As electric vehicles roll off assembly lines, a bottleneck sits upstream: lithium refinement. Turning raw lithium into the compounds needed for batteries is expensive, messy, and energy-intensive, but Mangrove Lithium, a Vancouver-based startup, has a better way. The company has developed an electrochemical refining process that converts lithium feedstocks into battery-grade lithium hydroxide. Converting raw lithium to lithium hydroxide typically requires roasting spodumene—a mineral from whic...

For the last 12 weeks, California start-up Rondo Energy has been operating what it’s calling the world’s largest thermal battery. Rondo’s system converts cheap renewable electricity into heat that can be discharged on demand into industrial processes. This differs from most next-generation energy storage strategies, which provide electricity to grids in the absence of sun or wind. Instead, Rondo’s system aims to help decarbonize emissions-heavy sectors like steelmaking and cement. The sy...