Ideas saving the planet: Supercharging Next-Gen Lithium-Ion Batteries

Battery technology has come such a long way. In just a few decades they’ve gone from powering game boys and electric toothbrushes for a few hours to powering entire cities. So what is it like to actually work in this space? Just how difficult is it to innovate and design new battery products whilst ensuring your cutting-edge inventions are protected? And just how close are we to owning our own battery-operated jetpacks? Hello, I’m Lisa Leong.

This is Season 3 of From Idea to Intellectual Property. It’s a podcast about today’s big ideas and the IP considerations behind them. Christiaan Jordaan is the founder and CEO of Sicona Battery, a company focused on battery innovation as we accelerate towards an electrified future.

So Christiaan, how exactly does one get into the business of batteries? In my case, by a roundabout way, I didn’t study battery science or any science for that matter, then went into studying finance and law. And then, yeah, post that I had an opportunity to join another more experienced entrepreneur on my first entrepreneurial journey, co-founding a company doing mining and energy projects in southern Africa. Four things, I started getting involved in the mining sector, exploration for minerals and developing energy projects and all sorts of fun stuff throughout southern Africa.

So as you can hear, I’m from those parts. Through that, that I eventually found my way to battery science. We discovered a graphite deposit in Mozambique and that sort of led me down the path of what do you do with graphite and I realized it goes into batteries and I sort of followed that down a deep rabbit hole, which I haven’t emerged from since.

That’s sort of fast forward quite a few years later and experiences of reverse listing companies in Australia and raising capital and running businesses from Australia back into Africa and all sorts of fun stuff. I decided in 2019 to strike out on my own and wanted to do something in the battery technology space and was fortuitously met a group of inventors at the University of Wollongong with some pretty cool technology in the anode space. Yeah, that was sort of the foundational moment that I realized this is something that could be quite massive in the battery space and I saw the opportunity and I just jumped at it and set up Sekona in June 2019 and went from there.

Christiaan, you spent a long time thinking deeply about the future of batteries, but for most of us, well, we stopped understanding how batteries worked around about the time we had those Duracell ads on TV, you know, the one with the rabbit that never ran out of energy. With more power, Duracell always wins. Duracell lasts longer, much longer.

So how did batteries get from powering rabbit toys to powering things like high-speed computers and even cars? Also, can you please use an analogy that we all might understand, like why don’t we use cake? Yes, that’s one of my favourite analogies and it seems to sit well and people can relate to it. Yeah, so I would say the batteries you refer to would be some of the not rechargeable batteries and used once and done, whereas the world moved towards rechargeable batteries and predominantly that technology that emerges lithium-ion as the chemistry and that sort of became more useful from around 1991, so sort of the history of lithium-ion batteries. It was actually the oil industry that did a lot of fundamental research at Exxon Mobil and places like that that they made some initial breakthroughs and that was in the 70s and I think then in the 90s, Sony were the first, the Japanese were the first to commercialize lithium-ion batteries into handheld camera recorders.

Looks different, acts different, the new Sony IP55 Handycam.

So they started putting it into applications and that sort of picked up speed after that and people started using lithium-ion batteries for laptops and phones and all sorts of devices and that sort of grew from strength to strength and eventually they became cheaper and cheaper and people realized that as a rechargeable storage device or storage medium you can potentially use this to power other devices such as vehicles. So that’s where you know famously Tesla got involved and said hey let’s buy thousands of these of these batteries and put it in a car and see what we can do.

What if there was a car that could move nature without disturbing it? A car that gets smarter with age?

A fair bit has changed in the chemistry makeup and we don’t have time on this podcast to dive into it too deeply but where companies like Sicona are now sitting is after all of this innovation over especially the last five to ten years some of the last frontiers on the one of the layers of the of the battery cake. So if you can imagine a lithium-ion battery using that analogy a cake with multiple layers and you have two predominant layers – a cathode layer which is where you find things like nickel, cobalt, manganese and lithium and then you have anode layer which has predominantly today graphite a carbon source and lithium ions move between these two layers backwards and forwards and in a battery those layers are duplicated so it’s sort of a multi-layered cake but you just duplicate the anode and cathode and in between you put a little separator and you fill it in with electrolyte that’s basically gets your battery you package it up into whatever form you want to package it and it becomes a lithium-ion battery but Sicona focuses and our technology and innovation is on the anode layer of a cake so it’s specifically a material we call it a cake ingredient that enhances the energy density how much lithium-ions you can you can store in your battery cake and it’s literally a sprinkling in of a silicon-based material that we’ve developed and we’re commercializing and by sprinkling it into that one layer something as simple as that you can increase the energy density as a technology lithium-ion batteries have come a hell of a long way they’re now pairing vehicles proud to drive one of those and they’re fantastic once you start driving them you never go back to the old way.

