So, what makes you think battery prices are going to continue falling ? Isn't lithium mineral the main cost in building these batteries ?
No, and I have no idea why anyone would think that. Raw material costs are generally not that significant, most costs in manufacturing come from labor and capital.
The lithium in a $15000 75kWh battery pack costs around $1600 at current prices. There is a lot of room for the price to fall even with rising raw material costs, as manufacturing gets more efficient and capacity is built out.
And also, rising raw material prices will cause production to expand, which will eventually push prices back down.
IIUC 50% of the cost of a battery is coming from lithium
Manufacturing is only about bout 25%
Which is precisely why the industry is moving to chemistries that don't use cobalt, pushing the materials price back down.
The other thing is we're innovating in battery chemistry. It would not surprise me if Lithium were only one of many options in ten years, depending on the storage capacity and number of cycles needed per kg. Sodium is a likely candidate, and it's as cheap and available as salt. Iron, aluminum, and others are a possibility, for stationary batteries where weight doesn't matter.
I know people here are very skeptical of every battery advance press release, and rightfully so. But nonetheless, some of that is going to pan out, and the world of energy storage is going to fundamentally change the economics for cars, airplanes, and grid storage within the next decade.
The theoretical energy density of sodium is too low for the weight, this isn't a matter of developing the technology.
What we can look forward to is sodium batteries becoming cheap and reliable, replacing every application of lead-acid, and most, perhaps all, stationary lithium. Great choice for house or grid-level storage, where the lower density is basically harmless.
Batteries are such a major component of an electric car that there's a sort of Rocket Equation which applies: a sodium car with the same range as a lithium one would have to carry so much more battery that one would have to add substantially more just to move the extra weight around.
This will never pencil out.
LFP (lithium iron phosphate) batteries are already used by Tesla and have a gravimetric energy density of 125 Wh/kg, much lower than Lithium-ion.
CATL currently produces a sodium-ion battery at 160 Wh/kg, and they expect the next generation to reach 200 Wh/kg. Even if that doesn't come to fruition, it's already higher density than what's being used in electric cars!
Now consider that sodium-ion is less flammable and doesn't have the risk of thermal runaway. You might be able to drop weight in hazard protection systems. Battery cycle times are competitive with Lithium chemistry. Contrary to your prediction that it doesn't pencil out, I expect sodium-ion to completely displace Lithium batteries for use in electric vehicles because it pencils out so much better. It will just be so much cheaper and doesn't bottleneck on any materials as you scale up.
Tesla uses iron phosphate in its cheaper models, but the high end is still reliant on NMC. I'd be interested to know the maximum range available on LFP.
BYD sells a lithium-iron-phosphate battery with an energy density of 150 Wh/kg. CATL's LFP is 125.
Also, a lithium-iron-phosphate battery is a lithium-ion battery, in that the electrolyte works by lithium ionic conduction. The appropriate contrast would be "lithium-nickel".
>CATL currently produces a sodium-ion battery at 160 Wh/kg, and they expect the next generation to reach 200 Wh/kg.
This is reported as the "single-cell" energy density, and is not directly comparable to the battery pack density.
>Now consider that sodium-ion is less flammable and doesn't have the risk of thermal runaway.
Surely this isn't because of the stability of sodium, which anyone who watched that chemistry demonstration in high school knows, is significantly more reactive than lithium. I expect the risks to be similar; furthermore, the concept of a dense energy storage that has no risk of sudden release is physically unlikely.
In theory 490 km, in practice, 380 km. Because they don't degrade as much, after a few years they are closer to what you call the high end models.
Correct, I want to point out that John Goodenough was responsible for the basic research which lead to all lithium-ion batteries.
I explicitly intended LiFePO to be included, and I hope for a variety of reasons that it's much more popular than cobalt-heavy formulas in ten years.
They offer a lithium-nickel chemistry without cobalt. If it can be proven in practice, it would allow comparable density to the best car batteries in a scalable chemistry. The founder is a researcher at the University of Texas who wrote several papers on the chemistry:
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdf/10.1002/adma.2020027...
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S240582972...
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdfdirect/10.1002/aenm.2...
