They don't mention it in this article but the big positive going for Sodium batteries is the cost, they are half the price of li-ion per KWH and about a third the price of Li-Pho. There are already quite cheap Sodium battery based cars out from BYD and while they are the lower range end of things (200 miles) they are also considerably cheaper.
So I think Sodium will find its way into the lower range EVs and home/grid storage since its so much cheaper. But I don't imagine we will want less power in phones or laptops as sodium is bigger and heavier.
I would love a lower end rickshaw/golfcart tier small ev. It would be great for trips and errands around town you could do on lower speed roads. I don’t need a 5000lb behemoth.
Bikes are a place where weight matters more than in a small car, at least for the user. Although I guess some ebikes have motors that don't require pedaling.
For protection from the elements there are things like the Veemo[1], I guess compared to the tiny EVs you do get a little exercise too (but you have even less collision protection, not much different from riding a normal bike).
My problem is, if EV is not going to work for 100% of my use cases, I need a second car. But if I need a second car then it doesn't make sense to overthink the EV, any will do. What would be really awesome is if I could have one car and swap the power train easily, but that's just fantasy talk.
Towing actually seems in practice an awful place for renting. Use case is taking kids trailer camping: UHaul at least offers only trucks with (a) single row seating, and (b) no brake controller. Even if spouse did drive, the lack of the brake controller is a showstopper.
If someone knows where I can rent a crewcab with RV brake controllers, I'm all ears. I'd love to not have to own a tow vehicle.
There's the Arcimoto FUV. I'd consider it a step up from golfcart/rickshaw as it's meant to go at highway speeds, but it's much smaller/lighter than a regular car.
Lithium is only a small fraction of the mass of Li-ion batteries. Also, Li does not change oxidation state in Li-ion batteries, so its energy of ionization doesn't affect the voltage of the cell.
Why do you say they don't mention the cost? I'm sorry but like that's what the ENTIRE article is about, the cost savings of sodium batteries over lithium.
"Since the chemical components are cheap, a scaled-up industry should be able to produce batteries that cost less than their lithium counterparts."
They do not mention its a half to a third the price of the two prevailing technologies and they they have weaselled it with "should". It does cost less already, you have been able to buy sodium ion batteries on aliexpress for months and the cars are already out from BYD and many more are scheduled later this year and into next.
The article is mostly about the geopolitics of the materials.
So I stand by they don't mention it, I read that article and I felt this was the key missing context as to why Sodium batteries are going to matter.
For me, the biggest benefit is the dramatically improved environmental profile. You drop a lithium battery in a body of water and besides the potential for some interesting pyrotechnics, you also have a moderately bad environmental pollution situation. I expect the situation to be much better with a sodium based battery.
This is the short version of The Economist's piece on sodium batteries. For headline stories there is often a short and a long version. The long version is linked in the article or you can find it here:
Yeah the ignorance here is pretty strong. Unless all these people have inside knowledge that CATL's claimed density and specs are BS.
CATL's Sodium Ion is 160 wh/kg. That's basically LFP, and LFP means a 200-300 mile car, and supposed to scale to $40/kwhr (cell level) which implies a drivetrain cost at initial purchase that is almost physically impossible for ICE to match.
Roadmap is 200 wh/kg, and while roadmaps are often a bit optimistic from chinese manufacturers timewise, they do seem to hit the densities.
The other big news is CATL is doing 200+ wh/kg LFP, and of course has roadmaps for 230+.
We shall see, but if CATL and others meet the cost and density estimates with acceptable cycle endurance and safety, it is a clear path to probably 3-4 billion EVs.
And if Sodium-Sulfur and Lithium-Sulfur succeed ... that should be 2x to 3x the power density
> Perhaps the biggest disadvantage of sodium batteries is their late start.
Sodium batteries have a long history. I know the US Navy was using them for batteries on their submarines back in the 70s, and they surely started long before then. Lead-acid batteries emit H2 which would be a disaster in a sub.
