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Comment by EntrePrescott | Hacker News Reader

Maybe the next big disruption is not about making better batteries based on Li (Lithium) but to ditch Li for most mass use purposes and go with a different material, e.g. Na (Natrium, vulgar name: Sodium)… which unlike lithium is extremely abundant. It would (at least in its early less optimized versions) have a slightly lower energy density at about 200 Wh/kg compared to the current best lithium-based state of the art batteries, but still be in a similar ballpark and easily enough for many applications, especially given the much cheaper price.

Some manufacturers (e.g. CATL in China) are apparently already ramping up for Na battery mass production.

https://archive.is/qJQPn

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Sodium chemistries currently have intractable problems with dendrite growth, limiting the cycle life to a level not viable for use in commercial cells. It's an active field of research though, and probably the most promising lithium alternative if that problem can be solved.

Multiple companies in China report GWh scale production lines close to opening.

I am sure you're not the first person to not want dependency on foreign countries that have lithium deposits. Why is this not done already with sodium? Is it costly to manufacture with it? Durability?

My guess as a layman would be that AFAIK the reaction of alkali ("group 1") metals with water is more violent the further down it's situated in that column in the periodic table. Since Na is one down from Li it should react more violently to any water contact (even water vapor in the atmosphere) which would make it inherently more of a safety concern.

That's correct about the specific energy, it's partly related to sodium's atomic mass of 23, vs lithium's atomic mass of 7.

It's weird that people have failed to notice that hydrogen has an atomic mass of 1. Far better than both of them. To quote what I said elsewhere:

> 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.

Yeah hydrogen's energy per kg is definitely an attractive nuisance.

I don’t think anybody has failed to notice this. Toyota and Honda have both had notable failures bringing Hydrogen fuel cell cars to market despite exciting claims along those lines.

I think you’ll have to quote some more authoritative sources to convince people that it could be viable.

This ignores the part where battery powered cars have existed for over a century and have "failed." But recent events have changed the needs of society, and now they have "succeeded."

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.

The needs of society changed but so did the technology. An EV built in 2020 is a completely different proposition to one built in 1990.

> 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?

And a fuel cell car today is completely different than one built in 1990 too.

> 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.

I have not said that. I have asked what the avenues of research are that suggest that there are major advancements to be made and are underfunded.

It is literally a battery chemistry. It should have broadly the same properties as li-ion batteries. There should not be any challenges, at least not ones that can't be solved via just spending more on R&D.

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.

My point is the idea is taken seriously and there is already funding and research applied to it.

Clearly not, since the original article didn't even mention it and very few in the comments section brought it up either. It is seriously being ignored in a real way.

Fuel cells is not a problem. Hydrogen storage is. Hydrogen is just a very nasty material, it leaks through everything, makes steel brittle and requires extreme pressures to store it at meaningful density. Combine the last two problems together and it's easy to see why there are significant technological barriers to hydrogen adoption.

And lithium is somehow easy to deal with? This is really just another excuse. The point wasn't claiming those problems don't exist, it is asking why we are not seeing those problems as motivation for massive R&D spending in order to solve them.

> And lithium is somehow easy to deal with?

Yes. Especially in LiFePO batteries.

Cars are most likely the wrong application for the technology given it's explosive potential.

Grid connected or off grid storage seem like a far more apt use for the tech.

One the other hand lithium ion batteries only contain a few percent lithium by weight. So a sodium ion battery is likely 10% heavier.

The interesting thing of course is that 'few percent' which means theoretically there is a lot of room for improvement.

And if we could somehow do Solid State Sodium Battery, we should be close to the optimal solution.

There are frequent articles talking about various researchers that are investigating that vulgar Sodium as a new chemistry for batteries.

Different sodium based battery technologies have existed for quite a while (much longer than lithium based batteries actually), and research as well. And there were already a couple niches where some of them managed to establish some foothold, e.g. in the domain of high-temperature batteries.

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.

Lithium actually is super abundant

“Abundance” is kind of a tricky concept. 99.999%+ of earth’s resources are not yet within human’s ability to mine. Mostly either inaccessible or too sparsely concentrated or locked in compounds difficult to industrialize.

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.

depends by what measure… if it's just about how much lithium is theoretically estimated to exist in the earth crust, then one could twist together an argument for lithium to be somewhat "abundant" (even though even by that measure Sodium is, depending on the source, 1000 to 2000 times more abundant).

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.

Also in Austria we have one of the oldest salt mines on earth and it is still very pretty there. Salt mining can be done with very little environmental impact.

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