An ode to electrochemistry

Batteries were electrochemistry’s breakout hit. For years it was a field that kept a low profile, outshined by flashier cousins like biotech and computer science. That is until lithium-ion batteries became big business, showing that studying the relationship between chemicals and energy could unlock technical pathways that other disciplines could not. Now the field is making breakthroughs in critical areas like cement, metallurgy, and new battery chemistries. So what else can electrochemistry do? Which problems is it especially good at solving? In this episode, Shayle talks to Dr. Yet-Ming Chiang, a professor of materials science and engineering at MIT. He’s also the co-founder of at least six electrochemistry companies, including Form Energy and Sublime Systems, which are both portfolio companies of Energy Impact Partners where Shayle is an investor. They cover topics like: Promising applications like mining, SAFs, and other industrial processes that require a high concentration of energy The strengths of electrochemistry and where it fits best in larger system The weak spots of electrochemistry, like solid-solid transformations and the limitation to 2-dimensional surfaces How electrochemical processes work with intermittent power and the role of embedded chemical storage AI’s potential to shape the field — and its limits Recommended resources Catalyst: What do you do with a 100-hour battery? Catalyst: Fixing cement’s carbon problem Catalyst: Seeking the holy grail of batteries Catalyst: The promise and perils of sodium-ion batteries Credits: Hosted by Shayle Kann. Produced and edited by Daniel Woldorff. Original music and engineering by Sean Marquand. Stephen Lacey is executive editor. Catalyst is brought to you by EnergyHub. EnergyHub helps utilities build next-generation virtual power plants that unlock reliable flexibility at every level of the grid. See how EnergyHub helps unlock the power of flexibility at scale, and deliver more value through cross-DER dispatch with their leading Edge DERMS platform, by visiting energyhub.com. Catalyst is brought to you by Antenna Group, the public relations and strategic marketing agency of choice for climate and energy leaders. If you're a startup, investor, or global corporation that's looking to tell your climate story, demonstrate your impact, or accelerate your growth, Antenna Group's team of industry insiders is ready to help. Learn more at antennagroup.com.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

  Hey, it's Executive Editor Stephen Lacey. Many of you were loyal listeners to a show I created and co-hosted for eight years called The Energy Gang. Well, we're back. Jigar Shah, Catherine Hamilton, and I are excited to announce our latest project, a weekly news roundtable called Open Circuit. Every week, we'll break down how major projects come together, how deals and policies get structured, and what it takes to build critical infrastructure at scale, all through the lens of current events. You can subscribe to Open Circuit wherever you listen to podcasts or follow it at latitudemedia.com.

• 0:35Speaker 01

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• 0:40Shayle Kann?

  I'm Shail Khan, and this is Catalyst.

• 0:44Speaker 03

  So what I often tell people is that electrochemistry is powerful enough to break anything.

• 0:49Shayle Kann?

  Coming up, bear with us. It's a love letter to electrochemistry.

• 1:04Speaker 04

  Catalyst is brought to you by Antenna Group, the communications and marketing partner behind the most influential companies in energy, climate, and infrastructure. For three decades, Antenna has helped ambitious companies stand out, build market leadership, and become category-defining brands. From breakthrough startups to global industry leaders, their team brings the expertise, relationships, and track record to accelerate your momentum. Learn more at antennagroup.com.

• 1:31Speaker 00

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• 2:02Speaker 04

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• 2:37Shayle Kann?

  I'm Shayle Khan. I lead the Frontier Fund at Energy Impact Partners. Welcome. So I've been wanting to do this one for a while. Here's one thing that has bothered me. In the startup world, which I inhabit, there are entire firms, like investment firms, dedicated to investing in the biotech, or sometimes they call it tech bio-revolution. Just taking one random example, Andreessen Horowitz, which many folks know, they have a core venture fund, they have a growth fund, and they have a bio fund. Which is all great. There's all sorts of interesting things going on in bio world. But I've always wondered why we don't see quite the same love for my favorite discipline, which is electrochemistry. In the greatest hits album of electrochemistry, you'd have a lot of tracks focused on batteries,

