From China to Global: Insights from battery industry veteran Bob Galyen

In this exclusive interview, we sit down with Bob Galyen, a seasoned battery industry professional with over 40 years experience. Galyen is probably the foreigner with the deepest experience of China's battery industry, having served as CTO of the world's largest battery company CATL.
Raised in the US MidWest, Galyen's career began at General Motors’ Delco Remy plant in Anderson, Indiana. He soon became a staff engineer, and worked on GM's first electric cars in the 1990s. He was lead engineer on GM's EV1 car.
Then in December 2011, a chance encounter changed his life. Galyen met CATL's founder Robin Zeng at a conference in Shenzhen. He later moved to the company's hometown of Ningde to work for the company.
In this interview we discuss how China became dominant in batteries; how the US should catch up to China; whether the US should work with Chinese battery companies; his views on future battery technology; and more!
👉 Stay tuned and subscribe for more content on the movers and shakers of the clean energy revolution!
The video is part of Benchmark's new Power Players video series, where we'll be speaking to leaders in the global battery supply chain. Click subscribe to catch up with new episodes. Benchmark Source subscribers can access our full library of interviews, analyst presentations, and energy transition insights here: source.benchmarkminerals.com/. Not a subscriber? Request a free trial: source.benchmarkminerals.com/....
#lithiumbattery #chinaevcar #lithium #electricvehicle

[@gunsumwong3948]

The takeaway I got from this video is Bob Galyen is clearly a world expert knowledgeable in battery for having served key positions in the America's GM and China's CATL. Chinese battery CATL founder has the wisdom to recruit him to work in China and Bob has been instrumental in contributing to CATL's today's 37% global share in the battery market. So China can work with the US but the US has a problem and wants to exclude China. Bob has given the 4 key areas for others to learn from Chinese battery's success. I am in total agreement with the key points but my reaction is the 4 key points naturally develops and Bob has mentioned some of it. The government showing the direction is just a common sense. Unlike the US China doesn't have vast oil reserves so it can't possibly let the Chinese run cars like the Americans as just for the fuel China will be slave for life by importing fossil fuel to keep the ICE cars running on Chinese road. Bob mentioned quite correctly the health care cost suffered from pollution has forced Chinese government to act in favour of rechargeable battery development. The private equity part is easy and straight forward. Once the government identifies an industry for growth everyone would put money in the industry clearly with a future. So China solves the capital investment needs. Technology side is known to every Chinese but may be unknown in the west. The consumable electronic has a huge demand on rechargeable battery as Bob has pointed out. Thus China has been ahead of everyone in supply the lithium-ion battery used in every laptop, tablet, toy, domestic appliance and smart phone. The large volume production and having the world largest consumer market allow China to lead the world in lithium-ion battery for almost a decade. The large battery pack for EV is just a scale-up process of making the small version used in mobile phones. That is the heart of the latter half of the key point of Man and Machine Bob has stated. Lastly China has 4 times of population of the US. However China is a developing country so there is more demand in stem graduates in math, engineering and science simply because there are more job opportunities. The actual stem graduates ratio between China and US is about 8:1. Thus China can move faster in battery development simply because it does not have any shortage of required skilled personnel. Looking at Bob's 4 key areas of Chinese success in battery it appears in the US case the 1, 3 and 4 are actually obstacles.

[@jimgraham6722]

Interesting observations

[@friedhelmschroter8124]

"So China can work with the US but the US has a problem and wants to exclude China." ==>I think the problem is more complex. The "work" relationship with China was, China is doing the blue collar work, the West is doing the white collar work (win-win for both). But in recent years China has shown it has not only the capability but is progressing very fast to supply at lower cost products Western manufacturers cannot compete on (win for China only), because labour cost in China is quite a lot lower. This leads to the great danger of social unrest in the West because not only workers, but also white collar engineers, .... could lose their jobs in larger numbers. With China entering the stage of being able to do also the white collar work a new kind of "controlled" free trade is necessary. Controlled in the sense that the trade balance stays at an acceptable level of deviation from the ideal of being fully balanced. This problem is esepecially in US intertwined by the fact that US has changed its gestratetigic mind on China from positive to quite negative (hostile) seeing China to progress into a 1 person dictatorship and challenging US position as hegemon at least in China. You can clearly see this in the much less aggressive import customs the EU considers to introduce on electric vehicles with initially just an announcement that is followed at this moment by negotiation how to achieve an in total basically balanced trade (while US just introduced prohibitively high levels). In my understanding China just occurred as a major lithium battery manufacturer just in the last 10 years and in my understanding the key point for this China success was and is cost (after Tesla decided not to stick to its patents on battery technology and car battery packs). Before this Toshiba was the long term leader followed by Samsung and LG, yet all 3 have in my understanding problems to compete on the price and China's advantage supporting winning a fight is for sure its domininance in processing the key battery materials. I fully agree on your point, that China has more strategic interest on lithium as US has oil and does not really care for climate change. And the move to electrify city buses in China was clearly a strong boost for chinese companies to put money/effort and develop technology for batteries much larger than needed in cars.

