GM's big new battery tech push

Latitude Media covering the new. of the energy transition. I'm Shilkan, and this is Catalyst. There are markets for each one of these chemistries within the EV market alone. Coming up, it's been a while since we did a good old-fashioned battery technology deep dive. So here we go.

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I'm Shao Kahn. I invest in early stage technologies at Energy Impact Partners. Welcome. So as you know, I'm a venture capital investor in early stage deep technologies for the energy transition. And so, as is true of many of my peers, I've taken many, many pitches for new EV battery chemistries. There are two big challenges with this category from a startup perspective, in my humble opinion. The first is just how hard it is to penetrate.

timelines, the capital intensity, the requirements of the vehicle OEMs, who are your ultimate customers if you're trying to build one of these businesses, they all present this nigh impossible gauntlet to cross for a startup. Second though, to a first order, virtually all of these battery technology pitches kind of sound the same, at least on their surface. They promise better performance at lower or equivalent cost.

Lots of upside, no downside. And so it becomes a little bit of a blur. But what stands out to me at least is when one of the major players in the market announces their own innovation in similarly breathless terms. So the title of GM's blog post in May was quote Why LMR Batteries Will Change the Outlook for the EV market. All right, so that seems worth understanding.

So I brought on Kurt Kelty, who is GM's VP of battery propulsion and sustainability, to talk it through. Kurt is also a longtime battery supply chain expert. He worked at SELA Nanotechnologies. He worked at Tesla before that. So I wanted to spend some time with him talking more broadly about the state of the North American EV battery supply chain. Also, before we begin, I'm hosting, I think, my third Ask me anything episode, maybe fourth.

Anyway, I will answer all of your questions, big and small, about technologies and the energy transition, markets, venture capital, investing. Something cool, something boring, come at me. If you want to ask a question, just email at catalyst at latitude media.com. That's catalyst at latitude media dot com. For now, here's Kurt. Kurt, welcome. Glad to be here.

Glad to have you. Um, I want to start talking at the high level about the state of manufacturing for batteries in the United States. And then get a little bit more into detail on this new battery chemistry that you guys are pioneering. Uh, but starting at the high level, I guess how would you characterize where we are in terms of the journey to be able to manufacture EV batteries here in the United States?

I would say we're at the early stages of this. Um I I joined the battery industry about thirty years ago and at that point we were moving all the manufacturing offshore to Japan. And uh, you know, I uh I um I ended up leading the effort at Tesla to bring Panasonic along the ride and to bring

cell manufacturing back to the US. And at that time, uh we built the gigafactory. It was going to double worldwide production with the first factory that we put in place there. And we were successful with that. Um, that was kind of the first um real uh deployment of battery manufacturing back to the States with lithium ion cells. And since then

Uh multiple companies have got in into it, whether it's LG, Samsung, SK, uh, and uh the uh many of the Chinese as well. So our manufacturing in the US right now. I would say it's a very early stage. All of us are getting started. Panasonic's got a couple of years ahead of us because of that Giga Factory that we put in place. But um with Ultium cells, we started producing in high volume about two years ago and we're pretty much the second ones uh right after that. So we're

We we've got two factories right now producing the c capacity is roughly 40 gigawatt hours at each factory. So they are significant high volume manufacturers. Um, and we're we're now at a point where we are the largest uh OEM producer of battery cells in North America uh with these two factories. We're adding a third factory, uh Synergy. Uh it's a joint venture with Samsung.

So we'll have three then then that one goes online at the end of 27 in Indiana. So we'll have three factories at that point, roughly all of them having about 40 gigawatt hours per year capacity at each one of them. You mentioned a couple times cells. Um I I guess walk me through the value chain for a second, starting, you know, minerals, materials, precursor materials, et cetera. Cells pack. Like where do we have the most domestic supply in that supply chain and where do we have the least?

Yeah. No, that's uh it's a good way to look at it because The the what what you want to do is you want to manufacture as close as you can to the end product, the end product being an EV. And so you want to manufacture the battery packs as close to that as possible because it's just very, it's prohibitive to ship. It's it just gets very expensive.

uh the packaging, the logistics cost of that. Then of course you want to do the module here locally as well. So those are kind of two right from the beginning. You got to do the m module and pack. uh domestically if you're gonna be producing EVs domestically. Um, then the cells the cells ship better than others. So you could actually uh manufacture the cells elsewhere.