And Christiaan for your business what’s the mission? Yeah the mission for us is to get batteries into electric vehicles and electric vehicles on the road and for everyone to be able to afford them and for that transition to happen faster so we want to really have a meaningful impact on decarbonizing and depolluting the transport sector passenger transport sector in particular, but the way we move things using internal combustion engines is is highly pollutive so it really causes damage to to our health and our planet’s health through the greenhouse gases that it that it emits so it’s something which we we feel very passionate about trying to change and we think the sort of way we can do that through getting more energy density in today’s batteries and to charge them faster we address two main pain points for adoption of electric vehicles: the upfront cost how far you can drive in the case of an electric vehicle and how quickly you can charge them so making a meaningful impact on those pain points is something that you can they can have big impact and then broad impact is what we get through our technology being a drop-in material into the existing battery manufacturing process so we’re not asking the industry to just you know rip up what they’ve done and spend tens of billions of dollars of new money on on our technology we’re just saying just sprinkle this wonderful ingredient into your cake mixing batter and and bake some bake some better cakes that’s really what it’s about.

So your customers then EV manufacturers so as the ultimate consumer we might not know your company name but am I thinking that in the future it might be a little bit like intel inside? Absolutely yeah that’s it’s the second time this week that that conversation came up it’s like how do you position your brand how do we see ourselves and I think we definitely see ourselves as a as a quasi intel of the battery world it’s we’d be proud to one day have these vehicles driving on the road powered by Sicona and by our innovation and something as simple as the material but it really is fundamental to how these batteries become cheaper and perform better for the benefit of consumers and ultimately the planet and humanity.

So what role do patents and other intellectual property rights play in helping you with your business? Yeah it’s the foundation on which we build the company like the initial inventions that gave rise to the company and initial patents that we acquired out of the University of Wollongong, but then the subsequent innovation on top of that and our team’s work to to grow our portfolio so we started with two patents we acquired from the University of Wollongong fast forward five years we now have 126 granted and pending patents in 26 families. We’ve really gone all out and all in on patent protection but beyond that we can talk about that obviously as well as is other intellectual property trade secrets in particular. It really is foundational because without innovation and without something that you can protect and yourself against competitors and also something which is a visible and usable stick to eat others with if you have to or defend yourself with you can’t just say oh we’ve got some cool technology but what is it based on what is your house built on what is the foundation.

I did an interview about trade secrets and actually I was quite surprised by how integral trade secrets are to businesses these days. Can you share a little bit about what you do to protect your trade secrets so we can look under the hood a little bit of what you do and you know we heard the story of Coca-Cola so I’m not surprised if you know there are three of you walking around with little bits of paper that you have to join together to be one recipe.

Yeah it’s a little bit like that in our game and making these materials there’s a fair bit of formulation chemistry and formulations like take part a x percent or so many grams or kilograms or tons and mix with part b and then you get c and the way you mix it the temperature this that and the other sort of the specifics really matter in getting the the ultimate best performing product at the back end so you obviously cover all of this in great detail and breadth in a patent description but it’s deliberately obfuscates what you exactly do so it’s in there somewhere which you have to do but the exact way you do it you keep close to your heart and that’s the trade secret and how you protect that is it’s tricky you need that sort of gets into the realm of keeping sort of cyber security being very important how you protect your access to your systems managing access not every person in the company having full access to all the deep secrets of these formulas and formulations and having those sort of different layers of protection against attack from outside but also from potential inside leakage of information that’s sort of things you have to think about it and it’s something that’s very important as you grow and you become more and more serious you really need to spend some time money and effort on protecting the trade secret elements as well and a lot of it’s becoming closely aligned with cyber security.