• 3:21Shayle Kann?

  for sure, and for good reason. But there are deeper cuts, too, and some new music with pretty extraordinary potential. Anyway, think tracks on cement and steel and fuels and mining and all sorts of other industrial categories and heavy emitting categories, I should add. Anyway, in my opinion, electrochemistry needs more love and more understanding. So I brought on the perfect guest to talk through it with me. Yet Ming Chang is a professor at MIT, but he also is well-known in the kind of climate tech startup ecosystem for having co-founded, I think, an unparalleled number of electrochemistry-focused startups in and outside the clean energy space. Among them are two EIP portfolio companies,

• 4:06Shayle Kann?

  I should add, Form Energy and Sublime Systems, but also 24M, Desktop Metal, A123 Systems, and even more than that. So yet is prolific, both as an academic and as a generator of ideas in how to apply electrochemistry in the real world to decarbonize things. So with no further ado, here's yet. Yeah, welcome.

• 4:27Speaker 03

  Thanks, Joe. Happy to be here.

• 4:29Shayle Kann?

  Excited to use you as my foil to write a verbal love letter to electrochemistry here. And I think there is no better penman than you to do that. I'm going to ask you maybe to start to just define electrochemistry for anybody who is not already familiar and maybe tell me why it's interesting at the highest level.

• 4:48Speaker 03

  Great. And as you know, I love electrochemistry. And so this is the perfect opportunity for me to talk about it. You know, when I bring folks into my lab, I tell them I do electrochemistry. And I show them a lab apparatus, let's say a glove box in which inside there are chemicals. There may be beakers, there may be solid compounds. And I show them below this glove box is all this electrical equipment. And there are wires leading into this glove box. And I say, well, I do electrochemistry. Here's the chemistry and here's the electricity. Together is electrochemistry.

• 5:27Speaker 03

  To answer your question a little more specifically, you know, how do we think about electrochemistry and what makes it interesting?

• 5:35Speaker 03

  The key point to me has always been the fact that electrochemistry allows you to make chemical reactions occur that otherwise may not occur.

• 5:46Speaker 03

  In particular, you know, chemical reactions that may be very much energetically uphill. If it's spontaneous, it's energetically downhill. It's going to happen on its own. But what about those that you want to make happen that are very much uphill? And so, you know, my example for that would be something like a lithium ion battery. Lithium ion battery, the single cell voltage is about three and a half to four volts. And if we just close the external circuit on a charged battery, it discharges. It's energetically downhill. But then when we want to charge it again, we have to apply that four volts or so. May I geek out for just a second on this?

• 6:30Shayle Kann?

  I expect nothing less.

• 6:31Speaker 03

  Okay. So what's moving when you apply that charge voltage is a lithium ion. So this is a lithium plus one ion, and it's moving across four volts. And so the energy you're importing to that lithium ion is four electron volts. That's a unit of energy, four electron volts. And it turns out that four electron volts is an absolutely enormous amount of energy. If we were to compare it to, for example, the heat of vaporization of water, it's about 10 times that. If we were to compare it to just temperature terms, thermal energy,

• 7:13Speaker 03

  it's equivalent to a temperature of, you know, 46,500 degrees Kelvin. It's an absolutely enormous amount of energy. Yet, we can sit there at room temperature, turn a knob, and make this reaction go backwards and charge that battery. Now, that's really cool.

• 7:32Speaker 03

  Can I give you another example?

• 7:36Speaker 03

  So, the power of electrochemistry, you know, we think, you know, how much is this energy? Again, how do we think about this amount of energy? And let me compare it to mechanical energy. So, you know, mechanical energy, you take a solid, let's say, and you load it and you stress it until it breaks and has a strength. And, you know, some materials have, you know, very high strengths. And if we compare that amount of mechanical energy that you can store, elastically store, in a solid, it is so tiny compared to electrochemical energy. So, what I often tell people is that electrochemistry is powerful enough to break anything.

