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Tech Brew

Sustainability

Tricia Crimmins

techbrew.com

There’s a new type of battery in town: Last month, sodium ion battery manufacturer Peak Energy launched the largest sodium ion battery system in the world. The NFPP battery will be deployed to the electric grid at a site in Colorado and used by utilities and independent energy producers via a shared pilot program. 

In an interview with Tech Brew, Peak President and CCO Cameron Dales said that the launch marks the beginning of sodium ion technology being used for stationary storage and the sodium ion market writ large.

 Sodium ion batteries differ from lithium ion batteries, which are used to power electric vehicles, in a couple of key ways. First, lithium ion batteries need to be meticulously cooled to avoid 

, or electrical current in the battery overheating and potentially catching fire, while sodium ion batteries maintain a more stable temperature. And second, lithium ion batteries have a higher energy density than sodium ion batteries.

Dales told Tech Brew that while lithium ion’s higher energy density lends the batteries to be better suited for EVs, sodium ion batteries are a great match for grid storage.

“You can build a [sodium ion] system that doesn't even have the cooling systems that these complicated [lithium ion] systems have. So you're saving a bunch of money on all the equipment up front,” Dales said. And without a cooling system, Peak is adding “more batteries so you make up a bunch of the energy density penalty at the cell level by having more room in the system to put more cells because you have less of that equipment.”

Because sodium ion and lithium ion batteries are so different, Dales said that he expects Peak’s launch to usher in an era of varying in battery solutions for a diversity of energy storage applications.

“There's no one size fits all best battery for every application,” he told Tech Brew. “We collectively believe that this really is a better fundamental approach for grid scale storage.”

 For now, Peak is building its energy storage system around sodium ion battery cells that are currently in production. Eventually, Dales said, the company intends to bring a cell manufacturing plant to the U.S. to make them domestically in order to recoup clean energy tax credits, per the One Big Beautiful Bill Act.

“[The Act] makes some pretty tough rules around how you access those tax credits, which are not going to be trivial for any of us to go meet,” Dales told Tech Brew, “but I think it is doable.”

Peak Energy launches first grid-scale sodium ion battery in US

It's the start of “commercial deployment of sodium ion technology” globally.

Peak Energy launches first grid-scale sodium ion battery in the U.S.

Jordyn Grzelewski

The future of transportation is electric.

, that much is clear to Bob Holycross, Ford’s chief sustainability officer and a company veteran of more than 30 years.

Electrifying its global vehicle portfolio will play a key role in helping Ford achieve its goal of being carbon neutral across its vehicles, operations, and supply chain by 2050. With progress well underway in the first two areas, Holycross is focused on what he calls the “next big frontier”: decarbonizing the company’s supplier base.

“We’re into this phase of the journey where more of our electric vehicles are getting out there. We’ve done a lot of work on water, air, waste, and energy,” Holycross told Tech Brew during an interview at Ford’s headquarters in Dearborn, Michigan.

Eliminating emissions from the automotive supply base is sure to be a challenge; automakers rely on vast networks—ranging from mom-and-pop operations to Fortune 500 companies—to supply them with tens of thousands of components for each vehicle.

Enter a new initiative called Transform: Auto, spearheaded by the Suppliers Partnership for the Environment. The program brings together Ford, General Motors, Honda, Toyota Motor North America, and Magna in an alliance—supported by energy advisory company Trio—aimed at helping suppliers reduce energy-related emissions. The group will collectively invest in renewable energy in North America, and eventually around the world.

The initiative will help auto suppliers procure renewable energy “through voluntary green tariffs, onsite solar, community solar, utility-scale renewable energy power purchase agreements, and environmental attribute certificates,” per a news release.

 Holycross said that the first step to bringing suppliers along on its sustainability mission is ensuring there’s accurate data across the entire supply chain. Emerging technologies like blockchain have been helpful in providing a more granular picture.

