Northvolt develops state-of-the-art sodium-ion battery validated at 160 Wh/kg

https://chemistry-europe.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdf/10....

As I wrote a few days ago, once charging is below 10 minutes, charging stations work just like gas stations in terms of throughput. We will see gas stations converting directly from gas pumps to chargers. (Unclear if gas pumps can coexist near high-powered chargers; gasoline vapor and high voltage electricity should not be in the same space.)

I'm sure like any battery the charging gets slower over time as the battery warms up, so finding the sweet spot would be nice.

I'd quite like to buy an electric car and select an appropriate power bank based on this.

Also, why do the packs have to be permanent? Why not have the ability to add or remove modular cells as and when needed? Just add the capacity when you need it. Plug the unused cells into your solar array when you aren't using them.

That opens up a few options. Firstly, you can choose to power your house or your car, or of you need to get to work and you forgot to charge, you take the dead cells out and swap a fully charged set in. Leave the dead ones charging at home.

Have a modular system where battery swapping is possible doesnt seem to be a system that EV manufacturers have considered for some reason.

an order of magnitude less. 30KWh is just about 3kg of lithium in theory. On practice it would be about 7-10% of the weight of the battery.

Some articles, if you are interested:

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S09626... https://www.euractiv.com/section/energy-environment/news/fac...

It's not even comparable to sodium, which is abundant practically everywhere.

This estimate is very far off.

1% is closer.

When you think of an application like grid connected energy storage, most of those performance metrics are irrelevant, and the only thing that really matters is cell cost per total energy stored and delivered during its lifetime. We will likely see something over-engineered and simplified to maximize cycle count and minimize cost, leading to a much larger raw material consumption, at the expense of density - the cell is not going anywhere.

So the ability to use dirty cheap ingredients is a game changer for the grid storage market.

For now. But more importantly, there are sovereignty problems to considered in case things get worse in the future. And the quality and usability of the lithium substrate varies quite a bit between suppliers, with the better ones, for now, coming from the less "attractive" suppliers.

There is also a lot less Lithium in the universe than our models predict:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cosmological_lithium_problem

You cannot estimate abundance by atomic number like that. The big bang produced mostly hydrogen and helium, with traces of lithium and beryllium. The elements heavier than that are mostly produced by stars, and the physics of fusion have a massive impact on what elements, specifically, get made. Free protons join together to become helium-4 much more readily than any other fusion process, meaning that by the time heavier things start forming, the raw material is entirely ⁴He.

This means that things that are easily made of ⁴He are dramatically more common than anything else, making the most common isotopes after ⁴He oxygen-16 (4 alphas), carbon-12 (3 alphas, less common than oxygen because it's less stable and easily picks up another alpha), neon-20 (5 alphas), and iron-56 (14 alphas to nickel-56 which immediately decays twice through β+ to produce ⁵⁶Fe). Iron is so high up above all the other intermediate steps, because it's the last stop: In heavy enough stars, the entire core converts to iron, and reactions past that are energy-consuming, not energy-producing, so after that the star collapses.

Lithium is not on any of the major stellar nucleosynthesis pathways, which means it's only produced by exceptional processes, making it roughly as universally abundant as the other stuff that is made by exceptional processes, like scandium or gallium or zirconium. But none of that matters, because:

Lithium is abundant and easy to extract in the earth's crust.

While there's not that much of it up there, there's plenty easy to extract down here, because it's so light and likes forming light compounds, meaning that a huge proportion of all the lithium of all the rocks that came together to form the earth is reachable to us. Lithium is not rare. Any statement about lithium batteries that bemoans the scarcity of lithium is doubly confused: Firstly, because lithium is simply not scarce. Secondly, because lithium is such a tiny portion of the battery, that despite being in the name, only a small fraction of the materials cost is lithium.

Lithium price has had a few big spikes because mining is a very high-capital industry where spinning up projects is measured in years, if not decades, and we suddenly started using a lot more lithium in ~2010. Accordingly, the price has spiked from the ~$5k per ton (which is roughly in the same ballpark typical cost of extraction, where any abundant mineral prices end up at), to the heights of $37k per ton last year. Even at this high price, lithium was not even the most expensive material component in most lithium batteries, because typically only 1-3% of the battery's weight is lithium.

But these prices won't last, because having the price of a commodity so high above the cost of extraction means that new mining projects are spinning up.

Now if you look at how larger stars operate (the CNO cycle [1]) you’ll see that it matches up with the higher relative abundance of carbon, nitrogen, and oxygen in the universe. Lithium, beryllium, and boron get “skipped over” in a sense.

Furthermore, if you look at a graph of the relative abundance of all elements, you’ll note that odd-numbered elements are less abundant than even (with the exceptions of hydrogen and beryllium). This is called the Oddo-Harkins rule [2] and it may also be playing a role.

Edit: I should also add that the third major process in stars, triple-α [3], involves the fusion of three helium-4 nuclei into one carbon-12 nucleus. This occurs in older stars that have exhausted most of their hydrogen fuel and so have built up a large core of “inert” helium. When their outward pressure from hydrogen fusion is no longer high enough to withstand gravity, they reach the much higher pressures and temperatures needed for triple-α fusion. Unfortunately for the lithium industry, there’s no chance of producing lithium this way since it is skipped over on the way to carbon.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CNO_cycle

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oddo%E2%80%93Harkins_rule

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Triple-alpha_process

Lithium production capacity is scarce however, since it’s a mostly useless element unless you’re building batteries out of it.

