< Batteries are catching fire at sea

August 02, 2024

SYLVIE DOUGLIS, BYLINE: NPR.

(SOUNDBITE OF DROP ELECTRIC SONG, “WAKING UP TO THE FIRE”)

DARIAN WOODS, HOST:

This is THE INDICATOR FROM PLANET MONEY. I'm Darian Woods.

WAILIN WONG, HOST:

And I'm Wailin Wong. Lithium-ion batteries are everywhere these days. They're in our smartphones and laptops. And they're in bigger things, too, like e-bikes and scooters and electric vehicles.

WOODS: Yeah. And with more lithium-ion batteries comes more battery fires. I mean, you've probably seen the YouTube videos, Wailin, of, like, electric vehicles exploding in people's driveways.

WONG: I've seen those, yeah. And there's also news reports you see about exploding batteries in airplanes or in people's homes.

WOODS: Yeah. And these are causing huge problems, not just in airplanes but in another piece of critical infrastructure in the global economy - cargo ships.

WONG: Today on the show, we climb on board these oceangoing vessels to find out what's going wrong with lithium-ion batteries and what can be done about the problem.

(SOUNDBITE OF GIOACHINO ROSSINI'S, "IL BARBIERE DI SIVIGLIA (OVERTURE)")

WOODS: Captain Rahul Khanna spent 14 years at sea in charge of cargo ships, transporting everything from oil to iron ore to grain.

WONG: And in your career, did you ever have to transport lithium-ion batteries?

RAHUL KHANNA: Fortunately, no.

WONG: Today, Rahul is the global head of marine risk consulting at the insurance company Allianz. That's a fancy way of saying he spends his time thinking about all the things that can go wrong at sea. And lately, a big problem for the maritime industry is lithium-ion battery fires.

KHANNA: 2017, I think, was the time that we recognized it first. We started to see regular fires, regular incidents happening. And at that time, we thought, this is an emerging trend. Fast-forward a few more years - now, it's almost an emergency.

WOODS: In 2022, Allianz looked at five years' worth of marine insurance claims, and it found that fire and explosion was the most costly kind of loss. It was also one of the top causes of total losses, which is when nothing can be recovered from a ship.

WONG: One recent example of a total loss is a ship called the Felicity Ace. The incident made international news last year, including in the U.S. on the newsmagazine show, "Inside Edition."

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MARA MONTALBANO: A cargo ship carrying luxury cars caught fire at sea, and Portugal's air force was sent in to rescue the crew.

WOODS: And the cause of the fire on the Felicity Ace is not known, but some of the cars aboard were electric vehicles, and that made the fire worse.

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MONTALBANO: Officials say lithium-ion batteries in some of the electric vehicles ignited and made the blaze harder to fight, requiring...

WONG: The Felicity Ace was carrying more than a thousand luxury cars, like Porsches and Bentleys. The crew managed to safely abandon the ship, but the fire took days to extinguish. And efforts to tow the ship back to land were unsuccessful. The Felicity Ace sank into the Atlantic Ocean off the coast of the Azores.

WOODS: And Rahul says the Felicity Ace incident shows why lithium-ion battery fires are especially bad for car carriers. Now, these vessels are called roll-on/roll-off - or ro-ro - ships, and these ro-ro ships are built differently than your regular container ship that's separated into compartments.

KHANNA: So if something goes wrong with one compartment, you can probably still contain something in there. But car carriers are large, open spaces divided into large decks running from back to front of the vessel. Because the cars are stored within a very close proximity of each other, fire spreads very, very quickly. And then you have more lithium-ion batteries to fuel the fire, and it just keeps happening.

WONG: While Rahul says these fires are an urgent issue for the maritime industry, overall, these battery fires are still not that common. One estimate put the failure rate at 1 out of every 10 million lithium-ion batteries.

WOODS: But there are a lot of batteries out there, and it keeps growing. And even one failure can result in a fire with catastrophic consequences. Some fires have resulted in deaths, and it's because it's a specific kind of fire that is really dangerous.

WONG: Now, a lithium-ion battery consists of a bunch of individual cells packed together. If a single cell fails, it can go into a state called thermal runaway. This is when the temperature gets super hot super fast - much faster than the heat can be dissipated.

WOODS: Ofodike Ezekoye is the lab director at the Fire Research Group at the University of Texas at Austin. He's the kind of person who, when he's in a new place, will immediately look for the fire exit.

