A long-sought-after step change may be coming with renewable energy battery tech.

“No, policy makers don’t know. But to be honest, that’s my job. My job is to educate policy makers because I am the CEO of the company that produces that product. So it is my job to educate them and make them understand,” he said.

That was part of what Craig Jones, CEO of Forever Energy, told me when I interviewed him in mid-September. Jones said he has been making frequent trips to Washington, D.C., to raise support for his proposed project to manufacture vanadium flow batteries in the United States. , Louisiana

My question to Jones: Do you think the regulators and members of Congress he’s talking to really understand America’s transition from the current fossil fuel-heavy energy mix to one that relies on renewables like wind and solar? A demand license with electric vehicles means the US should return to the mining and quarrying business in a big way. The question seems especially relevant this week in light of West Virginia Sen. Joe Manchin’s killing of legislation designed to streamline federal permitting projects for energy-related infrastructure projects.

“You’re right,” Jones continued. “People need to understand that solar panels are fantastic. They’re a very low-cost, reliable, non-polluting source of electricity. But when the sun goes down, you have a problem. You need storage.”

“Our vanadium battery absorbs all the electricity produced by the sun beautifully – it’s a beautiful combination. But to have a vanadium flow battery, I need a lot of vanadium. And so, exactly what you say is correct. The United States should not rely on foreign countries for this provision. Local supplies are available.

America has very adequate domestic supplies. During our conversation, Jones emphasized that vanadium is one of the most abundant minerals on Earth and has twice the global abundance of zinc. However, vanadium is made with a small amount of zinc, as 99% of it is currently used as a hardener. “Every year, 12 million tons of zinc are produced around the world, only 100,000 tons of vanadium,” he said.

Another problem is that since the vast majority of steel production in the world currently occurs in China, the extraction, processing and supply chains for this critical mineral are almost non-existent outside the country. “The supply chain is still in its infancy,” Jones said, “which is why one of our biggest initiatives at Forever Energy is to build a processing plant at Caddo Bossier Port in Shreveport to support the company’s manufacturing operations.”

Jones said the processing plant produces waste streams of industrial fly ash, a byproduct of coal-fired power generation and some other industrial processes, which in some applications are loaded with vanadium. This underscores one of the benefits of locating Forever Energy jobs in Shreveport, including its connection to the Red River, which eventually flows into the Mississippi River and connects to the Gulf of Mexico.

“Louisiana and North Louisiana in particular offer many advantages,” he said. “This vanadium processing plant we’re talking about is capable of producing 80 million pounds of vanadium a year, which we need for our batteries. We need river access because that brings in waste streams from the area. So logistically, that makes a lot of sense.”

In another recent interview, Bernadette Johnson, general manager of energy and renewables at Enverus, emphasized to me that the renewables industry must seek a state-of-the-art battery technology change to meet US and global net zero goals. This long-sought-after step-change in battery technology always seems to be around the corner every year, but it hasn’t quite arrived for the past several decades.

Jones agrees, and says his company can finally bring that change to the stationary battery space.

“Right now, for batteries, the market for storage is lithium,” he said. “They are different lithium chemistries. The lithium batteries in your phones, consumer electronics, automobiles, and many others require permanent storage. Jones said he believes that needs to change, and noted that the Chinese have adopted other technologies, such as vanadium flux, as a permanent storage standard and are already deploying them at scale.

Forever Energy is finalizing negotiations with the State of Louisiana regarding the proposed location and is also in the process of raising capital, debt and equity. A key upcoming event is the final approval of a $1.6 billion loan from the Department of Energy, and the recent Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) also includes advanced manufacturing credits available to the company, Jones said. to reach.

Jones believes that Northwest Louisiana’s pre-existing hydrocarbon economy will serve to speed up the process of getting all the necessary permits in place. “Another advantage of North Louisiana, and Louisiana in general, is that there are existing processes through the hydrocarbon economy there. So, letting go and what you have is much faster. You’re not skipping any steps: the bureaucracy there always does because it understands how to process them.

In terms of the energy transition and helping the country reach ambitious climate-related goals set by the Biden administration, Jones believes the plant could be producing vanadium flow batteries at scale within a year and a half from the date of funding and permits. It has been maintained.

“Our battery is a plastic and water battery. We can do this very quickly,” he said.

As I wrote in an August story on vanadium flow batteries, a series of mistakes by three presidential administrations and general bureaucratic incompetence have caused the United States to fall far behind China in vanadium flow battery development and deployment. Jones and his Forever Energy team believe their project will give the U.S. a chance to start getting it in the next few years.

To do this, the company needs the help of the same government that allowed the technology developed in the DOE laboratory to be sold to Chinese interests in the first place. For those agencies, it represents a shot at some measure of redemption.