Breakthrough ‘Donut’ Battery Technology May Crush Global Oil Demand and Reshape the Energy Ecosystem
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Okay, welcome to this special report.
We have some potentially really groundbreaking game-changing news for the world, and that's not hyperbole.
And this concerns battery technology and what it means for so many things, for transportation, data centers, for off-grid living, solar power, much more, even aviation.
This could make electric airplanes quite possible.
Well, there's no question it does.
But is this news legit?
So let me back up and describe what just happened.
So there's a company that I believe is a Finnish company out of Finland.
And they have, they're called Donut Lab, and their website is donutlab.com.
And I know Donut doesn't sound like a serious name, but this company has a history of doing some pretty amazing things.
For example, they've innovated a motorcycle.
They sell these electric motorcycles that have this really unique electric motor that drives the rear tire, the tire that has no spokes, no hub.
It's incredibly interesting, high performance.
It's got great range, etc.
And that's real.
They created that.
Well, they just announced, and remember, it's the CES show time of the year right now.
So a lot of companies are announcing a lot of new things based on that show out of Las Vegas.
Well, the Donut company has just announced a new solid-state battery that has specifications that almost seem impossible.
But I'm going to go through those with you here and then talk about the implications with the caveat that it's hard to believe that this is real.
And many people are skeptical of these claims.
And if this was a company out of the blue that was announcing these things, no one would believe it.
But this is a company with some kind of track record of doing very innovative things.
And they claim they're shipping these batteries right now.
So this isn't some, oh, we're going to have it by 2030 type of announcement.
They're not asking for, you know, investment funds that I'm aware of.
They're not asking people to pre-purchase batteries that will ship two years later.
You've all heard those things before.
This is something that they say is shipping now.
It's shipping in their motorcycles and it's shipping in the tractor trailers that help drive highway rigs with battery technology.
So what is this?
Well, you know, lithium-ion is the common battery technology and chemistry that's used everywhere today.
I've covered sodium ion technology and I've been hoping that sodium ion would really have some breakthroughs and I was very disappointed in the bankruptcy of the Natron Energy Company in the United States in the last several months.
That was unfortunate.
And so, of course, I've been hoping for a breakthrough battery technology because I understand its implications for everything, robotics, drones, aircraft, transportation, but especially off-grid living.
I want a way to store a lot of energy that's safe, that's not going to self-ignite like lithium can in the summer heat, you know.
I want to be able to put a battery bank in a garage in the summer heat in Texas and be able to have faith that it's not going to just set the house on fire.
And in addition to that, you know, lithium-ion will typically only cycle, what, 4,000 or 5,000 times.
It's not great.
It's several years, but there's degradation along the way because of the formation of the dendrites.
I think they're formed on the anode side, but the lithium is in solution, so it's a liquid.
It's like a liquid, sloshy solution in there.
And the more you use it, the worse it gets.
And before long, the battery is useless, you know?
That's lithium technology.
And then if you're driving an EV with lithium batteries, when you have to replace that lithium battery pack, oh, that could set you back $20,000 or $30,000 depending on the car.
So lithium has a lot of problems.
It's also difficult to mine.
And you have to get it from countries where there can be a lot of conflicts.
And lithium requires a tremendous amount of fresh water to process after you mine it.
And so lithium is just bad for lots of reasons.
Sodium ion battery technology is better, but it doesn't have the same energy density as lithium.
So sodium ion perhaps is not as good for vehicles or robots, things like that.
It's better for sort of stationary, large grid-shifting battery storage technology, you know, to shift power from wind turbines or solar farms.
That's where sodium ion really shines.
And there is a company out of California that makes grid-scale sodium ion battery storage systems.
There's one company, forgot their name, but they now create a solid-state, large sodium ion battery storage system that ships in, I think, a 20-foot container, and it has no moving parts.
That's a big deal.
Doesn't even need cooling fans, apparently.
That's a big deal, but that's not going to help you and me with EVs or robots or whatever, right?
Okay, with that as the backdrop here, let's talk about Donut.
Donut Lab.
I still don't like that name.
Donut sound kind of silly?
It's like, you know, Krispy Kreml Labs or something.
You know, it's just something's not right.
Anyway, let's not judge a book by its cover.