Um, we are manufacturing for all of our vehicles. We've got twelve EVs on the road right now, which is more than any other EV manufacturer. Um and all of those cells come from our ultium cells in North America. So we produce all of them domestically. Now when you go back up the supply chain further.

The big materials next are the active materials, the cathode and the anode. The anode right now is almost 100% from China. That's they they they make uh graphite, both the artificial and the natural graphite. We're the um so that that comes from China right now. The um uh cathode material uh that is a little bit uh more diverse in a sense for for us it's coming from uh Korea. Um

uh right now and it it's gonna be and each one of these materials will be more localized going forward. But right now, if you were to say where is the value stream, um, so the cathode materials coming from uh from Asia. And then uh before that you've got the precursor material. Before that, you've got the nickel sulfate, the manganese sulfate, cobate, cobalt sulfate. Those are all coming from Asia. And then you actually have the minerals. So the nickel, the cobalt, and the manganese.

Uh nickel primarily uh is Indonesia right now, uh is where it's coming from, as well as China, uh as well as there's multiple other count countries. Canada makes uh a bunch uh through Vale. Uh so there's there's a bunch of locations, but Indonesia's really uh leading that right now. Cobalt is generally from the Dominican Republic of uh Dominican, the Democratic Republic of Congo. Um the uh and

There you're getting more and more companies like ourselves that are trying to reduce the amount of cobalt uh in the cells. Um so that comes from Africa, um, and the manganese is from multiple locations. Uh but nickel is generally Indonesia and that's the high value item. And then the last high value item is really the lithium. And lithium reserves are around the world. We've got a a a really large

um a number of reserves in the US. In fact, um we've invested a lot in in this. So Lithium Americas is a company we've invested several hundred million dollars in already. So they're produ they're gonna be producing in the US. They're coming online in the next couple of years. The um but in general what we're doing is this supply chain is coming is getting more and more localized. So

Between now and 2028, we're gonna localize the supply base by about eightfold between now and twenty-eight. So we're we're we're we're putting a huge amount of uh emphasis on trying to bring that. supply chain into North America. US if possible, but North America uh is what we're going for.

And we're making investments. We're we're putting money behind our talk. As I say, we've invested in lithium. We've invested in uh uh manganese production as well, we invested in in graphite, bringing graphite to to North America. So we're putting a lot of money in this to bring the supply chain more local.

I'm curious what the high level theory of the case is for you on when it does and doesn't make sense to onshore or near shore for that matter, various steps in the supply chain. You know, you mentioned one element of it, which is it becomes primitively expensive to ship Thank you. modules and packs. And so there you've got what I imagine is a pretty straightforward calculus around the different cost of production versus the additive cost of shipping.

Uh now of course there are a million confounding factors here in the US with regard to tariffs from on China and all other countries, possibly the existence or non-existence of Inflation Reduction Act related incentives. Set all that aside, maybe, because I know a lot of the decisions that you've been making predate that. What do you think of as the factors that are determinant in whether it does or does not make sense to onshore manufacturing at whatever step in that value chain?

Yeah, it's a I mean it's a theoretical question because we don't live in that world where there's no Uh there's no tariffs and there's no uh uh incentives, but but let let's go to that world um because I I think it's valuable to have that discussion. Um so if there were no tariffs, no incentives. then I I think you would go to the place that is the most economical to produce and where the most economic economical to produce is generally where the material comes out of the ground.

Um the uh it depending on how far you go because uh um the processing, it doesn't make sense to ship rock from Indonesia to the US to do processing here. So you would process it in Indonesia for the first stages. And and then what you're gonna do is once you get the nickel from that, you're you're from from the from the mountainside there, you're gonna get nickel. And then you need to make nickel sulfate. Nickel sulfate is predominantly a a liquid.

You don't really want to transport that uh because it's uh uh it's not you're not this the percent nickel is just too small. So you'll make the precursor material. on site there is what you would normally do uh in in with rational actors. That's what they would do. And then you would most likely ship that precursor material, which is a which is a powder and you

uh send it in these big super sacs and uh uh and you'd send it to a facility to make cathode material. Now you could make cathode material at the same location. but you also have to combine that n that nickel sulfate with some of the other materials, including the lithium, uh when you're making up the cathode material. And so you've you've most likely need to find a central location to do this.

