By Gary S. Vasilash

When you consider the on-going development of different battery chemistries (to make batteries that are less expensive or more capable or with fewer rare earths or whatever) and you then take into account the billions of dollars that OEMs have already invested in battery manufacturing equipment, a question arises about the extent to which the existing equipment can be used to produce batteries with a different chemistry than the one for which the factories are setup for.

While an imperfect analogy: Consider a factory that makes compact cars. It is decided that more capacity is needed to produce full-size SUVs. While most of the equipment in the plant can be reused, there is still a non-trivial amount of new robots and suchlike that have to be purchased as well as all manner of new tooling.

If that holds in the case of battery manufacture, than it is, to quote Carl Sagan from another context, “billions and billions.”

Lyten, a firm that describes itself as “a supermaterials application company,” has announced that it has determined that the lithium-sulfur battery that it has developed will allow something of a seamless transition from what is being done in many battery plants today.

Dan Cook, Lyten CEO and co-founder:

“Lyten now has demonstrated that lithium-sulfur can be built in standard cylindrical and pouch formats, can be scaled to automated manufacturing, and can be done on the same equipment and processes already being used around the globe to manufacture legacy lithium-ion.

“The result is a significant reduction in the manufacturing scale up risk for a locally sourced, locally manufactured battery that can leapfrog the performance and cost of existing lithium ion and future solid-state batteries.”

One of the benefits cited by the company for its alternative chemistry is that it contains no nickel, cobalt, manganese, or graphite in the cathode and anode, which means that battery materials can be locally sourced and the battery locally manufactured. (Which can mean $3,750 per vehicle tax credits for the manufacturer for local materials and another $3,750 per vehicle for local battery component manufacturing.)

And there’s that other non-trivial bonus of keeping one’s instaslled base of equipment.