Cheap and safe, water-based organic redox flow batteries are coming – an interview with Quino Energy's founder Eugene Beh.

Quino Energy CEO and co-founder Eugene Beh is a chemist and physicist with an impressive history of accolades from Harvard to Stanford and back again and deep expertise in electrochemical systems, be it a postdoctoral fellowship working on aqueous organic flow batteries at Harvard University or inventing and commercializing a redox flow desalination technology platform at Xerox PARC, a research and development company in Palo Alto, California.

At Quino, Beh is helping to develop and commercialize water-based redox flow batteries that can cost-effectively store up to 40 hours of electrical energy in organic molecules called quinones.

Metal Tech News recently spoke with Beh about alternative battery technologies, the organic redux-flow battery developed by Quino, and his interest in space weather and the aurora borealis. This is what the award-winning chemist had to say.

MTN: There are some interesting alternative battery technologies coming out of companies trying to circumvent the mad dash for battery minerals, which definitely can have some uncomfortable realities – per the World Bank, we need to find and mine five times the minerals like graphite, lithium and cobalt which will necessitate a lot of industrial activity that hasn't yet been decarbonized.

Avoiding that rush while maintaining a competitive product is a very valid prospect, and redox-flow batteries are one of those highly anticipated options still going through interesting iterations. What first captured your imagination and set you on the path to developing batteries?

Beh: This is more about energy storage in general rather than specifically batteries, but the first example I can remember was the classic elementary school science experiment with electrolyzing water using a 9-volt battery. When you're a kid, igniting hydrogen is a whole lot of fun. Then you realize you can fill a whole balloon with the stuff ... pyrotechnics aside, it's the whole concept of energy conversion, that electricity can be converted into other forms that might be more easily stored.

MTN: What do you find are the most engaging challenges with existing energy storage technologies, and where do water-based flow batteries come in?

Beh: Existing energy storage technologies have evolved since their 1970s debut on the world stage. But neither the incremental gains of lithium-ion technologies nor the innovations of alternative battery chemistries have yet achieved what the energy transition, at least at the grid scale, really needs: a sustainably produced, affordable, safe solution for the 6-40 hours of storage needed to balance a renewably-centered grid.

As you know, the minerals in most battery chemistry pose geopolitical, environmental, and ethical concerns thanks to where they are located and how they are produced. Plus, traditional batteries suffer limited lifetimes, are challenging to recycle, and produce potentially harmful byproducts during their production process. All those hurdles contribute to volatile material prices. Additionally, lithium-ion batteries, in particular, are known for their fire risk.

Now, there's been a lot of great work by a lot of great researchers and entrepreneurs on how to tackle these challenges one by one: how to mine minerals more sustainably, recycle batteries more effectively, etc. But, the challenge that has inspired me is how to come up with a solution that circumvents these problems entirely.

That's where water-based flow batteries come into play. The battery uses zero critical materials or per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS) and only uses active materials that are readily manufactured domestically. (You've likely already encountered quinones, the basis of our battery material, in the form of Vitamin K or the lawsone in henna). The battery materials are made from commercial dyes using a zero-waste production process; they enjoy degradation that is several times lower than lithium-ion, even at extreme depths of discharge and are easy to recycle at the end of life. Moreover, since everything is dissolved in water and the cell potential is just below the water-splitting potential, there is zero fire risk.

Best of all, these quality advantages coincide with a price advantage: water-based flow batteries cost less than alternatives for eight- to 24-hour storage, they compete with alternatives on cost for the full six- to 40-hour storage window, and are also compatible with existing oil and water storage infrastructure to further cut installation costs and times.

Quino Energy

The Quino battery materials production line.

MTN: On paper and in our previous article about your company's MRL 7 developmental milestone, there's a pretty dry list of standards to meet. Quino has done well with seed funding and is putting the cash to good use. Can you take me through how your next steps look in action off the page?

Beh: First, we've taken one more step forward since our MRL 7 announcement: in April, we took delivery of a 100-kWh (kilowatt-hour) pilot system to augment the 6 kWh and 24 kWh systems at our lab. Of those systems, at least one has been powering our facility's internal microgrid for a few months now, while the rest are being put through their paces on a battery cycler. We're excited to see the 100-kWh system operational next month, and given that we are already using full-size flow battery stacks made by other manufacturers, we do not anticipate too much difficulty there or even with much larger-scale systems.

More broadly, our next big step is to debut three to six pilot field systems, each between two- to 10-MWh (megawatt-hour) in capacity, to provide the results needed to gain full certification and product warranty. These systems will use our quinone materials (produced in the pilot production line, which, as you covered, recently reached MRL 7) as a drop-in replacement for vanadium in field-validated hardware made by conventional vanadium flow battery OEMs. We expect these pilot systems to break ground late this year and the first of them to be fully operational in 2025. The pilot systems will be located across the continental United States with a slight focus on Texas.

In the meantime, while the pilots collect the needed data, we'll book conditional orders from utility users and large commercial and industrial customers. Once we have the certification and warranty in hand, the next phase would be fulfillment, which we anticipate in 2027. GWh scale will follow shortly after.

With all our results so far, the technical and manufacturing risk has been all but retired, and the problem becomes one of supply chain management. From a curiosity in the lab to where we are today, Quino Energy has come a long way. I'm excited to guide our company into a new phase of pilot demos, sales to customers, and growth.

Eugene Beh

A spectacular shot of the lesser-known New Hampshire aurora borealis.

MTN: This last question is just for my personal gratification, being a space exploration and tech fan myself. As a tech metals writer I love when a story intersects with space exploration – what makes you a space weather enthusiast, and what are the rest of us missing out on?

Beh: Space weather is really a personal hobby founded on my interest in the aurora. For me, the fascination is less about space exploration (which relates to space weather only tangentially) and more about enjoying celestial phenomena: specifically, how to see the northern lights from places not usually known for them, even when there hasn't been a noteworthy solar flare.

Did you know that you can see the Northern Lights from the Boston area two/three times a year? When I worked at Harvard, I would drive 90 minutes to the south shore of a lake in southern New Hampshire, which offers an unobstructed northern view unshadowed by urban centers. I've seen the aurora there a dozen times, even though most state residents don't even know that they can see it from NH at all.