Bill Derasmo and John Busbee, CEO and co-founder of Xerion Advanced Battery Corporation, discusses John's transition from a 21-year career in the U.S. Air Force to advancing battery technology.
In this episode, host Bill Derasmo interviews John Busbee, CEO and co-founder of Xerion Advanced Battery Corporation. Dr. Busbee discusses his transition from a 21-year career in the U.S. Air Force to advancing battery technology. The pair focuses on domestic manufacturing, the geopolitical aspects of battery materials, and sustainable and cost-effective battery solutions. Listen in to hear about the insights, challenges, and opportunities emerging in the battery world.
Battery + Storage Podcast — Cobalt, Lithium, and the Quest for Sustainable Batteries With John Busbee, Xerion
Host: Bill Derasmo
Guest: Dr. John Busbee
Recorded: January 15, 2025
Aired: April 4, 2025
Bill Derasmo:
Hello, and welcome back to the Troutman Pepper Battery + Storage Podcast. I am your host, Bill Derasmo, partner at Troutman Pepper Locke. Today, I am pleased to have with me Dr. John Busbee, the CEO of Xerion Advanced Battery Corporation. That is Xerion with an X. For the audience, you can go to xerionbattery.com. Welcome to the program, John.
John Busbee:
Thank you. I've enjoyed your podcast episodes. I'm happy to be here.
Bill Derasmo:
Excellent, excellent. You'll be the first episode for 2025, so we're pleased to have you. Great to have you on today. You're the CEO at Xerion, as I mentioned, and you have been since 2013. Before coming to Xerion, you spent 21 years in the U.S. Air Force. Why don't you tell us about your journey from a long military career and now more recently with Xerion, and then I want to discuss Xerion's story?
John Busbee:
Yeah, that's great. I spent most of my career from undergraduate onward in the Air Force, as you said, and specifically in the Air Force Research Labs, where I ran an intelligent processing control group. We were doing AI 30 years ago when it wasn't called AI, and people thought we were quacks for doing it. It was that you need to be timely in the technology. I think it's a lesson for today as well. But in around the 99-2000 timeframe, I became the first program manager of nanotechnology for the Air Force. There was a lot of hype about nanotechnology, just like there is in the battery space today.
Money frequently follows hype, and there was a lot of money. I was given a lot of money through that job that I had discretion to give it to people doing that work. A lot went to universities, but we funded a lot of small companies. My service in the government as a civilian and military is exactly what it is, it's service. I believe passionately in making sure you're serving for the better good.
As I was doing that, I just got bit by the entrepreneurial bug, and I felt LIKE I was fake. Then I finished my service, that I was comfortable. I don't believe to really maximize what you're supposed to do in life. You're supposed to be comfortable. And so, I decided to start a company. I wanted to be based on nanotechnology, and I wanted to be based on manufacturing and specifically domestic manufacturing, because I thought we had made a real mistake sending all of our manufacturing overseas. My dad spent 40 years as a manufacturing engineer. I was passionate about manufacturing domestically. I was passionate about nanotechnology, but I'm most passionate about making a difference. Being in the military for so long, I wanted to make a difference for the military people on the other side, but I want to make a difference for society in general.
I decided that day that I was going to go start a company. The question, and it wasn't a battery company, it was a company that would make a difference. That was the focus. Then the question became, okay, where can we have the most impact? Our company came about, I did my PhD at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. Paul Braun is one of the professors there who happened to be my advisor. I had done my PhD there for, so it sent me for that, I'd been back at the Air Force and Paul's the one that found the first technology that we commercialized the company around, which was a nanostrip. There's the nano word, the nanostructured foam, which gave us the world's highest power battery and fast charge long before anybody else was doing it.
I was looking for something to do, Paul called me and said, “Hey, I want you to take a look at this. If you like it, I'd like you to help me come commercialize this.” I looked at it and it was nano. They had this nanostructured foam and they were high power and fast charge. It was made with electroplating, which is 150-year-old manufacturing technique, and it was a practical yet innovative twist on using a very long existing technology to make something in the battery space. That's how we get started and that was in 2010. We've grown a lot since then, but that was the genesis of how we got to where we are today.