• 8:19Speaker 03

  And one of the really interesting examples of this is actually in a battery again. If you take a freshly assembled lithium ion battery, it hasn't been charged at all. And we did this experiment, it was part of a thesis in papers. And you put on it a acoustic emission sensor. That's a fancy word for microphone. So you take this battery, you put on a microphone, and you start to cycle it. All this noise comes out, you hear snap, crackle, pop. And that's the solid compounds breaking due to this power of electrochemistry.

• 9:00Speaker 03

  About a decade ago, we recognized that electrochemistry had the ability to literally break anything, which means it could also deform anything. Therefore, we used electrochemistry to produce mechanical actuators. And one of the applications of those mechanical actuators was in a DARPA project, where we were trying to make helicopter rotors twist in flight for aeroelastic purposes.

• 9:28Shayle Kann?

  Yeah, so I think you've well described my impression of electrochemistry, which is that it's kind of magic. But my sense is that it was kind of a backwater field to some extent, pre-batteries. And then batteries are the thing that really have driven... You've mentioned batteries a few times as an example, because it is kind of the quintessential use of electrochemistry. But am I right to understand that there just wasn't that much going on in the world of electrochemistry prior to batteries? And that's what really has unlocked the field? Or was there more before that that I'm unaware of?

• 9:59Speaker 03

  Yeah, I wouldn't say it was a backwater. There's always been ongoing interest in electrochemistry. If you look at the scientific conferences that go on annually, there's always been, for example, a Gordon Research Conference. That's one of the premier no-holds-barred kind of open conferences. There's always been one on electrochemistry. The interest, I would agree that the interest in electrochemistry, and especially in how to use electrochemistry, has really exploded with the onset of the lithium ion battery and all the things that followed that used electrochemistry that you're alluding to.

• 10:42Speaker 04

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• 12:52Shayle Kann?

  I have, I guess, one higher-level question that I've always been curious about. So you want to do some kind of chemical transformation. You can use electrochemistry. You can apply a voltage and induce that transformation. In many cases, there's also, there are alternative pathways to do it. And so one that you see, just taking a specific example, say you want to produce sustainable aviation fuel, for example, right? There are electrical pathways that use electrochemistry to produce ESAF. There are also biological pathways. And that's true of a bunch of different categories where you have the, you know, possibility of the competition between a biological pathway and an electrochemical pathway.

• 13:32Shayle Kann?

  Do you have a heuristic for what are the types of transformations for which electrochemistry is best suited and which are the things that, like, what is it good at? What is it bad at?

• 13:42Speaker 03

  Yes. Great question. And I do believe, as much as I love electrochemistry, that it's important to be absolutely clear about where its limitations are. If you don't follow that kind of pathway of thinking about these problems, you end up with a hammer looking for a nail and that's not really what you want to do. Right? So, one of the reasons the application of electrochemistry have become much more prevalent and interesting is because of this mega trend towards low-cost electricity. The lower the cost of electricity, the more attractive it is as an energy source. And that's what has driven many of these innovations.

• 14:26Speaker 03

  You know, the mantra, "Let's electrify everything." Right? Certainly, you've heard that, I've heard that. The limitation of electrochemistry is that it's a chemical reaction that takes place at an interface. In a way, you could say that it's a two-dimensional process. You always need an electrode and you need electrons being transferred out of the electrode. And that makes it a two-dimensional process as opposed to a thermal process, which is a three-dimensional process. And that, I think, is the inherent limitation.

• 15:02Speaker 03

  We can take electrochemical processes and electrodes. We can increase the surface area, for example. Maybe we can get things to go up by a factor of 10, something like that. But it still has that fundamental limitation. So, what you'll see in a lot of the innovations that use electrochemistry is that they don't use electrochemistry everywhere or in every step. You use it where it does the most good. And, for example, decarbonizing cement with electrochemistry, that would be an example of that we can talk about.

• 15:33Shayle Kann?

  Yeah, maybe walk through, because I think the two-dimensional, three-dimensional thing is a little bit intuitive, but it'd be useful to better understand. Yeah, exactly, take cement as an example. What are the parts of that process for which electrochemistry does make sense and what are the parts for which it does not?

