Northvolt develops state-of-the-art sodium-ion battery validated at 160 Wh/kg
northvolt.comThis summer a French company started to sell sodium ion battery power tool in a major hardware store.
National French research agency announcement: https://www.cnrs.fr/fr/cnrsinfo/batteries-sodium-ion-une-pre...
The power tool : https://www.leroymerlin.fr/produits/outillage/outillage-elec...
Unfortunately, all I could found about the Wh/kg efficiency was an article about the same company saying they were currently able to build cells at 90Wh/Kg in 2017.
Nevertheless, it's not a promise, it's a product currently on sale.
> company saying they were currently able to build cells at 90Wh/Kg in 2017.
I found an article from 2021 where they were claiming 90Wh/kg to 120Wh/kg, and that they would not go beyond that. They argue that their strength is fast charging, not high energy density, with charges to full capacity in less than 10 minutes.
https://www.ecinews.fr/fr/tiamat-energy-lance-la-production-...
In a vehicle, "fast charging" is not just convenience, it means you can use a smaller, _lighter_ battery having less autonomy but knowing that you can refill it in a few minutes stop. It doesn't make range anxiety go away completely but it makes long trips practical.
The big advantage of fast charging is that charging stations are smaller. With hours-long charging, everyone needs a parking place with a charger. With 20-30 minute charging, you need a big lot with parking stalls and something for people to do for 20-30 minutes. With 10 minute charging, you're almost at gas station throughput. With 5 minute charging, you're at gas station throughput levels.
As I wrote a few days ago, once charging is below 10 minutes, charging stations work just like gas stations in terms of throughput. We will see gas stations converting directly from gas pumps to chargers. (Unclear if gas pumps can coexist near high-powered chargers; gasoline vapor and high voltage electricity should not be in the same space.)
Just off highway 80, the first exit after crossing the Yolo bypass on the way from Davis into Sacramento, there's a 7-eleven store/gas station/ChargePoint.
The chargers are not right in with the pumps, but not all that far either.
Street view link but the imagery is 6 years old so no ChargePoint visible. The chargers are where the unhitched semi cab is parked. You can see better pictures by looking at user submitted photos for the ChargePoint. https://maps.app.goo.gl/EEnpFRwwv49fkUPo7
For gas-station throughput, you need replaceable batteries which you trade at the station, or 3-minute charging. With 10 minutes you still need that parking lot and something better than your typical mini convenience store. But - it does go a long way, for sure: 10 minutes is something you're willing to just accept as a stop along your way, while 30 minutes is something that you would try to plan in advance.
Replaceable battery isn't easy and likely won't happen for cars. Maybe for airplanes when the time comes, but even then I'm a bit skeptical... Maybe for part of it for bigger jets.
3min is better than 10min, but ask anyone if they'd prefer to fuel up 3 times slower and pay half the cost and I bet most everyone would say they would.
For fueling up, you must be there until it's done. For charging you don't. You connect your car and go inside the convenience store. With 10min, that's excellent. Chances are most everyone will either exit their vehicles, plug it in, go back inside their vehicle for 10min, walk around for a bit, or go to the store for a quick errant. In any of those cases the experience will be better than dealing with fuel.
China is already doing it. Replaceable batteries are seen as the way to go over there and multiple companies are already offering it. Drive your car in and a robot will drop the old battery out and lift a new one in. No more hassle than a carwash.
It definitely works well for scooters where you don't need much real estate to put in a swap station.
From a logistic point of view, replaceable batteries is a nightmare to manage.
It's been tried. See Better Place.[1] Battery swapping was a bet against better batteries. Even in Israel and Hawaii, where you can't drive very far, it was a losing idea.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Better_Place_%28company%29
Nio, in China, has revisited this, successfully.[1] They have about 2000 battery swap stations and claim to have done 30,000,000 battery swaps so far. They have a few demo stations in Europe.
The idea is to use smaller batteries for cheaper and lighter cars. Range is less but batteries are swappable for long trips.
[1] https://electrek.co/2023/11/21/nio-is-joining-forces-with-a-...
I live in Israel(/Palestine), and I can tell you that Better Place' failure here had very little, if anything, to do with the use battery replacement logistics.
(Of course, electric cars are not a key need in Israel anyways, the country is in dire needs of mass transit system improvement and integration - which would significantly reduce car overuse and congestion problems.)
Can't be much harder than Calor gas cylinders.
The whole battery replacement situation is why EVs depreciate so much.
If swapping batteries in a modular system became a thing, the depreciation problem might shrink...it would also make EVs a lot more appealing to a significant number of people.
I don't see Calor gas cylinder as the same problem as batteries, because you don't drive around with your Calor gas cylinders. You bring it home, and you bring it back.
With battery, the main issue I see is the same as cities encounter with shared-vehicle: sometimes many people go at the same time from place A to place B, which lead to empty stations and overflowed stations. And you end up having to compensate this effect A LOT.
I admit that the problem is not intrinsic to battery-swap, it's more that it's not adapted to the way people move around. And as people don't move around randomly (which might be the best scenario), the solution is not as simple as the Calor Gas cylinder problem.
The swapping station looks fine for a new technology endlessly claimed not to work. (lmao)
Lets not stop there, you also want to be able to dispose of the battery if you can no longer control the heat.
Currently the solution is to submerge the entire car or let it burn out on the spot. Takes about 2 days but it can randomly reignite.
Hate to be that pragmatic engineer...but wouldn't a decent balance between range and fast charging be nicer? I'd like to see the graph for capacity vs charging time for these cells.
I'm sure like any battery the charging gets slower over time as the battery warms up, so finding the sweet spot would be nice.
I'd quite like to buy an electric car and select an appropriate power bank based on this.
Also, why do the packs have to be permanent? Why not have the ability to add or remove modular cells as and when needed? Just add the capacity when you need it. Plug the unused cells into your solar array when you aren't using them.
That opens up a few options. Firstly, you can choose to power your house or your car, or of you need to get to work and you forgot to charge, you take the dead cells out and swap a fully charged set in. Leave the dead ones charging at home.
Have a modular system where battery swapping is possible doesnt seem to be a system that EV manufacturers have considered for some reason.
It's a perfectly good tradeoff, absolutely. Even more so because the sodium-ion batteries run cool, contrary to the the Li-ions, meaning that their installed energy-density is a lot closer to their theoretical energy density, which is not the case for Li-ions.
Not necessarily. You must have those fast chargers conveniently placed on your route. I can't even imagine going to Vegas from LA with an electric car currently.
You must have gas stations conveniently placed on your route. I can't even imagine going to Vegas from LA without a horse and buggy currently
The last part felt a little mean-spirited in retrospect. But my intention was to point out that you're just describing a lack of infrastructure yet
Once we build this stuff it's *there for use* and just has the usual burdens of maintenance. Arguably less since we don't need to transport big trucks full of oil to it regularly
Sure, but complaining that someone is noticing the real infrastructure issues doesn’t mean they don’t exist right now?
Not everyone wants to bleed so they can be on the bleeding edge.
There is no lack of charging infrastructure between LA and LV.
If you were talking about LA to La Paz then there is a real concern about making it, but LA to LV is no problem at all.
LA to Vegas is about 270 miles, which is under the 333 mile estimated range of a Tesla Model 3.
I'm sure under normal conditions, 270 miles would be cutting it pretty close, if it even makes it there at all. Luckily there are 10 supercharges along the way.
Not sure how it is for non-teslas, but I'm guessing at least a few of those places with superchargers also have chargers that will work with other kinds of cars.
Think about what that means as to a practical limit, today. How many cars per day can make that trip assuming they have to recharge once along the way? It’s far from a solved problem even on that route.
I love electric cars. I’ve been drawing pictures of them thinking about them and waiting for them for a long time. And, I am very grateful for those that made them a reality. That said, I’m also pragmatic. Where we are today versus where we need to be to make them practical for a large portion of the population is sublime.
Each Tesla charging station has anywhere between 10 and 30 ports, so you can charge around 200 cars at the same time, let's say each takes 30 minutes(rather on the high side, 15-20 is more likely) and we have 10 active drive hours.
That makes around 4k can be charged on route, more realistic it's above 10k already.. and that's only Tesla.
Growing pains happen, but I drove my M3 across EU multiple times.. and needed to wait for a charger once, for 3 minutes.
People generally travel at daylight hours, so it’s actually about a third of that. And, worse, people generally travel at peak hours. Again, reality.
There are 3 1/3 daylight hours?
Where exactly is this peak on a 3-4 hour drive where everyone starts with different percentages/takes break at different point in time and software optimizes to avoid overloaded stations automatically?
There are not so many and the chances of them working are a coin flip.
Driving through the desert on an open road is not conducive to efficiency. It’s hot, need AC blasting. It’s an open road—drive fast! (Or it’s bumper to bumper for 10 hours).
Exactly. But if two ten minute stops in Barstow and Baker was all it took to make it possible with a cheaper electric car, a lot more people would consider it. Anyway you'll need to stop for a piss.
As another commenter pointed out, LA to LV is actually doable with a number of current on sale EVs, with a decent size range buffer left behind after the trip. Furthermore, there are several fast chargers on the route in Hesperia, Barstow and Baker.