Bill Derasmo:
Well, and that may lead me to ask about your direct plate and structure pour technology, which I know we're diving right into the weeds, the technical weeds. But when you mentioned that, I didn't know if that's where you were going. I don't know if you want to start there. I understand it's a very technical subject, but I think it's what helps distinguish your company.
John Busbee:
Well, I think anything in the battery space you can talk about qualitatively is really simple, it's the details that are really complicated. This nanostructured foam that we were doing, we were looking for something for a trademark and I actually said, well, it's structured and it has pour, so we put them together as a placeholder. That's how we invented the name and it just stuck. That's like naming your dog dog. But that was where we started and that would give us this fast charge. It's just a foam that was made first by the university. We licensed it from the university worldwide license, no geographic, or fields of use restrictions. It was made by just using a traditional battery process tape casting to use sacrificial particles. Then we electroplated through that, washed the particles out, and then we had this nanostructured foam, which we would use as the current collector of the battery.
Instead of having a mesh that we tape cast the battery structure on top of, we electroplated the active materials in and throughout that and that gave us really high surface area, which is where the world's highest power and all those things came from. That's really hard to do. We were very focused early in the company until about from 2010 to 2014 on very high-power systems. There's not a lot of large markets in high power. In about 2014, we were initially working with Samsung in the electronic space and they said, “High power and fast charge is really nice. It's pretty cool. But the world's moving DVs and everything in the electronic space needs more and more run time and more power. We really think you need to focus on high energy density and fast charge.” We said, well, at that point, maybe we should pivot a little bit.
That's when we developed a direct plate process. Up to that time, we were electroplating in water. That's the way electroplating has been done for 150 years. Lithium and water don't get along too well. That causes problems with lithium batteries. So, all of our lithium that we were using, we were doing in a second process. At that time, I said, it would be really cool if we could do the lithium in the electroplating bath. Why don't we try to do a solvent that's not water? There have been some people exploring using battery electrolyte, which are organic solvents. I said, well, aluminum refinement is done in molten salts. That's a molten salt electroplating. Why don't we try to see if we can find a combination of salts that melts low enough that it's easy to handle, that we can dissolve, or starting materials and use that?
That's what we did. That's where we started. A simple idea that really grew. We just happened to be in the right place, right time and had an idea that turned out to really have legs. Now, that's really our dominant thing, because we can grow all of these different lithiated transition metal oxides, which is most of the commercial battery materials today through this electroplating process. We're actually synthesizing and depositing the material in one step. That makes us skip a lot of steps. We get some structures that give us some really cool other battery properties. From about 2014 to 2017, we were really just developing batteries based on that.
We still had the foam. We didn't put it on the part of the electrode, the cathode, because there's really no way to put holes all the way throughout it and still have enough material to have high energy density. We moved it over to the anode, where we could use it on silicon, where it became an advantage, because silicon anodes, they’re are Achilles heels that the material swells incredibly, to the point that it will actually break the electrode and the microcrack, and that happens is why it's taken a long time to get that commercialized.
Our swelling was being accommodated in this porous material. We could use a much higher amount of pure silicon, up to 20%, 25% of where graphite silicon hybrids, which is prevalent in use today, usually top out around 5%, 6% before the cracking really kills the cycle life. We had a way to make the silicon anode a much higher energy density from a practical perspective. Then as we were electroplating this material, what we realized is that we had something that was actually through playing games with the structure. We had high power on the cathode too, higher than you could get in a powder-based system that is what is used today.
We had skipped all of the binders. We'd skipped the conductive [inaudible 0:09:37]. Since we're throwing out the material that didn't participate actively, we actually had a really high energy density on both sides and still maintained a lot of the power. We had high energy, high power, turns out it's a really safe system. We had a range of properties that a lot of big companies were really interested in high energy, high power, fast charge. We kept the fast charge, safety, all in the same battery. That's really what we were working off of.
We had some nice advantages there early. Because we were early and it sounded too good to be true, we went into a semi-stealth mode. There had been some announcements originally from the university. They got very broadly publicized, like a lot of battery stuff did, especially back in that time around the 2011 timeframe. The structure port technology had been advertised. It was in NBC Nightly news, 60 minutes, Green Car Congress, all of the normal websites, Wired and BBC. There was a huge hype wave, like there is typically. Because of that, the first year to two years of the company, I spent on the phone with CTOs, a Fortune 500 company going, “When can you get me a sample?” I'm like, “Dude, we're years away.”
