Mitra Chem

By the beginning of 2020, the range of new electric cars had surpassed 330 km, up from 130 km a decade earlier. But drivers in the US were still pushing for more. “More range, more power, faster acceleration,” Vivas Kumar, then a principal with the battery material research firm Benchmark Mineral Intelligence, said in a talk at Stanford University that spring . “That’s the kind of attitude that drives Western automotive design decision-making.” To boost the capacity of their batteries, carmakers were increasing the amount of nickel they contained. Kumar, who previously managed Tesla’s battery material supply chain, predicted that they would continue to do so. But he warned that future shortages of nickel and cobalt could prove a roadblock for the industry. After the talk, a university administrator introduced Kumar to William Chueh, a materials scientist working on batteries at Stanford. Over the next several months, they brainstormed ways