OFODIKE EZEKOYE: One of my colleagues recently said, you're a professional worrier. And I think that's what I do. It's my hobby, too. So I worry about risks.

WOODS: Ofodike knows all about the risks posed by lithium-ion battery fires. He says because the cells of a battery are so tightly packed, this thermal runaway process that starts in one cell can easily spread to the other cells.

EZEKOYE: Once a single cell is going into thermal runaway, you can't really change that evolution. These cells are packaged deeply into other compartments, and it's very difficult to get any cooling water into that package to be able to affect those cells.

WONG: Previous fires have shown that water can put out a lithium-ion battery fire eventually, but it takes a whole lot of water. And because it's so hard to bring down the battery's temperature, the fire can keep reigniting. There's even a risk of explosion because of flammable vapors that can ignite.

WOODS: Last year, a Tesla that spontaneously caught fire in a California junkyard needed 4,500 gallons of water to extinguish. And for reference, that's about as much as firefighters would use on a typical burning building. And that was for a battery pack in a single car on land. Once you're looking at potentially thousands of electric vehicles at sea, water isn't that great of a fix.

WONG: Yeah. For one thing, a cargo ship is surrounded by saltwater, which can make batteries short-circuit and even cause a fire. And then if a fire does start, dumping thousands of gallons of water into a cargo ship can destabilize it and make it capsize.

WOODS: Allianz, the insurance company where Rahul works, says that because shipboard fires are so hard to extinguish, the focus should be on prevention. And this responsibility falls on the entire supply chain for lithium-ion batteries.

KHANNA: So to start from, we have the manufacturers who have responsibility in producing a quality product and doing everything as much as possible by the book.

WONG: Rahul says a lot of battery manufacturers sprang up in response to the huge consumer demand for electronic devices, and the quality of these batteries can be uneven. A poorly made battery can be a real hazard.

KHANNA: And then you have the shippers who are packaging, transporting it from the factories to the ships and then stuffing them in containers.

WONG: Batteries need to be stored in a certain way to prevent fires from starting, and they're supposed to be labeled as lithium batteries so that they're handled properly while in transit.

WOODS: A few years ago, a fire broke out on a container ship that was traveling from Malaysia to India. Industry news reports blamed lithium-ion batteries aboard that hadn't been properly declared.

WONG: Another time, a container of old batteries caught fire en route to the Port of Virginia. The paperwork for the cargo wrongly identified it as computer parts, not batteries.

KHANNA: That problem of misdeclared (ph) cargo has been going around in the shipping industry for a long time, but it has now become a problem which we really need to deal with.

WOODS: Allianz says that some container ship operators are beefing up inspections and imposing higher fines on misdeclared cargo. And when it comes to improving safety on the ships themselves, Rahul says that people in the industry, along with the United Nations, are talking about updating regulations around what kinds of fire detection systems should be required on board.

WONG: In the meantime, private companies are pushing ahead with technological fixes. At UT Austin, Ofodike Ezekoye and a few of his colleagues have a battery fire safety startup. They're working on technology to get rid of the explosive and toxic gases that can build up. The idea is to minimize the amount of damage in these fires.

EZEKOYE: This is something that touches on many parts of the economy we're not really aware of - how we're all taxed in some sense by the safety implications or lack of safety considerations in dealing with lithium-ion batteries.

WONG: You mentioned that you're a professional worrier. And I feel like I'm, like, an amateur worrier, but now I'm, like, turning into a professional worrier (laughter).

EZEKOYE: The more people who are thinking about all the things that could go wrong, maybe we can then correct them and we wouldn't have so many problems, so - good.

WONG: Well, Darian, I'm going to start the Professional Worriers Association. Are you in?

WOODS: I mean, isn't that our job description at THE INDICATOR - to be worrying about recessions around the corner or things that could go wrong?

WONG: Yeah, so I guess you already have a card. You're a card-carrying member.

(SOUNDBITE OF GIOACHINO ROSSINI'S, "IL BARBIERE DI SIVIGLIA (OVERTURE)")

WONG: This show was produced by Brittany Cronin and Noah Glick, with engineering from Katherine Silva. Sierra Juarez checked the facts. Viet Le is our senior producer. Kate Concannon edits the show, and THE INDICATOR is a production of NPR.

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