Even if a "lighter" car hits you, it's gonna be a bad day. Better to avoid the collision altogether, no? :)
On the other hand, I think maybe hoping that vehicles become no heavier than modern EVs is at least somewhat realistic.
> It’s also about weight. Trucks today averaging around 5200 pounds -- that’s a jump of more than a half ton since 2000. And things get heavier as electric vehicles look to become our new normal.
> On average electric vehicles are 10 percent heavier than gas powered cars. For instance, the new electric Hummer weighs in at a staggering 9,100 pounds or more than 4 and a half tons. All that weight can have deadly consequences. Researchers have found that for every 1,000 pounds a car puts on, a pedestrian is nearly 50 percent more likely to die if they’re hit and the more a truck weighs the longer it will take to stop.
1. https://www.clickondetroit.com/news/2022/08/08/size-does-mat...
This is absolutely not clear. Active lithium is just ~60g per kWh in a battery, or ~1% of the mass of a state of the art LFP battery. Even though sodium weighs 3.5 times more for the same charge, if it's use would allow just a few percent reduction in total weigh, either by reduction of inactive cathode material or some other source, it could easily beat lithium batteries.
There is a reason lead ones are not "just" heavy but also physically much bigger than same capacity lithium one.
What will (probably) happen if we get competitive sodium batteries is that they will phase out lithium from the stationary storage so there won't be that huge demand for lithium for everything. Or possibly they will become "cheap EV's battery"
Sodium cannot improve lithium by replacing it in batteries, for physical chemistry reasons which can't be negotiated.
I don't consider it likely that lithium will become so much more expensive that people will want their second-largest purchase, a car, to be inferior in the way that it must be with sodium batteries.
Rather more likely that cheap and good sodium batteries relieve pressure on lithium supply for the enormous amount of battery storage we need to handle intermittent renewables.
By weight, something around 1% of a lithium battery is lithium.
Sodium is seen as an interesting alternative, because there are some indications that it can make that 99% that makes up the rest of the battery lighter. Even though sodium is ~3.5 times worse as a charge carrier, if it's use allows cutting enough weight from that rest, it can be a winner overall.
For example, aluminium is, for complex reasons, not compatible with every part of a li-ion battery, and so they use copper connectors internally, typically containing by weight at least 10 times as much copper as they contain lithium. Sodium batteries can use aluminum everywhere, which saves on not just cost, but also more in weight than the weight difference between equal molar amounts of sodium and lithium.
If I look at say my laptop or phone, they definitely aren't compatible with newer batteries even if it's technically feasible so why would we expect cars to be?
The reason it's not true for laptops is that batteries aren't standard form factor sizes in laptops.
You might notice that Li-Ion AA batteries CAN'T be charged by Ni-Cd or Ni-MH AA battery chargers. Even a smaller change like Ni-MH to Ni-Zn requires different equipment.
This is like suggesting that my computer can't go from AMD to nvidia because they would need to know deep specifics about AMD's proprietary chips to support them. But that's what drivers are for!
Most chemistries can be charged using the same "constant current up to this voltage, constant voltage to the max voltage" method, just need to set the right values.
Seeing the 4G rollout was a good economic course in environmental pollution and abandonded psuedo-innovation. All of the older surplus 2G/3G/4G hardware and abandonded software was sold to developing countries. Now every device on tcp/ip has inferior muck with an out-of-date ecosystem.
Desktop computing had it right when the information superhighway still existed. Just install new hardware thats backwards compatible (the hardware was forward compatible by design).
The tabloid quality fodder and disposible commerce has always been 3rd world, much in the same way that tcp/ip evolved.
Anything for an inferior integer to stay relevant, huh? The environmental impact is someone elses problem :p
If you split salt into sodium and chlorine, and use the sodium for batteries, what do you do with the chlorine?
If you had to dump it, you'd probably react it with something cheap to make it inert. This would generate energy, it's akin to combustion with oxygen. You could use that energy to decrease the energy requirements of splitting the NaCl in the first step.
Something that might work on a small scale could become an ecological threat on the scale of a billion electric cars.
On serious note, Chlorine is widely use chemical, used in cleaning products, bleaching paper and cloth, pesticides , rubber, and some solvents.
