2 core technologies. Both who are of which are about electropp plating one what we started with was this nanostructured foam which was created um with electroplting and so this nano. Sponge if you will is what we use as the basis for an electrode um without getting into a lot of details on and technology what that usually means is very high surface area and and high surface area means you can keep. Thin film aspects that give you the high power and then kind of wrap that up into 3 dimensions and then get enough of that thin film that you have a high amount of volumetric energy storage and so it gives it kind of breaks the tradeoff ah physics straight off between the ability to discharge fast. And store more energy because as you actually want to store more energy. You have to have more material in there and then it takes the electrons in the lithium ions longer to go through that material. That's why there's a fundamental tradeoff there and then the second core technology which really is the probably the more transformative of the 2 was the ability to just directly electropplate these cattonne materials. You know so in the electronic space you'll hear about cobalt based materials and the automotive space. It's either for high performance. It's nickel-based materials and and for less expensive cars. It's ah iron phosphate based materials and.
16:43.52
John Busbee
All of these materials are created as they're all ceramics by the way so they create this ceramic which means they have a high energy firing process to convert it into this then they crush it bank it into powder they put that powder and a polymer binder which is very similar to paint. Which is not conductive and so then they have to dump in a bunch of carbon nanoparticles usually carbon black which is the same stuff that make your tires black to make it more conductive. Um, and that ah and then they spread that out on a piece of foil aluminum foil to actually make a battery electrode. Um, and so we're skipping all of those steps and so what we're actually able to do with the electro electropplating process is we run the aluminum foil into our plating bath and so we're simultaneously refining synthesizing and depositing the final battery electrode in 1 step. And so we're taking 14 steps and putting them down into one step and with the water base for step. So we're we're getting rid of all the organic solvents we're getting rid of all the capex now you did to do those other steps we're skipping 3 very highly energetic steps in battery manufacturing which. Equates to both lower costs but also equates to a much lower carbon footprint for Lithiumon Battery manufacturing so and then we can actually use a broader range of starting materials in the electroplating bath because of the refining aspects of it.
18:15.37
John Busbee
And so it actually helps north american supply to be able to skip the refinement steps that need to do which are happening predominantly in China now.
18:25.23
Jeff M_
And Wow that that sounds like a lot and and very sophisticated. Also it sounds like because of that you can be chemistry agnostic did I hear that where this manufacturing technique can be used across Lfp or Nco or the different. Chemistries you mentioned.
18:43.12
John Busbee
Yeah, and and so I would call it versatile but not agnostic because you do have to be able to electropplate those materials. We started out demonstrating it for Manganese materials which are still very relevant in the ah.
18:59.82
John Busbee
Automotive space right now and then move to the cobalt-based material because we were really working first on wearables for electronics and a 100% electronic space uses this cobalt-based material. And then we've demonstrated the nickel-based materials and then the cobalt free base materials. So what we're really trying to do is both match the material and our economies of scale in terms of our manufacturing capacity to market size. So. I have a military background I like I said I joined this and started the company from the military. So we're starting out first with military and wearable electronics then moving into. The commercial drone space in terms of you know, vertical takeoff and landing for like electric air taxis and then moving into evs and then later on we've identified the correct plating pathways for the iron phosphate base materials but haven't actually demonstrated those yet but feel confident that we can.
19:59.33
Jeff M_
Is.
20:00.89
John Busbee
So that we move later as that the grid stationary grid storage really continues to take off and become a larger part of the market then we're going to address that as we grow beyond our capacity to supply in the electric vehicle space. So it is very versatile.
20:09.17
Jeff M_
Yeah.
20:17.95
Jeff M_
Yeah I wanted to ask about that in terms of volume. It sounds like a very ah logical approach in terms of selling to the highest dollar value applications per unit of production so where are you today in terms of volume and. Where do you expect that to ramp over the next five years as you go into these different. Um, you know higher megawatts of deployed application.
20:44.35
John Busbee
Yeah, so so our core technology is being able to make an electrode which they make as roles and so we are currently at the pilot scale so we can make small roles of electrodes. Um, we're actually in the final stages of building our production prototype line and at the conclusion of that line then we go directly into. Also we've purchased a ah low rate ah production assembly system. And that'll give us the ability to do about eight Megawatt hours of batteries next year we're starting construction on our full production plant which will be a five Gigawatt Hour electrode capacity plant. We have a second plant plan that will start about eighteen months after that in Florida which will go up to an initial ten Gigawatt hours expandable into 20 so we're going to move from some of these smaller markets into the size that you'd see in the first plant and the major ev space. With plans to then expand later into Asia and europe as well. So that ah you know we're we're doing this so that we can actually have impact that's the whole purpose behind the company and you can't have that if you can't scale rapidly so we kind of waited and stayed in a low growth mode.
