Lithium battery ripe for disruption, inventor says
spectrum.ieee.org
spectrum.ieee.org
Some things you did long ago are just plain wrong, others are only eighty percent right. There’s an expectation that something better will come along, even discounting fads. You just can’t see it or have been sucked into worrying about ten other things. Someone should take that baton.
As an inventor I suspect there comes a day where you open the trade journals expecting someone to have supplanted your old inventions. You were trying to improve the state of the art and having lived with it for years or at this point decades, you start wondering where the flying cars went. Please supplant my work.
Some manufacturers (e.g. CATL in China) are apparently already ramping up for Na battery mass production.
The interesting thing of course is that 'few percent' which means theoretically there is a lot of room for improvement.
> It's bizarre how people refuse to accept that hydrogen fuel cells are technically batteries and have absurdly high energy densities. And if pressed, you usually hear some excuse like poor efficiencies, as if that isn't a powerful justification for pouring billions of dollars into the problem.
I think you’ll have to quote some more authoritative sources to convince people that it could be viable.
People are now claiming that this can never happen again or that no innovation is possible in the future for another type of battery chemistry.
> People are now claiming that this can never happen again or that no innovation is possible in the future for another type of battery chemistry.
Who is claiming this?
> Who is claiming this?
You are claiming that. You seem intent to not accept the fact that hydrogen fuel cells are a form of battery technology that can advance.
Yes. Especially in LiFePO batteries.
Not to mention that you are consistently implying that this must somehow come at the exclusion of progress anywhere else. That is an absurdity. The point is that we should take this idea seriously alongside other ideas.
Grid connected or off grid storage seem like a far more apt use for the tech.
But most sodium based battery types either had a too low energy density to be competitive or they had other drawbacks that - while sometimes controllable in lab or industrial conditions, made them unsuitable for common mainstream mass uses where lithium batteries are established.
Only quite recently have we reached a point where new Na battery types emerged that simultaneously 1. do not suffer of such problems, 2. have a sufficient energy density AND 3. have made it to a commercially viable alternative to the common Lithium-ion-batteries for mainstream uses. Let's hope this time is the right time for the Na battery revolution. We'll see.
Titanium for instance is also very abundant. But it hasn’t been until relatively recently that humans were able to mine and process it at industrial scale.
But if it's in terms of practicably available (mineable or otherwise practicably extractable at a sub-exorbitant price) lithium reserves, it's quite bleak actually, and we are currently forced to either rely on a small set of limited reserves, mostly concentrated in a few rather uncertain countries of origin… or to resort to extremely expensive low-yield extraction methods.
In contrast: Na (Sodium) is trivially and cheaply extractable from salt, which is readily available everywhere in much larger quantities (be it as sea water or from salt mines which are enormously more common than lithium mining) for cheap.
The relevant bit is here: “Otherwise please use the original title, unless it is misleading or linkbait; don't editorialize.”
- Reducing energy inputs for manufacturing
- Eliminating cobalt from cathodes (largely achieved already, depending on what performance characteristics the application can live with)
- Using clean energy while mining for battery materials, and ensuring that there are regional supply chains around the world
- Expanding battery recycling
These sound more incremental than truly disruptive to me, but mining and heavy manufacturing change on a much slower cadence than microchips and software. So maybe these changes would be disruptive in context.
They haven't invested trillions, the lithium ion technology is in a relatively young and poorly optimized state and is similar to the state of the art 40 years ago.
You are right, disruption isn't the correct word. Investment, incremental improvement and niche applications are where we see most progress. Other chemistries are not seeming particularly promising for mobile, lightweight applications.
> It's bizarre how people refuse to accept that hydrogen fuel cells are technically batteries and have absurdly high energy densities. And if pressed, you usually hear some excuse like poor efficiencies, as if that isn't a powerful justification for pouring billions of dollars into the problem.
This is not due to lack of focus or funding. Toyota, the largest auto maker in the world, has spent decades trying to make hydrogen-powered cars a reality. And in any honest assessment, it has failed dismally at doing so (indeed, it has spent so much focus and funding on hydrogen that it is woefully behind its competitors in battery electric vehicles).
And guess what, that's exactly the same story with terrestrial transport. Around the world, natural gas powers a lot of vehicles. It is a great storable means of distributing hydrogen - safe enough and well-understood enough that much of the developed world is content at piping it directly into their homes. What it is not is carbon-emission free.
