This is just armchair analysis, but my perception from easily Googleable sources on mining & resource companies for battery tech is that it doesn’t actually look like a good investment for casual investors.

The lithium market seems crazy and susceptible to high volatility from Chinese stockpiles. Meanwhile, battery technologies, even at the high end, are becoming rapidly commoditized and experiencing price wars, meaning new investment even into state of the art battery tech probably isn’t exposed to a lot of upside because all the consumer markets it can feed into will have consumers expecting the highest quality at bargain basement prices.

The exceptions will likely be highly industry-specific and involve complex military or enterprise consumers with special needs, and I doubt casual investors will have access to information necessary to reliably speculate about those opportunities.

Seems to me that an immature market that is on its way to becoming a commodity is a great time to invest, as opposed to post commoditization

Commoditization drives down profits which will limit the returns on your investment.

Generally you want to invest in complements to things that are going to be commoditized. The drop in price and profits for the commodity drive increased profits for the consumer of the commoditized good.

Maybe. That could have described the solar photovoltaic manufacturing business in the first decade of the 21st century, but it would have been a real gamble making money trying to invest in any of the individual companies or even baskets of companies. Commoditization comes quickly, and with "too much" competition even proprietary advances benefit buyers more than manufacturers.

The fracking revolution looks similar, for that matter. So far it has delivered a lot more value to buyers of fossil fuels than to producers.

They caveat their comment with "casual investors".

To win, you'll probably have to have a quite wide basket or get lucky and pick the right companies.

Sila Nanotechnologies (https://silanano.com) is doing interesting things with battery chemistry. They recently raised a bunch of money from Daimler.

Maybe start here?

http://energystorage.org/membership/members

Maxwell, now owned by Tesla. I think Tesla will become a big player in the battery tech space

Maxwell dry battery electrode tech [1] is going to rapidly drive down cell costs (while increasing energy density) for Tesla. I posit this is also how they intend to pack 200kw of storage into the 2020 Roadster.

Disclaimer: TSLA investor

[1] https://www.nextbigfuture.com/2019/02/tesla-buys-maxwell-to-...

If this tech allows BEVs a significantly higher range it would be a game changer. Currently the range is about the same as gasoline cars with a longer refueling time. For your average consumer that’s not an improvement. But if I can go 800 miles per charge all the sudden my BEV looks like an iPhone X compared to your flipphone traditional vehicle.

Model S and X with the new Raven drivetrain is already pushing 370 miles of range. Very few people are going to drive 4 hours at a time without a break, definitely not going 600-800 between stops, although I could see this as beneficial to the Tesla Semi and their truck offering (where higher energy density is crucial).

I think it's 20-30% better energy density than current batteries

So far Tesla has not really done much in terms of battery tech. Pretty much everything they are doing with 18650 cells in their cars and power walls is hardly ground breaking science. They have managed to make things look incredibly beautiful, but 18650 batteries have been around for a long time. If Tesla starts to do more with different chemistries that will be interesting.

Thermal tech and longevity have been pushed by Tesla. 18650 is a form factor not a chemistry.

It is in general more efficient to do basic research in universities and publish the results so that everybody does not need to do the same large amount of experiments.

Then do the productization in companies.

I don't know which part is harder regarding batteries, but I assume we have still quite a lot of basic research to do as well.

Is that how it works?

My impression was that the basic research was done in universities (with public funding) until there are some good patents, then the patents are transferred to some kind of private company that take the profits.

I don't know the procedures very well, so, I would be happy if somebody assure me that this is not the case.

In the united states the main commercial option for non-lithium batteries is Nant who is developing zinc-air batteries (but for usage alongside lithium)

Then there is Redflow out of Australia and Voltstorage in Germany.

Not sure on vanadium flow batteries

I worked for a vanadium flow battery startup which went out of business. Vanadium provides a higher degree of safety due to the chemistry not being flammable. The chemistry also cycles (charges and discharges) without degradation in energy storage capacity. However, vanadium flow batteries are far less energy dense, have moving parts (pumps), and a poor track record of reliability. There was a lot of interest in vanadium flow batteries when Li-Ion was way more expensive, but now that prices have plummeted (and will continue to do so) I don't see much of a future outside of certain applications.

Redflow is doing good targetting to telecoms for reliable power at the radio mast. Africa, Asia, Latin America rural and remote like them. They struggled to be market viable in Australia head to head with Li-ion on price but if you understand their powerbudget and want a system on standby from binary chemicals they're a good way to go. (Not a shareholder, but been following them for years)