Let's talk about the claims from the Donut Lab company.
God, I hope this is not some early April Fool's joke.
In any case, they are claiming 400 watt hours per kilogram of energy density.
That's about double the current average energy density, I would guess.
I mean, there are some batteries that have over 200 watt hours per kilogram, but many are below that.
So let's say this doubles energy density.
What is energy density?
Well, it's how many watt hours you can fit in a given space, you know, like cubic centimeters, let's say, or cubic meters, whatever, however, wherever you want to put the decimal point, you know.
So double the energy density.
That makes it great for aviation, for robots, for drones, for motorcycles, for everything.
I mean, more power and less space.
Okay, that's awesome.
They also claim that this can be fully charged.
However many batteries there are, whether it's for a truck, a car, a motorcycle, a robot, the whole thing can be fully charged in less than 10 minutes.
So no more waiting at the charger for two hours while your Tesla charges up.
They say this can charge in less than 10 minutes.
In fact, they were showing some examples of it charging in five minutes.
Okay.
They also claim that this battery is designed for 100,000 cycles.
Now, they're not claiming they've tested 100,000 cycles because, of course, that would take a long time.
But remember that, you know, lithium-ion typically will only do like 4,000 or 5,000 cycles.
Sodium ion might reach 10,000 cycles, which is great.
Depending on your use case, that could be 10 years or more.
But 100,000 cycles with essentially no degradation.
100,000 cycles, that's, I mean, well, we could do the math on this, but I think that's a lifetime of driving your car, pretty much your whole life.
So your battery would never go bad.
The rest of the car would fail before the battery failed.
You know, you would junk the car because of the transmission problems or whatever, the tires, the frame, the rust, you know, before the battery had a problem.
In fact, you would take the battery with you.
You would take the battery out.
And I've predicted this before.
I've said we're going to have some breakthroughs in battery tech and the batteries will outlast the car.
And then you'll pull the battery out.
You'll transfer it to your next car.
And then when you go shopping for a car, they'll probably mostly be EVs.
That is, if this breakthrough is true.
And you'll be able to buy the car without the battery.
And it'll be a lot cheaper for that reason because you'll just install the battery you took out of your old car because the battery will outlast the car.
So that's where we are.
That is, if Donut Labs is legit here.
Now, let's see, there's more to this.
They say that their batteries are safe.
They don't use flammable liquid electrolytes like lithium-ion typically does.
They claim there's no thermal runaway chains.
There's no metallic dendrites that can cause internal shorts.
That's a good thing.
I don't want to have to deal with metallic dendrites on a daily basis.
It sounds like something that Skynet would do.
So anyway, the chemistry of the battery, they claim, is incredibly safe.
That will make firefighters gleeful to hear because how many of you listening, how many of you are firefighters or first responders, and you've seen firefighters try to put out lithium vehicle battery fires because it doesn't work, does it?
Spray all the water you want, battery still burns.
So this could change all that.
And that has a lot of implications for better safety in parking garages, in like scooter storage facilities, motorcycle storage, parking a car in your own garage.
Vehicles involved in accidents are less likely to combust, which turns out to be bad for the occupants.
So this is a much safer battery chemistry.
But Donut Labs doesn't tell us what the chemistry is.
They say it's 100% green.
I don't know what they mean by that.
They say it's made from abundant materials with global availability.
Well, you know, that could be anything.
That could be anything on the table of elements.
I suppose.
It just depends on what you mean by abundant materials and global availability.
I mean, now if you tell me it's zinc, you know, it's zinc and copper.
I'm like, that's great.
That sounds abundant.
But if you're thinking more like, now there's silver involved here, then we got a problem because of all the silver scarcity that you and I know is happening.
In any case, Donut Lab says that there's no reliance on rare resources.
Okay.
So maybe they don't need cobalt.
I don't know.
Maybe they don't need.
Oh, and they said it's not from geopolitically sensitive resources.
Like we don't have to go conquer more countries and pillage their minerals.
Gosh, Trump is going to be disappointed because he was writing up the whole list.
Let's do this one and then that one and let's take this and that and that.
It's like a shopping list.
If we don't need all that stuff for batteries, like if you can make it out of, I don't know, North American dirt, then that's awesome.