I did a whole trip from SF, national parks, Las Vegas, Phoenix, San Diego, LA, and back to SF in an electric car (Tesla Model Y). This was ~3 weeks ago.
No issues whatsoever.
If it’s impossible to charge the battery in less than 30 minutes, that changes the dynamics of charging a lot.
Interesting. The second web site cites a number of advantages of the sodium-ion battery:
> Sodium is 10 times faster to charge than lithium, and safer because of its low operating temperature. The number of recharging cycles is up to 5 times greater than lithium. Another advantage is that sodium is more widely available and accessible on the planet, and its processing has less impact on the environment.
Worth noting that Tiamat's battery is sodium vanadium fluoride phosphate, not sodium ferrocyanide. So, these are not quite the same technology. Vanadium costs a similar amount as nickel and has a higher abundance, but the present-day annual production is much lower. The long-term resource outlook for vanadium is unclear.
Sodium ferrocyanide ("Prussian white") was claimed by CATL as well, though they have been supplementing it with lithium in cars for some reason. The cynic in me thinks that the lithium is there to stabilize unfavorable cycling characteristics of the sodium; the optimist hopes it is just because lithium is cheaper at scale right now.
I was banned from the second site (like many other commenters), and got a chuckle from how switching the first from FR to EN did not, in fact, translate the actual content.
Silly me for expecting that, I guess.
Banned for using a VPN.
I got banned and am not even using a VPN! Overly aggressive bot protection.
It's the first time a captcha tool flagged me as robot and banned from their site.
They are banning entire countries (violating the EU geo-blocking directive as well, probably).
I didn't even get to a captcha
> There is a robot on the same network [...] as you.
Same here
They're French. They don't care about your suffering <puffs on cigarette>
00100011 01101101 01100101 01110100 01101111 01101111
The entire product weighs 0.5 kg, and it is 0.7A at 3.6V. I assume the amp rating is really amp-hours, which would give it 2.52Wh. Figure the battery is half the weight of the tool, which would give it roughly 10Wh/kg.
According to https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S03787... the batteries Tiamat produces are 18650 format, 3.7V, 0.61Ah. The latter more or less matches the specs of the product. This would mean the product might have a single 34g battery with a specific energy of 68Wh/kg, and 135Wh/L. So low end of nimh. Which sounds somewhat reasonable, 10 (and around 20Wh/L) I don’t think you’d bother even going forwards with.
Sadly I can’t find any teardown of the product, it’s all just press reprints.
There’s a split view PDF (in the documents section), it doesn’t seem to show the battery but does not show a huge amount of space for it.
I got the same 68 Wh/kg from this report: https://www.greencarcongress.com/2023/10/20231030-tiamat.htm...
Low end of Nimh doesn't sound very great, but - what if you could get 18650 cells for (making up a small number) $0.50 each? I think I would end up with a box full and just swap them as I use them. Even better if they retain charge well.
It has other great advantages over NiMH: fast charging, no memory effect, no self-discharge
NiMH self-discharge is low enough to not matter for most applications. 5th generation Panasonic Eneloop is 90% after 1 year of storage, 80% after 3 years, 75% after 5 years, and 70% after 10 years.
NiMH doesn't have noticable memory effect. NiCd does.
Absolutely! However my baseline are my Li-ion 18650 cells which have those advantages as well, in addition to larger capacity. But I think I would be willing to give up the capacity if the price was much lower.
Yeah, considering the tradeoffs it has to be much cheaper to be worthwhile. I would say 5-7 euros per cell retail to be worth considering. Otherwise why bother ?
This paper describes Tiamat's battery as Na3V2(PO4)2F3:
https://chemistry-europe.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdf/10....
How much of that weight is the essential weight of the battery, and how much is consumer-friendly outer shell, electronics, other one-offs etc.? I.e. if you wanted to take the same tech, put it in a non-consumer-facing context (say a grid-scale battery) and wanted to make it 100x the capacity, would it be 100x the weight?
I can imagine a lot of the weight of the battery unit itself isn't necessarily the battery, if that makes sense.
The spec sheet on the store is confusing. It says :
Intensity(Ah) Less than 1.5
Tension (V) 3.6
Amperage (Ah) 0.7
Edit : the box indicate 0.33 Kg, the 0.5 weight probably include the charger and other parts.
According to https://www.epectec.com/batteries/cell-comparison.html, 160 Wh/kg is about the same density as Li-po and Li-ion. This battery chemistry is attractive in that it's made from common materials & is more stable/safer than Lithium. The press release doesn't say, so I assume it's not competitive in energy density per litre so I assume not.
Wikipedia has a comparison table at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sodium-ion_battery#Comparison but no idea how accurate/up to date it is.
It's made of sodium and iron, which together make up about 8% of the earth's crust, so yes, they chemistry is made of really common materials. By contrast lithium makes up about 0.002%.
Misleading way of looking at it. Lithium and sodium are not the major cost (or weight, or volume) inputs to making batteries, and crustal occurrence is very distantly related to cost. We mine things from places with 100x-1mx higher concentrations than natural. Water concentrates lithium into brines and clays for us. Sodium's low density causes it to create massive domes underground that are extremely recoverable. In contrast many metals aren't naturally concentrated.
Lithium batteries aren't made of lithium. They're made of nickel- or iron, or manganese, or cobalt. In iron and manganese batteries the #1 price factor is the manufacturing- the energy, solvents, and machinery used to deposit materials onto film.
Likewise sodium batteries are not made of sodium. There's 13x more iron in them than sodium. There may also be large amounts of manganese or vanadium. The cost of manufacturing is also higher per kWh.
Lithium batteries are made of lithium to a point that there is a lithium supply bottleneck if we want to use lithium-ion batteries as the base chemistry for the green transition.
It will take time to mass produce things regardless, but I imagine Sodium has far fewer bottlenecks.
The lithium bottleneck idea comes from people who go "looking at the current lithium supply we would run short if we instantly started producing 10x as many batteries as we do today", completely ignoring how markets work.
It's great if we can get a chemistry that avoids the need for lithium, but it won't be a showstopper if we don't.
There is no lithium bottleneck, we merely haven't even bothered to catalog all the lithium that is easily accessible.
Yes and: No long term shortage with occasional short term crunches. Mostly due to lag time bringing new supplies online.
Like with every commodity market.
Lithium is still part of the cost of producing batteries and their production still requires a large number of lithium mining operations. Having a ton of lithium mines around isn't exactly what's destroying the planet, but having fewer would be more better.
This sort of misses the point of sodium ion batteries though, no? One of the main objections to lithium ion batteries is the need for cobalt because of how it's sourced through "artisanal mining" in Africa.
LFP has no cobalt.
And can be regularly charged to 100%, and lasts for a greater number of charge cycles.
Northvolt’s original factory in Skellefteå is near (well, ‘Arctic near’: 460 km along an existing rail line) Kiruna, one of the largest Iron mines in the world, so that’s one of the two material supply safe.
Industrial Sodium is made with electrolysis of sea salt; the factory is next to the Gulf of Bothany and has abundant (wind and hydro) power, so the other material supply is safe.
It wasn’t hard anywhere, but it’s straightforward in that particular case.
This got me thinking - the salinity of the water in the bothnian bay is very low (seems to be about 1/10th of ocean water). Wouldn't that effect electrolysis?
Possibly—but if that’s a concern, you can also get some from the North Atlantic.
https://www.reddit.com/r/coolguides/s/Co4zeAhcmT
Iron is on top. Lithium is one up from the bottom left.
strange how calcium and sodium are omitted
Sodium is not "mined" per se, as, you know, just get some sea water
Calcium is, but maybe because it's not processed as most metals it is not included in the graph
At least half of all NaCl that's used world wide is mined from salt mines. For many places in the world it's not feasible to rely on solar evaporation of sea water. Using other energy sources to evaporate sea salt is not cost effective and many places have large salt deposits.
I am aware of this, but mining (or salt water processing) for the specific extraction of sodium metal from NaCl or others is really small
Mined salt is probably more valuable as table salt (and cattle feed) than as source of metallic Na
Would it be feasible to use the sodium from desalination wastewater?
desalination wastewater contains a number of other chemicals used in the desalination process (e.g. pH adjusters, coagulants and flocculants, antiscalants, dispersants, biocides, and reducing chemicals)
So the next question: would those contaminants significantly degrade the performance of the battery?
I mean... pH adjusters would definitely significantly alter things. The other major problem (I'd guess) is just the health implications of working with toxic wastewater. Is it safe?
For context, as of 2019, we produced enough of this "brine" to cover Florida with 30 centimeters of brine every year. That means, as a whole, desalination plants actually produce even more toxic wastewater than they do clean drinking water.
As a result figuring out ways we could utilize this _product_ ("byproduct" feels like the wrong term here considering it's the primary thing produced) is a major area of interest
I looked up your claim that desalination plants produce "toxic wastewater" and I found nothing to support it. The output appears to be simple concentrated ocean water, and that's it.
Can you cite your claim?
I'm more interested in what you possibly looked up that made it hard to find...
> Furthermore, chemicals such as biocides, surface−active agents, anti-scale additives, and solid residues from filter backflushing may be present in the effluent discharge on a continuous or periodic basis, posing a risk to the environment
> Brine effluents from RO desalination plants not only have a high salt content but typically also contain compounds from the desalination process, such as phosphonate-based antiscalants and ferric (or alum) sulphate-based coagulants
[1] https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fmars.2022.8451...