Anyway, once cities realize that they need to stop taking water from rivers, we should be able to skim quite a bit of lithium from desalination plant waste water.

If someome resists, they will end up just like anyone who opposed the US's quest to take other nations oil.

As Donald used to say:

"Take the oil, then get out". They took the oil and stayed.

Well you do?

It won't work as long as there's a roughly equal alternative that's cheaper/easier to produce. Free market will win here.

There's no way one state can force another state (aside from war) to manufacture something a particular way. It's like if I controlled the world's timber supply and said Canada must produce houses out of timber and not, say, concrete. Canada's gonna go produce using concrete unless I somehow make my timber price competitive.

Any country without an expeditionary military force (about 187 of them) likes the resources they have. Ab abundant is great unless you have a known military adversary with extra-territorial ambition (that’s three countries).

Think about it :)

This announcement is about an improvement in energy density made possible by $Bs being invested to allow sodium batteries to become more competitive with lithium.

There are also other battery chemistries being rolled out. Iron based ones seem particularly promising for stationary storage.

It will take time to mass produce things regardless, but I imagine Sodium has far fewer bottlenecks.

Frank Wunderlich-Pfeiffer should consider writing in english, I love his expertise and clarity of writing.

Burning a gallon of gas generates 20lbs of CO2 (most of the weight is the O2), so 100 gallons produces a ton. Direct air carbon capture should cost roughly $100 per ton at scale, so the fee should be $1/gallon of gasoline (either at vehicle purchase or at the pump).

That’s completely affordable and lower than current gasoline taxes in many places.

If we made that one change (and funneled the revenue into carbon capture) existing ICE cars could be carbon negative in 5-10 years, and, as we phased them out (because EVs are just better) we’d have a clear path to pre-industrial atmospheric CO2.

Even here in ostensibly progressive Europe, populist parties are riding on "Cheap gas!!!".

Low efficiency vehicles are taxed on import, and the money raised is returned as rebates on high efficiency vehicles.

A Ford Ranger might attract the full fee, a new t Nissan leaf would get the full credit. A small ICE car attracts a smaller fee. Hybrids are given a smaller credit.

The exact amount of credit varied over time as the fees gathered changed.

We're at most 10 years from the confidence in oil and gas investments being completely shattered. A lot of the investors and engineers will seek out opportunities where they can apply their competence. Geothermal is a good fit. Whoever captures the market first will have the most to gain, so once they see it's even remotely possible there will be a race.

I suspect politicians in countries with oil/gas-development in northern regions will start subsidizing this as well, both to attract voters from workers in that sector, and to help them establish a new competitive industry that they can replace their oil and gas exports with.

LiPho? Are you thinking of LiFePO4, aka LFP?

In the case of bulbs you could get a better form factor, but no one's doing that, they're just using non replaceable bulbs.

Batteries. Are you going to get rid of your TV just so you can use a different battery chemistry? There have been various chemistries available in AA. Would you rather we have even more battery sizes to keep track of?

I've also seen manufacturers who make 3V or 3.2V cells in AA format, and then supply a dummy AA-shaped link with it, which is just a straight-through connection like a wire. Put one cell and one link in your tool, or two cells and two links.

And yes Sodium is fine for most applications where it can be a little heavier (grid uses, maybe cars) which is where most of it is projected to be needed.

Here's how much of everything we mined in 2022. Lithium is bottom left corner just above Gold.

Per a 2023 Nature article: https://www.nature.com/articles/s43017-022-00387-5

> The locations of suitable continental brines are also geographically restricted, with an estimated 50–85% of lithium-rich continental brine deposits located in the Lithium Triangle and with China as the next richest source. Hard-rock ores are also geographically concentrated in Australia and China

Lithium in a form that is economical to mine/process is indeed quite rare. Which is why 3 countries produce 90% of it.

And it is extremely environmentally costly which is treated as an economic externality. It takes 1.9m litres to mine one ton of lithium and solvent chemicals like hydrochloric acid contaminates groundwater, making the entire site toxic and unlivable.

Entire governments have been overthrown for access to this resource.

You can put these huge batteries under your solar arrays and your wind turbines, on the land already paid for. If it's not flammable, you can hide it in a basement.

The sodium extraction process is cool! Metallic sodium is highly flammable though.

For high end e-cars the maximal reach tends to matter a lot, even if for some buyers it only matters in advertisements.

For less high end cars they often anyway compromise on range so it might not matter as much but then in many places (which are not in the US) having small cars matters a lot to a point that sometimes e.g. typical SUVs might not be usable _at all_, and I mean EU style SUVs not US style SUVs (through most times its just very inconvenient). And small cars mean little space for batteries (potential only 50% of the space).

Lastly there are some aspects of different styles of "skateboard chassis" having different usable volumes for battery cells. And some especially save and refurbishable chassis designs come with the penalty of having a bit less volume to use.

So the answer is very dependent on the context.