• 15:48Speaker 03

  Yeah, so I'm referring to what we do as Sublime Systems, as you know. And the key thought process there was that, given low-cost electricity, and how would you use that low-cost electricity to decarbonize cement production? And what we didn't think would work was simply using it for heating purposes. You can, of course, take electricity, turn it into heat, and power a thermal process that way. What we, the pathway we took is one that has become interesting in a few other sectors since then, which is to use that low-cost electricity to create a chemical reagents that will then do the chemical work for us.

• 16:31Speaker 03

  And that's a device called an electrolyzer. Most people know an electrolyzer from, you know, a middle school, high school experiments, we split water. And a, you know, what we would call a neutral water electrolyzer, starting with, you know, pH seven water, and applying a voltage in the cell, something above about one and a quarter volts, will split that water and gives you hydrogen and oxygen. But chemically, if you think at the same time about what happens if you're emitting hydrogen, you're starting with H2O and you're taking off hydrogen, you're going to be left behind, what you'll be leaving behind is OH, hydroxyl ions.

• 17:12Speaker 03

  The other end, if you're emitting oxygen, well, you should be leaving behind hydrogen. And so the end where you're emitting oxygen becomes acidic, the other end becomes, the other electrode becomes basic. And so you've created acid and base at the same time. So this idea of using low-cost electricity in an electrolyzer to produce acid and base allows you to produce acid and base for chemical reactions that then follow. And those chemical reactions can be done on a volume basis. And in fact, you can decouple in terms of time when you carry out the chemical reaction. So that, those chemical reagents, the acid and bases, actually become a form of chemical

• 17:57Speaker 03

  storage of the energy that you got from a low-cost electricity. So that general idea has now propagated to several different areas of mining. And for example, if you were to look at the ARPE miner program and the projects under there, you would find several that use electrolyzers to produce acid and bases for mining purposes.

• 18:19Shayle Kann?

  And so the key insight there is that that step, the production of acid and base, Is well suited to this. If you have low cost electricity, you can do it on a two dimensional interface. Whereas the chemical reactions that need to occur after that, you benefit substantially from an economic basis. You benefit substantially from it being a volume thing that you could basically do in a tank essentially as opposed to on a plate.

• 18:46Speaker 03

  You want a big tank. That's right. You want a big tank in which everything's reacting all at once rather than making it all happen at a, at a, an interface.

• 18:56Shayle Kann?

  Okay, so cement is a good example. Mining is another good example. What are some other areas where there's like an interesting intersection of electrochemistry or I guess emergent capabilities of electrochemistry up against what otherwise would have been or has been like a thermal process or a biological process?

• 19:13Speaker 03

  Well, so SAF, system aviation fuels would be an example. And in particular, you know, CO2 to fuels, that is a case where, you know, CO2, you know, decomposing molecules is highly energetic and that's where electrochemistry has that advantage that I referred to earlier. Dial in with voltage, a high electrical potential that can drive a reaction that otherwise thermally is very hard to make happen or essentially impossible to make happen. So, so transformations from gas phase to fuels, from liquid phase to solids even. You know,

• 19:56Speaker 03

  earlier we talked about some of the limitations. I would say that one of the other limitations of electrochemistry, something it's not very good at, is solid, solid transformations. Okay. So, and that, so, you know, why would that be? It's that one of the things you have to have in order to make electrochemical reactions take place is that you have to have some electrical conductivity. You have to be able to move electrons around. And solid particles, especially insulating solid particles, just don't have that conductivity. And so those transformations, when you force them to take place in an electrode, tend to be even slower, more sluggish, which isn't to say you can't make that happen.

• 20:39Speaker 03

  In fact, we have some projects in which specifically we have a way around that. But that's a general limitation, solid transformations.

• 20:48Shayle Kann?

  You mentioned one of the core principles of what makes electrochemistry exciting, which we should dig into a little bit more, which is the availability of low-cost electricity. I think what we've learned over time is that, one, to some extent, there is a fight for low-cost electricity, certainly now, today. If you have low-cost, available, significant-capacity electricity, you're fighting up against a data center probably, or something else. But then the second component of it is that, to the extent that there is really low-cost electricity, absent places that, and particularly if you're looking for decarbonized electricity, absent places that have hydropower, you're talking about low-cost electricity that is sometimes available.