[2] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S00431...
> However, concern also exists regarding the use and release of toxic anti-foulants and anti-scalants to maintain plant infrastructure
[3] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S00431...
> The super-salty substance is made even more toxic by the chemicals used in the desalination process, researchers reported in the journal Science of the Total Environment.
> Copper and chlorine, for example, are both commonly used.
[4] https://phys.org/news/2019-01-brine-highlights-toxic-problem...
Didn't gasoline start out as a byproduct of kerosene production?
Sure but it's alternative uses were already known. It just so happened that a world-altering invention (the consumer automobile) came along to dramatically raise already existing demand for it. There is currently no demand/use for desalination brine. For every "this byproduct is actually useful" story there's likely 10 byproducts that simply stay byproducts. Still, it's urgent we figure out something to do with it since it's damaging our ocean ecosystems
They can be removed in purification steps.
Go from the super high salinity brine through to crude salt, then chloralkali process to get sodium (which can be cleaned up) and chlorine gas (industrially useful).
Sodium is also mined for sure. There's a reason there are many expressions about salt mines :-)
I was editing after doing some basic research so sorry for making it look like you're repeating my comment :)
Lithium is element #3 on the periodic table so it's very simple and should be universally abundant. Literally in the universe, unfortunately not on earth.
That’s not how it works! Lithium is a fuel that gets used up by stars immediately whenever it might be produced in trace amounts. Unlike hydrogen, lithium wasn’t produced in the Big Bang. So most of the lithium that remains in the universe is produced outside of the cores of stars through the interaction of cosmic rays with other matter. Needless to say, that’s not a very common interaction (relatively speaking).
Now if you look at how larger stars operate (the CNO cycle [1]) you’ll see that it matches up with the higher relative abundance of carbon, nitrogen, and oxygen in the universe. Lithium, beryllium, and boron get “skipped over” in a sense.
Furthermore, if you look at a graph of the relative abundance of all elements, you’ll note that odd-numbered elements are less abundant than even (with the exceptions of hydrogen and beryllium). This is called the Oddo-Harkins rule [2] and it may also be playing a role.
Edit: I should also add that the third major process in stars, triple-α [3], involves the fusion of three helium-4 nuclei into one carbon-12 nucleus. This occurs in older stars that have exhausted most of their hydrogen fuel and so have built up a large core of “inert” helium. When their outward pressure from hydrogen fusion is no longer high enough to withstand gravity, they reach the much higher pressures and temperatures needed for triple-α fusion. Unfortunately for the lithium industry, there’s no chance of producing lithium this way since it is skipped over on the way to carbon.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CNO_cycle
Nitpick: Lithium was produced in the Big Bang, though in a ratio of something like one per billion compared to H production.
There is a lot less Lithium in the universe than you might expect being element #3
There is also a lot less Lithium in the universe than our models predict:
This stinks of bad science. All of the observations come from stars. "Older stars seem to have less lithium than they should, and some younger stars have much more."
"BBC Science Focus wrote in 2023 that "recent research seems to completely discount" such theories; the magazine held that mainstream lithium nucleosynthesis calculations are probably correct."
I am unconvinced.
Helium is no 2 , and that too is pretty scarce on earth , but again helium is a very light gas and simply shoots out of the atmosphere eventually, Why is lithium rare
Lithium is not very universally abundant.
You cannot estimate abundance by atomic number like that. The big bang produced mostly hydrogen and helium, with traces of lithium and beryllium. The elements heavier than that are mostly produced by stars, and the physics of fusion have a massive impact on what elements, specifically, get made. Free protons join together to become helium-4 much more readily than any other fusion process, meaning that by the time heavier things start forming, the raw material is entirely ⁴He.
This means that things that are easily made of ⁴He are dramatically more common than anything else, making the most common isotopes after ⁴He oxygen-16 (4 alphas), carbon-12 (3 alphas, less common than oxygen because it's less stable and easily picks up another alpha), neon-20 (5 alphas), and iron-56 (14 alphas to nickel-56 which immediately decays twice through β+ to produce ⁵⁶Fe). Iron is so high up above all the other intermediate steps, because it's the last stop: In heavy enough stars, the entire core converts to iron, and reactions past that are energy-consuming, not energy-producing, so after that the star collapses.
Lithium is not on any of the major stellar nucleosynthesis pathways, which means it's only produced by exceptional processes, making it roughly as universally abundant as the other stuff that is made by exceptional processes, like scandium or gallium or zirconium. But none of that matters, because:
Lithium is abundant and easy to extract in the earth's crust.
While there's not that much of it up there, there's plenty easy to extract down here, because it's so light and likes forming light compounds, meaning that a huge proportion of all the lithium of all the rocks that came together to form the earth is reachable to us. Lithium is not rare. Any statement about lithium batteries that bemoans the scarcity of lithium is doubly confused: Firstly, because lithium is simply not scarce. Secondly, because lithium is such a tiny portion of the battery, that despite being in the name, only a small fraction of the materials cost is lithium.
Lithium price has had a few big spikes because mining is a very high-capital industry where spinning up projects is measured in years, if not decades, and we suddenly started using a lot more lithium in ~2010. Accordingly, the price has spiked from the ~$5k per ton (which is roughly in the same ballpark typical cost of extraction, where any abundant mineral prices end up at), to the heights of $37k per ton last year. Even at this high price, lithium was not even the most expensive material component in most lithium batteries, because typically only 1-3% of the battery's weight is lithium.
But these prices won't last, because having the price of a commodity so high above the cost of extraction means that new mining projects are spinning up.
Re: Lithium as a resource:
USGS (2021):
USGS (2023):Five mineral operations in Australia, two brine operations each in Argentina and Chile, and two brine and one mineral operation in China accounted for the majority of world lithium production. Owing to overproduction and decreased prices, several established lithium operations postponed capacity expansion plans. Junior mining operations in Australia and Canada ceased production altogether.
Sources:Six mineral operations in Australia, one mineral tailings operation in Brazil, two brine operations each in Argentina and Chile, and three mineral and two brine operations in China accounted for the majority of world lithium production. Additionally, smaller operations in Brazil, Canada, China, Portugal, the United States, and Zimbabwe also contributed to world lithium production. Owing to the rapid increase in demand and prices of lithium in 2022, established lithium operations worldwide increased or were in the process of increasing production capacity.* https://pubs.usgs.gov/periodicals/mcs2021/mcs2021-lithium.pd...
* https://pubs.usgs.gov/periodicals/mcs2023/mcs2023.pdf
Bonus British Geo. Soc. Global Li Map: https://www2.bgs.ac.uk/mineralsuk/download/global_critical_m...
Also from the 2023 USGS periodical:
Lithium supply security has become a top priority for technology companies in Asia, Europe, and North America. Strategic alliances and joint ventures among technology companies and exploration companies continued to be established to ensure a reliable, diversified supply of lithium for battery suppliers and vehicle manufacturers. Brine-based lithium sources were in various stages of development or exploration in Argentina, Bolivia, Chile, China, and the United States; mineral-based lithium sources were in various stages of development or exploration in Australia, Austria, Brazil, Canada, China, Congo (Kinshasa), Czechia, Ethiopia, Finland, Germany, Ghana, Kazakhstan, Mali, Namibia, Nigeria, Peru, Portugal, Russia, Serbia, Spain, Thailand, the United States, and Zimbabwe; lithium-clay sources were in various stages of development or exploration in Mexico and the United States.Sure, there's two or three pages there IIRC.
If you want to go in depth, though, you can always hit:
https://www.spglobal.com/marketintelligence/en/campaigns/met...
Thank you for a fascinating comment. I learned new stuff from it; I appreciate you and your expertise!
Thank you for this explanation.
> because lithium is such a tiny portion of the battery
Is this why recycling it is so difficult?
Lithium is extremely abundant on earth. Unless we start launching it into space, or start building up after covering the surface with buildings and roads, we’re not going to run out.
Lithium production capacity is scarce however, since it’s a mostly useless element unless you’re building batteries out of it.
Anyway, once cities realize that they need to stop taking water from rivers, we should be able to skim quite a bit of lithium from desalination plant waste water.
I mean in that case Hydrogen fuel cells are clearly the future, just as soon as we manage to make our gravity well irrelevant.
> the chemistry is made of really common materials
I don't want to sound like a conspiray theorist, but something tells me the really big actors (like states) only want materials that they can control the suply of.
> sound like a conspiray theorist
Well you do?
It won't work as long as there's a roughly equal alternative that's cheaper/easier to produce. Free market will win here.
There's no way one state can force another state (aside from war) to manufacture something a particular way. It's like if I controlled the world's timber supply and said Canada must produce houses out of timber and not, say, concrete. Canada's gonna go produce using concrete unless I somehow make my timber price competitive.
> Free market will win here
Think batteries and nuclear fusion.
Extremely hard stuff, not easy to pick apples.
State actors can absolutely influence the fields for decades by choosing to fund certain approaches that lend themseves to centralisation.