Are there specific avenues of research and development that have a decent shot at bringing roundtrip grid>hydrogen>motor efficiency on par with other EVs, and which are currently starved of funding?
In fact, this entire argument is a made-up one to begin with. People are being willfully ignorant of the fact that both lithium and hydrogen are on the same column on the periodic table. That they should both behave very similarly to each other in all matters related to battery chemistry.
No. There is no reason to believe that the efficiency can be significantly improved. If the efficiency of clean hydrogen is bad enough and will always be that bad, it's very possible it is more efficient to power vehicles through easily transported liquid hydrocarbons (which are almost certainly always going to be better in effective volumetric and mass energy density) and spend the power saved to run centralized carbon capture.
> both lithium and hydrogen are on the same column on the periodic table. That they should both behave very similarly to each other in all matters related to battery chemistry
Hydrogen is a notoriously difficult element to work with, that behaves in complex and poorly understood ways, even now. Aerospace applications, arguably those with the most experience in handling hydrogen, routinely struggle with its challenges.
Hydrogen and lithium are both on the same column and have one electron in their outer shell. They should have very similar chemical properties. You're just demonstrating the problem I was talking about: That the facts should be driving a strong motivation to solve these problems. Instead, it is just a series of excuses to not try. As if climate change just wasn't something to worry about.
And yet the cars are more expensive, the refilling stations are expensive to build and only exist in limited geographic regions, the cost to refuel is high, and we don't have infrastructure to provide clean hydrogen in volume to filling stations.
Sure these are solvable problems. But at some point if we want it to actually exist it has to actually be built instead of being a California and Japan toy project.
How many years and how many billions to create a device the size of a refrigerator that can connect to grid power and refill Hydrogen cars all day long? We have had this for EVs for a decade.
Toyota, Hyundai, GM, and others have been putting money in since at least the 90s. Why haven’t they been able to create a compelling product and bring it to market?
If hydrogen is just a battery, and someone wants to create an EV that happens to use Hydrogen as the battery, and finds a way to charge that battery off of an AC or DC grid connection, then it can use any of the EV infrastructure we are building today.
None of that infrastructure is li-ion specific. It’s for batteries that charge from grid power.
You are aware of what is at stake here? Not even multiple trillions of dollar is a number too high to be unjustified. Anything less than $1 trillion should not even qualify as a serious argument against it.
I could be wrong but I haven’t seen anyone suggest that there is a path to creating a hydrogen charging network that will be as efficient or effective as a direct EV charging network. More money doesn’t change that.
I reject the premise that there is some conspiracy or avoidance to spending money on hydrogen vehicles. Tons of money has been spent and is being spent, with less useful results so far than other battery types.
Every vehicle credit, infrastructure plan, or fleet emissions target I have read already calls out hydrogen alongside EV as qualifying.
For use cases where the technology fundamentally makes sense, such as Aircraft where infrastructure only needs to exist at major airports and the energy density requirements are much more significant, there is active investment and development with a solid path to useful results.
Like I said, the arguments against that are just excuses. And no one is implying that this path comes at the exclusion of everything else either. That just seems like another excuse. We can easily fund everything else while also funding this idea too.
Existing policies are pretty much rigged in favor of li-ion batteries. People sometimes cite fuel cell tax credits, but ignore the part where the government is heavily subsidizing battery factories or paying for charging networks. It is not remotely a fair comparison.
I didn’t say there was a chemistry with higher density than hydrogen. You’re the one saying people have forgotten hydrogen, or it is somehow generally not being supported.
I haven’t seen any evidence yet that investment in research into hydrogen is lacking compared to other projects.
You say the return on spending more is self-evident, so finding some actual evidence should be easy.
If we could spend $1T and have a high likelihood of a high density storage system that can run on clean grid energy, doesn’t waste large amounts of its input energy, can be viably deployed in all areas where vehicles need to be recharged, I would support that.
You seem intent on missing the point. This is the very reason why people should be open to the idea. Hydrogen is the very thing you are describing here. And let's not forget the issue at hand: the problems of climate change. It demands we spent significant resources tackling it, and thus refusing to spend money on potential solutions is the unsupportable idea.
The point you are missing is the “high likelyhood”.
Current round trip hydrogen efficiency seems to be below 50%. Is there an actual concrete path to making that 90%? Is spending $1T today going to achieve that?
Would spending that on other chemistries (ex sodium ion) produce better results?
