Cohort 11 (2024): Critical Minerals, Recycling Economics and Next-Gen Cells

The battery industry insights that ran through Cohort 11 in August 2024 reflected a sector caught between rapid scale-up and hard questions about supply. Over ten lectures, more than twenty office-hour talks and a wide spread of case studies, our cohort worked across the whole value chain, from where the metals come out of the ground to where cells go when their first life ends. The picture that emerged was less about any single breakthrough and more about the industry learning to industrialise.

From critical minerals to finished cells

The cohort opened where every battery really begins: with materials. Sessions on battery market trends and critical minerals set the tone, and the theme kept resurfacing through case studies on NMC pre-CAM development in Australia and the case for nickel, direct lithium extraction from oilfield brines, and a high-grade manganese mine in Minnesota. These were not abstract commodity discussions. They kept circling back to a practical worry: can the upstream keep pace with the cell factories being announced downstream?

That question gave the manufacturing sessions their weight. Talks on battery manufacturing steps, challenges and latest trends were paired with material handling for battery production and a case study on a European gigafactory for heavy machinery. The cohort spent real time on quality at scale, including a lecture on computed tomography scanning for cell inspection and an office-hour talk on high-precision, multi-functional battery cyclers. A recurring lesson: a gigafactory is only as good as its ability to catch defects before they leave the line, and the tooling to do that is becoming its own industry.

The chemistry frontier and the systems that use it

Cohort 11 did not treat lithium-ion as settled. Cell design lectures paired conventional chemistry with lithium-sulfur, and a session on aerospace application batteries brought in sodium-ion and lithium-ion-air alternatives for cases where energy density, safety or cost point away from the mainstream. A case study asked directly whether solid-state batteries will end up a challenger or a genuine successor to liquid electrolytes. The cohort's read was measured: promising chemistries need a manufacturing path, not just a lab result, and that path is where most of the difficulty hides.

Alongside the cells sat the systems that manage them. Practical considerations for battery management systems grounded the electrochemistry in engineering reality, while sessions on predicting cell life and aging in virtual environments, plus an office-hour talk on remaining useful life estimation with deep learning, showed how modelling is moving from research curiosity to operational tool. Automated formulation for rapid material screening rounded out a clear message: software and simulation are compressing the timeline from idea to qualified cell.

Recycling, regulation and the money behind it all

If one thread tied the cohort together, it was sustainability made concrete. A dedicated lecture on battery recycling solutions was reinforced by case studies on the recycling industry in Malaysia and on how policy can advance a circular battery landscape for electric vehicles. Office-hour talks stretched the geography further, from a small-scale battery smelter in Nigeria to the broader push towards a sustainable battery value chain. The cohort treated circularity not as a compliance afterthought but as a business model in its own right, with its own economics and its own bottlenecks.

Those economics ran through the whole cohort. Managing ESG risks in the supply chain sat next to frank office-hour discussions on how to fund a battery startup, whether venture capital belongs in battery hardware at all, and the challenges a start-up faces in aviation. Regulation featured heavily too, from current and future rules for BESS under United States customs policy to the impact of emerging trade blocks on the manufacturing value chain. The Nordic battery value chain, Ontario's growth in battery storage, South Africa's green potential and a proposed Ukraine gigafactory gave the cohort a genuinely global map of where capacity and capital are heading.

Grid storage moves to centre stage

Stationary storage earned its own gravity. Utility-scale battery energy storage appeared as both a lecture-adjacent theme and a case study, with office-hour talks on utility-scale BESS in the United Kingdom and Ireland and a modular energy storage and delivery system for microgrid-style applications. The takeaway was that grid-scale batteries have moved past pilot projects into infrastructure planning, and that the constraints are now as much about regulation, interconnection and financing as about the cells themselves. Voices from Volvo Penta on energy storage positioning and from machine builders serving the battery market showed how established industrial players are repositioning around this demand.

Key Takeaways

• Cohort 11 traced the full value chain, from critical minerals sourcing (nickel in Australia, manganese in Minnesota, direct lithium extraction from brines) through to end-of-life recycling.
• Manufacturing at scale dominated, with quality tools like computed tomography scanning and high-precision cyclers treated as central rather than peripheral.
• Next-generation chemistries including lithium-sulfur, sodium-ion and solid-state were examined through the lens of manufacturability, not just lab performance.
• Battery management systems, virtual cell-life prediction and deep-learning remaining-useful-life estimation showed simulation moving into everyday operations.
• Recycling and circularity were framed as businesses, with case studies from Malaysia, Nigeria and EV policy shaping the discussion.
• Financing and regulation were inseparable from technology, covering venture capital in hardware, startup funding, US customs rules for BESS and emerging trade blocks.
• Grid-scale storage emerged as infrastructure, with UK, Ireland and Ontario cases showing deployment scaling well beyond pilots.