> It's like if I controlled the world's timber supply and said Canada must produce houses out of timber
This is quite naive - in fact we do this all the time
* IMF provides loans to developing countries on the condition that they dont have 'socialist' policies
* EU bailouts for Greece/aspain/etc. was given on the condition of sale of state assets and doing other things
* The worlds ship insurance industry is run in London. Nuclear powered contsiner ships are faster, cheaper, and better in every way. Good luck insuring them. Running them without insurance is. illegal
*'non-tariff barriers' - i.e. free trade negotiations - are all about aligning countries on how they manufacture/insure/regulate things like cars. Guess which econony gets the bigger say.
Russia was forced to adopt Eu standards for petrol quality and engine emissions standards in 2,000's and they still follow
IMF provides loans and expects them to be repaid, having rules on government spending attached to the loans is... reasonable. Not to mention, that IMF loans are typically bailouts of governments that overspent.
Same goes with the EU bailouts, but PIGS countries were already in a compact with the rest of the Eurozone. Not to mention, that governments should not own things that can go bust and drag a budget under water.
As shown lately with Russian oil sales - it's absolutely possible to insure ships somewhere else, other than Lloyd's of London.
You're right I was too flippant with my language. I was only thinking about the US and its strategic desires.
> IMF provides loans to developing countries on the condition that they dont have 'socialist' policies
Because these 'socialist' policies are usually the reason why these countries need IMF loans.
China already has GWH scale sodium battery plants. So if THEY have been trying to suppress it THEY aren't doing very well.
This announcement is about an improvement in energy density made possible by $Bs being invested to allow sodium batteries to become more competitive with lithium.
There are also other battery chemistries being rolled out. Iron based ones seem particularly promising for stationary storage.
That's actually the official policy in many cases. For instance, the EU is funding research in li-ion recycling so that it could create a "circular economy" with imports only there to make up for material lost during processing, as e.g. the car market is largely saturated, so the expectation is that demand won't grow.
Yeah, but that's not a conspiracy or even something negative. It's just common sense for a country/group of countries.
OP made it sound like the Evil Corporate Overlords are conspiring to hold us back from achieving battery freedumb.
> It's just common sense for a country/group of countries.
Conspiracies are just common sense for a group of people; but that's exactly my point. A group doesn't have to meet at night by the torch light in black robes and decide upon secretive actions to further their own interests.
I don’t think control goes that far. China definitely thinks that way, but I doubt the western governments do.
If they can; abundant is the next best thing.
Any country without an expeditionary military force (about 187 of them) likes the resources they have. Ab abundant is great unless you have a known military adversary with extra-territorial ambition (that’s three countries).
Transistors are the most valuable thing we can produce per kilogram and sell easily. We had many processes over the years, but we settled on making them from sillicon. I.e. sand.
Think about it :)
As always, whoever has the biggest guns will control this resource as well.
If someome resists, they will end up just like anyone who opposed the US's quest to take other nations oil.
As Donald used to say:
"Take the oil, then get out". They took the oil and stayed.
Which countries did the US take oil from? Any data around number of barrels ect?
They're probably referencing Iraq and I'm not sure it was raw resource extraction as it was so much removal of a competitor (whatever the name of the Iraqi state oil company was) and more than that, enabling sales of equipment, consulting, etc. It wasn't as simple as some 1800s colonialism, it was advanced wealth extraction worthy of the 21st century.
Ok. So the US spent $3 trillion[0] on a war in Iraq to get some consulting contracts from a country with a GDP of $36 billion[1]? And didn't invade Saudi Arabia, which actually has oil? How much wealth do you estimate the US extacted from the war?
[0]https://www.hks.harvard.edu/publications/true-cost-iraq-war-...
[1]https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/NY.GDP.MKTP.CD?end=2001...
While I don't lend credence to it being that simple, it's worth noting that the people making that profit aren't the ones paying for it, and the ones paying for it aren't using their own money.
The Europeans were starting to loosen Iraqi oil sanctions and develop the fields before the second war.
The US often does stuff that costs taxpayers trillions so that the people bribing congress can make billions.
PFAS, Canadian lumber sanctions and oxycontin are three recent examples.
>The Europeans were starting to loosen Iraqi oil sanctions
Any links I can read about this? I'm open to the idea that suppressing Iraq's oil industry was the main objective of the war. I don't like claims about "the US's quest to take other nations oil" being that it never happened either in Iraq or even Iran. At least when I ask for a source I can never get one. To me the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan were mainly about projecting power, not oil. Certainly not Afghanistan because there is little to no oil there in the first place. Even regarding Iraq it is OPEC that sets the price and I doubt they would let Iraq greatly reduce the market price. It would have to be as you say: people with connections using the US's power to suppress competition. Many people online, however, seem to have the idea that US foriegn policy dictates collecting oil and that the US is stealing trillions of dollars of oil from various third world countries. I think the US gains a lot more from war to project power. Iraq for the most part today is a US ally. And if we are looking for people who would gain from the war it would more likely be Lockheed than Exxon. Lastly, there is no reason to say that US oil companies staged the war exclusively. It is possible that eg. SA were also involved or the main initiators.
I'm sorry, but Saudis were the biggest losers in removing Saddam.
Removal of Saddam removed one of the biggest adversaries of Iran. Now Iranian Revolutionary Guard can freely move from Tehran to Beirut and support the rebels in Yemen.
The US spent a ton of money from the US public so that a few US individuals can stuff their pockets. Corruption.
You literally contradicted your own original statement.
Those individuals used the US gov to do it, see Cheney. Read up about Leopold and Congo.
Wasn't Iraq about to switch away from trading the oil in USD ?
But let me flip your argument -- why did the US invade Iraq?
The US has/had troops stationed in Saudi Arabia and Saudi Arabia was in the US's pocket at that time (it might have reversed since then).
>Wasn't Iraq about to switch away from trading the oil in USD ?
I don't know. Do you have a source for that claim? Preferably from before the war started. (Later is fine too.)
>But let me flip your argument -- why did the US invade Iraq?
This doesn't flip the argument. That would only be the case if not being able to explain the war meant that it therefore was started for oil. These are not two sides of a coin. Simmilarly I wouldn't say that if we can't explain Iraq then it must have been to find aliens.
>The US has/had troops stationed in Saudi Arabia and Saudi Arabia was in the US's pocket at that time
And what percent of the oil profits did the US get? If the claim is that the US will invade for oil then being in the US's pocket, whatever that means, is irrelevant. But I think you answered your own question here. The US likes having countries "in it's pocket." It wants to station troops in other countries. These are legitimate -- here I don't reffer to moral legitimacy -- national objectives. Skimming contracts or suppressing oil fields is not a legitimate national objective. If there are groups in the US (eg. Exxon) that are so powerfull they can make the US go to war without a single national objective achieved then they could simply take the $3 trillion directly. I think your point about the petrodollar is interesting, although I'd like to see some more evidence.
Iraq, Syria comes to mind. Yes, the US is still in Syria. They would have tried that shit with Venezuela, but Ruskies got there first.
If it's cheaper than lithium but not significntly smaller, at least it'll be more scalable and affordable for e.g. energy grid or home battery applications.
It also has a vastly superior safety profile, also meaning is easier and safer to construct. It does not have the overheating problems of lithium batteries.
I've long dreamt of being able to to have a battery buried under the cellar floor. Size and weight wouldn't matter. Lifetime and safety would be quite important.
Is the lifespan of sodium-ion better than Li-ion?
They claim 2'000 cycles for their current 18650s, which, I believe, is about twice that of li-ions?
"Lithium Ion" encompasses a lot of chemistries. LFP, which is what is most competitive with sodium ion, has a cycle range of 3000-10000.
Depends on the anode
With the moves in places like California to curtail the value prospect of net metering for solar (particularly during peak hours), home storage is becoming more and more important. But I don't especially like the idea of big lithium batteries around the house ... particularly because I live in a flood zone.
While I am very pleased to see these developments away from Lithium I do think your estimates for Li-po and Li-ion are off by a few generations of batteries.
Lipo can be 200+ /kg density and Li Ion can be 250+ in current, commercially produced, generations of battery cells.
I'm not a pro so anyone feel free to correct me.
Not sure about the exact numbers, but your sentiment is basically accurate.
This is an article about the Northvolt news by a German journalist specialized on battery technology (in German): https://www.golem.de/news/akkutechnik-northvolt-und-altris-e...
He says that 160 Wh/kg is in the ballpark of LFP batteries from five years ago. It is, however, about the same as the sodium batteries announced by CATL in 2021.
This would be a way better article about the topic, than the press release by Northvolt, if it wouldn't be in german.
Frank Wunderlich-Pfeiffer should consider writing in english, I love his expertise and clarity of writing.
Volume also matters.
Yes and: Their anode uses "hard carbon", not graphite. Apparently without sacrificing energy density.
This is huge. HUGE.
China dominates the graphite market and now has export controls.
IIRC, most current Li and Sodium batteries use graphite anodes of some kind. Northvote's use of hard carbon may prove to be an amazing cost and derisking advantage.
I know nothing about their novel Prussian White cathode.
I eagerly await the expert analysis of Northvote's anode and cathode.
