By Kristopher Benke
Colin Wessells, founder of Natron Energy, takes a moment to talk to us about how his experience as an industry user at the Foundry influenced the growth of his company right from its very inception. He shares the fascinating chemistry behind the Prussian blue electrodes in Natron’s sodium batteries, and how what he learned at the Molecular Foundry led to the company’s expansion from just him as a sole proprietor to a 250-person company with facilities across the country.
Tell me about what Natron Energy does and what is special about the batteries it builds.
Natron Energy is in the business of building and selling sodium ion battery systems for industrial power customers, including data centers, telecom networks, and big businesses that need batteries to help manage their electrical power consumption.
The special thing about the chemistry inside the Natron batteries is the materials that store the energy. The positive and negative electric materials are highly related to Prussian blue pigment–it turns out Prussian blue is a sponge for sodium ions. It can just soak up and release sodium ions super, super efficiently, so if you can get the chemistry right to make it into a battery instead of just making it blue, you get devices that have very interesting characteristics.
Where did the idea for your user project come from? What brought you to the Foundry?
Before I founded the company, I did my doctorate in materials science at Stanford. For the first couple years, I was focused on lithium-ion materials. Then, I shifted my focus to work on new chemistry systems. One of them turned out to be potentially commercially viable.
I wrapped up my doctorate at Stanford, started Natron Energy in 2012, and the goal was to learn if Prussian blue pigments could have applicability in batteries. The prototype material we had at Stanford was a positive electrode material and we could charge it tens of thousands of times before it would go dead.
What questions did you originally come to the Foundry to answer?
We had some very, very basic questions about the chemistry, namely, could we make them into battery materials that are going to be useful? We didn’t know what the rest of the device would be like. What’s the negative electrode going to be? What’s the electrolyte that passes the charge between them? None of that was known.
And then, furthermore, that particular cathode material that we worked out at Stanford contained a lot of copper, which made it too expensive for a real battery. So then the obvious question would be: even for this positive electric material, can we come up with something that’s cheaper? Something made of iron or manganese, or something else? There were some very basic chemistry questions about whether these Prussian blue pigments can be made into battery materials that can have performance and costs that make sense for a product.
And so, the premise of the first few user proposals I had at the Foundry was to do some basic chemistry research on making materials having different compositions. We used X-ray methods, electron microscopes, and other tools to characterize and figure out what is in these materials.
Tell me a little more about Prussian blue, the material in your batteries. How common is it to find new uses for it?
Prussian Blue was actually the first synthetic pigment. Some chemists in Germany developed it in Berlin, when it was still the Kingdom of Prussia. In the early 1700s, people figured out how to synthesize it for use as a pigment. In the late 20th century, scientists started looking at it for use in smart windows.
The interesting thing about Prussian Blue is that if you chemically oxidize or reduce it, or do electrochemistry on it, it’ll change from blue to transparent. Then it’s one of a handful of materials you could use in a smart window where you turn the window on and off, and it goes from opaque to transparent. That was actually what inspired the work we did at Stanford on that first Prussian Blue cathode material.
We said, wait a minute. It’s also possible we could pass charge in and out of it to store energy. There’s all this data where people have cycled the window in the display on and off a million times. So, what’s stopping us from trying to use Prussian Blue in a battery and operating it a billion times before it goes dead?
And so that was the impetus that led to the initial work of Stanford, and then we had enough data to make it exciting. And so I decided, the next phase of my career is going to be starting a company to make battery products based on this chemistry. At that time, I’m just a guy living in a garage in Palo Alto.
How did you try to answer your questions before you applied for time at the Foundry? Were there any other options available to you?
From a business perspective, the ability to operate depends on financial resources. I was in the process of trying to raise venture capital money when I was able to get a proposal submitted and accepted by the Foundry. It’s possible I could have raised that money and then set up a corporate research lab. It’s also unlikely.
The resources required to establish a corporate research lab is a lot of money. You need to be financially stable enough to even get a landlord to rent you the space. You have to get all the instruments and tools, and you have to hire the people.
From that perspective, I would say it is improbable Natron would have gotten off the ground as a venture had the Foundry not accepted my first user proposal. That led to ARPA-E committing grant money, which then triggered the first venture capital investments. It’s possible there would have been alternatives for raising funding before starting operations, but at that time, there were no other options on the table besides starting the lab work at the Foundry.
ARPA-E took a bet on a 25-year-old kid with a crazy idea, and the only reason they did it is because they could see how hard I was working. They could see the data was getting really, really good, and that was because I had access to the labs at the Foundry.
How did your time at the Foundry affect the growth of Natron Energy?
The core tech has changed over the years, and so has the chemistry, but these core concepts, the Prussian Blue cathode and anode, and the chemistry syntheses that we were doing back at the Foundry, are like the grandfather of what’s in the product today. You can trace it all the way through to that time.
If you take the long view on what has happened in the 13 years since then, we’ve got over 200 people working there at Natron. We’ve got a lab and a pilot line in the Bay Area. There’s also a factory in West Michigan that, when running full speed, can produce enough batteries to support a gigawatt per year of data center customers. Natron now has partners that run chemical plants that are producing literally metric tons of material per day.
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In my view, the fact that we were able to bring a product to market and impact all these customers was only possible because the user facility existed. I would say that user facilities are one of the most important functions of the National Lab system because they have doors open for opportunities like these to arise.
How did working with the staff at the Foundry influence your success?
I think the other thing that was beneficial for me as a founder of the company is that I had exposure to the staff running the user facility–not just the director, but all the staff members working there. This helped guide everything from the company’s lab operations to safety protocols for years.
If you walk into Natron’s corporate R&D lab, there are all these little basics that my time at the Foundry helped with. How do we do the safety training? What types of lab work are you allowed to do on your own, or do you have to have a buddy system? How do we do the training on the electron microscopes we ended up getting? How do we do maintenance on the equipment efficiently and keep it running so people can do their work every day? We learned so much about how to operate a lab just by bumping shoulders day-to-day with the staff there.
It’s not just about the company-specific chemistry problem statement of ‘hey, we want to make Prussian blue battery products at Natron.’ The other thing we learned was how to run the lab, and all those little intangibles that help make the business successful later. I suspect that would be true for any user coming into the Foundry as part of the incubation of a new venture.
How do you see the Foundry impacting businesses like Natron Energy in general?
It isn’t realistic to conduct modern research without instruments like electron microscopes, x-ray diffractometers, and all these things. You can’t really bootstrap the way you might have done 50 or 100 years ago. Because the tools are so sophisticated now, to develop advanced technologies, you need a lot of resources. That’s part of the reason programs like Activate exist. Without the niche the Foundry is filling in the research and entrepreneurship ecosystem, there are really no resources for founders in energy hardware technologies to do applied research.
My hope would be that whoever is reading this will appreciate that the Foundry as a user facility, is unique in the sense that it gives folks an opportunity to do applied research. If that were to change, it would be a shame because then I suspect we’d see fewer research projects actually get new types of products to market.