“The way we start with our suppliers, we set the expectations,” he said. “‘Here’s the data we want to understand.’ We want to know who their sub-tiers of suppliers are. Some of the challenges can be that they have proprietary technology or relationships that they may not want to be completely disclosed. So, we work our way through that to make sure that we understand what we need to know, and then it all flows from there.”

Next, he said, it’s important to confirm that expectations are being met. For example, Ford might ask suppliers whether they’re following standards established by the Initiative for Responsible Mining Assurance, a third-party assessment program.

Ford is still in the process of establishing sustainability targets for its suppliers.

The transition away from fossil fuel-burning vehicles now appears to be happening a bit slower than automakers initially anticipated.

Indeed, Ford has been candid about the challenges of going all-electric. In recent months, the automaker has 

 in the combustion engine vehicles that generate profits.

So, how does this slowdown affect the company’s march toward carbon neutrality?

Holycross said that the company settled on 2050 as a target in part because it recognized that the transition would take time, but pointed out that it’s still pursuing interim targets in the 2030s.

If there is slower uptake of all-electric vehicles, he acknowledged, the company does have to evaluate what that means for its decarbonization strategy. These dynamics require careful management to ensure the company doesn’t get off-track from meeting its interim goals.

One way Ford is doing this is by offering a portfolio of ICE, hybrid, and battery-electric vehicles.

“But then it also is another reminder for us that it’s not just about the propulsion system,” Holycross said. “It’s like, ‘Hey, what are we doing to incorporate more use of non-petroleum-based materials in our products, whether it’s recycled content or advanced carbon neutral-type materials, polymers, other things?”

In March, the Environmental Protection Agency 

 new tailpipe emissions standards that would have battery-electric vehicles make up between 30% and 56% of new light-duty vehicle sales by 2032.

Despite the possibility of regulatory rollbacks if there’s another Trump presidency Holycross said the auto industry is planning far further ahead than the 2024 election: “History has shown us…that when it comes to looking at 2030, 2035, beyond that, we’re going to have to be prepared beyond just the short-term election cycles.”

Now, he views previous industry debates about the technology of the future as settled.

“This focus on broader electrification—whether it is through fuel cells, hybridization, pure battery—has really given us a clear vision of what we need to do, how we truly get to zero,” he said, “And now it’s, ‘How do we bring everything else around and go as fast as we can, but not get ahead of any customer or constituency?’”

Ford tackles ‘next frontier’ of decarbonization: the supply chain

The automaker says it aims to be carbon neutral by 2050, but is pursuing interim targets in the nearer term. 

Modern vehicles contain more software and tech than ever, but they’re still essentially steel on wheels.

Steel is the most common material in cars; it’s found in everything from the chassis to the wheels, making up at least half of a vehicle by weight.

The automotive industry accounts for about 16% of global steel consumption, per a 2023 

. Steel is responsible for more than 30% of a vehicle’s material emissions, the report said, and the percentage of automotive-life emissions from materials is slated to rise to 60% by 2040 as electrification eliminates tailpipe emissions.

That is why climate advocates say the auto sector is uniquely positioned to push for decarbonization in the steel industry, which accounts for about 7% of global carbon emissions.

 from Public Citizen, a nonprofit progressive consumer rights advocacy organization, that demands that the auto industry step up its game on 

, or steel that’s made without fossil fuels.

“The idea is that by encouraging top automakers to make these changes to their supply chains, it will catalyze major action by other automakers—and ideally, wider heavy industry,” Carly Oboth, senior supply chain campaigner for Public Citizen’s climate program, told Tech Brew.

“If [automakers] can signal their demand for green steel,” she added, “it will encourage and convey to steel producers that they need to invest in the technology and they need to use fossil-free steel.”

Traditional steelmaking, Oboth explained, relies on a substance known as coke, a coal-based fuel that is a “significant contributor to planet-warming greenhouse-gas emissions,” as well as to health-harming air pollution.