22:06.84
John Busbee
Until we had the technology ready and everything that we're doing in the electroplaying mode. We can do out of the basically the same electro playinging rolled roll module and so everything that we're doing is modular so we can do you know. A different material. We can do the cobalt material or the nickel-based material in the same bath. We just changed the fluid that changed the recipe a little bit and then when we need to make more of it. We can just concatenate more modules to make the throughput higher. And so we feel like and this production protype is the first one with this modular-based system which is art toign so we feel like we can rapidly scale that so our plans are aggressive. I call what we're doing pragmatic boldness. We've got a bold vision which is we're going to have fifty Gigawatt hours of capacity by 2032 but you have to have pragmatic steps and so this basically cellular manufacturing paradigm where we're replicating this one machine just replicate the hell out of that. And then that can do all the things that we're talking about but whether it be making battery powder which is by the way just coatding electrodes scraping it off crushing it into powder. Ah then is kind of throwing away some of our technology but then you know that that actually helps us match up.
23:23.68
John Busbee
With the maturity level of the battery implementation in different companies in different industries and so ah and I believe that flexibility is the key to implementation so we really want to make what they need at the time that they need it. So if they are just looking for a source for powder. We think ours is better. Also has a single crystal nature which was a similar basis to what Tesla had done with the millionmile battery. So we think that's there's some technology advantages to what we can do there as well. But then as they get used to that and then they start to plan new products they can implement our electrodes. Into their current assembly lines and then later on ah farther out in the cycle. They can actually use our complete cell which is the highest eventnge they could get to so what we're really trying to do is enhance the flexibility to get it into as many projects products as possible. So that you know we we can have that impact.
24:23.36
chrissass
Now that's a pretty aggressive growth plan I think you know going to fifty Gigawatts here you and this seems like ah a pretty rapid growth plan how much of this comes from your background so you you started I think in our precall we talked about your bell lab days and the nanotechnology and your military experience. This start. Is something kind of as a security type effort is this a Dod initiative ah initially or did you start this independently from that or are we taking a military application and putting it into civilian life. So.
24:49.56
John Busbee
I mean I really saw the potential of nanotechnology from the military perspective but you know I really wanted and I definitely want to be able to give the soldiers. The best products they have right now. 1 of the things that we're trying to do with this is put it into a pack. A soldier wears. It actually goes. It's a pack that's flexible that goes behind the armor plate in a bulletproof vest to run his like night vision goggles and his radios and things like that. But this is really driven primarily on the commercial side I mean military is something that's very near and dear to me. I really want to make an impact and so it has to move beyond small applications into large applications. So and and then you know we're in essence a spin out of the University Of Illinois that original technology we licensed from the University Of Illinois Paul Bro is a professor there who invented that nastructured foam and then the. Company took that then later developed the ability to directly electroplate these cathode materials which is the second part that we're doing there. So yeah, we're really very much driven by commercial technologies. Although we're helping what we can with the military.
26:04.14
chrissass
That makes sense. Um I guess the other thing that kind of is a head scratcher when we first spoke is Ohio Dayton Ohio I think your first plants Ohio um, what makes that uniquely qualified as a good starting place for your your venture.
26:19.46
John Busbee
Well, that's ah it's a really good question when I started the company in in Dayton which is where I live is where the ripepaston air force base is and the headquarters air force research labs but then in order to get the license from the university that requires to be in their incubator for a year so we actually. Actually set the company up in Illinois in the midwest and then as we were getting ready to exit the incubator. We looked pretty broadly about where we wanted to be and so one of the things that I did was I put ah I put an old elementary school map. Up on a wall and I drew a two hundred and fifty mile Radius around all the locations that we're looking at and then I mapped battery suppliers and I mapped major research universities. Um, and the Midwest has a battery corridor. You know there's been traditionally batteries in Indianapolis. And the Chicago up into the Milwaukee area a bunch in ah the area around Detroit and then if you look at the number of research ah universities were within that radius the only place that came close was bossin so the the midwest has more. Ah, in that area then the Silicon Valley then the research triangle um in North Carolina then the area centered in Colorado around you know the boulder Denver area. Um, and so it made a lot of sense and we wanted to manufacture and the manufacturing breadbasket is the midwest and.
