Sodium batteries offer an alternative to tricky lithium
economist.com
economist.com
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.
"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.
https://www.squadmobility.com/
https://electrek.co/2022/12/06/squad-solar-electric-city-car...
Am I missing something?
Oh, I see in the text below:
> Regular production Squad. Price estimation €6250 ex. tax.
Is this a common thing with EU sales pages, or are they just being extra weird?
I own a cargo bike, and it's great mostly, alas not when the weather is inclement.
Cars are already very expensive for something with such a low utilisation rate.
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.
https://www.economist.com/science-and-technology/2023/10/25/...
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
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!
Please remember there are a lot of different sodium-ion chemistries.
If they can be recycled like lithium, even better.
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.
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.
How much cheaper are these types of batteries expected to be?
This is not true if you are talking about lithium ion batteries. It may be true for some chemistries if you are talking about lithium iron phosphate.
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.
Sodium is good for stationary deployments. It's not good when weight matters.
Add water to elemental sodium, and you get heat, hydrogen gas and sodium hydroxide.
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.
[Update] Watched a CNBC video[1] and found one in Silicon Valley.
https://www.theinformation.com/articles/the-electric-a-start...
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)
See: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lithium_carbonate#Production
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.
Look at titanium. The US had to buy it (through shell companies) from the Soviets for their spy planes, because there were no alternatives.
There was at the time a severe shortage of usable titanium refined metal. Refining Titanium is much more difficult than aluminum.
The soviets had over invested in the ability to produce it, so it was more economic to get it from them than try to produce the capacity here.
Ukraine now barely ranks as a producer while China, South Africa, and Australia are the primary sources.
When demand pops up, different deposits start becoming viable.
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.
[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heavy_mineral_sands_ore_depo...
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ilmenite#Feedstock_productio...
[2] https://www.mineralcommodities.com/operations-projects/south...
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.)
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.
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.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.
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2023-06-23/vanadium-flow-battery...
IIRC, this particular chemistry is an Australian development, as well.
It seems like time is the bottleneck in basically all cases rather than overall capacity as well.
Batteries have no bottleneck. Just lots and lots of things one can improve a bit with some amount of work.
It sounds like a false premise to me.
It's a perfectly fine point to make, and it's one of the things worth optimizing.
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.
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.
I'll hold back from giving you a let-me-google-that-for-you link (:
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.
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.
I hope this helps clarify any misunderstandings.
Common salt is NaCl, not metallic sodium.
The later (needed for batteries) explodes in contact with water.
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.
Here's one of the search results for "sodium explosion": https://www.nature.com/articles/nature.2015.16771
Unless your comment is about how an explosion needs a pressure wave and sodium is just really burning hydrogen or something.
Hence the name "sodium ion batteries"
You are factually incorrect and should educate yourself on basic high school chemistry before you embarrass yourself further.
Are sodium ion batteries somehow different? If so, how can they keep metallic sodium stable at all?
I wonder how much of the cost of home batteries involves shipping costs though.
I wonder what the connection is.
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."
Salt for batteries might also be a tougher target for any campaigns against it.
The energy cost of that is not a solved problem.
I also don't know what chlorine waste looks like. Maybe react it with iron to do sea-seeding?
it looks like a poisonous gas attack from WWI, subsequently declared a war crime.
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.