I very much understand the issue at hand. And I do not think we are “refusing to spend money” on hydrogen. In fact I see quite a lot of evidence to the contrary, that hydrogen is getting more funding than other avenues relative to the demonstrated utility thus far, because of that very alluring promise if it were to become viable for broad applications.
You are still acting as if investment in one idea somehow precludes investment in another. This entire time, I was stating that we can easily justify vast sums of R&D in many possible ideas. That should include hydrogen, not coming up with a series of excuses to avoid it. Especially considering that hydrogen fuel cells already exist commercially, and are already well past the lab stage (something na-ion have not gone past).
Finally, the words "high likelihood" is not a well defined claim. You can easily adjust your numbers to justify or reject any idea depending on what you personally feel. In reality, we are strongly motivated to pursue many ideas simultaneously and we do not have the luxury of ignoring options.
This is the political reality. Yes we should be doing more.
> I was stating that we can easily justify vast sums of R&D in many possible ideas.
Perhaps we should, I’m not sure that “can easily” applies to spending trillions on R&D.
> That should include hydrogen, not a series of excuses to avoid it. Especially considering that hydrogen fuel cells already exist commercially, and are already well past the lab stage.
Agreed, we should be researching hydrogen for energy storage. And we are. We are also researching other chemistries with different tradeoffs. And a few of those chemistries have become viable as current market products, so they are receiving different kinds of investment to move them from research products to broad implementation.
> In reality, we are strongly motivated to pursue many ideas simultaneously and we do not have the luxury of ignoring options.
Agreed. I have not seen any evidence yet that hydrogen is being ignored as an energy storage medium.
The devil is in the details - this is only partially right. Hydrogen has absurdly high energy densities when considering weight, however when considering volume it has absurdly low density. The low volumetric density is one of the primary barriers to hydrogen adoption.
Battery tech is too important for the survival of our species to get caught up in these silly hostage negotiations.
The amount of industry that desperately wants better density is stunning and the fact that despite the billions spent we are still stuck with basically the same tech is a testament to its stubborness
“Eternally five years away? No, batteries are improving under your nose” https://arstechnica.com/science/2021/05/eternally-five-years...
It's a hard problem.
50% extra energy density with the same performance characteristics as lithium ion otherwise would probably level us up as a civilization.
A problem is that lithium is more or less the best choice for materials, and we've been pouring resources into developing it.
And quite a lot of others: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_battery_types
But there are many emerging energy storage use cases for which lithium ion was never a real contender.
Trading off those constraints gets you options like cheap long term energy storage (metal air batteries, flow batteries, heat batteries), or batteries for lower performance vehicles or stationary storage (lithium iron phosphate).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lithium-titanate_battery
These are not very good for mobile applications such as vehicles due to the lower energy density but for stationary applications they hold a lot of promise and they are in production already. The volume is still too low though, once that goes up this will be a serious contender for things like home batteries. They have some really interesting properties, one of which is a very long predicted life span (30 years!!).
The perfect battery will probably never become a reality, but the incremental changes may get us specialist solutions that are good enough for all practical applications. Titanium isn't all that expensive in raw form, it's when you start machining it that it gets expensive quickly. Typically it's about 1.5 times whatever the going rate for Aluminum is.
Was this transcribed correctly? 60-80kWh for a device that can be charged thousands of times doesn't seem that bad... And even for the higher performance lower-cycling number batteries in phones, it doesn't seem that bad.
If, say, fracking for natural gas produced so much utility for so little energy input, we would have to worry a lot more about natural gas competing with batteries. The primary metric to focus on for batteries should be total cost, which is what will give batteries an even bigger edge over natural gas peakers. Reducing the energy input for 1kWh of capacity from 60 kWh to, say, 6 kWh will have minimal benefit for speeding the transition tk a carbon free energy system. With solar costs as $0.02/kWh, that 60kWh is only $1.20 of a battery pack that costs multiple hundred dollars.
That would be interesting given how far away we've moved from that. You can find sketchy electrical products now not just on AliExpress or Amazon, but in lots of US retail stores.
Lithium will almost certainly remain the one, and only mainstream battery chemistry simply because of physics. Lithium ion has the lowest mass per unit of charge.
It's about cathodes, and electrodes which may change, as well as their manufacturing technology.
> It's bizarre how people refuse to accept that hydrogen fuel cells are technically batteries and have absurdly high energy densities. And if pressed, you usually hear some excuse like poor efficiencies, as if that isn't a powerful justification for pouring billions of dollars into the problem.