On problem I remember about them was that they run very hot, and are liable to catch fire. Perhaps that has been solved in the last five decades!
Apparently the non-rechargeable version is the primary power source of AAM, SAM, and cruise missiles. The interesting thing is before use the salt is solid and inert (without degradation in a long-term stockpile) but once triggered with a pyrotechnic primer they reach an operating temperature of 400-550 for the single use lifetime.
Sodium batteries looks great on the outside, but amount of charge discharge cycles is roughly half what lithium batteries can do. So what you will save on cost difference between sodium and lithium will get eaten up by shorter life of sodium battery.
Understand that, they're about half the cost of lithium currently, but they don't have nearly the same scale benefit as lithium does. It's likely that cost could half again if they achieved the same scale.
And recall that, early lithium batteries had a fraction of the longevity that current designs have, so, it's likely that sodium batteries have plenty of room for improvement in that regard as well.
In my mind, the likely application is grid-scale storage where density doesn't matter as much but upfront cost does. Not really so much for renewables, but more so that you can store your unused base load during offpeak hours for later use.
That's true, which makes them perfect for Powerwall-type backup power, where weight is not a concern and the number of cycles will be very low.
The other way to deal with low cycle count is to keep the cells only half-charged and minimize the excursions from that. A large pack that goes from 40 to 60 percent daily will last eons compared to one cycled from 90 to 10 percent.
From what I understand, the degradation of the cell is not linear with the discharge excursion. So you may have exponentially better battery life the narrower of charge band you keep it in. If anyone has more detailed information let me know, I'd like to see better numbers.
That’s fine though. Thanks to time value of money, if it costs half as much but has to be replaced in half the time it’s actually quite profitable. (Assuming, of course, the labor cost is low.)
If they can be recycled like lithium, even better.
Something that will complicate technological solutions going forward is the need to have no negative environmental impacts across the entire lifecycle of any new contraptions, under a scenario where they are produced, used and recycled at planetary scale and for... a long time.
These types of constraints did not exist in the earlier technological innovation eras but are sort-of self-evident now: There is not much point to do embark on expensive retooling of the entire energy system if it simply results in a sort of "footprint-shift", reduce GHG emissions but increase environmental impacts elsewhere.
The article (and links therein) don't provide an immediate view on these aspects of different approaches to battery construction. Maybe it is too early in the cycle. But I think these issues will have to be explored thoroughly for any solution that is deemed technically and economically viable.
It'll be interesting to see whether there might be any kind of late-mover advantage for those who sat out lithium and begin pursuing sodium-based batteries now.
The safety problem with Li-ion batteries is the electrolyte is a flammable organic solvent. It is unrelated to the amount of energy stored in the battery under normal operation.
Sodium battery production mosdef benefits from lithium's advances.
As you know, each new chemistry (and anode, cathode, etc) opens up new niches, use cases, and price points. Sodium won't displace so much as compliment lithium.
Lithium is plentiful enough for grid storage, but it's so at a higher price than it has today. It's also cheap enough for mobile batteries, but not negligible, and cost is the most important metric for grid storage.
Thus, lithium looks like one of the fundamental bottlenecks for grid storage. It can kinda work on high-cost small-size pilot projects, but we probably won't be able to use it for real.
Sodium on the other hand has all of the same desirable chemistry properties, but scales much better. And iron has all the cost benefits, but undesirable chemical properties. (And there are, of course, people working on C-H vs. C-OH bonds that are completely out of the box.)
Flow batteries always seemed like the ideal solution for grid-scale storage.
You decouple the transformation (charge/discharge) from the capacity (liquid volume), with the goal of making the latter "a standard pressure, watertight tank."
But I believe last time they came up here, people said the charge/discharge still needed some work.
Yes, it looks like that to me too. Also, they make the lifetime of the active element independent from the one of the reagents, and recycling and maintenance very standard. It's just not really related to the chemistry.