Fun fact, that is why PR uses 160 Wh/Kg as its current "best in class". The Northvolt release is a bit cagey on what they actually have today for sale but it seems like they are going into production so that is a good thing. "Whole house" energy store (think PowerWall types of products) are getting good traction and grid scale batteries have changed some folks minds about what is "good enough" (you don't care if it is maximally dense if you can spread it out over an acre or three). So I would expect them to push for this sort of application first.
The current market need for large local battery store for EV chargers is apparently one of the limiting factors in deploying new chargers, delivering spot excess demand can be provided by either onsite diesel generators (like some rest areas in California are doing now) or a battery bank. The latter is preferable for energy efficiency and maintenance reasons.
> so I assume it's not competitive in energy density per litre so I assume not.
Their competitive argument is a fast charging time with a low impact on the life the battery pack, with a full charge under 10 minutes and about 2'000 cycles. They also have a good available power and capacity at 20C discharge rates.
Sodium is extremely plentiful, while lithium is not.
I had thought that this was not a huge win, as lithium is fairly cheap, and not a large portion of the overall cost of a battery. However, my research taught me I was incorrect.
Lithium is worth about $40k per tonne, or $40 per kg. A Tesla power wall 2 is about 150kg, if half of that is lithium, then the lithium alone is worth $2.3k. Powerball costs about $9.5k, so the lithium is a fair portion of the cost.
https://www.thisoldhouse.com/solar-alternative-energy/review...
https://www.statista.com/statistics/606350/battery-grade-lit...
Note, I know raw lithium carbonate is not stuck directly into a battery, just spitballing with the little bit of learning I just did.
Lithium is cheap because the externalities of the environmental damage it causes is not accounted for in the pricing. It's a highly exploitative resource which has destructive impacts on local bacterial ecosystems, human communities, and water availability.
Some articles, if you are interested:
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S09626... https://www.euractiv.com/section/energy-environment/news/fac...
It's not even comparable to sodium, which is abundant practically everywhere.
> Lithium is cheap because the externalities of the environmental damage it causes is not accounted for in the pricing.
Like every other raw resource we use.
Let's not flatten it. Different materials have different externalities. And are available in different places with different levels of human rights and environmental protections
Sodium is better than lithium in that respect. But both are MUCH better than hydrocarbons.
The amount you need for driving a car for 3 years is several kg vs tonnes. And you can recycle the battery but you can't recycle the oil you burned.
That's why I'm not particularly harsh on lithium externalities. Let's get the low-hanging fruits first before we focus on nuances.
Lithium and sodium are both easily mined from sea water.
Seawater contains less than 1ppm of lithium (compared to 300-7k ppm in brine). There are zero commercial facilities to produce lithium from sea salt. It's not even a notable byproduct from other seawater-based processing facilities
Now compare to fossil fuels.
> A Tesla power wall 2 is about 150kg, if half of that is lithium,
This estimate is very far off.
1% is closer.
That's a electric car battery, optimized for mobility: fast charge & low self-discharge, maximum density allowed by the projected lifetime, custom form factor, heat and cold resistant, vibration resistant and mechanically sturdy etc.
When you think of an application like grid connected energy storage, most of those performance metrics are irrelevant, and the only thing that really matters is cell cost per total energy stored and delivered during its lifetime. We will likely see something over-engineered and simplified to maximize cycle count and minimize cost, leading to a much larger raw material consumption, at the expense of density - the cell is not going anywhere.
So the ability to use dirty cheap ingredients is a game changer for the grid storage market.
>A Tesla power wall 2 is about 150kg, if half of that is lithium
an order of magnitude less. 30KWh is just about 3kg of lithium in theory. On practice it would be about 7-10% of the weight of the battery.
Do you have a source for that? I don't doubt what you write, but I would love to learn more.
realistically the cobalt based Li-Ion can reach ~250Wh/kg (and they are better than the LiFePO4). So 3kg of cobalt based li-ion would be below 1kW/h
Also right now about 70% of all lithium comes from only two places (Chile, Australia). Iron and sodium are pretty much everywhere so this potentially eliminates at least one supply bottleneck
> eliminates at least one supply bottleneck
The CIA wants to know your location /s . I know this kind of joke is not appreciated on HN (for good reason), but one has to ponder of the implication of cheap/dense energy/storage and what big actors like governments, big corporations would think about not being able to effectively control energy production/storage/distribution.
If you are the Chilean or Australien government you would maybe be unhappy about moving away from Lithium. Most other governments would love it e.g. Europe doesn't have much Lithium (or at least not a lot that is easy enough to extract to make it profitable). The EU and european governments already try to rely less on foreign supply chains, especially since they relied so heavily on Russia for gas and now have to scramble to find other sources.
> Europe doesn't have much Lithium
The USA doesn't care if there's Xium inside the USA.
Xium just has to be in a few places and it has to be moved across the globe, transacted in USD and guarded by the US Navy.
Big corporations will not invest if they can't create a moat.
Maybe the corporations of those countries. But Australian and Chilean citizens both loathe the environmental and health impacts of these industries. Especially those that live in or around the "sacrifice zones" of these industries
At least in Europe, governments are going to great efforts and expense to decentralise and decarbonise the production, storage and distribution of energy. The implication is that as well as producing energy through renewables close to where it is used, it can be cheaply and sustainably stored there as well.
> lithium is fairly cheap
For now. But more importantly, there are sovereignty problems to considered in case things get worse in the future. And the quality and usability of the lithium substrate varies quite a bit between suppliers, with the better ones, for now, coming from the less "attractive" suppliers.
lithium is not the issue at all for Li-Ion.
Price of lithium jumped 6x in 2020-2022: https://www.iea.org/reports/global-ev-outlook-2023/trends-in...
but is now down by 75+% since last November peak (and still declining). I suspect that we won't see another price spike like last year's for quite some time.
Keep in mind sodium ion and LFP are much safer and don't require nearly as much cooling and management systems as nickel-cobalt chemistries
So at the PACK level of energy density, which is really all that matters, sodium ion and LFP close much of the gap with nickel-cobalt.
So spitballing here, an NMC chemistry at 240 wk/kg at the CELL level will lose about 20+% ore of density per weight for cooling and safety, so that they will be effectively 160 wh/kg at the PACK level.
Most CATL literature has LFP and sodium ion at 90-95% at the pack level with "cell-to-pack" which bypasses modules and other intermediate packaging.
So if 240 wh/kg NMC chemistry is actually 160 wh/kg at PACK level, and this sodium ion is 160 wh/kg but about 150 wh/kg at PACK level, well then you see the real power of these chemistries.
If the pack level 160-180 wh/kg equates to a 400 mile car, then 140-160 wh/kg sodium ion at pack level equates to a 300+ mile car.
300 miles means a really good city car. It means you can probably do a 50-100 mile PHEV car pretty cheap. It means cheap, limit-is-number-of-factories scaling of EV battery supply.
Sodium ion is supposed to be 40$ or less bill of materials per kw-hr compared to 80-100 for NMC and about 50-70 for LFP. And it should probably drop from there in the long run.
It also means that EVs beat ICEs on drivetrain cost, possibly by a significant margin, which might translate to a 4000$ + price difference from an ICE. Combined with theoretically cheaper maintenance and "fuel" costs, this should translate to an EV cost advantage that people simply won't be able to overlook.
Personally I think there should be an overall "carbon externality charge" of $5000 on a new ICE as well, or something that scales with the carbon inefficiency of the vehicle (so a bigass suburban assault vehicle is like $10000).
Also, note that the roadmap for batteries of CATL, a lot like the roadmap for future nodes in semiconductors so take it with a grain of salt as to when they realize the goals, is for 200 wh/kg sodium ion and 240-260 wh/kg LFP. With superior cell-to-pack density, that should mean a 400 mile car for sodium ion, and a 500 mile car for LFP.
Now, hopefully in 5-10 years we get lithium-sulfur and sodium-sulfur that are AT LEAST 50% more dense with similar materials costs. Then you get to shrink the battery to make the EV even cheaper.
So the revolution is coming, in my opinion. And this isn't just a gee-whiz a faster pc for my Overwatch. This is "future survival of humanity in the balance". We NEED to decarbonize transportation, and we NEED cheap batteries for alternative energy grid storage. The development of these technologies is preservation-of-humanity level of importance, and high density sodium ion chemistries are a major major step towards that because of all the economic and practical levels/needs/requirements they meet/exceed.
> "carbon externality charge" of $5000 on a new ICE as well, or something that scales with the carbon inefficiency of the vehicle
Your whole writeup was inspiring and gives me more hope for the future. This part, though, I'm angry about. I'm angry that we don't already have this legislation in some form. I'm sure it will be fought tooth & nail by the big auto manufacturers, but we should do it anyway. Maybe we could tack on higher penalties for anyone caught 'rolling coal', too.
New Zealand has a scheme (soon to expire with the change in government) for this.
Low efficiency vehicles are taxed on import, and the money raised is returned as rebates on high efficiency vehicles.
A Ford Ranger might attract the full fee, a new t Nissan leaf would get the full credit. A small ICE car attracts a smaller fee. Hybrids are given a smaller credit.
The exact amount of credit varied over time as the fees gathered changed.
The sort of obvious way is to slap on a decent carbon tax on fuels. But of course that is fought tooth and nail by a lot on entrenched interests.