[@gunsumwong3948]

@@friedhelmschroter8124 So in your own word the progress and development of China must be adjusted so that the west interest is not harmed. Has the west something remotely similarly to China to warrant such reciprocation? I think the western high living standard and high labour cost are unsustainable.

[@friedhelmschroter8124]

@@gunsumwong3948 "So in your own word the progress and development of China must be adjusted so that the west interest is not harmed" ==> Reading above sentence is not really what I am thinking (yet it includes my main point but in a somehow twisted wording easily causing misunderstanding). The ideal in trade is win - win situation, because then both parties are happy, want and will continue the trade. What was the win of the West in the past? The not clean, rather simple blue collar work was transferred to China which allowed the West to concentrate on the rather demanding/interesting white collar work and this transfer of blue collar work did not cause any excessive stress on unemployment (only when looking into the details you will find a certain number of previous blue collar western workers who did not have the ability to upgrade to white collar work, but went in Europe into the social security net, while I think in US sufficient blue collar work was still present as rich people hired poor people to clean their swimming pool, do garden work and keep the house in order, all jobs not so well accepted in Europe as we believe more in EQUALITY/EGALITÈ of all people disfavouring the work as servant to rich people. What was the win for China in the past? A certain number of people did earn money by the blue collar work for the West, China also started to produce simple goods at low cost by themselves allowing China to earn foreign money. And while blue collar is associated with some bad smell, the reality of Western production transfer did include also quite sophisticated production methods requiring skills similar to white collar workers. With the money the people earned they could save so much to buy a flat or house which started the housing/construction boom in China and with the money China had earned China was able to buy more sophisticated machines and the West was willing to support as the total developed into a spiral getting more and more power having a lot of advantages while the clear disadvantage as huge trade deficit was somehow suppressed/did not get resolved. In my image about 5 years ago China reached in first areas a white collar knowledge/skillness that put it on par with the West, but this resulted in the West to play out how this white collar achievement by China and the 1971 introduded and never changed basically free trade relationship could end and in my image the worst end result was the West has to declare bancruptcy in all areas China is on par causing a strong increase in unemployment, while China does enjoy a strong increace in employment, this means the West strongly losing while China strongly winning. You cannot call this "that the west interest is not harmed", because the relationship worked as it resulted in a win-win situation and China's drastic progress and development brought this desired win-win realationship into the disorder/from the West not desired lose-win relationship. It now needs ideas and open discussion to mutually understand the problem, that at this time the West only forecasts, yet the problem is easy to happen within a few years when no correction back to win-win will be applied fast. And such problem is not specific to China, yet you can look into history how the Japanese car manufacturers with their continuous effort for improvement put bancruptcy pressure on the US automotive industry and Japan is only 125 Mio people while China has a pool of 1.400 Mio people. As solution Japan and US agreed that Japanese car manufacturers will set-up production bases in US while the Japanese car manufacturers put an limitation on itself by not trying to bancrupt the remaining 3 US manufacturers but rather concentrate on increasing their margin while these 3 tried to compete. So the EU interest is to bring the situation that has a clearly visible trend to run into disorder back to the desired win-win relationship. And this should also be China's interest, because if no mutual agreed solution will be found/fixed the EU will act by itself to bring the relationship back to win-win using tariffs, but at least in my image a mutually agreed solution is clearly the perferred one (yet complex EU internals are acting in addition). And this kind of thinking is reciprocal, this means should China ever fear any larger loss of jobs by something the West does sell, also China has the right to request some adjustment to avoid social unrest by too many people running into the danger of losing their job. China is neither requested to adjust the progress nor the development (both are considered rather as a win by the EU as experts are clearly aware the progress in the EU is not fast enough and by competing with Chinese products for sales European manufacturers should learn this time fast from China what is the best way and the wider range of solutions by adding China's many young people fresh ideas should give a better understanding what characteristics an electric car buyer is really deciding for. For combustion engine cars a kind of global standard appeared and I expect similar for electrical cars, yet it is not yet totally clear how this standard could look like or if increased urbanisation (more and larger cities) will result in different solutions seeing rather long distance travel in US, while city travel is rather short term. Reason for the trend into disorder lose-win is in my understanding rather the drastic difference in salary and not as probably out of formal WTO reasons said subsidizing (anyhow key point is price difference of cars offering about the same value). As there was never the situation of reciprocal salary difference (Chinese workers earning drastically more than Western workers) I cannot offer something similar to warrant to you "reciprocation" as in the past, now and for the foreseeable future it is not expected Chinese to surpass Western salary levels (rather similar levels should be expected in longer term), but as stated above avoiding larger unemployment/social unrest has a higher priority than free trade and therefore it is reciprocal. And independent of this China has somehow less yet similar power allowing it to make similar reasonable requests. Finally one very important point. You should clearly understand that US position is strongly different from the today in my understanding moderate/realistic EU position (this means using "west" in your sentence is not OK, I would limit to EU). Out of geostrategic reasons US has changed its mood on China drastically from positive since 1971 to negative or even hostile today. This means out of geostrategic reasons US does put pressure on China not possible to understand only by looking into the trade situation. The communist party/Xi Jinping should quite clearly be aware on US having got hostile on China and if and how this will change is not easy to answer for me, as I can understand and follow US position to about 80% yet there are points where I reject US strategic position and are in agreement with China against US. 2 major geostrategic points are Ukraine and Taiwan and from these you will understand how difficult/complex the China-US relation is today. I have no clear opinion on your thinking "the western high living standard and high labour cost are unsustainable". On one side I tend to agree because quite a lot of countries, most important the US, do finance their investment/spending by debt and this could result in a sudden crash yet it is more reasonable to assume a longer agony because the people/organisations owning this debt get permanently cheated for example by a zero interest policy while the inflation runs at a low level. On the other side the West has developed and is developing new technologies all people in the world are eager to buy. Look at the smart phone, a US (Apple) invention combining cellular phone, computer, camera and many other functions allowing today simple people to create videos in a quality you would have paid extremely high money and spend excessive time in learning how to correctly use. Look at artificial intelligence not being a physical product, yet again expanding simple people's possibility meaning they would be willing to spend money. There will be either a continuous or abrupt adjustment, or capable people in capable countries will grow up in salary reducing the difference may be meaning overall some reduction as more people request access to the limited ressource of our earth. Yet the largest all dominating real problem is for me the CO2 exhaust and the associated climate change that happens for long time by rather gradual temperature up, but occasionally something quite severe to happen is expected. Sorry for again long text, but trying to reply in one or only a few sentences is difficult (I am not so happy with your short 1 sentence summary) and would probably fail but it is surely possible to delete/shorten some points, yet I like to concentrate on improving my non-native english writing and wording not into perfect english, but in an easy to understand/grasp simple wording with few mistakes difficult to misunderstand.