That's not a good conversation. I was like, I don't want anybody else to know about this until I can hand them a battery and say, “Don't believe me. Just test it.” Because of my experience in the nanotechnology space, I'm really anti-hype, because in the end, it's counterproductive. I think that's what's happened right now in the battery space is that we just bottomed out in the hype curve. We just went semi-stealth and just worked on developing it with companies. It's all been business to business. I made the decision in 2017, 2018 that we weren't going to jump into the EV space, like everybody else. We decided to stay with the traction that we had in the military and electronics, because we had this emerging technology, where we were recreating the manufacturing process.
In addition, it was really the same materials. It was a new way to make it. They created some really cool structures with new battery. I thought, man, that's hard enough to get people to adopt without going into an emerging market. Emerging technology, emerging market risk squared. It was just too much, so we just decided to stay where we were. Now that the thing is now seeming like it's going to go into the last part of the hype curve, which is just steady growth, we've been working with a lot of the automotive companies.
As we started going through that development process, we found the last core technology, which is I told you in the beginning that we thought this was similar to aluminum refinement. We knew that chemistry electroplating is a refinement process, which means we did not need battery grade materials to make a good battery. We had no idea at the time, number one, how far down the refinement chain we could go. Also, this geopolitical situation between China and the Western world was going to wind up where China had a chokehold on refined materials and so on. It turns out, we don't need refined materials to make our batteries. We've really tried to position the company. I told you that the premise of the company is to help the country to really do something. We knew that we didn't need it for our batteries.
During the COVID period, when we were looking at that, we were quite quick enough, like I said, to get into the automotive space, the EVs. Decisions that had been made about the initial manufacturing in the United States, most of that was with the South Korean auto company. We said, well, if we're going to make a difference, we need to supply what they need, not just push our technology at people. What can we do in the upstream space that could also help? Can we adapt our technology to not just make battery electrodes, but also make some of the starting materials? That also turned out to work really well.
Then to add insult to injury, it works really well for recycling, too. We got all of these things that we got out there that have a lot of potential where we really think we can really impact the space. But we, like all of the small battery companies really have to focus on getting through that hurdle into manufacturing, which I think is one of the central problems in the United States today to really have a robust industry. We're really focused on getting our electronic materials, cobalt-based LCO into the electronic space. We're doing that as a component supplier of electrodes and then making boutique cells and first, the military space. Then, also, it's very well adapted to the drone space, like to eVTOLs and the air taxis.
Bill Derasmo:
Well, why don't I jump in there? Because you've gone through a lot, so let's start piecing through it a little bit. Because you mentioned the importance of energy density and fast charging and safety are three things that you, I think, walk through with your technology. There's the thermal runaway risk, any time you're dealing with lithium ion. As I think about one of the safety issues, fast charging, everybody wants fast charging, whether it's an EV, or any other application. Then the energy density issue, which again, I guess, I've viewed that as through the lens of the EV space, but it sounds like, your focus, at least initially might not be there, but more on defense applications.
I know you've gotten some grants as well. Why don't you just start with where's the space that we're talking about where you guys are working with other companies and where you see this great technology, where you see the applications?
John Busbee:
What we've tried to do is match our current manufacturing economies of scale with the market size, so that we can grow with those, wet our teeth in smaller markets, if you will, and then start to address larger markets as we move forward. We decided to, like I said, stay in the military. I told you I'm passionate about making sure the shareholders have the best equipment that they have. We're talking about cells that go into packs for radios and night vision goggles and things like that. We've been working with the army and some of the army tier one pack suppliers in that regard. Then we've been working with a lot of the large electronics manufacturers in wearables and moving into the cellphone space, so the typical.
When you talk about energy density there, we're talking about every generation of new phone, or new watch, or whatever the world will happens to be as more that try to cram more and more in, so there's more energy usage and they went to last the same amount of time. The energy density has to grow there as well. That market continues to grow robustly. It's been a good thing for us, because there's a good compounded growth there. It just got eclipsed by the EV space. Everybody forgot about it in the EV gold rush. That's what we wanted to do.