We don't need to conquer and decapitate all the leaders everywhere around the world.
Okay.
And they say it's lower material cost than lithium-ion.
Okay.
Okay.
But I wonder what the manufacturing cost is.
Is it really expensive to put it all together?
I don't know.
They're not saying.
They are saying they have a universal battery platform now that it's the same module.
It can be used from microelectronics to defense, drones, you name it.
One battery architecture, many applications, and it works in a wide range of temperatures from minus 30 Celsius, which turns out to be pretty cold, to plus 100 Celsius, which of course is the boiling point of water.
Because my audience is mostly Americans, and you may not be familiar with the entire Celsius spectrum there.
But yeah, that's a wide range, a very wide range.
And apparently this battery works in all those ranges.
So it's great for EVs for those of you who live up north, right?
Canadians?
I mean, EVs are rough in Canada or some parts of it, the colder parts, because of, you know, you lose battery capacity due to plummeting temperatures, right?
So this apparently would solve all that.
Okay.
So those are the claims.
Think about it.
Higher energy density, lower cost, 100,000 cycles, charging cycles, which means it lasts forever.
I mean, a lifetime.
What else?
Green materials?
Oh, charges really fast.
So it would give you much, a huge extension of range for your EV with much faster charging time, like you could recharge in 10 minutes.
So that would make a cross-country EV trip actually tolerable instead of whatever it has been, people hanging out at charging stations for hours and hours and hours, and that's crazy.
All right.
What are the implications of this if it's true?
Now, remember, I'm not yet totally convinced that this is true.
I'm hopeful that it is.
I would love for this to be true because I want this.
You know, I've been trying to put together off-grid battery storage systems for a number of years, quite a few years, and everything has failed.
And I mean, I look into flow batteries and that's just crazy expensive and complicated.
You know, pumps have to circulate all the flow chemicals and everything.
And then, you know, lithium ion has its own fire problems, as we know, and sodium ion just hasn't been put into mass production yet.
And it doesn't have the energy density.
So I want this to be true.
But if it's true, then here are the implications.
It's much more than you think.
I mean, in the big picture, this essentially makes most combustion engines obsolete.
It really does.
And, you know, I've been a critic of EVs because of all the limitations they've had, like crazy long charging times, you know, batteries that combust into flames and things like that.
Well, this solves those problems.
You have long range, you have fast charging times, and you don't even need lithium, apparently.
If that's true, then who's going to buy combustion engine vehicles any longer?
You know, for common use.
The typical consumer, if these batteries are cheaper and longer-lasting, last a lifetime, etc.
You know, I mean, it's easier to maintain an EV.
You don't have to change the oil.
You don't have to change the air filter in the engine or the oil filter in the engine, etc.
It's just easier to maintain.
You know, it's cleaner to be around.
You can inhale near the non-existent tailpipe, you know, you know what I mean?
So this is going to make many, many combustion engine applications utterly obsolete.
And it would the battery density is so good and the charge time is so fast that it would begin to bleed into the construction industry, Caterpillar, okay?
Komatsu, Kubota, like all these companies, John Deere, whatever, that make the construction equipment, the excavators, skidsteers, the loaders, the compact track loaders, you name it.
And then tractors themselves.
Now, I've said before, there's no electric tractor because it's insane.
You know, because, you know, tractors use a lot of power.
At the PTO, a typical tractor could have over 100 horsepower, for example.
And, you know, tractor engines need to be very, very strong in order to do that.
Batteries just don't have the energy density.
Well, this could change that starting at the small scale, like hobby tractors and riding lawnmowers could be all electric and still be very effective.
So start thinking about that, what this means for also electric airplanes and aviation, personal drone taxis that take flight and hopefully don't drop you over a lake or something.
Probably won't have electric locomotive trains because, well, that's a lot of energy that you need.
And the diesel-electric locomotive engines are already actually electric with the diesel generator on board, but it's all converted into electricity.
So those are going to stay diesel for a long time.
But many other areas, you would start to see the reduction of combustion engines very quickly, especially when China is designing and building really impressive electric vehicles.
China has become, you may not know this, China's become the most impressive electric vehicle manufacturer in the world by far.