• 21:33Shayle Kann?

  So like your curtailed wind, or your over-generated solar, and things like that. One of the areas in which I think electrochemistry can shine, but does not always shine, is in the ability to operate intermittently. Can you just talk through what are the dynamics that determine whether a given electrochemical system can operate at partial-capacity factor, can ramp up and down to take advantage of cheap electricity if it's only available some of the time?

• 22:01Speaker 03

  That's right. And of course, that's one of the roles of large-scale grid storage. And what we do at Form Energy is the ability to store and buffer those variations.

• 22:13Speaker 03

  But you know, this example with electrolyzers that I mentioned earlier, we initially started off that project thinking that we would do everything inside this one device called an electrolyzer. Split water, you know, make acid and base, or split salt, actually. Make acid and base, carry out the reaction. And then we realized that, you know, actually storing the acid and base made a whole lot more sense because it allowed us to accommodate the intermittencies and have a form of storage. So I think that just in general is the rule. We should think about, you know, how to, you know, of course, the first part of the problem is, you know, what are the implications for CapEx if your capacity factor is not, you know, close to 100%?

• 22:57Speaker 03

  Can't really get around that, you know, it is what it is. But the ability to, you know, run processes continuously downstream of that, that is where having some form of storage, I think, is important. That's what you have to think about doing from day one.

• 23:15Shayle Kann?

  Yeah, I think that's one thing that people maybe don't fully appreciate. So you can, you could sort of solve for the intermittency of the input electricity in two different ways. One is you could literally add batteries. You can add a separate thing that is a battery and that can be, that can be power to power. It could be a form battery. It could be power to heat with a thermal battery, whatever it is. But you can, you can add a battery or you can design your, your system such that it sort of effectively has a battery within it, has a form of storage, energy storage in the form of chemical storage, which is what Sublime does, more or less, right? Like it is

• 23:51Speaker 03

  Exactly.

• 23:52Shayle Kann?

  Kind of has a battery embedded within it. You just wouldn't use that battery to do anything other than the one unit operation that it's supposed to do.

• 23:58Speaker 03

  That's right. That's right.

• 24:00Shayle Kann?

  Yeah. Um, okay, so. Understanding a little bit better than what electrochemistry is good at and why it's interesting in this context, I'm curious about what you feel like are the kind of frontiers of the space. Like, obviously, the biggest body of work in electrochemistry, at least as it applies to things that are commercial out in the world, is in the is in battery universe. And there's like a whole host of different directions to take that, new battery chemistries, there's, you know, I don't know, new materials for lithium ion batteries, all sorts of different things. But then I think what where you've also been a pioneer is in the application of electrochemistry into other sectors. We mentioned cement

• 24:42Shayle Kann?

  is a good example of that. What do you view as like the frontiers today? If you're looking out in the field and you're like seeing things that make you excited about the next five or 10 years in this space, what should we be looking out for?

• 24:53Speaker 03

  Yeah, well, there's, there's quite a few of them that, you know, are in my mind, certainly at the moment. So first, if we go back and think about where are there examples of electrochemical processes that have scaled hugely? A lot of people might say, well, isn't that hydrogen? Isn't that electrolysis? Turns out that that's not, that's not the one. It's really the chloraldehyde process, in which you take a sodium chloride solution, you make sodium hydroxide at one side, chlorine gas at the other side, and hydrogen at the same time. If you want to make HCl, you just react the hydrogen and chlorine. And so there

• 25:35Speaker 03

  are these standing examples of very large scale electrochemical processes. So, and of course, you need to have, you need to have the power supply to make all those things happen. If you look historically at, you know, where manufacturing operations that take a huge amount of electricity, not, not necessarily electrochemistry, but things like, you know, high temperature ceramics, they, you know, Niagara Falls has been a favorite place because of low cost electricity there, right?