Now, there are emerging efforts to clean up steelmaking by using renewable energy sources such as green hydrogen to process the materials used to manufacture steel. Green steel is not yet in commercial use, but dozens of 

 around the world look to make it a reality—including a pair of projects in the US that recently got 

With steel demand growing globally and corporations aiming to hit decarbonization goals in the years to come, clean-energy think tank RMI estimates that green-steel demand in the US will grow to 6.7 million tons a year by the end of the decade. The auto industry is projected to make up half of that demand.

“Car makers are uniquely poised to lead in the low-emissions steel market, with 77% of annual US car sales originating from companies that have already publicly committed to clean up their supply chain,” RMI experts wrote in a 

, “some of which have even publicly committed to start using near-zero emissions steel.”

Public Citizen’s campaign calls on automakers to use their influence in the steel industry to advocate for green-steel production.

The campaign kicked off last month with Public Citizen publicly targeting Ford. Oboth said that the nonprofit decided to focus on Ford because it’s a top player in the US auto market and because the automaker already has taken some steps toward promoting green steel, including joining the World Economic Forum’s First Movers Coalition.

Ford, which aims to be carbon neutral by 2050, has committed to purchasing at least 10% low-carbon aluminum and near-zero steel by 2030, per its latest 

, where the company notes that it has signed nonbinding memoranda of understanding with several steel suppliers.

The company reported that it is “taking steps to secure a supply of near-zero emissions steel and low-carbon aluminum for future products” to help meet its carbon neutrality goals and fulfill its First Movers Coalition commitment. Ford last year met with steel suppliers “to understand the required transformation, including the significant increase in demand for carbon-free electricity and hydrogen,” according to the report.

Ford declined to comment on Public Citizen’s campaign.

Public Citizen’s campaign’s demands, detailed in a 

, include Ford signing a procurement agreement by the end of 2025 for 30% green steel by 2030 and establishing a target of using 100% fossil-free steel by 2050.

“You must send a clear demand signal to US steelmakers—and their investors—for fossil-free steel processed in the US,” the letter states, “as a means of transforming the US steel industry and preventing these harmful blast furnace relines.”

Behind Public Citizen’s campaign to get cars made with ‘green steel’

The nonprofit advocacy organization lists Ford as its first target to get fossil fuels out of steelmaking.

Replacing gas- and diesel-guzzling ICE vehicles with EVs has been touted as key to 

EVs eliminate tailpipe emissions, but the process of making them isn’t exactly squeaky clean. A vehicle, whether ICE or EV, emits about a third of its lifetime carbon pollution before it ever hits the road, 

 Public Citizen, a progressive consumer rights advocacy nonprofit.

But there are burgeoning efforts to tackle one of the dirtiest aspects of auto manufacturing and heavy industry in general: steelmaking.

Traditional steelmaking accounts for about 7% of carbon emissions globally, according to 

; steel industry emissions must be halved by 2050, the International Energy Agency estimates, in order to meet climate goals like 

Emerging technologies that promise to drastically reduce emissions from steel manufacturing will play an important role. And experts say the auto industry, a huge consumer of emissions-heavy primary steel, will be key to driving demand for “green steel,” or steel that’s produced without fossil fuels.

“We need automakers to be making more EVs and we need the infrastructure to support EVs and we need people to buy EVs,” said Carly Oboth, senior supply-chain campaigner for the climate program at Public Citizen, which is 

 for green-steel adoption by the auto industry. “But we also need to think about the materials that cars are made with.”

Let’s brush up on some steelmaking basics.

Steel is made from iron ore that is processed largely in coal-burning blast furnaces.

This process is the main culprit behind the approximately 3.6 billion metric tons of carbon dioxide that, 

, steelmaking produces annually. In the US today, there are 

 integrated steel mills—the facilities that use this process—in operation.

The primary pathways to emissions-free steel involve using renewable hydrogen or electricity to produce what’s known as direct reduced iron, or DRI.

Using renewable energy sources to process DRI can virtually eliminate emissions from the process, but the problem is that low-carbon hydrogen is in short supply; none of the DRI plants in the US use green hydrogen today.