Other countries in Asia could be appropriate. For example, Korea, Japan could be locations where you would do this. It could be also in North America. And that's the direction that we're going with local production of cathode material. So we we're working with partners here to uh manufacture that locally because that makes good economic sense. You send the precursor material over here and then you take that precursor and you make cathode material. Now if you want to become

uh less dependent upon the uh the supply chain coming from Indonesia or from coming from Korea or Japan. You could also make the precursor in North America. The challenge with that uh is that it will most likely be more expensive because our environmental rule rules are are tougher. The concentration from the mountain may not be as great as uh what we're gonna get in Quebec, for example, uh for nickel.

So there's there's multiple uh there's a lot of different moving pieces here. And then when you put the terrorist and the incentives in place, then it changes this all around. Like if you want, if you're really trying to encourage domestic production uh in the US, you would put in tariff.

um and to increase the cost overseas and you'd you'd incentivize local production. The problem with that is that your cost would end up going up higher and your EV cost your EV prices would end up being higher, you'd stifle the EV demand. And that's not accomplishing what you want to accomplish. So it's a really complicated um with multiple dimensions here to really f uh figure out exactly what what is the the optimal strategy.

We're trying to do this at GM right now is trying to figure out what is the optimal strategy with you got movement on tariff. You got movement on the PTC, the incentives. They're gonna expire in two thousand thirty one or two thousand thirty two. And you wanna build up a supply chain that is also economic after that, after those incentives go away. So there's there's a lot to think about here in trying to set up the the optimal supply chain for for batteries.

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All right, shifting over from supply chain to battery technology itself. So You guys put out an announcement uh at GM what a a month ago from this recording, maybe a little bit more. That was uh I would say for corporate blog posts, pretty breathless, um and excited. It it came through.

Um, focused on this cathode chemistry that you are commercializing called LMR. So give me the context and the background here. I mean, folks know, I think who are listening to this NMC and LFP, maybe at the high level, but Walk me through LMR, the history, and like why it is so exciting to you. Yeah, this is super exciting for us because it enables us to lower the cost and maintain high performance.

And what we're trying to do, so over time, uh NMC has been the chemistry of choice in the Western world for EVs. And that's a mixture of the N stands for nickel, the M for manganese, the C for cobalt. And when EVs first came out, when we were doing this at Tesla, when I was there in 2006, we were buying cells that were basically 111. One, one, 1% nickel, uh, same percent cobalt, same percent manganese.

The problem was that the cobalt was the most expensive. So what we all tried to do is reduce the amount of cobalt. And we did that. As the industry, we reduced that. And the new chemistry of choice became what we called high nickel. So that was majority of nickel. When we say majority, it went from 60% to 70%, 80%, even nowadays, you're up to 90% nickel. So it's mainly nickel, and you got a few percent cobalt and a few percent manganese. Yeah. What we wanted to do was take the next

highest material cost, which is the nickel. And we wanted to reduce that. And so that's what we've done is we've reduced the nickel way down in the amount we use and we fill it in with manganese, which is really cheap. Manganese like$2 a kilom. It's really cheap. uh to buy manganese. And so um by doing this, we reduced the cost. Now the what we were able to achieve though was we're able to maintain a really good energy density. Now it's not as good as a high nickel.

But it's in between that high nickel and the LFP in terms of energy density. So for example, when we you look Let's take one vehicle, uh, the the Chevy Silverado. Uh this is an EV that gets over 490 miles of driving range, the the best on the road of any truck out there. The you take that and you you can get that with high nickel, that 490 miles.

Now, if you put um LFP in there, you're getting about 350 miles of range. Same battery pack, same size and all that. It is the difference in energy density. So you'll get 350 miles. Now if you do NMC. you're going to get 400 miles of range, but you're going to get it at the LFP pricing in terms of dollars per watt hour.

So that that's that's the advantage is that you get something in between there in terms of of your driving range, but you're able to do it at the cost of the LFP. And that that's what's really exciting for.

Is there a case here that look if the if the promise of LMR is it is NM near NMC level energy density at LFP cost? I mean the setting aside the EV market for a second, which I know is where you're focused, the stationary storage market, that is dominated by LFP. If you and energy density is not as important in stationary, but it's important still because the balance system costs and site costs and all that scales with size.