Even here in ostensibly progressive Europe, populist parties are riding on "Cheap gas!!!".
It should be a bit more than $5000. However, prepare to be even angrier:
Burning a gallon of gas generates 20lbs of CO2 (most of the weight is the O2), so 100 gallons produces a ton. Direct air carbon capture should cost roughly $100 per ton at scale, so the fee should be $1/gallon of gasoline (either at vehicle purchase or at the pump).
That’s completely affordable and lower than current gasoline taxes in many places.
If we made that one change (and funneled the revenue into carbon capture) existing ICE cars could be carbon negative in 5-10 years, and, as we phased them out (because EVs are just better) we’d have a clear path to pre-industrial atmospheric CO2.
With what process can you capture and permanently store carbon from the atmosphere for that price?
The EU mandates a minimum €0.36/L excise tax on gasoline, which is about $1.49/gallon. In practice many large countries like Germany, France, Italy already levy more than $3/gallon. But they certainly don't funnel the revenue into carbon capture.
Agree with all. Especially this:
> So the revolution is coming, in my opinion.
Yes and: The nascent thermal batteries (box of hot rocks) and advanced geothermal power generation are just now crossing the chasm.
Both tech stacks have been proven, have financing, and initial customers.
And now they're jumping on to the cost learning curve.
Roughly, thermal tech today is where solar and batteries were in the 2000s.
The will be huge because 1/2 of energy consumption ends up as heat. So skip all the middle steps.
I'm optimistic that the rise in geothermal will be astronomical once it gets off the ground. Both advanced and more simple conventional for district heating.
We're at most 10 years from the confidence in oil and gas investments being completely shattered. A lot of the investors and engineers will seek out opportunities where they can apply their competence. Geothermal is a good fit. Whoever captures the market first will have the most to gain, so once they see it's even remotely possible there will be a race.
I suspect politicians in countries with oil/gas-development in northern regions will start subsidizing this as well, both to attract voters from workers in that sector, and to help them establish a new competitive industry that they can replace their oil and gas exports with.
And how strange to rate a storage battery 'per kilogram'. It's just sitting there, on the grid, storing. The weight is entirely irrelevant.
The interesting number for stationary storage is, Wh per $. I wonder where how they compare on that (relevant) measure?
CATL's Sodium Ion is claimed to be 1/3 the price of Li-ion. It is a lot cheaper per KWH but also a little bigger than LiPho which itself is quite a bit bigger than Li-ion.
I haven't seen it that cheap yet, its got new tech prices at the moment for cells on aliexpress.
> LiPho
LiPho? Are you thinking of LiFePO4, aka LFP?
Yes. Sorry Long Covid brain fog I keep thinking there is a H in that I know there isn't because I have 3 of them in my house!
Shin, this is 7th week in the row you've shown new battery invention to the class
---
but honestly, what's the deal with same-y headlines about batteries? can we have articles that actually keep observing these technologies as they progress after being invented?
Sodium-ion is real. Here's more news from China: https://carnewschina.com/2023/11/20/sodium-ion-batteries-are...
It's not widely touted since the density is not as good, the Northvolt announcement notwithstanding. But the costs apparently are much lower.
> the density is not as good
This can of course mean that this is a game changer for stationary storage, because density is not as much a concern.
Yup, looking forward to using this as backup storage at home.
Could it be good for deep cycle batteries for cars as well?
Dear battery technology claimant,
Thank you for your submission of proposed new revolutionary battery technology. Your new technology claims to be superior to existing lithium-ion technology and is just around the corner from taking over the world. Unfortunately your technology will likely fail, because:
[ ] it is impractical to manufacture at scale.
[ ] it will be too expensive for users.
[ ] it suffers from too few recharge cycles.
[ ] it is incapable of delivering current at sufficient levels.
[ ] it lacks thermal stability at low or high temperatures.
[ ] it lacks the energy density to make it sufficiently portable.
[ ] it has too short of a lifetime.
[ ] its charge rate is too slow.
[ ] its materials are too toxic.
[ ] it is too likely to catch fire or explode.
[ ] it is too minimal of a step forward for anybody to care.
[ ] this was already done 20 years ago and didn't work then.
[ ] by the time it ships li-ion advances will match it.
Can we have a webpage with (1) all basic battery tech information and (2) updated progress for each new battery type?
what metrics could you use for "progress"? Maybe a crowd-sourced thing where users can update the highest achieved density for each? Still there's other measures that are probably even more important and harder to measure. Like adoption
EDIT: actually I just realized I'm describing Wikipedia
like NREL did(does?) for solar https://www.nrel.gov/pv/cell-efficiency.html
can that webpage have an RSS feed, and a subscribable .ics file?
Exactly. Where can I actually BUY these batteries that would fit to AA, AAA etc..
I don't think anyone is intending to or wants to develop new batteries for consumer applications like that. The point here is large scale energy storage and maybe EVs which could be the closest thing to consumer tech. Lithium vaee batteries started development in the 1970s so that gives you an idea of the order of magnitude of the timeline. Hopefully that cycle is shorter now due to greater upfront interest and better tech
Modern chemistries don’t really do 1.5V (nominals are usually above 3V), so you need to package a buck and a boost converter alongside your cell(s). There are li-ion and LFP batteries in alkaline formats but they’re hardly going to be ideal, you’re probably better off going with 18650.
On the other hand, it's quite rare that a tool takes a single 1.5V cell. Many of them will take 2 or 4, and then you can make a double form factor 3V cell that will fit in most double AA holders.
I've also seen manufacturers who make 3V or 3.2V cells in AA format, and then supply a dummy AA-shaped link with it, which is just a straight-through connection like a wire. Put one cell and one link in your tool, or two cells and two links.
> dummy AA-shaped link with it
Can't find on Amazon. Care to share or make a photo please?
If you're using these, be 100% sure your device connects the batteries in series, not in parallel, or you'll have a mess on your hands.
Yes, the page does mention this.
Retrofitting is =dumb=, like very dumb. The nominal voltages are different to begin with. However not that only - retrofitting in general is not a bright idea: case in point LEDs into E27/E17 incandescent fixtures.
Why not?
In the case of bulbs you could get a better form factor, but no one's doing that, they're just using non replaceable bulbs.
Batteries. Are you going to get rid of your TV just so you can use a different battery chemistry? There have been various chemistries available in AA. Would you rather we have even more battery sizes to keep track of?
> Why not?
B/c the LEDs require a driver which runs on DC [the better case is constant driven], the space constraints are too high and there is not enough room for heat dissipation which in the US kills the driver (as running on 110/120AC is less efficient), and in Europe it tends to kill the LEDs because they get to be overdriven, but the driver dissipates less heat. The power factor on all them tends to be atrocious, usually 0.5phi. They tend to quite noisy, esp. when it comes to EMF. In short there is not enough space to have a decent LED driver along with enough space for heat dissipation for the LEDs (usually only 15%, being generous, of the energy will be emitted as light. The rest is heat, so if you see 8W of LED, more than 6.5W is just heat)
Pretty much almost all LEDs you can buy in a retrofit case are almost guaranteed to be overdirven to show better numbers and be 'brighter'. Near ceiling larger fixtures can be designed for LEDs. They tend to have an actual 15-30k hours lifespan.
Dimming the LEDs is the next atrocity, esp. when it comes to chopping the sine wave. The LED dirvers have to work with the chopped sine wave and detect how much it has been chopped to reduce the current or the PWM.
About the AA(A) and the TV. I can control the TV w/ bluetooth and an app but I find that incovenient. However NiMH nominal voltage is 1.2V which fits the 1.5 of the alkaline batteries. It's good enough already. So yes, it takes different chemistry unless the remote controls provide built-in step-up/step-down converters, effectively variable operational voltage.
Most of this problem becomes a non-issue with the advent of LED filament bulbs. That's pretty close to the holy grail IMO.
And besides, making everyone change every fixture in their house in order to take advantage of LED would just have meant it never happened. E26/E27 bulbs are going to be around for a while.
>LED filament bulbs.
Just lots of LEDs in series with higher target forward voltage. Still, LEDs are current driven devices and quite temperature sensitive, and still need a driver. The issues are not that different.
>That's pretty close to the holy grail IMO.
I guess we have a very different idea about the grail, then.
We probably do. I like that filament bulbs have much smaller driver requirements and much better heat dissipation, and I can stuff 100W bulbs into enclosures without worry. The only thing I don't love is that they are somewhat more prone to flicker. Not enough that my eyes notice, but some might.
I think it's more a case of enshitification.
The first LEDs I got were metal bodied.
One of them has gone in the past 10 years. So they must be around that lower bound by now.
Tbf I don't think subsequent ones have been too bad.
Re your TV. Ok your TV might be, my TV isn't, and I have plenty of other remotes, and then there's clocks and weighing scales and kids toys and all the other things that use aa batteries.
> I think it's more a case of enshitification.The first LEDs I got were metal bodied.
The heavier the better when it comes to such LEDs. Yes, it's possible to make them work okayish, and control the temps (LEDs should not go over 60C) but that would show poor lumens (and watts) on the box, and be expensive.
Dumb is a feature. If less things are there to defeat, we can change or fix the thing so it works and lasts much longer. Smart is an anti-feature.