We've been working now in the automotive space. It's just we decided not to target that as our initial market. You got a four-year development cycle. It's a different chemistry that they're interested in. We felt like, one of the mistakes that a lot of small companies make, especially when there's as much potential as what I mentioned in our technology that we just needed to put a stake in the ground, get that moving, get that commercialized. Then our second generation, we wanted to target into the EV space.
We're doing the early work with that now with many of the large companies. In the next two to three years, as we're actually finishing the scale up and production of our cobalt-based materials for electronics, we're doing the R&D and the early scale up on the nickel-based materials for the automotive space. Then in about two years, we're going to actually move. We're staying in the commercial materials. We just have a better way of making them. It's more cost effective. It's cost effective, because we're skipping steps, but we're also removing a lot of the energy from those skip steps, which means we have a much better carbon footprint. Those are things that all just line up in this too good to be true area.
Then later on, as we get into that, we'll catch the low end of the EVs with the iron-based materials and then also, move into grid storage. We're trying to grow into the area and then we're doing the same thing, not only in the market size, but what we're attacking. Our electroplating process, these molten salts, there's no organic solvent in them, so there's no outgassing, so we're not adding to global warming from emissions, which means we don't have to recapture the organic solvent, which is a huge energy cost.
In addition to that, our only byproduct of this lithium cobalt oxide process is that we make highly pure cobalt metal as a byproduct. On electroplating reaction, there's two electrodes, which means there always has to be two reactions. Reaction on one side, which we're using is that thing, cobalt oxide. The reaction on the other is refined cobalt metal. There are some things there that we can do. We're going to go into the EV space first, not with our NMC electrodes, but with some of the precursor materials into the cathode active materials.
Bill Derasmo:
Well, that's an interesting point. Let's just talk about a couple of issues there. One, I know you mentioned the lithium that you are able to use, which has an impact on supply chain in a positive way for the United States. Then, also, talk about the cobalt issue, because on previous podcast episodes, we've mentioned that a little bit and there are some issues with how cobalt is typically extracted in mind, etc., and some real controversy, I think, around that. I was wondering if you could talk about it, because my ears perked up when you said one of our end products is cobalt. I'm curious about all of that.
John Busbee:
You know when we first got started, we were really just focused on the battery technology itself and weren't really paying that much attention to the raw materials. But then, you know, as we got done with our first set of R&D prototypes and really were ready to start looking at scale-up, we really started to think more about the raw materials themselves.
So, you know, that was around the 2017 timeframe. We did start with lithium, but you know, we've been really focused on batteries for electronics and drones, a lot of which are the cobalt. So we really started delving into those raw materials as a source of supply starting about that timeframe.
So we've been looking at it for quite a while now. As most people know, about 70% of the world's supply of cobalt right now comes from the DRC, and there have been some concerns in that area about domestic abuses. And whether or not those are the reality or not is independent of the point.
But in the United States, when those concerns started to become more prevalent the United States government and other players in the United States basically said, you know, we don't really wanna take this from there because of these perceived abuses. And it all went to China. And so now if you look at it, China has about 70 to 75% of the world's cobalt metal refining capabilities.
And then if you want to actually use that in the battery space, whether it be for LCO or NMC, you really have to go through that choke hold in China. And so we think it's really important for us that we can actually use those materials in a non-refined form and avoid that Chinese refinement choke hold.
As a matter of fact, now that the people in the US government and decision makers are looking at that, they're like, “yeah, okay. So we understand what's going on in the DRC. We understand now that there are actual sources which don't have those problems and so let's use those.”
The fact that we can buy imported Cobalt first refined that in the United States, whether it be for high purity alloy uses or as precursor materials into a battery, that allows us to completely bypass that Chinese choke hold. But beyond that, I think one of the things that's a really important point for us is that we can actually take very low purity grades that you may have domestically.
As a matter of fact, anywhere you have copper or nickel, you always have cobalt. A lot of times those just wind up in the tailings because they're not at purities that are economic to extract, and our process is the single step process that can directly draw the cobalt out of the system. And so we can make it profitable at those low purities.
And then that increases tremendously the total amount of cobalt that's practically available to use in the world. So not only are we able to use cobalt that's refined from other sources, but at the same time, we can actually greatly increase the abundance that's available and provide some stability in the world for Cobalt and some of those other metals used in our technique.