Is there not an argument that you should be going after also going after the stationary storage market and trying to basically swamp LFP in that market? Or is there a a downside or a trade off here with LMR that would make it less attractive and stationary?

So I I I I like to talk about batteries in terms of trade off. So I'm glad you use that term because what happens and i I've seen this so many times uh o over my years is you get this announcement from A company or B company and they're like, oh yeah, we've got the best. It's solid state. It's whatever. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. And they they they and and they yeah, they announce this thing and what happens, they leave out one or two metrics that are kind of important. Uh like they leave out cost.

or the leave out um uh cycle life or uh or like the uh a fast charge rate or whatever it is. They leave out something. And the beauty of LMR is that there are no drawbacks to it in in the sense that it has good energy density. It's not as good as high nickel. So I want to be clear. It's between LFP and high nickel.

Um and then but all the other uh characteristics of the chemistry are all solid. So it's it's it's not a trade-off chemistry. That that that's the beauty of it. Now, when you're going, you're going though to a different market. Uh so I I'm talking there's no trade offs for the EV market. But if you go into the ESS market, the energy storage market.

What's required there? They're looking for 10, 15, 20 years of storage. They're looking for it to be cycled every day. So you can do the simple math, you got 10 years. 3,600 cycles that you need to get on the battery cycle. You do 20 years or double that. Now, in vehicles, generally a thousand, fifteen hundred cycles is considered sufficient for the lifetime of the vehicle. But if you're looking for something that's

much greater cycle life, LFP is really good for that. LFP has got really deep I mean you obviously have to optimize the chemistry for it. You you you can make an LFP that's optimized for reasonable energy density and cost. that doesn't have great cycle life or you can optimize around really good cycle life and you can pay for whether it's hard carbon you put in the anode or something like that, you pay a little bit more for the uh for the anode, but

uh you're getting much greater cycle life. So LMR is is good for some energy storage applications. that are cycling periodically, that are cycling thirty times a year, fifty times a year, something like that. LMR would be great for that, because you'd have a smaller footprint that would be required for it. Um compared to LFP. But if you're looking for something for 20 years cycling every day, LFP is still the preferred chemistry for that.

Okay, so then back to the E V battery world. Um, why I mean LMR, you didn't invent LMR. It's been uh attempted for decades, a century. I don't know, you tell me I probably less than a century, but um why has it been tough historically? Yeah, this was started probably about 20 years ago in Jeff Dunn's lab uh at Dauhausen University in Canada is where they started it. And then Argon uh really took it to another level.

And then it was kind of parked for a long time. Um, and I know uh Professor Don has come back to this uh a couple of times looking at it, um, but it they just haven't been able to solve some of the technical challenges uh that were there. And our teams have been working on this for about a decade overall. And one of the beauties of uh uh being an EV manufacturer and now having the lab capabilities.

um that we have at GM now is we can prove out our own technology and figure out how it's gonna work in the vehicle. We've invested over the years in Really state-of-the-art equipment for our RD labs. And then about two years ago, we opened up the Wallace Center, which builds large-scale battery cells. So they can do a large 200 amp hour pouch cell or prismatic cell or whatever we need, and we can actually do testing on it in an auto-scale size.

uh and then and put it under the test of what our automobiles would see in in the real world. And so we were able to do this. So we did work in the R D lab, then we pushed it up to our Wallace Center to build the full scale Uh cells. We tested it under the variety of conditions that it would have for a vehicle. And then we worked very closely with our partner, LG Energy Solutions.

and got on board with them uh such that we all agreed, well, this this is an excellent solution for an EV truck or a full size SUV. It just fits in there really well, the energy density. is because we've got more space to work with in a full-size truck and a full-size SUV, it doesn't need to have that amazing energy density because you got space to move to move around in there. You want it to have a really good range, but you're really driving down cost.

And that's what enabled us to to the LMR enables us to drive down that cost while maintaining that range. You you mentioned that historic it's been difficult to overcome technical challenges. dig into it a little bit more just because I feel like um Battery manufacturing is notoriously hard, but a lot of people just don't like understand what the actual problems you run into are. So can you give me an example? Like what exactly made it hard?

to do LMR. Like what was the technical hurdle you had to overcome? So yeah, bat batteries batteries are really, really hard and I've I've gone on So they kind of starting back in my my days at Tesla when Elon wanted to get into cell manufacturing. And I I really argued that, no, we shouldn't do that. uh argued with him a second time, we shouldn't do that because he really wanted to get his cell manufacturing because no one would listen to us and build enough cells for us.

