The Anti-China Battery

As a reminder, we’ve got our first event of the season – Turning Biomass into Batteries – on Wednesday, August 27th @ 5:30pm at the Clean Energy Institute in Seattle, WA. 

And if you’re just dying for a preview as to what we’re going to be talking about, here’s the Big Idea in 60 Seconds.

Thanks to a recent scientific breakthrough, the Pacific Northwest is about to become the epicenter of what’s being called the “Anti-China” battery ecosystem.

In case you missed it, China dominates the ~$140 billion global battery market thanks to its chokehold over cathode, anode, and refined battery materials production.

In fact, almost 500 technology and automotive manufacturers in the U.S., Europe and Japan use the top three Chinese Li-ion battery makers – Contemporary Amperex Technology Co. (CATL), BYD and China Aviation Lithium Battery Co. (CALB).

With announced battery manufacturing capacity roughly 2-3x the global demand, it might be easy to think China has already won… no matter what executive orders or tariffs come from the White house next.

But what if there was a low cost way to build a “China Proof” battery supply chain that could immediately create local jobs, solve a significant environmental issue, and unlock the hidden potential of renewable energy assets?

It’s not science fiction. It’s called Long Duration Energy Storage (LDES). 

As the name suggests, energy storage systems have different durations – or how long a battery can deliver power once it’s full. 

Most grid-scale lithium-ion projects today are built to ~4-hours, which is great for peaking and evening ramps but not for true overnight coverage.

LDES offer the promise of 10+ hours of storage – a gamechanger for anyone with residential solar who are seeing less economic benefit (if any) from net metering schemes.

And even though Li-Ion battery chemistry is getting better, faster, and cheaper…

A non-Chinese lithium iron phosphate (LFP) battery production supply chain is still some years away.

That's why the US Department of Energy opened up to $100 million for non-lithium LDES pilot projects — explicitly targeting 10+ hour systems. The Department of Defense, via the Defense Innovation Unit, is also field-testing extended-duration storage on bases. 

Not to mention, there's been more than $500m in private capital invested since 2010.

The most promising LDES technologies are called redoxflow batteries (or “flow batteries”). This design separates fluid into two exterior tanks, where electrons flow through electrochemical cells and a membrane that separates the electrons.

For comparison, flow batteries store energy in liquid electrolytes external to the cell, whereas “regular” batteries do everything within the cell.

This provides flow batteries with a key scaling advantage you can’t get with lithium ion batteries: Energy and Power Capacity Decoupling.

Flow batteries deliver power (kW) via electrochemical stacks and store energy (kWh) in external electrolyte tanks. This means once you determine how fast the battery needs to charge / discharge, you can scale how much energy can be stored by increasing the size of the tanks.

This makes multi-hour discharge scalable without multiplying expensive power hardware.

Flow batteries deliver power (kW) via electrochemical stacks and store energy (kWh) in external electrolyte tanks. This means once you determine how fast the battery needs to charge / discharge, you can scale how much energy can be stored by increasing the size of the tanks.

This makes multi-hour discharge scalable without multiplying expensive power hardware. 

But what makes this an “Anti-China” battery isn’t how long it can store a charge. It’s where the materials come from (and how cheaply they can be produced).

While China is by far the global leader in lithium-ion battery manufacturing, its government has supported the development and deployment of flow batteries too over the past few years.

As a result, a fully installed flow battery system in China had an average cost of $423/kWh. Excluding China, the cost of a flow battery elsewhere in the world averaged $701/kWh in the survey.

The most common and mature flow battery technology is called vanadium redox flow battery (VFRB), with vanadium as both catholyte (V2+, V3+) and anolyte (V4+, V5+).

In fact, China recently completed the largest VFRB project in the world.

While vanadium is certainly a promising technology, there’s no dedicated supply chain for the rare earth – it’s produced as a byproduct of something else.

Another popular RFB is the zinc–bromine battery (Zn/Br), a hybrid flow battery that plate and strip metallic zinc on a solid electrode. 

However, this “plate and strip” chemistry has a major problem: Over time that causes dendrites, shape-change, and clogging, which punch holes in separators, raise resistance, and force maintenance/reset cycles. 

Add bromine’s corrosiveness and you get leaky hydraulics, degraded membranes, and drifting performance—all symptoms of a chemistry that’s unforgiving to small manufacturing or materials errors.

Australian company Redflow was the most promising of Zn/Br companies. However, after 19 years of operation, Redflow entered voluntary administration (Aug 2024) due to the growing cost of dealing with failing products.

Because Redflow was small, it was forced to rely on repurposed third-party components. This put it at the mercy of other manufacturers, who would regularly decide Redflow's small orders weren't worth the trouble.

That’s why the most promising flow variant is hydrogen–bromine (HBr) – a true flow battery that has no plate and stripping.

The electrochemistry has fast kinetics and relies mainly on hydrogen, bromine, and carbon components (electrodes, bipolar plates), avoiding lithium, nickel, cobalt, manganese, and vanadium. 

Fewer plating failure modes, cleaner scaling, simpler bill of materials.

But long-duration storage still lives or dies on materials & manufacturing:

• Membranes and separators must block bromine crossover without choking conductivity—think proton-exchange films paired with bromine-complexing agents and real soak/pressure cycling, not just benchtop specs.

• Carbon hardware – like graphite papers/felts for electrodes and graphite/graphite-polymer plates for flow fields – has to hit low through-plane resistance and the right pore structure/wettability.
  

• Everything that touches electrolytes needs to be halogen-rated. Pumps and valves in PVDF/ECTFE/PTFE, with FFKM (perfluoroelastomer) or PTFE seals and non-metallic wetted parts where possible.
  

• Finally, stacks only stay efficient if the mechanics are right. Flatness, gasket compression, and torque must land in a tight window, with QA that measures contact resistance (mΩ·cm²), leak rates, and compression set over thousands of hours. Get those details right, and HBr stops being a lab curiosity and starts looking like bankable LDES.

Bottom line: Zn/Br Hybrid Flow falters because zinc plating is a reliability tax. HBr Flow removes that tax. 

If you can pair a robust membrane with bankable carbon hardware and halogen-proof balance-of-plant, and you have an LDES platform that scales, meets domestic-content goals, and finally looks like a market ready to tip into hypergrowth.

• The breakthrough: SkipTek’s self-healing liquid membrane turns HBr’s materials headache into a solvable engineering problem—already proven on 120 cm², multi-stack hardware.
   

• The bottleneck we remove: Regenerative Industrial’s domestic biocarbon plates/coatings slash corrosion/contact-loss risks and replace imported graphite with Washington-made carbon.
  

• The market moment: Utilities are shopping for 10+ hour options that are safe, non-flammable, and de-risked geopolitically. HBr with domestic carbons is the whole product that clears procurement gates.  

Want to find out how we’re doing it? Come check out our first event of the season – Turning Biomass into Batteries – on Wednesday, August 27th @ 5:30pm at the Clean Energy Institute in Seattle, WA. 

Click here to RSVP (please sign up for the waitlist if it’s already full)

The next industrial revolution will be what we make of it.

Let’s build it together,

– Jake Hoffberg
CEO, Regenerative Industrial

P.S. We had our first ever local radio interview on KELA! Click here to listen to the ~30 minute episode (starts about 4 minutes in).