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.