China sells them on Alibaba, not packed in AA/AAA but 18650.
Review here https://www.bilibili.com/video/BV1c34y1N7NU/
What are the advantages of sodium batteries?
Since batteries involve the migration of ions between electrodes, the much larger size of sodium ions means that the resulting batteries will be both less dense and have less charge cycles than their lithium counterparts, due to the higher volumetric electrode deformation during charging.
This makes them suboptimal for both grid and mobile applications, and the only use case I can see for them is making very cheap disposable stuff, which does not bode well for the environment.
Upsides: Cheap, safe, no hard to source materials. Relatively high amount of cycles (> 5000).
Downsides: somewhat low energy density, somewhat less efficient.
CATL has been producing sodium ion batteries for some time. I think most of those so far end up in cheap Chinese EVs. Relatively few of those have found their way to the European or North American markets yet. Part of the reason is probably the lack of sodium ion battery factories outside of China (so far). It looks like Northvolt is looking to change that.
It's competing with LFP and other battery chemistries. You'd use these mainly for cheap cars and possibly for grid storage.
Another major benefit, you can charge them with no issues down to single digit F temperatures.
Charging a lithium battery that is below freezing destroys the battery.
From reading the comments, seems like it would be useful for battery power storage in the home (since it's cheaper and safer, and weight doesn't matter), but not great for a car yet (since it weighs more)
Not that good for storage either, because of lower cycles than Lithium (which is already low anyway)
Huh? 5k cycles is huge?
It's a daily recharge for over 13 years. I don't remember having a battery lasting that long.
Yup. LiFePo batteries are now starting to have lifetimes that long (or longer), but they haven’t been in the field for long enough that people can notice yet.
Sodium is easier to find
Yeah, but lithium isn't exactly rare either.
I hope this doesn't come off as combatative, but I don't know why people keep repeating this fun fact from their highschool chemistry class as if it's relevant to the discussion.
Per a 2023 Nature article: https://www.nature.com/articles/s43017-022-00387-5
> The locations of suitable continental brines are also geographically restricted, with an estimated 50–85% of lithium-rich continental brine deposits located in the Lithium Triangle and with China as the next richest source. Hard-rock ores are also geographically concentrated in Australia and China
Lithium in a form that is economical to mine/process is indeed quite rare. Which is why 3 countries produce 90% of it.
And it is extremely environmentally costly which is treated as an economic externality. It takes 1.9m litres to mine one ton of lithium and solvent chemicals like hydrochloric acid contaminates groundwater, making the entire site toxic and unlivable.
Entire governments have been overthrown for access to this resource.
Actually not at the rates we're predicted to use it, no
And yes Sodium is fine for most applications where it can be a little heavier (grid uses, maybe cars) which is where most of it is projected to be needed.
https://www.reddit.com/r/coolguides/s/Co4zeAhcmT
Here's how much of everything we mined in 2022. Lithium is bottom left corner just above Gold.
Since Li kg price is not anywhere near to that of gold, the production is likely demand-constrained.
Lithium price jumped 6x in 2020-2022.
https://www.iea.org/reports/global-ev-outlook-2023/trends-in...
Which production (save for byproducts) today isn't demand constrained?
But cobalt is (which is the basis of the 'classic' Li-Ion). Of course, LiFePO4 doesn't require it.
Lithium is abundant, as are other "rare earths" (they are not rare), but the problem is that they are quite scattered and to extract them nowadays requires to process very large areas of land through chemical reactions (additives and evaporation).
to be clear, lithium is not a rare earth.
Lithium mines are hard to build (capital intensive, permitting, water availability), and there aren’t enough to satisfy demand.
Compared to what? Sodium?
In the majority of applications outside consumer electronics, the bottleneck problem with Li-Ion batteries is their cost and manufacturing resource intensity. We're lacking cheaper and easier to mfg options compromising on some qualities.
sodium batteries are safer as well when it comes to fire and explosion etc
Metallic sodium is quite reactive?
Price, number of cycles, weight, and temperature are the advantages as far as I remember.
maybe not weight.
There's another thread going on HN right now about limiting the charge of Li-ion batteries to 20%-80% of thier capacity. Do batteries based on Na-ion chemistry have this limitation/recommendation?
Thats fairly good and typical i think. Lead acid and AGM batteries are not recommended to be below 50% of their capacity.
finally some battery innovation from europe. Makes one hopeful that we will continue to play a role in the battery energy/automotive space in the future.
The Li-Ion and 2019 Chemistry Nobel prize went jointly to a British, American and Japan citizens. The Nobel Prize in Chemistry 2019 was awarded jointly to John B. Goodenough, M. Stanley Whittingham and Akira Yoshino "for the development of lithium-ion batteries" [0]
[0]: https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/chemistry/2019/summary/
but nobel prizes are usually for basic research a long time ago and the battery-electric automotive revolution is relatively recent development, where applied research and bringing new batteries to market is more important
No. Because there is no difference who makes an interior or motors or battery anymore. There is no real difference in BYD dolphin, Kia eNiro and VW ID.3. Except price maybe. Internal combustion engine was once the differentiator. And it’s gone.
The engine hasn’t been a differentiator for a long time.
The rest of the power train, suspension, frame, etc matter more these days.
There may be little difference in the finished device. But there is a big difference in the logistics, securing a steady supply, political complications that may interfere with that, etc. On the supply side, there is a difference in expertise and jobs.
i think battery tech can be a real differentiator
Original research article this development appears to be based on was published in 2015 is available on sci-hub, just paste the title in:
Rhombohedral Prussian White as Cathode for Rechargeable Sodium-Ion Batteries
It's notable that it was an ARPA-E funded project and some of the research was done at Lawrence Berkeley National Labs. It's more applied research than basic research as they were specifically looking for a setup that would work with existing battery manufacturing technology.
> "Compared with previous work, the high Na concentration in the new material overcomes the sodium-deficiency problem. We show that it could be directly assembled into a full cell with a hard carbon anode. This is critical for the scalable sodium-ion battery manufacture that is compatible with the current lithium-ion battery infrastructures."
Interesting timeline: from publication of research result to commercial development to deliverable product, ~8 years. Now, would a VC fund think that was a decent turnaround time - I really don't know, any opinions?
China is going to bring into production from this year a lot of sodium ion batteries. For me the weight and density of the batteries is not as important as recharge cycles and cost as that would price out more carbon producing electricity generation
https://carnewschina.com/2023/11/20/sodium-ion-batteries-are...
There are sodium ion batteries available at aliexpress. The claimed advantges (written in an unintentially comical way) are:
- better safety
- same number of cycles as LiFePo
- much better capacity at low temperatures
- protects environment (?)
I would take that with a truckload of salt. Also, price is roughly 50% higher than LiFePo.
On many product images there is an outdoor winter scenery. So performance at very low temperatures seems to be the main selling point.
LFPs do more cycles and are still cheaper. Sodium ion isn't going to make much of a dent in that market until the price can get below LFP.
Yeah but prices wont have the same kind of fluctuations as lithium does because of demand and supply. And as manufacturing picks up economies of scale should start bringing the price down
This is a good development, but it falls really short of the almost 3.5 kWh that would be possible to achieve with sodium metal fuel cell. Such device is described in the expired patent US3730776A (copy available here: https://orgpad.com/file/DrCoHGH6xJJqraDeusqrtS?token=D6S5Bow...) A similar device producing electrical current can be constructed in a garage.
The point is not energy density, or momentary power. The point is low price and immediate availability.
There is a lot of solar and wind electricity wasted in the world because there's no economical way to store it. LiFePO4 batteries are > $100 / kWh, last time I checked; a practical powerwall costs like a small car, and is also a major fire hazard.
We badly need cheap, non-toxic, non-flammable batteries we could deploy massively outside of cars, drones, and phones. The announced battery looks like something that may fit the bill.
If you want to store a lot of energy cheaply, the density (and power per volume/ area) is a killer property. The Castner process to electrolytically convert NaOH to sodium metal is known and was deployed at industrial scale even 100 years ago. The other direction, where you get energy by reacting sodium metal with water is described in the patent, which was reproduced successfully in a garage/ home workshop setting. It obviously worked for Lockheed.
Btw. sodium has many desirable properties even in the metal form. You can store it quite efficiently on pallets probably just wrapped in some foil. You would be able to store more than 3 MWh on a single pallet. No battery can match that. It's more like a replacement for stationary diesel generators - but you can recycle the resulting sodium hydroxide solution back to sodium using renewable energy quite easily.
Also sodium reacts with water so readily you could probably get stable current with just ~50 ms of delay, which on the grid would still be considered instantaneous. You don't need any expensive catalysts, spark plugs, pressure nothing. Just a thin film of water on a metal plate and some sodium to push against it.
My point is that a battery half as space-efficient as a lithium battery, and even 10 times heavier per kWh stored, may still be great for storage if its cost is, say, 20% of the lithium-based battery, and it's not flammable.
You can put these huge batteries under your solar arrays and your wind turbines, on the land already paid for. If it's not flammable, you can hide it in a basement.
The sodium extraction process is cool! Metallic sodium is highly flammable though.