[@gunsumwong3948]

@@friedhelmschroter8124 GM used to make 1/3 of its annual profit from China. Today no China brand has been able to sell EV in the US before the 100% tariff is imposed. That is the US win win arrangement!

[@davidwilkie9551]

Fabulous interview, more please.

[@Gman979]

China biz paradigm of increasing the size of the cake thru economic of scale so more can benefit from the bigger cake as opposed to Washington style of reducing the cake size to benefit a few is destined to prevail and thrive.

[@BobQuigley]

Great in depth interview. Learned tons of new facts. Truly appreciate the recognition of environmental damages and the need for electrification. Thanks

[@jimgraham6722]

Very good interview. In my view a big issue is optimisation of traction battery configurations. The west is continuing to develop all sorts of configurations, prismatic, pouch, jelly roll more or less on whim. They are generally all overly complex and expensive. They cant all be optimal. CATL and BYD are paving the way towards battery optimisation.

[@friedhelmschroter8124]

CATL and BYD have mastered the transition from a simple blue collar producer to quite successful/large companies also doing all white collar work including the development of new batteries and battery packs. Seeing the fact that chinese engineers and workers still work for a fraction of what Western engineers and workers would demand there is no chance for Western companies to be competitive. Either the West is ready to accept this situation or some kind of control is applied on "free trade".

[@peterjohn5834]

Excellent interview and superb content presented in a rational experienced voice. Thanks heaps

[@ozbandit]

LMFP. Safe and cost competitive with LFP with higher energy density, almost equal to NMC. In the nutshell, when you add M to the LFP and make LMFP you get a 20-25% increase in energy density, none of the risks of NMC and only 3/4% extra cost

[@BobQuigley]

World needs all the batteries of every nation. Cooperation must prevail. Parts per million greenhouse gases pollution are growing faster than ever.