27:48.66
John Busbee
I'm also a little bit of a contrarian and I really wanted to bring high technology back to where all this started and you know we're in Dayton Ohio Dayton was actually the silicon valley of the United States until about the 50 s and sixty s I mean there are actually still more. Inventions per capita in Dayton than there are anywhere else in the world. I mean you had the Wright Brothers you had the start of all of a lot of the general motors. Ah, the parts division was ac delco which I'm probably butchering this a little bit but but was basically. Dayton Electronic Lab Company so there was a lot of gm origins in Dayton a lot of interesting things and I really had a passion to make sure that the manufacturing came back and that domestically and that everything that we were doing. Doesn't have to be on the coast. It can be spread out across the United States I think the coasts are saturated with entrepreneurship and I wanted to bring that entrepreneurial aspect and kind of regenerate it in the midwest.
28:54.24
Jeff M_
That probably helps as well with domestic content post Ira so you also mentioned some supply chain innovations where the refining step. Ah maybe wasn't necessary and could be done domestically as well. So when you think about. Ah, those supply chain factors as it relates to upcoming incentives. Are there advantages as well.
29:14.57
John Busbee
Yeah, there certainly are and so one of the things that we started out with we actually we modeled our electroplane process after aluminum refinement which is the hallrow process. So it's molten. Solid electroplaating is how they refine aluminum. So we knew starting out when we started this low temperature molten salt electroplaing process which is what we use to make these cathope materials that we could use lower purity materials and we started out demonstrating that we can move from battery grade which is like 99.9 percent pure down to technical grade which is somewhere around 80% pure and even just that jump from 99.9 to 80 can create about a 35% cost reduction in the battery and then we actually wondered. Okay, we know we can go this far how far can we go down and so. As we finished our first generation product and actually started actually going out looking for raw materials at the mines. Um, we were in western australia and somebody said well hey why? why are you using this lithium hydroxide-based material which for the listener is you know one of the prevalent. Full highly refined materials that they use in the commercial lithium um batteries today. It's the most prevalent lithium precursor and they said well why don't you go to this another random thing sulfate materials and I said well we've done that but I don't know how far we can go down the purity chain and.
30:41.16
John Busbee
You know and then when we demonstrated he got really excited about it as a matter of fact, he stood up reached across the table shook my hands and I've been waiting 30 years for somebody to do this and I was like wow I really have to go back and understand the refinement chain for lithium and that's when I realized that this 8% lithium sulfate was the input to the lithium refinement. Ah, plant and so by going from 1 material to a lower purity different material I had skipped a plant and I'd already skipped the plant by not having to make battery powders and so if you think about it we had skipped two complete multibillion dollar refinement plants at scale. Ah, we'd skipped all the labor. All the equipment costs out of those. But more importantly, we'd skipped 2 super high energy steps in making a battery which also helped us lower the carbon footprint and so we knew that we had ah a large carbon footprint reduction but we didn't really know how to quantify it. So. We worked with a company in London called Monviro to do an initial lifecycle analysis in terms of carbon footprint and just by using that one lower ah quality lower purity lithium material. It. It reduced the into-end carbon. Manufacturing footprint of lithium on batteries by 20 to 40 and now we've demonstrated that we can do that with low purity nickel and low purity cobalt. So it's a dramatic carbon footprint saving. But it's also a dramatic cost savings and then it gets it gets a little more subtle but it's just as important.
32:12.32
John Busbee
What we've actually been able to do is you know cobalt and nickel are not the natural abundance is not the problem with these materials. It's actually finding it in the ground and a point that there's some vein that's high enough purity that they can get it out of the ground and make money and not go out of business. And so the fact that we can use these incredibly low purity materials. Ah means that we can make that economic so there are mines all over the United States that have been closed because they weren't economic to extract so we can help them open new mines. There are some that are already opening. And they're just about to start getting raw materials out of the ground but they have to send all those materials to China to get them refined and then bring them back and so the fact that we can use them without refinement as they are coming out of the mine means that you know that material can be accessed 2 to 4 years early. And so we've increased hopefully worldwide the amount of battery materials that will be available and made it where it's a lower carbon footprint to do so so. That's the piece that I think could be the most dramatic of anything that we're doing. When when the battery space you know a few years ago really started to grow as evs took off. Everybody's like I need the highest performing battery and now they're saying I need a battery because there's shortages and raw materials.
