US startup unveils lithium battery that lasts 1,300 cycles, skips China entirely

Interesting Engineering ^ | June 19, 2025 | Neetika Walter

[Jacquerie]

The monthly Free Beer tomorrow for batteries.

[GenXPolymath]

Most coal ash is absolutely loaded with vanadium, along with its chemical sister uranium. You can get both by leaching the ash with the SiLeach process Australia is using for bulk lithium leaching from clays.

SiLeach is exactly what is sounds like it is a halide enhanced dissolution of all the metals contained in silicates leaving only the silica behind or if you want the silicon you can leach that as well. Nearly every metal forms insoluble sulfates V and U for sure do, aluminum, iron ,nickel, titanium as well. You can in one fell swoop grab every metal from any silica based mineral, rock or ash since coal as is almost all silica based.

It cannot be stressed enough how significant finding a cheap, easy and low energy way to break the silica bond is. You can not only mine coal ash , but also the billions if tons of redmuds from aluminum waste tailings, they are red due to 40+% iron content more than most Iron ores now. That have 2-5% titanium as well. Oh and the 40% of the aluminum you missed in the first pass.

Granite is almost all silica based it’s loaded with uranium once you can solution mine cubic miles of granite while also getting geothermal energy the uranium supply is limitless. There is 40+ trillion tonnes of it in the top few km of continental crust.

They won’t have a issue getting the V coal ash and seawater both contain all you need. Fun fact the polymers that pull uranium from seawater that LLNL and the Japanese have come up with also pull all the vanadium out as well it’s a coproduct one they.try to reduce but if there is value for it they can tune the ion attachment sites to go after more or less V vs U.

Glad to see an American company upping the game for energy density and no conflict metals. 1300 cycles in a EV that does 300 miles per charge is 390,000 miles and that’s to 80% SOH the industry standard procedure it’s not dead it’s down to 80% of its initial capacity that metric is now every battery is tested for cycle life.