This would be preferred anyway: HCl is nasty, and carbon dioxide is not.
As to cost, it depends on chemistry but you need ~0.16kg of Lithium metal/kWh or 16kg for 100kWh battery pack. At current prices that’s ~1,300$ worth of lithium meaning the majority of battery pack costs are still from manufacturing and other materials.
https://www.dailymetalprice.com/metalpricecharts.php?c=li&u=...
But yeah, on average if you look to previous price, maybe it's more of x8 price increase. 18 month ago was the all time low of the data on tradingview, I give you that.
About the weight details, are you sure your figures are correct? First result on google gives me way higher numbers (minimum 80g/kwh, but likely more than 160g/kwh) https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/how-much-lithium-li-ion-vehic... Also, another comment in this thread gives 60g/kwh, and another 160g/kwh
160g/kwh is 0.16kg/kWh… But yes, it varies based on chemistry. 0.16kg/kWh is on the high end but hardly the limit. There are a lot of different electrode options: Lithium Cobalt Oxide, Lithium Nickel Cobalt Aluminium Oxide, Lithium Nickel Manganese Cobalt Oxide, Lithium Manganese Oxide, etc
In general if you assume high lithium prices then we would expect lower lithium use per kWh given sufficient time for the manufactures to adjust.
So I wonder if you can really rule out that the increase in demand for EV isn't the main factor in lithium's x15 price increase. And if it's the case, I don't see how battery prices could go down in the next decade, since increasing mining isn't spontaneous and demand is not going to decrease.
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/DCOILWTICO/
https://www.cnn.com/2021/04/20/investing/oil-prices-negative...
There are a lot of reasons that would reduce the cost of batteries even if the mining+processing of Li didn't grow (which it will).
Semiconductors spoiled us into thinking we could ride one technology idea down an exponential curve forever, but most technologies don't have that kind of progression. By the way, semiconductors didn't have that kind of progression either - chips from 10 years ago look very different than today's.
Nickel battery production has decreased as they're being replaced with Lithium batteries so they're no longer riding the experience curve.
Semiconductors have a relatively constant price per chip but a regularly decreasing price per transistor.
We need about 1000TWh for the clean energy transition, half for cars and half for the electrical. There might be better substitutes for the electrical grid, but cars are going to use something that looks a lot like a lithium-ion battery, like sodium ion.
So I figure we've got solid demand from our current 500GWh/year up until at least 32TWh/year or so, 6 doublings, which should lower the price by about 90%.
Look at the other side. Tesla's battery day announcement in 2021 promises 56% cost reductions in 4 years via 6 enhancements: silicon anodes, cobalt-free cathodes, dry electrode process, structural batteries, tabless electrodes, larger cells.
Only the dry electrode process is particularly innovative or risky, but the others still add considerable cost reductions. Not all of Tesla's innovations may pan out, but they're just one of many companies and Universities researching batteries, many of whom are more innovative than Tesla is.
Also, Tesla has a very spotty track record on predicting its own innovations (yes, even on battery design), so I wouldn't take that prediction too seriously.
I predict it will rain sometime in the next month at my address. I also predict that it will freeze hard in the same time period.
This is a useful prediction, given that I will be winterizing my yard today.
Making a prediction better than an expert's is hard. Useful predictions are often easy.
If my father in law decides to plant 1000 acres in wheat next year, he is making a prediction about the markets. Given the situation in Ukraine and with global climate, wheat prices are one of the most difficult to predict precisely. But he is a low cost producer compared to many, so he knows he is likely to make a profit whether the price is high or low. A precise prediction would be nice, but producers everywhere operate with imprecise but useful predictions all the time.
(Exception: solar panels, because those have the least processing over raw silicon and are therefore more price sensitive)
Which is a surprise, but so is a x15 increase in a raw material cost.
There’s also a limitless source in the ocean. If prices got high enough we could just filter ocean water.
https://www.visualcapitalist.com/breaking-down-the-cost-of-a...
I would expect battery prices to stall on their drop, or even rise a bit, in the next year or two, before dropping again massively in price. There has been a lot of supply chain disruption, and an absolutely massive increase in demand. But lots more production capacity is being built.