Bill Derasmo:
That's fantastic. That's the most positive development that I've heard about with respect to cobalt. There's a recent book out called Cobalt Red, I believe it's called. It's about, and you may read it, John. It's about the terrible situation in the Congo and how the cobalt is extracted. That to me is a great development. You're right, you're helping the United States and its supply chain, but you're really helping the world, because it's an untenable situation. I just get on my soapbox for 30 seconds. I've dealt with the electric part of the energy industry for a long time. People listen to the podcast know I'm more on the electric power space.
That being said, the energy world, that's why I got into the storage issue, because if you're going to firm up renewables, so to speak, one of the ways to do that is with grid scale storage. Then we got into the whole EV space and other applications and all that. It's going from there. One of the things that I'm always concerned about is we're going to replace one set of externalities that are negative, carbon emissions, etc., other kinds of emissions. I hope we don't just simply replace them with another set of negative externalities. Then one of them is the cobalt mining, which is a concern. In any event, I –
John Busbee:
I think in that same philosophical vein, I first got exposed to this. I'm a materials guy. That's what I did in the Air Force. We were doing our stuff that was needed for the airplanes. I saw a presentation by a guy who was a Canadian miner. They had in their leach fields, they had copper and it was killing the fish downstream. They greatly resisted cleaning it up and they got forced to clean it up. Then when they cleaned it up, they actually found out that they had profitable copper there. Then the story he was telling was, don't resist it.
I strongly believe in being a good steward, no matter what we're doing. Every time you start a new industry, if it's a physical object, it's materials, most of them get mined. We just have to ensure that they're doing what they need to do to clean it up and then to put the environment back the way it was when it ended. I think every time you move into a new and just like you say, that's the real challenge, is because I believe that you can do that economically and many times profitably, to make sure that you finish that whole life cycle.
Bill Derasmo:
Oh, it's fantastic. All right, let me just shift gears for a second. You're in Kettering, Ohio, which is you’re dating. How did you end up settling in Ohio?
John Busbee:
I'm a Texas boy, born and raised. Yeah, they say the thing, you can take the boy out of Texas, but you can't take Texas out of the boy. My accent's mostly gone to me, but everybody tells me I still have an accent. I did my undergraduate at Texas A&M, was in the Corps of Cadets, joined the Air Force to see the world. They sent me to Dayton, Ohio, and I never left. We started the company in Champaign, Illinois, but I've lived in Dayton, Ohio for almost 35 years now. I always expected that when we started in the incubator at the University of Illinois, that there'd be some company that grabbed over this and said, “We need you outside the gates of our facility,” and then we'd be forced to move somewhere. When that didn't happen, I moved the company home.
Bill Derasmo:
My daughter went to college in Ohio, so I was curious.
John Busbee:
I know it's a great place to live. I love it. It's subtle, but it's a good place.
Bill Derasmo:
No, absolutely, absolutely. Well, this has been a great conversation. I hope the audience has a good sense now for Xerion and xerionbattery.com to learn more about it. I think getting into where your space is right now, so to speak, and where you want to go, I mean, just my pet interest, I guess, my question would be, I think you mentioned it in passing the grid scale possibility in the future. Just if you could speak to that for a minute, because I think that's a lot of our audience comes into this battery conversation through that grid scale space. I don't know if you see what role you see for your company potentially down the road?
John Busbee:
I think it's going to be the largest one in a long time. Like I said, we were trying to – grid scale was a little farther out than EV in terms of really large implementations. We've been actually working with energy companies since the inception of the company. The things that I've learned in the grid scale space is that you need a 20-year life. Everything in the utility is based on our ROI out to 20 years. You don't care about weight, but you care a lot about cycle life to get to that 20-year point. There are materials that have done that.
In the end, the over-abiding more than anything else is cost. That's what we've been able to do more than anything else in the battery field. We had better battery performance, and that's what we've lived on. In the end, especially as we got through that hype curve, where it was energy density at all, no matter what it costs, now it's like, cost is the most important consideration. I say, we're skipping all the steps. We've actually been able to go now from mind gate materials to a finished electrode in one step. That removes 14 major commercial steps. That's the CapEx, the energy, the labor, out of all those steps, two full complete commercial plants are skipped. That drastically reduces the cost.