“This type of plant runs on natural gas today,” Kaitlyn Ramirez, a senior associate on clean-energy think tank RMI’s industries team focused on hydrogen and steel, told Tech Brew.

“There’s an opportunity for these DRI plants and this technology…to instead use clean hydrogen as the fuel and the reductant for that process and be able to produce green iron or green steel,” she added. “That’s the main pathway that we’re seeing in the near term that’s going to allow for large, commercial-scale, near-zero-emissions steel production.”

 an investment worth as much as $1 billion to 

 in Mississippi and Ohio that will be the first of their kind in the US.

The Ohio project involves transitioning a blast-furnace facility to a hydrogen-powered DRI plant.

The Mississippi facility, operated by Swedish steelmaker SSAB, will produce DRI with green hydrogen. The DRI will then be sent to SSAB’s electric arc furnace in Iowa.

SSAB is a partner in a pilot plant in Sweden—just one of several green-steel projects in development in Europe.

The plant is part of an initiative from SSAB, LKAB, and Vattenfall called Hybrit (hydrogen breakthrough ironmaking technology), and it uses a process that starts by splitting water into hydrogen and oxygen molecules. The hydrogen, SSAB explains, is used to remove oxygen in the iron ore. The byproduct of this process is water, which is then reintroduced into the process to produce hydrogen.

“This creates a natural, closed cycle,” 

. “No polluted water is being discharged, no carbon dioxide is emitted, and the coal stays in the ground where it belongs.”

 the world’s first green steel produced without coal in 2021. Hybrit plans to open a demonstration plant capable of producing 1.3 million metric tons of green steel annually by 2026, 

 with major automotive customers including Porsche and ZF Group. Its operations will include a DRI facility where hydrogen will react with iron ore to create iron that can be used to make steel in a process that lowers emissions by as much as 95%, 

, with electricity coming from local renewable energy sources.

Stateside, Bill Gates-backed startup Electra recently announced it’s capable of producing “emissions-free iron without melting ore on commercial-sized prototypes,” 

 a technology that uses electricity to separate iron from ore without releasing any carbon emissions.

To help boost demand signals, RMI last year convened a Sustainable Steel Buyers Platform, a tool that allows corporations to jointly purchase near-zero-emissions steel in North America. Members—which include Microsoft and real estate developer Trammell Crow Company—aim to collectively request up to 2 million tons of green steel.

“Hopefully with continued push from buyers that are ambitious and looking to meet their climate goals,” Ramirez said, “we can get producers and more green-steel plants online.”

RMI estimates that there is enough demand to support at least three US green-steel plants by 2030.

“Since not one ton of US steel currently produced is near-zero emissions,” RMI analysts wrote in a 

, “American steelmakers are at a critical investment juncture: build near-zero-emissions steel plants now or miss the boat by forcing US companies to import to meet their near-zero-emissions steel needs.”

The biggest barriers to adoption, however, are on the supply side, with no green-steel production yet online in the US and 

 of renewable energy to power the plants that will be needed. For example, last year, just 20% of electricity in the US came from renewables.

“Getting the supply in the ground and produced is the critical thing that’s going to be needed…to supply green steel to buyers that are already demanding it,” Ramirez said.

“The remaining pieces to sort out would be on the permitting side of things and making sure there is access to this large clean electricity and clean hydrogen supply…That’s going to be the critical piece of it, given the scale of what’s going to be needed to run these facilities.”

How new clean-energy tech can help eliminate steel-industry emissions

The pollution-heavy steelmaking process must drastically reduce emissions to help combat the climate crisis. “Green steel” technologies aim to help.

Jordan McDonald

Since stepping down from his executive chairman role at Alibaba in 2019, Jack Ma has reportedly been on an international fact-finding tour to find solutions for solving food crises.

 in the Netherlands and Thailand, as well as a tour of Japan’s Aquaculture Research Institute at Kindai University, where researchers have been farming bluefin tuna.