[@HyperionLogic]

The first key observation is that the IRA caused a slow down in EV sales. The second is that China is 10 years ahead of the US in the EV sector.

[@friedhelmschroter8124]

And why is Tesla still considered the world leader on EV? (The 10 years ahead do apply only for battery production and related material processing)

[@HyperionLogic]

@@friedhelmschroter8124 BYD is now the biggest EV maker in the world by sales volume. In what specific area is Tesla leading? Google search is your friend.

[@friedhelmschroter8124]

@@HyperionLogic In my understanding BYD is biggest in terms of quantity of produced cars. Yet I assume (have not checked in detail) Tesla is still larger on their USD turnover because Tesla sell less cars, but the much higher price per car is overcompensating the lower volume to result in larger USD sales. A 3rd important, yet difficult to get number is the margin. The margin determines how much new development effort a company is able to do. Generally the first comer can charge higher margin, while the 2nd and 3rd comer have to offer some price advantage to overcome the first comer's reputation it was able to earn while producing just for itself. So when doing a real comparison you should best look into all 3 of these numbers or others like how many workers, how many engineers, ..... Also when making some comparison as Mercedes vs Volkswagen you do get the surprising result that the rather low volume producer Mercedes may produce more margin than the high volume producer Volkswagen and even on turnover you may get some surprise, as Mercedes does have a huge truck division, to my last knowledge (checked several years ago) Mercedes is the worldwide No.1 in truck production (not sure if any Chinese truck manufacturer succeeded to surpass Mercedes).

[@yaoypl]

A great interview and the battery technology will change our life for good. Thanks.

[@friedhelmschroter8124]

Lithium battery has already strongly changed our life for good by allowing low weight smart phones having reasonable use time and the same for laptops, this means being able to use a PC seemless. A 3rd major market are the power tools, where battery powered ones are on same power level as 110/220V supplied tools. The electric car market is expected to need much much more batteries (this means materials) yet there is still ongoing the fight of people seeing the lower cost of combustion engine compared to only slowly rising environmental cost. The problem here is, the cost of buying a car is immediately clear, the environmental cost by exhausting more and more C02 will become only clear in the future (and if catastrophic/armegeddon may be difficult to reduce/impossible to correct).

[@rogerstarkey5390]

How do you know when an interviewer isn't actually *listening* ? 14:19 "Can you state what those 5 Golden Rules are?" Having been told 20 seconds earlier "These are the 5 Golden Rules"

[@geob3963]

We need to find and nurture more chemists, theoretical and experimental scientists. The capable minds out there could come from anywhere, but will they be recognized and given the opportunity to advance the technical fields of today and tomorrow?

[@Userkzb20253]

14:24 5 golden rules of electrification: Safety, Performance, Lifetime, Costs, & Environment

[@friedhelmschroter8124]

In my image these 5 rules do not only apply to electrification, but to all kind of products/development.

[@davidwilkie9551]

Excellent Teaching Observations. This is an orientation-observation lesson in the details of complex chemistry that is the Observable constant feature of holographic nucleation. Any chunk of coherence-cohesion wave-packaging is an energy source by sync-duration decay in flash-fractal positioning quantization cause-effect In-form-ation, and any University can pivot to a particular recognition of QM-TIME sum-of-all-histories wave modulation density-intensity condensation modulation superposition-quantization holography, and that re-evolution is coming from the students worldwide. (Or else!)

[@peteregan3862]

Australia's mining technology is not Australian. Project and general management are what gets stuff mined in Australia.

[@peteregan3862]

In relative terms, raw material nations like Russia and Australia are weak because it takes far longer to develop technology and produce useful things at scale than it does to substitute a raw material. Germany produced petrol and diesel from coal in WW2. The US has the luxury that it can produce ICE vehicles if China stopped cell supply. However, China would take export markets which it is doing. Lawfare is the US and West's great problem. Environmental law is the lawfare battleground as arts graduates become our politicians, but they don't understand service and the community does not get choice of government services. Environmental impact processes have become the place to complain about service. The cost in money and time of environmental analysis makes it vulnerable to hijacking. Because a society only needs about 10% of people with technical skills, the West will never get sufficient politicians with technical skills to develop service consultation, and thereby reduce lawfare over the environment to manageable levels. In the US, you must stop burdening public infrastructure with social programs. Far more public infrastructure gets produced if not burdened with social programs and far more people benefit. California is a failing state that loses population as a result. Software (keyboard work) is the only industry doing well in California as a result. It is no longer a place to make things.

