The four most abundant industrial materials on Earth.
A battery that may never need replacing.
The chemistry uses a CuFe-PBA cathode, a COP anode, and MgCl₂ electrolyte — all of which can be sourced domestically, manufactured without clean rooms, and shipped without hazmat classification.
Every instrument needed to build, test, and control this battery is already in the Emerson product catalog. The pantry is stocked.
Phase 1 materials cost less than a mid-range sedan. Everything ships standard freight. Nothing requires hazmat handling.
| Material | Grade | Source | $/kg | Phase 1 Qty | Cost |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| MgCl₂ · 6H₂O | Battery-grade (99.9%) | Nedmag · Veendam, NL | $3.00 | 100 kg | $300 |
| MgCl₂ · 6H₂O | Industrial (95%) | Intrepid Potash · Carlsbad, NM | $0.40 | 200 kg | $80 |
| CuSO₄ · 5H₂O | Reagent | Freeport-McMoRan · Phoenix, AZ | $3.00 | 20 kg | $60 |
| K₃[Fe(CN)₆] | Reagent | Domestic chemical distributors | $8.00 | 15 kg | $120 |
| Pyrrole monomer | Reagent | Sigma-Aldrich / domestic | $50.00 | 5 kg | $250 |
| CuO (copper oxide) | Technical | Freeport-McMoRan / domestic | $5.00 | 10 kg | $50 |
| Celgard separator | Battery | Celgard · Charlotte, NC | $3/m² | 100 m² | $300 |
| Prismatic cell hardware | — | Domestic fabrication | $80/cell | 50 cells | $4,000 |
| DI water system | — | — | — | 1 unit | $8,000 |
| Lab consumables | — | — | — | Annual | $15,000 |
| Phase 1 Annual Materials Budget | ~$28,000 | ||||
The raw materials are commodity-priced and globally abundant. The value is in the process — and the instruments that control it.
Every department. Every hallway. Every lab. The Shell Space sits at the northeast corner — 10,000 square feet, currently empty, adjacent to the first two customers on the grid.
Emerson Shakopee main floor — Pressure, DP Level, Temperature, Wireless, Gas Manufacturing. The instruments that run the world's refineries are built here. The Salt Kitchen goes in the northeast corner.
Pre-purified MgCl₂ from Nedmag (Netherlands) — known-good electrolyte that eliminates supply chain variables during foundational chemistry work.
Zone B: Cell assembly & CuFe-PBA cathode synthesis
Zone C: Cycling, EIS, ICP analysis
Goal: Confirm 120,000 cycles at C/4 to C/2 grid rates.
Industrial MgCl₂ from Intrepid Potash (Carlsbad, NM) — $0.40/kg deicing-grade salt, purified in-house to battery-grade on the DeltaV electrolyte prep skid.
Zone A: Ion exchange, selective precipitation, recrystallization
Rosemount 228 + 372 + ELITE: Closed-loop quality control
Goal: Match Nedmag spec with domestic feedstock. Then switch.
Industrial-grade MgCl₂ enters from the left. Battery-grade electrolyte exits on the right. Every step is measured, controlled, and automated by Emerson instruments.
The entire process runs on equipment Emerson already sells. The DeltaV recipe, once proven, becomes the template for Product 6 — the Sustainable Electrolyte Recovery System.
The battery operates at 2.2V — above the 1.23V thermodynamic threshold for water electrolysis. Concentrated MgCl₂ suppresses hydrogen evolution, but does not eliminate it. Trace H₂ is a known characteristic of all high-voltage aqueous batteries. This is the system that manages it.
We don’t just build the battery. We build the safety system that protects it. Because we already do — in every refinery on Earth.
For context: lithium-ion batteries risk thermal runaway — uncontrollable fire at 1,000°F that cannot be extinguished with water. Aqueous batteries cannot thermally run away. The electrolyte is water. The worst case is trace hydrogen in a ventilated room.
That's the starting lineup to validate the most promising
battery chemistry published this decade.
Phase 1 creates 5–6 new technical roles in Shakopee.
Phase 3 grows to 26–35 — a new team built from the ground up.
| Equipment | Avg. Draw | Daily kWh |
|---|---|---|
| NI HPS-17000 cycling losses (net) | 5 kW | 120 |
| Glovebox (Ar atmosphere) | 3 kW | 72 |
| DeltaV electrolyte skid | 5 kW | 40 |
| Environmental chamber | 4 kW | 96 |
| Fume hood exhaust | 1.5 kW | 36 |
| HVAC + lighting (2,500 SF lab) | 8 kW | 192 |
| ICP, EIS, instruments, DI water | 3.5 kW | 32 |
| Phase 1 Total | ~30 kW | ~588 kWh/day |
At Minnesota commercial rates ($0.105/kWh).
About 20 homes’ worth of electricity per day —
to power a lab that might change how the grid stores energy.
In a restaurant, family meal is when the kitchen cooks for itself. The staff eats what they make, before the doors open. This is that.
The Xcel Energy bill is the scoreboard.
If Phase 1 confirms what the paper suggests,
the energy return exceeds two thousand to one.
That is the question worth $1.8 million to answer.
Four ways this doesn’t work. What we’d see, and when we’d know.
Track A and Track B run independently. No single failure kills the program. And every one of these risks is something Emerson instruments can measure.
A battery installed during Phase 2, cycling once daily,
would still be running in the year 2355.
The building outlasts the engineers who built it.
The electrolyte outlasts the building.
This is not a product. This is infrastructure.
Like copper wire. Like concrete.
Like the telephone line.
What you’ll see at each checkpoint. What kills the project, and what earns the next quarter of funding.
The DeltaV electrolyte prep skid — developed and proven in Track B — adapted for desalination brine feedstock. A second product line. A second revenue stream.
Partner candidates: Tampa Bay Desal (25M gal/day) · Carlsbad Desal (50M gal/day, Poseidon Water)
The thesis: Sell the recovery system. Take a royalty on the recovered mineral salt. The electrolyte is waste. The waste is free.
The brine isn’t stored. It flows continuously to the ocean — a river of raw material that nobody captures. The recovery skid taps a sidestream from the discharge pipeline. No disruption to plant operations.
The waste from making water becomes the battery that powers the water plant.
Saudi Arabia has committed $65M to industrial-scale brine mineral extraction at Ras Al Khair. US DOE funding targets lithium recovery — high-value at $15–$20/kg. Nobody recovers MgCl₂ because at $0.40/kg, the economics don’t justify it. Unless you have a battery that turns $0.40 salt into $32/kWh energy storage. That changes the math entirely.
Salt, water, iron, and copper trade on every continent.
No nation needs to ask permission to store its own energy.
Emerson has spent 136 years building the instruments that measure and control industrial processes.
The question has always been:
what do we measure next?
The answer is the most important electrochemical reaction of the 21st century.
And it happens in salt water.
The same salt water Emerson has been measuring in every refinery, every food plant, every water treatment facility — for decades.
We know what to build. We know what to buy. We know who to hire.
We know what to measure and when to stop.
Build the lab. Answer the question.
The asymmetry: If Month 6 kills it, we’ve spent a fraction of the budget and we have a definitive answer. If Month 6 confirms it, Emerson owns the industrial process for permanent grid storage before anyone else gets to the starting line.
A detailed technical proposal is available for full review.
Edison didn’t invent electricity. He gave it a filament.
Bell didn’t invent sound. He gave it a wire.
The chemistry already exists.
Who gives it a factory?