Oregon Public Broadcasting

Officials with a high-tech battery company from Seattle celebrated a new partnership with an Oregon business that specializes in freeze-drying peas today.

It may seem an odd match. But as Kristian Foden-Vencil reports, they’re building a $21 million factory in Albany as part of Oregon's effort to get a slice of the electric car market.

As the country tries to wean itself off oil, more attention is being focused on batteries.  That's because alternative energies like sun and wind power don't always arrive when we want. So better batteries are needed to store energy.

Researchers at the University of Washington have come up with a new way of creating the carbon that goes into those batteries. They say they've made it purer and that they've managed to control the structure of each carbon molecule. 

Rick LeFaivre, who helps new businesses spin-out of the university, explains the process.

Rick LeFaivre: "Grind it down, there's a whole sequence of steps. Some of which, to be honest are proprietary, I don't want to describe exactly how they do it. And they wind up in the end with a very, very pure synthetic carbon. The purity is like several orders of magnitude more pure than what other carbons are."

That purity means the carbon can be used to make a battery much smaller and much more efficient. And one of the key processes researchers used to get that structure is, you guessed it, freeze-drying.

Gerry Langler: "They found Oregon Freeze Dry, freeze drying peas, they said: 'Gee, you're doing almost exactly what we need to have done at really high quality. Lets partner with you.' "

Gerry Langler is with Oregon Venture Partners, one of several businesses that have put a combined $15 million into the new partnership.  And Tuesday they all celebrated as work started on the new factory in Albany.

The U.S. Department of Energy is spending $21 million on the factory, which promises to generate 50 construction jobs and another 35 manufacturing positions.

But the CEO of Oregon Freeze Dry, Herb Aschkenasy, doesn't know how many jobs might be sustained.

Herb Aschkenasy: "I'm going to reluctantly decline to make an estimate because I don't really know. It depends a lot on how well this product works."

The business plan, according to Langler, is to sell the high quality carbon, not to battery producers, but to business that make something called 'ultracapacitors.'

Gerry Langler: "Batteries are really good at storing a lot of energy. Where they are bad is they charge very slowly, they discharge slowly, so you can't get a lot of power out of them in a hurry. As we know, if you charge them and discharge them many times, they ultimately ware out. And they hate cold.  Ultracapacitors are almost exactly the opposite. They charge very fast, they discharge very fast. They don't care about cold or heat. You can discharge and recharge them many times without having them ware out. But they don't hold nearly as much power as a battery does."

Capacitors have been around for years. But until recently, they've been relatively small and restricted to computer circuit boards.  But says Langler, new technology means capacitors are getting bigger and more versatile.

Gerry Langler: "If you have a hybrid car today. In there you are using your breaking power to recharge the batteries. The problem is that the power generated when you break is so high the battery can't take it fast enough. So you don't actually get the benefit of all that potential energy from the breaking process. But if you had an ultra capacitor sitting between your break and your battery, the ultra capacitor could grab that power really fast. and then slowly feed it to the battery in a way that the battery could accept it."

Some ultracapacitors are already on store shelves-- in cordless drills, for example-- that charge in seconds instead of a couple of hours.

MIT professor Joel Schindall is an expert in the new technology. He thinks a process that makes uniform carbon molecules might do well.

Joel Schindall: "It is a good idea. And it would make a big difference if it works. Right now an ultracapacitor stores about 5 percent as much energy as a battery. If you could get that up, even by a factor of two or four, it becomes much more attractive for a lot of applications."

But, he says, the question is: can the process be scaled-up to compete?

Joel Schindall: "Batteries are manufactured by the hundreds of millions. It's a big market. So any technique, whether it's freeze drying or whatever, it's partly does it work, but then it's also, can it be scaled up and are the materials and the processes cheap enough."

That should be clear in about a year, once the new Albany plant is up and running.