We've shown with our LCO materials, which can also have long cycle life, that we can reduce the cost somewhere around the area of LFP, the iron-based materials. People have asked me, well, if you could do that and you have twice the energy density at the same cost, why would you want to do LFP? I said, because then I'm going to turn around and do the same thing with the iron-based materials. I'm going to make them half the cost. Then it's really going to open up the energy space. That work is still to be done. We've identified theoretically that we can do the iron-based materials. To be clear, it's not done yet. We haven't demonstrated that. That's the work that we're starting on next year, because we're going through the nickel-based material R&D first. Try to keep that disciplined as we grow, so we don't lose focus. Because the goal is to have a sustained impact over a long time. We expect to be all in on the grid scale space with the demonstration starting two to three years from now and then becoming a majority of our business over the next 10 years.
Bill Derasmo:
We’ll have to definitely stay in touch on that, because I think that the opportunity is just enormous. It's obviously, look, it's my biggest interest in this, but I'm interested in all of it and the applications that you talked about today and the EVs. But yeah, that's my background. The grid scale piece is always of special interest to me. I appreciate you walking through that. I think, as you mentioned, it's a huge opportunity, because of the different policy goals and just the needs for the country in terms of new capacity. You got a lot of states that really just want renewables. What are you going to do if it's not dispatchable? What are the things?
John Busbee:
Yeah, exactly. You have to have some kind of storage. I'm an all-with-above guy. My thing is, and people are like, “Well, so you're saying we shouldn't use oil?” I'm saying, no, we shouldn't save our oil to make plastics, because it's really expensive to make plastics out of anything but oil. If you have something that's plentiful, then you might as well start developing it now.
I had the privilege to work with Rick Smalley, who won the Nobel Prize for bucky carbon, buckyballs. When he first got the Nobel Prize, he said, “I want to see what I'm going to use this bully pulpit for.” He listed out the top 10 world problems, and then realized that seven of the 10 could be solved with cheap abundant energy. He went through, he went through nuclear, he went through solar, he went through wind, wave. In the end, almost every energy source is derived from the sun. Solar is the only sustainable way to get there. I think we still have a long way to go before it could replace things. You got all the intermittency, which is why you need the whole balance of systems.
Like you said, the sun doesn't shine at night. All of those situations, you have to find energy storage solutions for. I don't know if batteries are the final solution, but I know they're the first solution.
Bill Derasmo:
Well, that's a good way to put it. I think they're part of the picture. For the record, and I think I've said this before, I'm an all-the-above guy, too. I have a battery storage podcast. I work with renewable developers. I work with integrated utility. I work with all different kinds of companies. I've come to the conclusion that if we're going to balance affordability, sustainability, keeping the lights on and dispatching the system, you go to the control room for some of these regions. The guys in the control room, they have a really difficult job. Let's make their job a little easier with more dispatchable resources.
John Busbee:
Absolutely.
Bill Derasmo:
Yeah. We're on the same page there. I think that these storage technologies will play a big role going forward, almost no matter of what. In any event, maybe we should wrap up there. But appreciate your time today. Really appreciate the conversation. Let us know if you want to come back on the program. I'll give you the last word. What should potential customers, people who are interested in working with you, what advice would you give them? What should they do?
John Busbee:
The last thing that I think as we build the national domestic battery space, the government, there's been a lot of work. I know you've had a few podcasts about the BIL and stuff like that. It's a big hurdle to get the domestic energy started. I think the mistake that the government's making, that's my mic drop, is they're trying to fund only projects that are bankable. My common is if it's bankable, go to the banks. The government needs to be funding things in the valley of death to get them through that into manufacturing, because we don't need to be going down the traditional institutional 10X home runs. We need to be playing Moneyball, to quote the movie, where we get a lot of these technologies that are done on the vine for lack of money. They're great technology. We need to get them through that process. Then natural selection can be the best technologies.
Bill Derasmo:
Great thoughts. Great thought. I love the Moneyball reference. One of my favorite sports movies. Appreciate that as well. Well, again, great to have you on, John, and we will leave it there. Thanks, everyone.
John Busbee:
Awesome. Thanks.
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