33:34.73
John Busbee
Um, and so it's really moved from where is the edge of the technology to what can I practically manufacture and how can I get the raw materials and so for us to compete domestically in that we have to grow holistically the whole supply chain. And ah the fact that we have we can sell to other battery manufacturers we can make higher performing components. We can make a higher performing battery but we can also give them access early to these refined materials. Ah, you know I mentioned cobalt nickel and and then on the on the lithium side. Um. The the hard rock lithium which comes out of a granite bearing mineral called spjaine which is in like North Carolina and in Quebec and that's also what all the stuff in and Australia is you know we could use those in that process. But we also recently just demonstrated. We can take our our battery electrode which we spent a long time doing xeron has to my knowledge the first practical fully dense solidate cathode and that whole design which took you know 8 years to develop was to officially move lithium in and out and the fact that it's fully dense means. Water or other solvents. Don't go through it and we're like holy cow or our electrode would make a great separator membrane for the salton sea and other lithium brines and so we entered into.
34:58.67
John Busbee
The department of energy's grand challenge on direct lithium extraction and wonan the dle lithium prize about a month ago after ah, a 2 year and 50 teams and so we've also created a system that can take these low purity lifting chlorides with high selectivity and go directly to the final battery material for others. Move it directly into our molten salt bath for for our own use. So it's it's really a pretty broad based way of accelerating the supply chain which right now in the battery space I think is the most important thing we have especially domestically and then later on for the whole world.
35:33.83
chrissass
Wow, that was that was quite a bit of information. Um and and it sounds like you guys are doing quite quite a lot I guess the 1 thing as you're describing all this technology in process that was going through my mind is. I tend to be in the software space. A lot of the time so we can quickly come to market with and scale ideas. But when you start going to physical things like manufacturing you have a supply chain of your own to to do all this. So if you're going to hit your goals. So I think you had Ohio plant is 2024 and then you you know future couple other plants that you were talking about.
35:55.75
John Busbee
Of yeah.
36:05.83
chrissass
Is there a supply chain or do you need specialized equipment to do your technique and does it need to be built from the ground up or is that what you've been doing over the last eight to 10 years kind of building that material.
36:15.40
John Busbee
It's exactly that modular electrolating system that I was talking about so it can do all of that refining aspects as well except for that Lithium Brine piece which is just our electrode which is what we've built. So. All of the things that we were talking about and in terms of nickel and cobalt and and other materials and being able to to kind of actually do some of the refinement aspects of those is is using our process. Um, the the brine selection Lithium extraction is actually taking our process to make an electrode and using that in a specialized application. So It's all coming out of the same machine and we already have the design for that machine like I said we've already built the initial production prototype of that machine. And so now it's just replicating that machine and using it across all these different varied things so people hear a lot of what we can do and they're like Wow these guys must slack focus you know because they're all over the place. But it's all coming out of the same machine just different applications.
37:14.27
Jeff M_
So coming back to the consumer impact because you mentioned that was a ah major motivator for you. So let's talk about success and what that looks like ultimately you're selling to another battery manufacturer. You're either selling the the powder or the machines and then what are they able to build with that. So think about an ev is that and is that ah instead of going three hundred miles it can go four hundred miles so who are you selling to and what is that impact.
37:41.25
John Busbee
Yeah, so all the people we're working with and we have joint development agreements across many people in the electronic space in the drone space and in the electric vehicle space. Um, we're we're giving them security supply so they can get the same thing that they're doing now and they are ins ensured that there's raw materials to keep getting that they can get the domestic content which is recently was just what we've always been working on just from a qualitative perspective but from the the Ira. Things has all of a sudden become a real pressing problem in terms of how do you keep the tax credits that you have for ebs and that's really actually kind of helped our our demand in our business side and so that's what we're providing early and then as they adopt the electrodes like I said we have. The highestnergies that you can make just like some of the other advanced battery Companies. You're kind of getting to the point where based on a particular material. You're you've gotten the most efficient packing you can inside the battery So they're all going to kind of Plateau at the same spot. But we're there with them and when those come in we have a battery that. Can do the same thing that's less expensive much less expensive and safe and fast charge and so you know we have all the compelling pieces on the user side but companies want to adopt it because we can use a wider area of material which means we have better secure supply and we're doing it domestically.
39:13.29
John Busbee
So we're really kind of vertically integrating and and the only company right now in the United States in the battery space. That's really kind of done that is tesla so and they're the ones that's been really successful because they went back and they secured that supply and so you know i. We were doing this before Tesla got popular but it is kind of in the same vein.
39:37.53
Jeff M_
So great John this is really ah, fascinating. We've touched on consumer applications. The manufacturing process the upstream supply and and how it all fits together. How did you. Get to a point where you feel comfortable I mean you've kind of gone in and out all these topics. So can you tell us a little bit more about your background and the things that you've done before xerion that you feel most prepared you for what you're doing now.
40:06.61
John Busbee
So um, my entire background prior to this was in the us military and so I started out I graduated with an aerospace engineering degree from Texas a and m.