• 26:08Speaker 03

  So if I think about, you know, what are the things that today look exciting? Well, you know, I mentioned mining earlier, right? And the, in general, I just think that reinventing these industrial processes that have gotten us to where we are and have primarily been based on, you know, on thermal processes using primarily fossil fuels is a place where we just find, you know, new opportunities regularly. And you know about electrolytic iron production, what Boston Metal does, you know, high temperature electrolysis, you know, a molten, fundamentally a molten iron oxide that you reduce to iron metal at one electrode,

• 26:52Speaker 03

  oxygen gas at the other. So that's, you know, that's on its way. My colleague Antoine Eleanor, who worked on that, is now looking at molten sulfides. And that'll take another 300 degrees C or so off of that. And so I think there'll be a number of cases like that. But at the same time, we can think about bringing that all the way down to room temperature or close to, right? And so that would be, for example, it's a solid phase transformation, which I earlier said can be difficult, but, you know, it would be iron oxide to iron metal, done electrolytically. And so this is an aqueous process.

• 27:36Speaker 03

  We have iron oxide in an alkaline electrolyte. If we bring that in contact with a metal electrode, we can reduce solid iron oxide to solid iron metal. And that, that then, you know, brings down the thermal load tremendously. And so reactions like that are worth thinking about how to make those more efficient in terms of both the, what we refer to as Faraday efficiency, electrons in versus product converted, and also voltage efficiency, how much of a over potential you need to apply to make that happen. So those, I think, are interesting. There's others in the mining area that I am thinking about,

• 28:20Speaker 03

  but probably not mature enough to talk about just yet. But, you know, for example, we'd love to Do mining of copper in a missionless manner. Right. And maybe there's an electrochemical route there doing something like that. Rare earth separations. You know, one of the big problems we have with rare earths is that they're all chemically similar. But for a magnet, we mainly want neodymium and praseodymium. And it gives any chemist a chuckle when the investment community refers to it as NDPR. All caps. So but neodymium and praseodymium is now referred as NDPR. But it should be capital N, capital P.

• 29:06Speaker 03

  But so separating those from all the other rare earths, which are chemically very similar. So in my lab here, one of my postdocs is looking at whether or not there might be electrochemical ways of doing that. So those are all there.

• 29:20Shayle Kann?

  Is it would it be right to think from the highest level that like the hunting ground for like sure first, I guess for electrification, but for electrochemistry is look for industrial processes that require a high temperature. And thus we generally burn fossil fuels to enact and then explore whether you can do it electrochemically.

• 29:41Speaker 03

  Yes, that are energy, not only a high energy, but concentrated energy. Energy intensity. And you know, you mentioned biology earlier.

• 29:52Speaker 03

  I tend to think of biology as processes which in terms of their concentration, the energy is not the total energy may be large, but the concentration of energy is not so is not as high.

• 30:06Speaker 03

  In fact, there's an electrochemical example of that. You know, I mentioned this 2D interfacial reaction issue. What matters to electrochemists most of the time is how much current you can get through a certain area of electrode, so called current density.

• 30:22Shayle Kann?

  Current density.

• 30:23Speaker 03

  We talk about that all the time in a number of contexts. Well, a biological process, even if it has an electrochemical component to it, it's hard to get to high current density. Why is that? It's just that the molecules are large and bulky. And inorganic molecules tend to be compact by comparison. So yeah, so high energy intensity, often inorganic. But those are the kinds of problems that I think benefit.

• 30:57Shayle Kann?

  Right, I guess last question for you. We're obviously in an interesting moment with the vanguard of AI moving all the time and lots of different things. One area in which we've seen folks pushing for the application of these new AI capabilities is in and around electrochemistry, largely in the materials discovery world. Can you use AI to identify better catalysts? Can you use AI to identify better electrolytes that are well suited to particular materials you're going to use in a battery, whatever it might be? How much do you think, I guess from what you're seeing, do those capabilities exist today? Do they actually accelerate the discovery that you'd be doing in your lab or others are doing in their labs? And how much do you see that pushing the vanguard?

