Nevada’s arid climate and proximity to a potential lithium supply chain are primary reasons why San Jose-based Lyten chose Northern Nevada for its planned lithium sulfur battery manufacturing gigafactory, said Celina Mikolajczak, Lyten’s chief battery technology officer.
“I fell in love with Reno a long time ago,” Mikolajczak said. “The developing battery ecosystem is great, and there are a ton of talented people in the area that my colleagues and I have worked with in the past. Those are great reasons to choose Reno, but when you add the economics of Reno to the equation, it becomes the obvious choice.”
Speaking last week with Northern Nevada Business Weekly, Mikolajczak laid out Lyten’s plans to construct a 1.25-million square-foot battery production facility on a 125-acre campus at Reno AirLogistics Park near Reno Stead Airport.
“Northern Nevada is a fantastic place to put battery factories,” Mikolajczak said. “In order to build a factory, we need to handle lithium metal, and that means we need dry air. You can do it in a dry room, but it’s a heck of a lot more energy efficient, with lower capex and opex costs, to site your factory somewhere really dry so all your dehumidifiers don’t have to be pulling crazy amounts of humidity out of the air.
“When you start with dry air, you can dehumidify it some more, and then you can work with the lithium metal in the cell assembly process,” she added. “Reno happens to have the driest, lowest-average dew point of any location in the country. It’s a beautiful dry-air location, so we won’t be paying a fortune for electricity for dehumidification.”
Reno also happens to be located in close proximity to an ever-growing domestic supply of lithium, both from the mining and battery recycling industries. Lyten plans to invest more than $1 billion to build its Northern Nevada facility, Mikolajczak told NNBW. The company has already raised more than $425 million from Stellantis, FedEx, Honeywell, Walbridge, the European Investment Fund and the Luxembourg Future Fund.
Those entities have multiple potential uses for lithium sulfur batteries, Mikolajczak said. Lithium sulfur batteries are lighter and more energy dense than traditional lithium-ion batteries, she said, so transportation carriers such as FedEx can carry more freight for longer distances in electrified last-mile fleet delivery vehicles.
FedEx is also interested in Lyten’s sensor products, Mikolajczak noted.
“Outside of the battery business, we are developing super responsive sensors for detecting things like explosives and fentanyl. FedEx likes our lithium sulfur batteries, but they are very interested in our sensors,” she said.
Stellantis, meanwhile, is the parent company for Chrysler and has announced a strategic plan to achieve net carbon zero by 2038.
Lyten is looking at a preferred location within the Reno AirLogistics Park and is performing due diligence, including geotechnical work, on the site, Mikolajczak said. Lyten has its eye on an alternate site within the park as well, she added.
Engineering consulting firm SSOE Group of Toledo and Turner Construction of New York have been working with Lyten on architectural designs for the lithium sulfur gigafactory, Mikolajczak said. Lyten expects to break ground within a year’s time and begin battery production in mid-2027.
“It’s aggressive, but not impossible, because it’s not that big of a cell factory compared to the Gigafactory 1 at Tahoe Reno Industrial Center,” Mikolajczak said.
Founded in 2015, Lyten is a supermaterials company that specializes in 3D graphenes, which are specialized carbon structures that are used in a variety of applications: Lightweight composites; military-grade coatings; sensors; and as an enabling component in lithium-sulfur batteries.
“Lithium sulfur as a chemistry has been on the backburner for 60 years,” Mikolajczak said. “It’s an amazing chemistry, but making a practical lithium sulfur cell has proved difficult because you have to control the sulfur. Sulfur is an insulator, and on its own, sulfur is not conductive, which is a problem when you are in an electrochemical system. Graphene provides that conductive backbone so you have conductivity and can move electrons.”
Sulfur also reacts within the lithium battery and creates polysulfides, which significantly reduces cycle life, or the number of times the battery can be recharged before its capacity significantly degrades, Mikolajczak said.
“If you are going to make a practical lithium sulfur battery, you have to provide conductivity to the sulfur, and you have to control the polysulfides,” she said. “With our 3D grapenes, we have enabled a practical cathode for lithium sulfur batteries because they are really great about holding onto the sulfur and polysulfides, as well as providing a conductive backbone.”
With the cathode issue addressed, the next step is developing a lithium metal composite for the cell anode, Mikolajczak said. Conventional lithium-ion batteries use lithium salts, such as lithium carbonate or lithium hydroxide as precursors for their cathode active materials. These salts are refined powders that are extracted from lithium brines or minerals – or lithium clays, as is the case in Nevada’s expansive lithium deposits. Lithium metal, however, is created by putting lithium salts through an electrochemical process to produce a pure lithium metal.
Mikolajczak said Lyten has been in discussions with lithium suppliers to create a domestic supply of lithium metal, and to produce specialty composites of that metal for Lyten.
“We have been talking to Arcadium and Albemarle, the two companies in the United States that supply lithium metal,” she said. “It’s a particular specialty that’s tricky, but we are going to be able to find suppliers.
“It’s something we are working hard on, and we’ve also kicked off our own project to see what it would take to produce our own lithium metal from lithium salts,” Mikolajczak added. “We are trying to understand what it would take to scale the technology.”
Sulfur, meanwhile, is bountiful in the U.S.
“We have mountains of sulfur in the United States,” Mikolajczak said. “If you use Google Maps and look at the ports of Stockton or Long Beach, there are yellow mountains that you can see from space. Those are sulfur piles.”
In addition to working through how to commercialize its lithium sulfur battery technology, obtaining all the funding required to build and equip the gigafactory is an ongoing challenge for Lyten, Mikolajczak said.
“We have got good partners to help us design and build the factory, and I am really confident that in the Reno area there is enough of an ecosystem to make this work well,” she said. “Within the supply chain, there are challenges – getting lithium is a big one. All of this can be done, but the biggest challenge is raising the money to do it because it’s expensive. If we can get the money we can change the world.”