40:20.67
John Busbee
I came into the air force as a military officer right? after the first gu four they said wow ah, you know what do you want where you want to go and what do you want to do I knew at the time what I wanted to do I said when I want to go to write Patterson Air Force base and day and I want to do materials and they said great. Well we're sending the right patent. We're gonna make you a financial manager because we've got 140% of the engineers that we need and so I spent my first three and a half years in finance First as a financial manager and then they sent me back to school and trained me as a cost analyst so I was doing cost estimates across the range of things anywhere from r and d to logistics and that. I think was the first thing that really prepared me well because even though as an engineer, it's not what I wanted to do. It was something that I I found was very beneficial in the company and then my research group and therefore research labs was. In the materials they divideolined directorates I worked in the materials director and specifically in the manufacturing technology division. My dad was a manufacturing engineer for 40 years I've always been very passionate about that and we were set up as a material scale up group in that group doing the research that we needed to do. Ah, in order to automate and increase the yield of new materials and materials technologies and so we were doing that with neural networks and genetic algorithms and data mining in the mid 90 s so we were doing ai-based materials research when it really was not popular.
41:49.42
John Busbee
As a matter of fact, people were very skeptical of that. But what that did was we wound up touching a broad number of technologies and material systems and so I really became a generalist when it came to understanding where different materials could be impacted. And then later on I went back to do my the air force sent me back to do my ph d at the University Of Illinois Urban brand of champaign and I did that I had that interest in nanotechnology and it was my entire focus was how can I manufacture a nanotechnology practical so assembling nanoparticles manufacturing techniques. And with all that hype in the and the nanotechnology space just like the battery space now it was I want to find the real things and make them practical to manufacture because that would that would lead to the impact. So all of my desire for impact grew out of that nanotechnology space and. Honestly has nothing to do with batteries today. Batteries were the first instentation where I saw that I could really have a dramatic impact so it's really been about the impact not about the batteries themselves that was just the first area that we chose to try to impact.
42:54.61
chrissass
Ah, yeah, an amazing journey to get there. Um I guess the question I would have is if I were a younger person just starting my career journey today listening to this podcast and excited about the battery tech and where electrifications going what advice do you have to someone just getting started here.
43:10.28
John Busbee
ah so you know as ah I stayed in the reserves after so I spent 7 years active duty in the military and then got out stayed as a government civilian in the same job but then became a reservist and so as a senior military officer. I would ah give young lieutenants coming in advice and you know the the advice that people would typically get is oh you know you got to do one tour in the pentagon you got to make sure you have a joint assignment so make sure you work with their army or Navy or something like that and they had this very prescribed way to success and my advice was always forget all that. There's only 3 things you need to do I said find what you love do it with all your heart and the rest will take care of itself and so I've always been really passionate. You know it's science and technology for me that I'm super passionate about it. We've got a real problem with it in in the United States and it's embroiled in our educational system people don't want to go into that anymore. So I've always thought as a retirement job I'd go teach like high school physics or something like that. But I'm going to come in in my thousand dollars suit driving a porsche and say yeah science did this forget the green slime that you make to get kids interested in science I want them to see. If they apply themselves and they can ah effectively articulate what they're doing and then have a dream that they can get to those end goals that they traditionally want to do which is have success and be able to take care of their families.
44:42.40
Jeff M_
Yeah, wonderful John it's compelling vision. We're looking forward to that date when you roll in in your five hundred mile Ev ah and and enabled it via what you're doing here today. This is really eye-opening. It's ah it's a part of the battery supply chain that I don't.
44:49.70
John Busbee
Um, that's right.
44:59.43
Jeff M_
Normally think about I didn't really know anything about coming into this conversation. So this has been really really helpful. Thank you so much for taking the time with us today.
45:07.52
John Busbee
Thanks yeah, I'm pleasure to do that and obviously I get excited about what we're doing and trying to make sure that the whole industry gets to where we need to do to really impact and hit the change that we all need.
45:19.74
chrissass
Well thank you John that's been an amazing conversation for our audience. We hope you've enjoyed this conversation as much as we did making it. It was eye opening as Jeff said we learned a lot about technology. There's a lot of bold changes coming here if you can reduce the demand and the supply chain. And reduce the steps. Hopefully we make a better impact for the environment and we see this technology take off. We look forward to checking back with John in the future to see how his vision comes to reality. He made a bunch of bold predictions. So I'm looking forward to touching base in a year or 2 to see where his company is again if you've enjoyed the content. Don't forget to subscribe follow us so you don't miss that follow up in his interview in the future and we'll see you again next time on the insiders guide to energy podcast. Bye bye for now.