Performing on par with the "worst" lithium-ion batteries would still be a great success if sodium-ion is cheaper to manufacture. They would still perform much better than lead-acid, Ni-MH, etc. There's a huge demand for cheaper batteries.
Especially in cases where size/weight is not critically important. This could be a huge deal for something like a home solar setup where batteries can make up a significant portion of the cost.
Also a huge deal for grid-scale applications. We've seen Tesla do that with lithium ion batteries for grid stability and energy price arbitrage, but if it were cheap and easy to produce batteries at massive scale without needing relatively rare elements like lithium, maybe we'd have big enough batteries to run the whole grid overnight off of solar.
Sodium is number 6 on the list, while Lithium is way down in the middle (above lead, below cobalt). Also, you can literally scoop sodium out of the ocean, so extraction will never be a problem over any reasonable human timescale.
I was curious about how much salt was in the ocean. There is
approximately 50 quintillion kilograms of salt in the ocean, which is nearly the mass of the moon
"Thanks for pointing out this mistake. Since we currently have no quantity surveyor, we would like to hand over control of the Planetary Quantity Survey repository to you. This is an open source project with no pay which requires 80 hours of thankless work a week. Good luck!"
The mistake is in the original citation... the moon's mass in 7x10^22 kg, and the number they gave for salt in the ocean (which I haven't verified) was 5x10^19 kg, so that would mean that the moon is about 1000 times heavier than the salf in the ocean... hardly 'nearly the mass of the moon'.
This is why the need arose for talking about "orders of magnitude". If you use base 10, the order is 3, which is generally considered as a large difference.
For a related reason you need "big oh" notation for computing speeds. But in that case the magnitude difference over larger numbers is what you are interested in. The difference between O(n) and O(n^2) can grow to an arbitrary magnitude difference. If you want a difference of 1000, then take n = 1000, and you get O(n|n = 1000) = 1000 and O(n^2|n=1000) = 1 000 000. But if you take n = 1 000 000, the ratio is now 1 000 000 = 1 000 000 / 1 000 000 000 000. So, a badly written sort function can get pretty bad with large arrays.
Anyway, the latter is just tangential to show that indeed as you say, context is important (abundance and total need for a resource) and factors vs. growth-in-factors over large numbers are different. Resources scale linearly to use in product output, however, so the "big oh" (counter-)analogy is just for the sake of interest.
More importantly, salinity buildup is a potential problem in desalination plants producing fresh water. If that much salt had economic viability, boom, two birds one stone.
I've been waiting for competition in this space to heat up for about full decade now. Around the start of the 2010s I was doing a ton of research, and it seemed like a big win was just around the corner... somehow it seems farther away now.
I really hope something - anything - makes it out of the lab at a market-busting price point soon, it might actually give me a chance to restart some projects that have been collecting dust on the shelf for way too long.
The thing is that li ion batteries bare these 10 years ahead. So to be competitive now, a battery chemistry bmust be either 10times cheaper (rough estimate) or fill in a niche application (high density, very stable). A battery that is just five times as cheap will never catch up to the learnings of li ion manufacturing.
But that calculation is affected by the commodity prices of lithium as well. If demand for batteries increases (i.e. if most people started driving electric cars) then a technology could go from 5 to 10 times as cheap very quickly
> would still be a great success if sodium-ion is cheaper to manufacture
Either if would be slightly more expensive, the environmental and logistic consequences (not depending on a few places in a few countries to mine it, not needing to import the raw materials from another continent) would be also a noticeable factor.
To be fair, that doesn't appear to be a quote and the last few words of the sentence you quoted is important:
> ... offering a comparable energy capacity and cycling ability to some lithium-ion batteries already on the market.
Having said that, it seems they do claim in the paper that the performance of their "battery" (really, they only tested a single cathode composition) is "competitive to the commercial LiFePO4-graphite" base on extrapolation of their lab results "to practical large format cells".
I feel funny about that sort of extrapolation in an engineering context, but I'm not an electrochemist and also not a chemical engineer, and I have only skimmed through the abstract, introductions, and conclusions of the paper; so take this comment with a grain of salt.
Edit: typo. Also, I'm not out to trash the work in case my comment comes across as being harsh—marketing aside (which is, sadly, pretty common in high-impact journals), it does seem like a step forward.
Wouldn't a sodium-ion battery be much more environmentally friendly to produce? It seems like there's value in sustainability that makes this attractive over lithium-based batteries.
The drooling part is that those batteries could be much less damaging when discarded. Even more, in a coastal area or a ship the danger of those batteries eventually ending in the water could be practically negligible by comparison with any traditional battery. And if done just with NA would be basically non poisonous for humans if reaching the food chain or water supply.
It they really work is a good leap in the right direction.
We must remember that some forms of NA will explode in a fire ball in contact with water.
Unfortunately, this battery still contains significant amounts of cobalt and nickel in the cathode, and battery electrolytes don't tend to be the type you want circling in your blood system - far from non poisonous.
It's valuable research, but still nowhere close to a superior end product.
Just occurred to me that a desalinization plant and sodium battery plant might be a good combination? Assuming brine could be used a source for sodium batteries being manufactured, it could be a good solution for all of the undesired byproducts of the desalination process.
Only if the energy density is not important for your application. There are such applications, but they are a minority. Smartphones, laptops, car batteries all want to be both light and small.
Yeah, but if all the grid storage and powerwall production could go sodium, that would free up lithium for the places it's needed.
The same argument could be made for nickel-iron batteries, though. They're heavy and bulky, but they last literally forever, and their source materials are ludicrously abundant. Why don't we see nickel-iron grid-scale storage? I'd love to know.