• 31:42Speaker 03

  Yeah, so one thing I would point out is that this line of thinking is not as recent as you might think. So back in the mid 90s, we started to think about high throughput computation as a way of being more efficient about the experiments that you would eventually do. I still think that in the real world, you have to do the experiment and show that you get the result that you might expect computationally. But so it's been since then that we first looked at whether or not you could compute a number of cathode structures, for example, and limit the number of experiments you'd have to do. That then developed into machine learning.

• 32:24Speaker 03

  And maybe you didn't have to do it quite so specifically, compound by compound, but take where you could get it, a large database, and see if there were patterns. So AI is just, in a way, the natural evolution of that. If you were to look at the number of, for example, lithium ion battery cathodes that have been discovered, truly discovered through this process, compared to those that were still developed by a, you know, good solid-state chemist intuition. I think that that intuition to this point still has won. There are a few key examples where I do think the computations led to the material.

• 33:06Speaker 03

  Disordered rock salt cathodes, I would say, is probably one of those. But, you know, on the other hand, it's getting, it's getting better and better. And so I, you know, I think it won't be, you know, I think more and more examples of successful discovery through AI will start to result, right? Now, here's where my real question is. Yeah. Is this kind of discovery process, is it really invention? Right? And so my question is, can AI invent? And in a way, I feel like if you equate that kind of discovery with invention,

• 33:48Speaker 03

  we'll see that happen, but it'll be in a limited scope. Such as, you know, it's a catalyst for a particular chemical reaction. It's a cathode for a particular type of battery. But can I, you know, can AI imagine a new system? Okay. That links together a number of different ideas, different concepts. I think a lot of the, you know, invention that's going on in clean tech today, and, you know, certainly the kinds of ideas that get me excited, are where you think about an entire system, where you have to do several things. You have to find a way to produce something. You have to find a way to use something. You have to find a way to dispose of or recycle something, all those together. And the invention is the whole system.

• 34:32Speaker 03

  So my question is, can AI do that kind of invention? And I don't know enough about it to give an answer. It'll be interesting what you think.

• 34:42Shayle Kann?

  I don't, I don't think we know yet, but I think, I think invention is the, is the end of the spectrum. And look, if we never get to true invention, but actually do get all the way to, let's say you don't have to run the experiment ultimately because the computation is going to be sufficiently trustworthy that if you say, okay, hey, I've got this, this architecture, I'm going to use these materials, find me the perfect electrolyte. And it spits out the perfect electrolyte for you. You know, if you get to that point, that's a pretty big, that seems like a pretty big leap in and of itself. It's not as far as saying, solve my problem of how I design a system to reduce iron electrochemically or something like that. But

• 35:27Speaker 03

  Yeah, that's a huge leap.

• 35:28Shayle Kann?

  But if we just did the first thing, it'd be huge, right?

• 35:30Speaker 03

  That's a huge leap. And freeze does have to do the other kinds of preventing.

• 35:33Shayle Kann?

  That's right. I mean, I guess what you're saying ultimately is that you don't think AI is going to put you out of a job, but it might, it might make you a little more efficient in your work.

• 35:41Speaker 03

  I don't think I have enough years left for it to put me out of a job, but I could be wrong.

• 35:45Shayle Kann?

  Yeah. I don't know. I feel like you're going to be co-founding companies into your, well into your hundreds, but we'll, we'll see. Um, yeah, this was, this was really fun. I greatly appreciate you singing the, singing the song of electrochemistry with me here.

• 36:00Speaker 03

  Thank you.

• 36:02Shayle Kann?

  Yip Ming Chang is a professor of material science and engineering at MIT. He's also the co-founder of at least six electrochemistry companies, including Form Energy and Sublime Systems. This show is a production of Latitude Media. Head over to latitudemedia.com for links to today's topics. Latitude is supported by Prelude Ventures. Prelude backs visionaries accelerating climate innovation that will reshape the global economy for the betterment of people and planet. Learn more at preludeventures.com. This episode was produced by Daniel Waldorf. Mixing and theme song by Sean Marquand. Stephen Lacey is our executive editor. I'm Shao Kahn and this is Catalyst.