Farming bluefin tuna could help provide a stable supply of a valuable and critical ingredient in sushi and Japanese cuisine, per the WSJ.

Ma’s Japan pit stop is a significant data point in rising global interest in aquaculture innovation, where 

 that, in turn, are used as feed for the aquaculture industry.

The largest aquaculture-producing countries in the world are in Asia, and together they account for 91% of global aquaculture production. In 2019, the US freshwater and marine aquaculture industry was valued at an estimated $1.5 billion, per NOAA.—

Fish farms: Jack Ma’s ag-tech tour

The Alibaba founder and former executive chairman is reportedly traveling in search of sustainable agriculture solutions.

Jack Ma’s ag-tech tour

Reduce. Reuse. Recycle. And, if AMP Robotics has its way, 

The Colorado-based robotics startup specializes in building waste-managing robots, that operate on a conveyor-belt system and organize piles of recycling and garbage based on their characteristics. The company has raised $74.5 million since its founding in 2015, from investors like Sidewalk Infrastructure Partners, an Alphabet-backed offshoot of Sidewalk Labs, and Sequoia Capital.

These recycling robots are trained to identify and then sort a variety of plastics, cardboard, paper, and aluminum metal, using computer vision. Matanya Horowitz, founder and CEO of AMP Robotics, told Emerging Tech Brew that for over two years, the robots have been able to correctly identify and characterize recyclable material with 95%–98% accuracy.

“There really is a lot of value in all of this material that we put in the recycling bin. Its value [is] in the plastics, the metals, and the paper. The problem is the cost of separating it is high because it requires a lot of work and requires a lot of heavy equipment that doesn’t work too well. And robots help reduce that cost of separation,” Horowitz told us. AMP is looking to grab a slice of the $7.6 billion recycling-facilities industry, but declined to share its revenue.

Part of the problem surrounding the recycling industry is the rates at which some countries recycle their waste. A 2019 study found that Canadians only recycle 9% of their waste, while in the US, the EPA has set a goal of recycling 50% of its waste by 2030. The 

 had a similar goal to recycle half its local-authority-collected waste by 2020, but fell short of its goal at 44.0%, but in Japan, up to 86% of plastic waste was recycled.

The recycling industry might be well-intentioned, but it is not a perfect industry, and the world is taking a harder look at the efficacy of recycling. Recycling itself costs energy and resources, while, according to the EPA, only 32.1% of municipal waste in the US is actually recycled. AMP claims it can help solve these problems by moving faster as well as reducing costs and human labor.

The amped-up recycling robots are capable of identifying and sorting through municipal waste, e-waste, and construction and demolition debris, and use machine learning and AI to spot out and differentiate between types of waste. Horowitz said that the robots are capable of identifying over 100 types of waste in minute detail, categorizing them by color, size, shape, opacity, form factor, brand, and more.

AMP operates globally, deploying over 200 robots in places like Japan, Canada, and the Western Europe, but also has domestic partners in companies like Waste Connections and Waste Management and municipalities like Emmet County, Michigan and Boulder County, Colorado.

For companies looking for a helping hand, Horowitz said the price of the robots varies depending on the buildout AMP’s customers want, but could cost “hundreds of thousands of dollars.” Horowitz claims most customers see an ROI in two years, regardless.

“Recycling facilities really aren’t able to extract value from material because they can’t quantify the performance of their systems. When they separate out plastics, they kind of eyeball it, and they’re like, ‘Okay, it looks like it’s 90% pure or 95% pure,’ but they don’t really know,” Horowitz said. “What it means is all the buyers of plastics have to assume the worst, so they don’t pay for the material’s actual worth. And then…the material doesn’t end up going to the highest and best use because they have to assume that the chemical properties have been degraded, even if they haven’t.”

the algorithms that the machines are trained on are in constant need of fine tuning and training to identify types of trash. Horowitz said that the algorithm needs to be refined to identify things like the plastic composition of clear Solo cups or the difference between torn and intact paper, for example.—

AMP Robotics visual displays how their technology recognizes types of trash