Christiaan moving now to the multitude of patents that you own, tell us about how you employ patents generally in your business what’s the process?

We’ve done a fair bit of everything we’ve acquired patents out of university holdings so we’ve dealt with university commercialization offices and have a good experience with the folks over at university of Wollongong we’ve dealt with patents that way where you deal with the fundamental research and inventors that come from university research and all the challenges that you oftentimes have with you know what have they published around it you know is there any anything that they’ve inadvertently created some prior art around yeah so things around university originated ip and patents. We’ve also acquired an existing portfolio which we did from a large larger corporation Johnson Mathie which in turn they acquired it from 3m corporation so we’ve acquired a mature portfolio as well and how to manage that and and keep prosecuting that and get everything you need handed over so we’ve dealt with that. We’ve also got on our ongoing research programs originated new patentable ideas and inventions that we’ve pulled together and started the process from the front to back and accelerated one in particular a very cool reactor carbon coating reactor we’ve developed in-house in conjunction with a third party outside of Sicona so we had to deal with making sure that the IP is consolidated within the company and also how do we go through the accelerated patent protection around that so we’ve dealt with all sorts of different angles to this.

Throughout this podcast series we’ve learned about some of the hurdles when it comes to navigating the patent process what have been some of the sticking points that you could share with us so that we know better?

I would say yeah the sticky points it’s a dark art is what i would say. i’ve got a very high level understanding but definitely not good enough to do this on my own so i would say if you try to do it on your on your own you’re going to not be successful you have to work with professionals. Wo we’ve been from day one been fortunate to work closely with specialist patent advisors Ahurai a startup company themselves run by former patents attorneys and then with Sprusons who’ve been very good to us so we’ve worked with the right professionals in guiding us through this this journey and so through them I’ve learned a fair bit of the sticky points on making sure that who the inventors on that you can substantiate it the sort of supporting evidence around log books and you know your experimental data and all that stuff that you need to maintain some of these you know workings importance of of how you draft your claims and that you’ve put enough meat in the specifications otherwise the claims could fall over, There’s a little bit we’ve we’ve picked up along the way but we rely quite heavily on on getting very good professional advice through that journey which i would recommend to to anyone you know it’s already pretty hard to to build a business and run a run a company so don’t try to skimp on this if you’re in in this sort of a field of science-led technology and invention deep tech any of that stuff you need you need to really take care of. Because IP does matter it matters to your investors matters to your customers it should really really matter a lot to you. I’ve seen too many companies say oh we just keep it all as trade secrets we patent nothing and investors are like well what’s that worth.

Let’s look into the horizon then Christiaan what are you most excited about in terms of battery innovation?

I’m most excited about what we can do with today’s lithium-ion batteries without going for crazy new chemistries i have good friends who are doing some amazing work in crazy new chemistries and you know i think that that work is absolutely needed but i think for the biggest impact we can have in electrifying transport and for everyone to be able to afford electric vehicle it’s sort of the incremental sum of the parts so it’s it’s companies like Sicona with our silicon battery materials that sprinkled into the anode layer it’s the way which these layers get coated when they are they get made where we’re changing from a wet base process to a dry process that makes a big difference. But it’s bringing all these things together at the same time and the innovation on top of innovation into this behemoth of a battery industry that is already there globally i think will have huge impact and electric vehicles will will take over. Yeah i’m quite bullish about how how all of this innovation is going to come together and it’s not per se this people are always looking for this new amazing battery chemistry that’s you know this new mate that’s going to completely take everything over it doesn’t work that way in this space it’s it’s usually small bites is how we eat the elephant it’s not going to just be a brand new elephant that analogy makes sense.

So Christiaan, battery operated personal jet packs – yay or nay? Nah same that would be a disaster I don’t trust I don’t trust humanity enough to be able to fly around safely um maybe flying taxis um that I can buy into uh you know it sort of keeps everyone reasonably safe um and robo taxis I can buy into for sure uh but not individual don’t individualize that it would be a disaster.

Thank you so much Christiaan wonderful to talk with you. Thanks lisa appreciate it.

That was Christiaan Jordaan founder and CEO of Sicona Batteries. Thanks to our producer Cara Jensen McKinnon. This podcast is brought to you by IPH – helping you turn your big ideas into big business. I’m your host Lisa Leong. Bye for now.