They are relatively expensive, they have fairly high self-discharge rates and aren’t very efficient. Last I checked, they had on the order of 1%/day discharge (some versions are as low as ~20%/month). They also are not very efficient in the charge/discharge cycle, losing 30-40% of the power put in. Lithium currently is around 10%.
Their primary use is in applications where their long lifetimes outweigh all other considerations.
Is it a minority? What about batteries tied to energy grids like the Tesla battery farm in Australia? Wouldn't that be a potential use case which would be useful across the globe?
Tesla plans to manufacture their own battery cells with ~0 cobalt. Given the growth in Tesla sales (cars and stationary storage) and their willingness to be "master of [their] own destiny" (in battery production), I wouldn't worry about cobalt shortage anytime soon.
I really wish I could find the research paper, but I've always been unsuccessful, when I worked in the battery lab about 10 years ago one of the scientists presented a paper that analyzed the amount of known lithium reserves at the time and how long they would last. With something like 50 or 75% EV adoption and zero recycling the amount of known accessible reserves there was estimated to be 200+ years of lithium available.
I wonder how that estimate holds up today with the amount of places we now use Li-ion cells and the new lithium reserves we have found.
The problem with looking at the number of years of reserves is that if there is >60-100 years of reserves, that means nobody is actively looking for more. If there is 200 years of no recycling, then we should only worry about the other materials that go into the battery.
Whats more important than lithium is the cobalt they need, which is particularly hard to source. As others have mentioned, battery makers are trying hard to remove cobalt from their batteries.
It's nice to see this progress - it's definitely been a focus for people for a long time.
I remember one of my chemistry profs in the 1990s telling us how Sodium ion batteries could eclipse Lithium ion batteries once we figure out the practicality to make it work.
Even if it wasn't ... If the energy density and mass density of a sodium battery are between lead-acid and lithium-ion, then an equally capable battery would weigh somewhere in-between.
The stellar processes that result in stable lithium are rare, like supernovas.[1] Another factor in its rarity as a material is that while it's present in a lot of things, it's not present in quantities for economical recovery.
Ahh, thanks! So if I understand correctly, it's because its stable isotopes can only be produced in high quantities through fission rather than fusion (otherwise they get destroyed in the same processes).
During the dotcom era someone tried to build Flow batteries (although I don't think the term had been coined yet), and if memory serves they were sodium chemistry.
There's a hint on the wikipedia page that someone may be trying it again, but I'm having trouble following the citations to figure out who.
>"One of the problems with them in their current form, however [...] inactive sodium crystals tend to build up on the surface of the negatively-charged electrode [...] which winds up killing the battery."
[...]
"Experimenting with the design of sodium-ion batteries led the team to produce a version with a cathode made of
layered metal oxide
and a liquid electrolyte with a higher concentration of sodium ions.
In testing, the team found that this led to a much smoother interaction between the electrolyte and the cathode, enabling the continuous movement of the sodium ions and
avoiding the troublesome buildup of inactive crystals on the cathode surface.
The upshot of that was battery offering capacity similar to some lithium-ion batteries and with an uninterrupted generation of electricity, maintaining 80 percent of its charge after 1,000 cycles."
Controlling Surface Phase Transition and Chemical Reactivity of O3-Layered Metal Oxide Cathodes for High-Performance Na-Ion Batteries
Junhua Song, Kuan Wang, Jianming Zheng, Mark H. Engelhard, Biwei Xiao, Enyuan Hu, Zihua Zhu, Chongmin Wang, Manling Sui, Yuehe Lin, David Reed, Vincent L. Sprenkle, Pengfei Yan, and Xiaolin Li
ACS Energy Lett. 2020, 5, XXX, 1718–1725
Publication Date:April 28, 2020
O3-layered metal oxides are promising cathode materials for high-energy Na-ion batteries (SIBs); however, they suffer from fast capacity fade.
Here, we develop a high-performance O3-NaNi0.68Mn0.22Co0.10O2 cathode for SIBs toward practical applications by suppressing the formation of a rock salt layer at the cathode surface with an advanced electrolyte.
The cathode can deliver a high specific capacity of ∼196 mAh g–1 and demonstrates >80% capacity retention over 1000 cycles. NaNi0.68Mn0.22Co0.10O2–hard carbon full-cells with practical loading (>2.5 mAh cm–2) and lean electrolyte (∼40 μL) demonstrate ∼82% capacity retention after 450 cycles.
A 60 mAh single-layer pouch cell has also been fabricated and demonstrated stable performance. This work represents a significant leap in SIB development and brings new insights to the development of advanced layered metal oxide cathodes for alkaline-ion batteries."
82% capacity retention after 450 cycles is nothing to write home about.
Besides those are lab tests. Show a thousand cycles of a hundred cells at various temperatures and vibration loads and there will be something to talk about.
This is a lab result that has some promise, nothing more. Only a teeny tiny percentage of promising lab results turn into commercially viable products, there are many obstacles along the way from here to there. One of the biggest is that Li batteries have gone through several order of magnitude scalings. That means that any technology that wants to compete with it can't be as good, it must be much better.
It just never does. Just as in the parallel universe with personal airplanes powered by sodium batteries, Lithium-ion and four-wheeled cars never made it to the mainstream. Incumbent power.
There's a universe of uses for batteries. Really depends on what you want it for.
For the average person using consumer products they are usually concerned with energy density and cost. Apart from electric cars most companies don't really care about no. of cycles, especially for phones.
One of the problems with them in their current form, however, is that while this is going on inactive sodium crystals tend to build up on the surface of the negatively-charged electrode, the cathode, which winds up killing the battery. Additionally, sodium-ion batteries don't hold as much energy as their lithium-ion counterparts.
>a comparable energy capacity and cycling ability to some lithium-ion batteries
Is that just covering their asses, or does this only perform as well as the worst-performing lithium-ion batteries?