Also, long-term storage will very likely use some different chemistry from short-term. High-temperature batteries have some very interesting trade-offs that I have no idea how will pan-out in practice. Things are mostly not settled on that area, it looks like a very interesting thing to work on.
I wonder if we (as a species) will ever get to reverse nuclear fission.
I.e. putting energy into nuclear reactors so that we can produce U-235. Although I guess technically breeder reactors, although like-to-like is less fun fantasy than solar -> fissile.
Grid storage doesn't need to consider weight at all. We can use heavy storage methods if they're cheap enough with enough capacity. There's some rather exotic designs for energy storage that don't use any materials that we could feasibly run out of.
I get that, but it is all relative. I'm not seeing any indication that lithium is the most difficult aspect of battery production. It seems like a short term problem compared to graphite, nickel, and (seemingly) cobalt.
It seems like time is the bottleneck in basically all cases rather than overall capacity as well.
Nickel and cobalt aren't a problem at all. Neither are necessary for current lithium batteries. Graphite is a manufacturing problem, not a material one.
Batteries have no bottleneck. Just lots and lots of things one can improve a bit with some amount of work.
Lithium isn't scarce relative to current demand levels but if the automotive industry wants to transition to 100% EVs that's an enormous increase in demand.
Isn't that just how markets work? They are sized to the demand today, so if you were to increase demand by 10x overnight of course they would be distorted. If however demand increases slowly over time then the markets react normally--suppliers increase production, new suppliers enter the market--and the price remains fairly stable.
That's assuming availability at quantity of base resources.
Which has generally been a fair assumption: as demand increases and price increases, exploration is incentivized and new sources are found, and capital is invested to increase production at existing / new sources.
But... there are also other ways it can go. Copper? Cobalt? Uranium-circa-1940s? Sometimes, more just isn't found.
In cases where supply is externally constrained the markets still work. The price of that component starts to go up so people search for alternatives. This is already happening in the battery market (as per TFA) and is natural.
With some more research, titanium looks like a fascinating example.
Heavy mineral sands [0] seem to be the primary source, with total heavy minerals at ~1% of weight (all mineral components).
Of that, ilmenite [1] is the primary titanium ore (reduced to sand).
So essentially, natural primary physical reduction (of hard rock to sand) is required to meet the current market price for economic viability. There exist hard rock sources, but most would be too energy intensive to exploit, given the low concentration.
The South African Tormin operation is especially fascinating, as it has ore reduced to sand AND then washed over geologic timescales by wave action, separating out less valuable minerals and concentrating the remainder (~25% THM). [2]
Which I guess is the bulk of my point: 'at any cost', there are always more resources to mine; 'at reasonable cost', there can be sharp differentiations between different types of resources (e.g. in titanium: naturally concentrated heavy mineral sands, heavy mineral sands, hard rock).
Something being widespread in the Earth's crust, but at less than 1% concentration, doesn't help us a lot if we need civilization-scale quantities of it.
Or, if copper were distributed like that, we'd probably all use aluminum wiring.
My understanding is for batteries lithium is the less tricky one because it doesn't change size during redox reactions. Sodium does and that damages the anode or cathode (can't remember which, don't care).
Yeah and the low production of lithium is due minimal demand historically. It's not like other metals with a large historic demand. Like copper.
Well, graphite is not all that scarce either. The problem is that China has almost complete dominance in the anode material production (ie, graphite) with 90+% market share in EV battery supply-chain.
I did, but I think the answer was kind of jargony or, at least, I didn’t get it. It sounds like she was saying that it exists all over the place in small amounts because it doesn’t like to be a solid?
I think it is an interesting lecture if you are interested in a sort of geographical answer of where they might look for it, but at least after skipping around a bit and watching some stretches at double speed, she hasn’t gotten to the sort of economic answer of, like, do there exist sources that can turned into batteries easily (since we are mostly programmers who mostly care about whether or not the batteries will exist to power the devices we want to program).