Northvolt also acquired Cuberg who are researching lithium-metal chemistries
sodium-ion is about low cost for stationary applications (grid scale ESS) where weight and size don't matter as much
A battery is something entirely different than a fuel cell. A fuel cell decouples capacity, power, discharging and charging, which is usually done by a different apparatus/ machine. A fuel cell is more interesting for longer applications, where you would build diesel generators, "peaker" power plants, seasonal energy storage. (E.g. you would produce a lot of sodium in the summer and react it to sodium hydroxide in the winter. In the summer you would recycle it back to sodium to store energy for the winter.) It should btw. be possible to transport sodium using very similar ships that nowadays transport crude oil. You could also transport sodium on pallets in colder climates as it is solid < 100˚C.
Full of adjectives. More cost efficient, more this and more that but no mention how much more and more to what exactly.
Now the articles "This could be in your next EV sooner than you think." would be already being composed and YouTube videos being edited.
Here's an article from June with more details about the current status of sodium-ion batteries (in China): https://carnewschina.com/2023/06/07/lei-xing-is-catls-sodium...
Note that CATL also claimed 160Wh/kg two years ago, but what they will actually be making will probably be closer to 120.
I share your frustration. Nothing about charge cycles, and "safety at high temperatures" is less interesting than an actual operating range specification.
Beware of battery technology announcements that only give a single parameter! They have usually made drastic tradeoffs in other areas in order to get the headline number.
And we are left to only speculate. But, if the other numbers were great, they would have also stated them.
It's still less than half Lion and not quite as good as current LiFePo or NMC.
Hope springs eternal.
Headline number (160Wh/kg) is the same as CATL achieved in mid-2021 with Na-Ion chemistry [1]
Northvolts PR department seems to historically be very sharp. In addition they seem to want to announce many things, like a co-operation to create batteries from wood (the wooden industry is large in Sweden so probably many very important people working at the top of those companies): https://northvolt.com/articles/stora-enso-and-northvolt/
In that light, I wonder how this press release should be interpreted.
Are any of these developing battery chemistries likely to become very affordable to the point that future houses are built with cellar-sized batteries stored underneath them?
So where is the catch? Because there is always a catch. It's either that it needs a tiny amount of extremely expensive ingredients (palladium?), or it requires extremely advanced manufacturing techniques? Or its both cheap and easy to make but the mass production makes way too many failures...
There is always something... Therefore I'll believe it when I'm able to but such battery and fly my drone with it.
The catch is lower gravimetric energy density (Wh/kg). But sodium-ion is great for stationary energy storage, where gravimetric energy density doesn’t matter that much (unlike automotive, aviation, or handheld tools).
Disclaimer: I’m a former Northvolter, but not involved in that program.
160Wh/kg is not super impressive in the first place, that’s the low end of li-ion although it is the high end of nimh. The energy density (energy per volume) is also unlisted so might not be great.
For reference northvolt also lists lithium-metal batteries at 395Wh/kg, and they do list the density on that one, 797Wh/L. When they acquired the designer (cubert) back in 2021 they listed the possibility of exceeding 1000Wh/L by 2025 though I don’t know if that’s still in the plans (at the times the cells were only listed at 369Wh/kg as well).
This. You need to take any battery-related news with a rather heavy grain of salt, especially when it comes to "solid state" or "sodium" headlines.
> heavy grain of salt > "solid state" or "sodium"
This made me chuckle a little. Thanks!
This is just another announcement. The catch remains unchanged. Engineering all the details of anode, cathode, electrolyte packaging, and manufacturing scale still needs to meet and also prove itself in the real world.
IIRC sodium ion batteries have traditionally had trouble with rapid degradation due to the large size of the sodium ion, which disrupts the carbon electrode via swelling during intercalation. So I would be worried about the number of cycles they can last.
The article does not describe the cycle life of the battery. This has been a common problem with sodium-ion batteries, so the lack of any statement on this matter is concerning.
I'm interested in $/kWh, that is the most limiting factor for cars.
volume/kWh also matters for car use-cases (but especially for less high end cars not as much as kg/kWh)
$/kWh is mainly affected by: material cost, manufacturing cost, cost of safely using it (e.g. shielding but also e.g. fire insurances), replacement cost (lifetime, frequency of repairs, needs full replacement for repairs?, refurbish-ability etc.)
As far as I can tell the material and safety cost should be much and somewhat cheaper, the manufacturing cost is hard to say but initially is likely more expensive as it's a new process and the durability and refurbish-ability are probably major points which will decide weather it's competitive in the vehicle market or not.
Will Volume/kWh really matter if they use the battery also as a major structural component? Doesn't skateboard chassis require structural reinforcement even at the cell level?
It can because even "skateboard chassis" have limited volume.
For high end e-cars the maximal reach tends to matter a lot, even if for some buyers it only matters in advertisements.
For less high end cars they often anyway compromise on range so it might not matter as much but then in many places (which are not in the US) having small cars matters a lot to a point that sometimes e.g. typical SUVs might not be usable _at all_, and I mean EU style SUVs not US style SUVs (through most times its just very inconvenient). And small cars mean little space for batteries (potential only 50% of the space).
Lastly there are some aspects of different styles of "skateboard chassis" having different usable volumes for battery cells. And some especially save and refurbishable chassis designs come with the penalty of having a bit less volume to use.
So the answer is very dependent on the context.
This is about 0.5 MJ/kg compared to fuel which is closer to 50 MJ/kg ( or closer to 10 when normalizing to efficiency). ie this is why ev batteries need 20x the weight of gasoline at least to store similar amounts of on board energy.
EVs don't need to store the same amount of energy as an ICE car though. Just enough to get as far would be more than enough energy. Twice the motor efficiency and the fact that ICE's don't regenerate fuel when breaking helps even it a bit.
Yet modern EV cars and ICE cars have similar range autonomy without carrying batteries worth 20x the weight of gasoline, due to the abyssal efficiency of combustion engines which produce mostly heat.
It is pretty close to a 20x difference, but they make up most of that on the lack of gas tank and engine, and lower range. (EV’s tended to weigh 600lbs more the last time I checked).
Someone should build an EV that shreds the empty batteries and ejects them into the face of passing schoolchildren to lighten the load and better recreate the health and environmental impacts of ICE vehicles.
except fuels burns only once and can't be recharged
For stationary batteries, density (Wh/kg) and volume (Wh/liter) are not a concern, only Wh/$. These sodium-ion batteries can be deployed for grid connected storage (or home batteries like powerwall), freeing up Lithium for EVs.
Another technology to watch is silicon anode Lithium-ion batteries (Amprius, Sila, Group 14) which have been demonstrated at 400-500Wh/kg.
Matt Ferrell's Undecided Youtube channel just posted a video today going over that technology: https://youtu.be/YJ4pg_exdvs?si=kKNE-yY-Va9xMuBf
And Enovix
Even if it performs worse, the abundance of minerals required to construct this type of cell is a good news for sustainability, given we figure out how to recycle them. I imagine it should be easier, or at least less dirty than lithium.
Whats the ramp up ramp down time? How much energy throughput before degradation? Can we improve that density furthermore? Cost?
If those are all good answers ostensibly some viable alternative.
I believe it when i see it at volume.
It's coming, by 2025
(French) https://www.cnrs.fr/fr/cnrsinfo/batteries-sodium-ion-une-pre...
it's actually shipping !
Leroy Merlin (the French "big box" home improvement chain) is selling a electric screwdriver that use sodium-ion battery, seems to be working well: (French) https://www.leroymerlin.fr/produits/outillage/outillage-elec...
doesn't seem to be many in stock - it's only available at some stores - but seems to be victim of its success
I don't mean sodium batteries. I mean anything at all from Northvolt. So far it seems to be more of "give us a lot of taxpayer money and we will say a lot of bs that will give you a lot of votes" kind of business.
Northvolt builds and ships lots of batteries.
I struggle to find any delivery stats at all. How many MWH/GWH were delivered in 2022? in H1 2023? There are usually only declarations of future production capacity. Anyone can do that.
And no sodium batteries
Honestly depends on cycle life is the thing. I believe anything can be made at volume: whether it is depends on whether it's actually genuinely useful enough when you do - hence a lot of the quiet "revolutionary" things which go away (because actually, all the other trade offs eliminate the revolutionary bit).
Why is 'Prussian white' a nice blue? (as shown in Northvolt's pic at the bottom)
Because that's not Prussian white, it's Prussian blue. The white version is derived from the blue.
It is probably good to have a sodium battery industry to hedge against high lithium prices. For our current and projected needs there is probably enough lithium on earth. Here is a chart of what we mine https://www.visualcapitalist.com/all-the-metals-we-mined-in-...
This is a fraction of the density of lithium ion. What’s the upside?
Pretty cool, go sweden!
Have anyone noticed that most technological breakthroughs in fields that require hard physical sciences seem to come from foreign countries?
I don't know which country you don't consider "foreign", but even if you're in the largest one by population, 82% of the world is foreign.
in the context of most of HN, unless noted otherwise, I think it is safe to parse foreign country as 'national entities other than the US'.
Is John Goodenough not good enough for you?
Too bad he has recently passed, though.
After all the OpenAI stuff I've just started reading drama into all these head lines. Like I read this as: 'North Korea develops state-of-the-art sodium-ion...' I am expecting something to happen now... OpenAI literally broke my brain...