By james art Nevada’s dry climate and proximity to a potential lithium supply chain are the main reasons San Jose-based Lyten chose Northern Nevada for its planned lithium-sulfur battery gigafactory, said Selina Mikolajczak, Lyten’s chief technology officer.
“I fell in love with Renault a long time ago,” Mikolajczak said. “The developing battery ecosystem is great and there are a lot of talented people in the field that my colleagues and I have worked with in the past. Those are great reasons to choose Reno, but when you add the economics of Reno to the equation, it becomes the obvious choice.”
Speaking last week with Northern Nevada Business Weekly, Mikolajczak laid out Lyten’s plans to build a 1.25 million-square-foot battery manufacturing facility on a 125-acre campus at Reno AirLogistics Park near Reno Stead Airport.
“Northern Nevada is a fantastic place to put battery factories,” Mikolajczak said. “To build a factory, we have to handle lithium metal, and that means we need dry air. You can do it in a dry room, but it’s a hell of a lot more energy efficient, with lower capital and operating costs, to put your factory somewhere really dry so all your dehumidifiers don’t have to extract crazy amounts of moisture from the air .
“When you start with dry air, you can dry it a little bit more and then you can work with the lithium metal in the cell assembly process,” she added. “Reno happens to have the driest, lowest average dew point of any place in the country. It’s a beautiful place with dry air, so we won’t be paying a fortune for electricity to dehumidify.”
Reno is also in close proximity to ever-growing domestic supplies of lithium, both from the mining and battery recycling industries. Lyten plans to invest more than $1 billion to build its facility in Northern Nevada, Mikolajczak told NNBW. The company has already raised more than $425 million from Stellantis, FedEx, Honeywell, Walbridge, the European Investment Fund and the Luxembourg Future Fund.
These entities have multiple potential applications for lithium-sulfur batteries, Mikolajczak said. Lithium-sulfur batteries are lighter and have a higher energy density than traditional lithium-ion batteries, she said, so carriers like FedEx can carry more cargo over longer distances in electrified last-mile delivery vehicles .
FedEx is also interested in Lyten’s sensor products, Mikolajczak noted.
“Outside of the battery business, we’re developing super-responsive sensors to detect things like explosives and fentanyl. FedEx likes our lithium-sulfur batteries, but they are very interested in our sensors,” she said.
Meanwhile, Stellantis is Chrysler’s parent company and has announced a strategic plan to achieve zero carbon emissions by 2038.
Lyten is looking for a preferred site at Reno AirLogistics Park and is conducting due diligence, including geotechnical work, on the site, Mikolajczak said. Lyten also has her eye on an alternative location at the park, she added.
Engineering consulting firm SSOE Group of Toledo and Turner Construction of New York are working with Lyten on architectural designs for the lithium sulfur gigafactory, Mikolajczak said. Lyten expects to break ground within a year and begin battery production in mid-2027.
“It’s aggressive, but not impossible because it’s not that big of a cell factory compared to Gigafactory 1 at the Tahoe Reno Industrial Center,” Mikolajczak said.
Founded in 2015, Lyten is a supermaterials company that specializes in 3D graphenes, which are specialized carbon structures that are used in a variety of applications: lightweight composites; military coatings; sensors; and as an activating component in lithium-sulfur batteries.
“Lithium sulfur as a chemistry has been on the back burner for 60 years,” Mikolajczak said. “It’s amazing chemistry, but making a practical lithium-sulfur cell has proven difficult because you have to control the sulfur. Sulfur is an insulator, and sulfur itself is not conductive, which is a problem when you’re in an electrochemical system. Graphene provides this conductive backbone so you have conductivity and can move electrons around.
Sulfur also reacts in the lithium battery to create polysulfides, which greatly reduces cycle life, or the number of times a battery can be recharged before its capacity significantly degrades, Mikolajczak said.
“If you’re going to make a practical lithium-sulfur battery, you have to make the sulfur conductive and you have to control the polysulfides,” she said. “With our 3D grapenes, we’ve enabled a practical cathode for lithium-sulfur batteries because they’re really great at trapping sulfur and polysulfides, as well as providing a conductive backbone.”
With the cathode problem solved, the next step is to develop a lithium metal composite for the cell’s anode, Mikolajczak said. Conventional lithium-ion batteries use lithium salts such as lithium carbonate or lithium hydroxide as precursors for their cathode active materials. These salts are refined powders that are extracted from lithium salts or minerals – or lithium clays, as is the case with Nevada’s extensive lithium deposits. However, lithium metal is created by putting lithium salts through an electrochemical process to produce pure lithium metal.
Mikolajczak said Lyten has been in discussions with lithium suppliers to establish a domestic supply of lithium metal and to produce special composites of that metal for Lyten.
“We’ve talked to Arcadium and Albemarle, the two companies in the United States that supply lithium metal,” she said. “It is a particular specialty that is difficult, but we will be able to find suppliers.
“It’s something we’re working hard on and we’ve also started our own project to see what it would take to produce our own lithium metal from lithium salts,” Mikolajczak added. “We’re trying to figure out what it would take to scale the technology.”
Meanwhile, sulfur is abundant in the US
“We have mountains of sulfur in the United States,” Mikolajczak said. “If you use Google Maps and you look at the ports of Stockton or Long Beach, there are yellow mountains that you can see from space. These are piles of sulfur.
In addition to working out how to commercialize its lithium-sulfur battery technology, getting all the funding needed to build and equip the gigafactory is an ongoing challenge for Lyten, Mikolajczak said.
“We have good partners to help us design and build the factory, and I’m really confident that there’s enough of an ecosystem in the Reno area to make it work well,” she said. “There are challenges in the supply chain – getting lithium is big. It can all be done, but the biggest challenge is raising the money to do it because it’s expensive. If we can get the money, we can change the world.