The best luxury vehicles, the most advanced vehicles, the most affordable vehicles.
If it wasn't for the 100% tariff on those vehicles that Trump slapped on China, we'd see Chinese-made EVs all over the roads all over America, and cars would be more affordable.
And they would be widespread.
But China's exporting all over the world with their EVs.
And this battery tech, combined with China's EV capabilities, could really start to see a revolution getting away from combustion engines all over the world.
Even in India, where they love their combustion engines on the roads.
Whatever makes the most noise is the best.
Okay.
And blows the most black smoke out the back.
Don't forget that's important too.
Okay.
So if you start to look at this, then you realize that, oh my gosh, annual demand for oil would begin to plummet.
I mean, you'd still need oil for lots of things.
I already mentioned diesel locomotives or diesel electric locomotives, but also military applications, you know, jets, fighter jets, whatever, transports, you know, big ass vehicles, big ass airplanes and things would still need, you know, jet engines and kerosene or aviation fuel for a long time to come.
But if consumers stopped buying combustion engine vehicles, well, that would be a huge shift.
And the global annual demand for oil would plummet.
You know what?
Let me ask an AI engine here to tell me what percentage we're talking about.
Okay, I just put in a question.
I'm getting an answer.
Road vehicles apparently account for 45 to 47% of total global oil consumption.
The entire transport sector uses about 60% of global oil, but the road vehicles are only 45 to 47%.
Let's see.
Then it says the rest goes to aviation shipping and rail, things like that, which I pretty much already mentioned.
You know, barges and bunker fuel for ships and whatever.
So let's just call it half.
Let's keep it simple here.
Let's say that road vehicles account for half of global oil consumption.
It's not quite half, but it's close.
So if just battery technology is the real deal, then in the years ahead, we're going to see, again, combustion engines really, really plummeting.
And we didn't even count lawnmowers and things like that, or even tractors and agricultural and construction equipment.
So easily we're talking about half of oil consumption here.
And by the way, there are already hybrid electric excavators that exist from companies like Komatsu.
They already have those.
They're not that good, but this could change that dramatically.
So what happens if half the global demand of oil ceases to exist?
Even though it would happen over time, but half the oil consumption stops.
But at the same time, at the same time, global electricity consumption off the power grid freaking skyrockets, right?
So we're not reducing energy usage.
We're just shifting it from fossil fuels to the power grid.
But then the question is, well, where does the power grid get its power?
And that depends on the grid, doesn't it?
That depends on what country you're in.
In some countries, that's natural gas.
In other areas, you know, it's a mixture everywhere, but some areas it's more solar, more wind.
Some areas it's hydroelectric.
A lot of areas it's coal-fired power plants, which again is fossil fuels, or liquid natural gas, etc., right?
Or just gas, as it's called in the energy industry.
So a lot of the energy shift coming away from oil will have geopolitical impacts.
For example, a reduction of income for Russia, reduction of income for Saudi Arabia, probably for Venezuela and Iran and the other major oil exporters, including a lot of U.S. companies that are, there's a lot of oil exploration in the U.S. You know, big globalist companies that are in that business, they're going to see the revenues plummet.
And the price of oil will also plummet over time.
Again, this will make combustion engine vehicles less expensive to operate.
Imagine if gas were at $2 a gallon.
You might say, well, why do I want to buy an EV when I can get gas for $2 a gallon?
While at the same time, the power grid scarcity is so bad that electricity is like 50 cents a kilowatt hour.
You see what I'm saying?
So that's the other part of this.
Electricity costs are going to skyrocket, especially in the United States and Europe, both of which failed to plan for increased demand of kilowatt hours, or let's just say gigawatt hours on the power grid.
You know, the European Union, led by a bunch of suicidal cultists, they decided to shut down their domestic energy production, you know, to appease the climate lunatics.
While in the United States, we suffered from a lot of climate lunacy over many, many years.
And, you know, we're a couple decades behind on nuclear power, for that matter.
I forgot to mention nuclear earlier.
But nuclear is hard to scale because it takes so long, 15 plus years, to build and permit and boot up a nuclear power plant.
This is not an easy thing.
Although nuclear is actually the cleanest energy source imaginable in the sense that there's no emissions, you know, I mean, it uses water for cooling, obviously.