[@friedhelmschroter8124]

To develop technology does need a certain number of highly skilled persons in several disciplines. Raw material nations usually concentrate on technologies for raw material exploration and neither Australia nor Russia has the top advanced technology/universities/experts for many other products. Lawfare is only a problem in how far it is made possible/accepted (usually easier and more strong in democracies). Not environmental laws are the problem, but the fact that many products do not charge the cost they cause as environmental damage immediately or in future/in other parts of the globe. For the sake of low cost/fine life environmental issues were disregarded completely when industrialization started, yet they got stronger year by year first in the industrialized nations suffering their negative effects like poisened water or polluted air. Recently THE ENVIRONMENTAL PROBLEM is the CO2 exhaust obviously changing the climate to become much much worse (heat waves, fire, draught and flooding by sea or rainfall and much more worse already fixed to come). From a European point of view the social programs in US are a desaster. But you are also right, because the social cost in Europe is such high that it doesn't allow any more sufficient investment into infrastructure. However, if I would be american I would also ask the question, is it really necessary for US to spent 800 billion into military. To me this is clearly exaggerated. Scale of size brought a loft of advantages. I would consider also software being an industry making things (but you are right in a more rigid view understanding under things phyiscal products). And you should consider that California is doing software for a large chunk of the world (scale of size). And last but not least, salaries for software have a higher level than salaries for producing physical things which can mostly be done in the poorest country.

[@Userkzb20253]

The guy debunks the Chinese-can’t innovate myth. All humans can innovate, given the circumstances. Even great Ideas are a dime a dozen. It takes incentives to actually carry out those ideas. Incentives breed innovations.

[@friedhelmschroter8124]

I think Japan first showed that not only Europeans living in Europe and US do innovate. It may be that all humans can innovate, yet there are societies that have an internal power/strive that is not easy to keep down by the European protection sword patents/intellectual rights as can be seen on South Korea and Taiwan. Yet a friendship to US (this means democracy) seems to be mandatory, otherwise .....

[@rovert1284]

Current batteries obviously fail on safety. Yet they are in use. Go figure.

[@economistfromhell4877]

Evidence? None. Answer - the evidence is that batteries are very sad and massively safer than ICE - Google it on the fully charged show and educate yourself. Plus we’re you not listening and world class expert…….,he knows more than you!

[@friedhelmschroter8124]

Combustion engine cars occasionally go on fire (go figure). Do they fail on safety to a level that they should not be used?

[@monkeysezbegood]

Can't see Europe or is moving faster on mines....

[@economistfromhell4877]

Other countries like Australia and Canda lead on mining….do nt sweat stuff you don’t know about……or go find out - Google BHP?

[@Charvak-Atheist]

Reduce tarrifs to 0%

[@laowai2000]

Can't get over the irony that the "IRA" is in essence inflationary.

[@rogerstarkey5390]

So what's your answer?

[@laowai2000]

@@rogerstarkey5390 The US and Europe can take a leaf from the Chinese playbook of the 90s when foreign vehicle manufacturers had to enter 50/50 Joint Ventures with the Chinese to enter the Chinese market at the same time effectively handing over their technology. Give the Chinese no effective option but to co-operate with US Vehicle Manufacturers in the form of US Manufacturing. In this case it should be less inflationary whilst providing US consumers more choice at more competitive prices.

[@friedhelmschroter8124]

For me the larger and much more important irony is, the US transition to electrification gets delayed (US is obviously happy to heat up the climate/fire climate extremes/damage/....). In my understanding the inflationary effect you are seeing is rather the basic point/question does US/Europe and other car manufacturering countries allow a full take over of this industry by China in favor of achieving fast low prices. In case of your solution 50:50 cooperation you still have a 50% inflationary effect, because US/Europe is simply more expensive on both, workers and engineers. With Japan the solution was Japanese to set up production in US (and Japan companies did not exercise their power to push the remaining US manufacturers to bancruptcy, but rather optimized their margin).

[@greggpon7466]

Cheaper, better faster does not compute with paying welch 100s of millions, mary barra 30 million a year...... These leaches are just a drain on american workers.

[@rogerstarkey5390]

"Welch"?

[@greggpon7466]

@@rogerstarkey5390 Jack Welch who mentored Jeff Imelt, mcnierny who ran Boeing, nardelli who messed up Chrysler........ Their modus opandai was to outsource, financialize operations, pump / manipulate their stock price , not innovate when it came to production. But always paying themselves millions and millions. At least musk concentrates on his products and not manipulating the stock market.

[@zapfanzapfan]

@@rogerstarkey5390 Already dead and buried... neutron Jack.

[@rogerstarkey5390]

Cheaper, Better, Faster.... Tesla 4680.