And finally I I was able to convince them, yeah, let's do it, but let's do it with Panasonic. And so I brought Panasonic along and Panasonic actually built the cells uh in the um in the Giga Factory. The uh uh and coming if you look at what we've done at GM is

They recognized that early on also that building sales was really hard. And so they partnered with LG. This is before I came here. And it was an excellent uh decision to make to partner with somebody that knows what they're doing. And so we had 50-50 joint ventures.

with LG. Now if you look at another example, Northfold in Germany, how they they tried to do it independently. And we we all see what what happened in that case. It's really difficult to make sales unless you have that that expertise. So we were able to make ourselves in the lab. We were able to overcome some of these technical challenges that had uh

had made it difficult to bring this to to commercialization. And then we were able to partner with LG and actually put it into their pilot line and to show that it worked. And that that was the big thing is to be able to take Take some of the the work that we had done, combine that with LG and the work that they had done, and then manufacture it in a pilot line and prove out that, hey, this actually, this will work. It'll get us the cycle life we need. It'll get us the energy we need.

We can manufacture it at an economical cost. Let's do it. And then we pulled the trigger. But just to pin you down, can you give me an example of a technical challenge? The one of the okay one of the challenges we had was on psycholife. And how how do we solve for that? Because initial cycle life just was not proving to be uh to be good enough for what we needed. And so we had to go back and figure out, okay, how are we going to solve this for cycle life?

How are we going to solve for formation time? Because formation can take a really long time to do. And formation is kind of the last finishing process that you have to do before you start shipping shipping sales, before they're ready for usage. And one of the things is if you have a really extended formation time, then it kills your cost because you're the everything that adds time in the production process just adds cost.

And so some of the these were some of the issues that had to be dealt with that our team was able to figure out, okay, let's uh uh it figure out a solution and work with LG and put this into production. So those those were some of the two of the issues that we had to deal with. How do you manufacture LMR? Is it is it drop-in for existing manufacturing? Do you need to stand up entirely new lines, entirely new factories? What does it look like?

So this is one of the beauties of LMR is that it really piggybacks off all the work that we've done with high nickel. So it's the same manufacturing process. So we'll use the same Ultium factories. The uh it's the same electrode manufacturing process. Um, the the the packaging is all the same. The um uh formation steps are a little bit different, but again, the equipment's very the is equipment's the same uh unless you change the form factor.

Um the so that's on the on the sell side, but what's more critical is what you referred to earlier when you're looking more upstream at the material supply, the the the supply chain, it's the same player. It's the same same company that we're buying L the same uh companies that we're buying the uh high nickel cathode from can make the LMR cathode as well.

And they use the same equipment for it. There tends right now there's surplus capacity on the market right now. So there's plenty of capacity to make the new cathode. The uh actually it just you drop out a couple of steps there, so it makes it easier and cheaper to make.

So you're using the same supply chain, using the same materials, you're still getting nickel. The uh there's still about 1% or less of cobalt. Um, and and then there's manganese. You need more manganese than before and less nickel. Uh the anode is still you're relying on graphite, whether it's artificial or or natural graphite. So it's it's really the same supply chain. It really is a drop-in solution. And that's the beauty of it.

Do you think this is the end of the line? I'm always asking when the cups of battery chemistry is like There there's always a next thing, or at least there's always the promise of a next thing. Are we gonna be continually evolving EV battery chemistries forever? Or is there gonna be ultimately a winner and then everything we're doing is just optimizing that winner from a chemistry perspective?

There is gonna continue I mean, we're gonna continue to evolve over time. There's gonna continue to make uh this advances are continuing year after year. I mean, we can see uh over the next five years some of the improvements that are gonna be made. And then you look beyond that. uh of of what's gonna happen. The uh I mean we've got silicon coming down the pipeline that's really gonna alter the the the anode landscape.

The uh cathode side, right now we're at the very beginning of optimizing LMR. You you can imagine with LFP. LFP's been around now. for 20 odd years it's been commercialized. They've come down that cost curve uh over time. And so there's not a whole lot of improvements that you can make with LFP. You've got to jump to a new chemistry. With LMR, we're starting at that uh top of the curve where we're going to head down that cost curve. So there is there is a lot of future potential uh with LMR.