But that water, most of it's recycled back into the local water source, whatever that happens to be.
So nuclear is clean, but slow.
Gas, natural gas, is relatively clean, but the climate people hate the carbon aspects of it.
And coal, you know, well, you know the story on coal.
Hydroelectric, you only have a limited number of dams.
So what does that leave?
Solar.
So solar can be scaled very rapidly.
And currently we're only capturing a very tiny percentage of the solar energy that reaches the surface of the earth.
Solar can be scaled up tremendously and rapidly, but solar, as we understand it today anyway, solar needs silver for the solar panels.
So if we want to massively scale up solar to power the power grids that everybody's using to charge their new EVs and their electric airplanes and whatever else, you know, your 10 home robots that have finally figured out how to fold laundry and pull weeds.
Yeah, you're going to have to charge all those things.
And that's going to require a massive deployment of solar energy, which requires a huge amount of silver.
Now, although some solar manufacturers are figuring out how to use less silver, it's not zero.
They all need some amount of silver to make it work for reasons having to do with physics.
You know, silver is the most reflective metal that exists, for example.
So there are still going to be limitations to building out the energy grid to power all the electric everything, even when these batteries come online.
In other words, the real challenge here for countries is building out the electric infrastructure and scaling it up.
And probably solar is the easiest way to do that.
It's certainly the fastest way.
But that's going to cause silver prices to skyrocket even more, even more than they are already.
So if you think about it, battery breakthroughs are good for silver because it shifts more people away from oil and onto the grid.
And the grid needs solar in order to keep up with demand.
And it takes a lot of juice to charge a truck.
You know?
They think about it.
Gasoline and diesel, they have very high energy density, much higher than any battery, by the way.
Very high.
So a lot of work in them, their hydrocarbon molecules.
A lot of workers in there.
There's horses in there.
That's why they call it horsepower.
There's little horses.
And replacing that with batteries just means you're shifting the energy to the grid.
And our grid in the United States, our grid sucks, especially the Eastern grid.
It's like a third world grid.
Seriously, it's bad.
Texas grid has improved since the near total failure of what year was that, 2021, I think it was.
I lived through that.
That sucked.
The Western power grid seems to be doing okay, but nobody wants to live in California anymore.
So everybody's moving either to Texas or the East, it seems.
And so the power scarcity on those grids is going to be intense.
And that makes the argument for getting off-grid, having your own power, your own self-reliant local power grid.
And what two key pieces of technology do you need to make that happen?
You need solar panels and you need battery storage, i.e., the donut lab batteries.
So, see, this is all connected.
It's all the same issues.
So, you know that if you can get these new donut batteries, that's still such a crazy name.
I'll take the batteries with sprinkles on top.
Okay.
You get your donut batteries if they work as advertised.
And then you get a bunch of solar panels, like you overbuild the solar on your house or your barn or whatever, so that you would build out typically two to three times the usage that you need to cover for rain and cloudy days.
And also this weird thing called night that causes solar panels to produce zero energy.
For some reason, they're still working on that problem.
But by having battery storage, you can solve that, right?
Especially if you can cycle those batteries 100,000 times.
So this technology will not only shift the whole geopolitical scene, it'll shift things away from oil, it will also make your ability to become more off-grid and more self-reliant a lot more economically feasible.
How cool is that?
Yeah, I mean, again, if all of this is true, and I will, I'll keep you posted on this because I'm very interested in this technology, as you can tell.
It's an enabling technology.
It's kind of like AI for decentralization.
You know, breakthrough battery technology is also all about decentralization as well.
It allows you to store power yourself and not to have to depend on the centralized grid where everything is monitored through your smart meters and you can be shut off if they don't like something you posted online.
Oh, what?
You criticize them?
Oh, no kilowatts for you.
You're probably going to be metered, especially on the east part of the country because they need all the power for the data centers.
So they're going to start setting limits for humans.
Like you can only use this.
And beyond that, you know, the prices go up 10x or something.
Or you just have a, you have a quota limit and that's it.
That's all you get.
That could be.
So check it out.
Stay informed.
I'll keep covering this in my podcast at brighteon.com.
I'm Mike Adams.
Thank you for listening.
Take care.
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