From Ed Conway's Material World substack, April 27:
A tiny company near the clifftops at the most northerly point in mainland Britain might be about to play a small but important role in the biggest economic story of the coming decade
Thurso, the northernmost town in mainland Britain, is hardly the first place you’d expect anyone to situate a pioneering technology company. Yet here, a few miles down the coast from John O’Groats, within sight of the Old man of Hoy over in Orkney, you’ll find a small but significant firm called AMTE.
You probably haven’t heard of AMTE before, or for that matter the name it used to go by up until a few years ago: AGM. But this is a little company with a very interesting history and, quite possibly, a very interesting future. Its past and its present tell you rather a lot about the underbelly of our economy, not to mention the global race to produce green technology.
They also illustrate a kind of subplot to one of the big global economic stories of the moment. As the world’s superpowers put untold resources into trying to win the race to create the green technologies that might help resolve climate change, many other countries around the world are wrestling with what on earth they should be doing. With the US providing hundreds of millions of dollars of subsidies, is there anything smaller nations like the UK can do? Come to mention it, what happens to nations which take a different view: that far from subsidising their industries, they should be allowing them to sink or swim unassisted?
In short, what happens in the UK is suddenly quite relevant.
A Little Factory with a Big History
Anyway, back to AMTE, who I first encountered while researching Material World. The company didn’t quite make the grade for the book, not so much because its story wasn’t interesting - as you’ll see below, it certainly is - but because the primary focus of the book is not on clever, niche technologies but on the mainstream manufactured products that have changed all of our lives. AMTE has for most of its existence (and that of its precursor companies) focused on small corners of the battery market. However, this little factory in the furthest corner of this country stayed in my mind, because of what it says about this country and its industrial destiny.AMTE’s story begins back in the 1980s, when a group of chemists hundreds of miles south at Oxford University invented the critical components for something which has since become incredibly important: the lithium ion battery.
These days lithium-ion batteries are everywhere, in smartphones, laptops, little disposable vapes and, of course, electric vehicles. And these days they are, a little like the semiconductors that go into smartphones, computers and pretty much all electronic devices, one of those products with geopolitical resonance. It isn’t just that our ability to eliminate carbon emissions and fulfil climate goals depends in part on our ability to produce enough of these cells. It’s bigger than that, for around 80 per cent of battery production happens in China, and even the staggering amount of money Western governments are throwing at the sector will barely reduce this proportion in the coming couple of decades.
But back in the 1980s none of this was especially obvious. As I cover in some detail in The Book, the pursuit of lithium as the ultimate battery metal actually began nearly a century earlier. But only in the 1970s and then the ‘80s did it begin to become a reality (taming lithium, an incredibly volatile element, was very hard).
....MUCH MORE