There's a lot of future w with silicon, as I mentioned. Um, we're and we're continuing, we've got an RD lab that really works with all the leading cell developers or battery developers. and tries to figure out, okay, what is gonna be the technology five years from now, ten years from now? And we work with them. We're not trying to invent this ourselves. We're trying to leverage what's out there with the startups in the state.

You can imagine there's a lot of solid state companies. You and I have been hearing about this for years. We're not doing solid state RD within GM. What we're doing is we're evaluating and leveraging all those startup players that are out there and and the major manufacturers, like Samsung's a big solid state developer as well. So we're leveraging what they're doing.

And trying to figure out when is the optimum time to introduce that. Um and what how yeah, how does that compare with NMC or LMR? What if you add silicon? How does that how does that all look? I guess the other question is um you s it's so the the promises that it's um higher energy density versus LFP, competitive on pricing with LFP. We've obviously in LFP prices

go all over the place in recent years, but down a lot. And there have been all these like particularly out of China, right? These eye watering LFP sell prices that get quoted. Um, do you see LMR as having a similar price floor, not current price necessarily, but similar price floor to LFP ultimately? And and you know, I guess to tack on to that is maybe you you pointed out the limitations in the stationary storage and the energy storage market.

f re to compete directly with LFP. But in the EV market, you know, LFP is being used in EVs too. Um, and there are some ridiculously cheap EVs coming out of China that are all using LFP batteries. So DC LMR kind of winning that. Race two ultimately, or is it really? Should I be thinking about it as like if you were going to use NMC, now you should use LMR?

No, so so I I I'm glad you're asking this because we want to be real clear. There are markets for each one of these chemistries within the EV market alone. Setting aside the ESS market, if you just look at the EV market. uh we recognize there is a high-range premium market that's out there that will pay for the high nickel.

That markets out. You can imagine a Cadillac, the Escalade IQ or the Lyric or something like that, where you've got customers that are willing to pay for that premium vehicle and that premium experience. Um, then you've got kind of that middle category that wants good range. but wants to that that is really is more price sensitive. And then you've got the the the lower range, which is the LFP. So we we see a future over the next five years where you're gonna have these three chemistries.

And then you're gonna you're gonna have some pouch, some prismatic in there. Um the uh generally where we're going is uh introducing more prismatic form factor cells in the future because it reduces our part count. Just as an example, the prismatic cells on our next generation pack will reduce our our piece count by over 50% compared to our current pouch cell packs. So prismatic cells, so the form factor also plays a big role in this. So we're looking at three chemistries.

We're looking at multiple suppliers. We're going to be working with LG and we're going to be working with Samsung as well as others going forward. So it's really, we've been able to change how we look at this market because you know, we came from this uh single pouch cell in a single um single module with with the um uh Ultium uh m uh module, which worked really well to get a lot of vehicles to market quickly.

But now what we're doing is we're optimizing each vehicle to try and optimize the performance at the lowest cost possible. And that's why we're going with different chemistries and different form factors to do that. But I see all three chemistries remaining, at least for the next five years. So you said over the next five years, I guess the the final question for you is when are we going to see LMR batteries in vehicles that we can buy? What's the timeline here?

So we've got a real uh clear um target beginning of 2028 is when we're gonna start introducing vehicles. with LMR. We've got our partner set up with LG. We've already set the recipe for it. We've got um we know where the sales are going to be made at Ultium here in uh in the US.

Um so that that's what we're and we've got our product already selected as well where it's gonna go into. So we we've got a clear line of sight. Uh it's gonna be early 28 that we're gonna introduce introduce this chemistry. Um and we're we're super excited about it because it's just gonna it's gonna continue to drive down our costs and maintain really good performance in in our vehicles. All right, Kurt, this was fun. Thank you for the time. I look forward to seeing an LMR battery in the wild.

Me too. I'm really looking forward to that as well. Thank you. Kurt Kelty is GM's VP of Battery Propulsion and Sustainability. This show is a production of Latitude Media. You can head over to latitudemedia.com for links to today's topics. Latitude is supported by Prelude Ventures. This episode is produced by Daniel Waldorf, mixing and theme song by Sean Marquon, Stephen Lacey is our executive editor. I'm Shale Khan, and this is Catalyst.