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.
The shortage of cobalt is a by far bigger problem. It's basically 80% about Congo, and what happens there.
50% to 80% of global supply can evaporate overnight if something is happening there.