> do there exist sources that can turned into batteries easily
Yes, but only a few. There aren't many high-concentration lithium deposits. (There are many more low-concentration)
Which is essentially the mining industry in a nutshell: concentration of raw mined feedstock -> economically efficient processing -> finished product (bought by consumers who don't care where it came from, and so has a single market price)
It seems like Lithium isn't so much quality limited by supply speed. At least for the moment.
There is some concerns in terms of total materials for stuff like Cobalt/Nickel but even then, my gut feeling is that those issues are more fear mongering rather than a real issue.
This is new! The only ones available when I last looked a few months ago were mislabeled li-ion batteries.
This is great, though. Thank you.
EDIT: my understanding was that one of the major benefits of sodium ion batteries was their ability to discharge down to 0V. These appear to all have low voltage cutoff marks.
EDIT EDIT: some available do list 0V discharge, though nothing looks like it will ship until 2024.
Perhaps a result of overcharging lithium cells? That's known to cause metallic lithium plating, definitely not a normal or a desired state in a Li-ion cell.
That's crossing the line into hostile pedantry--there's no reason to get nitpicky over which step in the reaction chain is most-to-blame for someone losing their eyebrows.
Fooker is still correct that (A) the metallic-vs-salt difference is very important and (B) bringing those metals together with water can cause explosions.
The article in Nature is about a paper by Thunderf00t (Phil Mason). He published the result in Nature Chemistry and also made a video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LmlAYnFF_s8 (the video has a nice balance, it's technical but not too technical).
The reaction is exothermic and also produces H2 gas. If the metal ignites it can also ignite the H2 gas which gets spicy in a hurry, so it's reasonable for someone to interpret that as the metal exploding.
Thankfully kitchen sodium is in compound form, and thus not likely to react violently with water. In this context, the properties of pure metallic sodium are relevant because it would need to be handled in manufacturing. Kitchen salt is more commonly mined or extracted, requiring minimal to no handling of pure metallic sodium.
Is this better from a safety standpoint? All I remember from sodium in its normal metal form in school was that it had to be kept in a bottle of oil because as soon as it gets into contact with oxygen it spontaneously combusts.. Which is exactly the problem with lithium cells too.
If news outlets took all of the money they have spent paying writers to tell us that a new battery technology will be here any day now, they probably could have funded one that actually will be here any day now.
Ya, mostly in China because they do it so cheaply, and aren't really concerned with the environmental consequences of cheaper refining processes. The market demands lower prices before anything else.
What are you talking about? Nothing in the article even remotely suggests that.
What it does say is that most of the world's refining of lithium takes place in China. It's right there in the subtitle: "Lithium is relatively scarce and mostly refined in China."
Acquiring sodium wrecks the landscape to the exact same extent as does lithium extraction. The only differences between them are 1) we already wrecked all the territory for sodium, so fallacious sunk-cost thinking kicks in, and 2) there is not (yet) a dedicated astroturf campaign funded by oil companies against sodium.
We just need to combine desalination for drinking water with sodium extraction for batteries. Solves some of the ecological problems from doing each in isolation.
What do you with the chlorine? PVC? Pool cleaners? Bleach? Rocket propellant? Others? What opportunities might arise with an abundance of cheap chlorine? Probably want to stay away from chlorofluorocarbons.
True but the mass of lithium or sodium in a battery is limited. A Tesla Model S which has a large battery uses 62.6 kg (about 130 pounds) of lithium. You only need to separate that once. This limits the amount of energy needed to produce that battery. That is unlike the ongoing energy needed to refine the gasoline in an ICEV.
What would be the additional massive amount of energy usage to capture the sodium output of the many, many already existing and economical desalination plants?
Our oceans are full of Sodium in very high concentrations. Sodium Choloride, aka. NaCl, aka kitchen salt. About 11 grams per kg in ocean water. And about 90 grams in the average human body. Lots of salt deposits in former salt lakes, mineral deposits, etc. Neither scarce nor hard to harvest.
You would literally die without sodium in your body. Very common mineral and pretty easy to get to.
