Enlarge (credit: Javier Zayas Photography )

In the world of renewables, Lithium-ion batteries are storage kings, making up around 70 percent of electric vehicle (EV) and 90 percent of grid batteries around the globe. As such, they’re becoming increasingly important in a world that’s trying to reduce its carbon emissions by electrifying homes, cars, and more. (Not that mining for lithium or the various rare earth metals in battery production is carbon-free .)

However, there are some problems with lithium-ion batteries, according to a recent Atlantic Council report . For one, existing supply chains for the minerals used for batteries are likely to be pushed to their limits as the world transitions to renewable energy.

But there are also geopolitical factors that could disrupt these supply chains. For instance, many of the minerals tied to the production of these batteries are either obtained or processed in Russia and China. For the United States, this might mean that the security of the supply chains for these batteries is put at risk by geopolitical conflicts. For instance, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine saw the price of nickel —a core component in EV batteries—skyrocket.

Enlarge / While the iPhone 14 battery will seemingly be much the same as the iPhone 13 (pictured), the cost to replace it goes up 43 percent. (credit: iFixit )

While the iPhone 14 hardware lineup costs largely the same as the previous generation, the cost of replacing the battery has gone up considerably, surpassing the prices Apple was charging before its 2016/2017 "Batterygate" reckoning.

iPhone 14 battery replacement costs at an Apple Store, as shown on Apple's support site.

Apple typically only replaces a battery within AppleCare+ service if the device's battery health is at 80 percent or lower. Apple states that its batteries are rated to last 500 cycles before hitting 80 percent, though factors like temperature, leaving the battery at low charge, and others can decrease battery lifespan quickly.

Enlarge (credit: Aurich Lawson | Getty Images)

There's a classic irony with new technology, that adopters are forced to limit themselves to two of the three things everyone wants: fast, cheap, and good. When the tech is batteries, adoption is even more challenging. Cheap and fast (charging) still matter, but "good" can mean different things , such as light weight, low volume, or long life span, depending on your needs. Still, the same sorts of tradeoffs are involved. If you want really fast charging, you're probably going to have to give up some capacity.

Those tradeoffs keep research into alternate battery chemistries going despite the massive lead lithium has in terms of technology and manufacturing capabilities—there's still the hope that some other chemistry could provide a big drop in price or a big boost in some measure of performance.

Today, a paper is being published that appears to offer low price combined with a big boost in several of those measures. The aluminum-sulfur batteries it describes offer low-priced raw materials, competitive size, and more capacity per weight than lithium-ion—with the big plus of fully charging cells in far less than a minute. The one obvious problem it has right now is that it needs to be at 90° C (nearly the boiling point of water) to work.

Enlarge / Pouch cells of the sort tested for endurance. (credit: Cuberg)

While lithium-ion batteries have experienced steady improvements, a lot of research has gone into new chemistries that provide a much larger leap in performance. Some of that work has focused on materials like silicon or sulfur that can potentially store far more lithium than existing electrode materials. But other options get rid of electrode materials entirely. These include lithium-air and lithium-metal batteries.

All of these have faced issues with stability, with batteries based on the technology having a short life span compared to existing lithium-ion batteries (though batteries with some silicon are already in use). But on Thursday, a company is announcing that a lithium-metal battery it has in development has reached a stability that's competitive with existing lithium-ion batteries, retaining 80 percent of its initial capacity out to nearly 700 charge/discharge cycles—and that this has been validated by an outside testing lab.

To learn more about this advance and where lithium metal might get used, we talked with Richard Wang, founder of Cuberg , a subsidiary of battery giant Northvolt .

Enlarge / Sodium metal will react with something in just about any environment it encounters on Earth. Here, a fresh cut shows how extensive its reactions with air are. (credit: Getty Images )

Lithium-based batteries are great , with different electrode chemistries allowing them to be slotted into a variety of use cases. The problem with them has nothing to do with their performance. The challenge we face is that we want to make a lot of batteries; if all of them use lithium, we're undoubtedly going to face supply crunches.

One potential solution to that is to simply replace the lithium with a different ion. Alternative batteries may not be as good as lithium variants in all the different places we currently use them. They just have to be good enough at one task to take away some of the need to stick lithium everywhere.

That's the reasoning behind some interest in sodium-based batteries. Sodium is very plentiful and correspondingly cheap and can be made to behave a bit like lithium when used in a battery. But sodium batteries always carry risks associated with sodium's tendency to react explosively. But a recently developed solid electrolyte suggests that at least some of the challenges associated with sodium could be overcome.

Enlarge / A customs officer inspects imported lithium carbonate at Longwu Branch Terminal of Shanghai İnternational Port Co., Ltd. (credit: VCG | Getty Images )

The industrial port of Kwinana on Australia’s western coast is a microcosm of the global energy industry. From 1955, it was home to one of the largest oil refineries in the region, owned by British Petroleum when it was still the Anglo-Persian Oil Company. It once provided 70 percent of Western Australia’s fuel supplies, and the metal husks of old tanks still dominate the shoreline, slowly turning to rust in the salt air.

The refinery shut down in March 2021, but it isn’t just oil below the region’s red soil: Australia is also home to almost half of the world’s lithium supply. The trucks and machinery are humming once again, but now they’re part of a race to secure the clean energy sources of the future—a race being dominated by China.

Enlarge / Zeng Yuqun, chairman of Contemporary Amperex Technology Co. (CATL), poses for a photograph in Ningde, Fujian province, China, on Wednesday, June 3, 2020. (credit: Bloomberg | Getty Images )

The headquarters of battery giant CATL tower over the coastal Chinese city of Ningde. To the untrained eye, the building resembles a huge slide rising out of the urban sprawl. It is, in fact, a giant monument to the company’s raison d'être: the lithium-ion battery pack.

You may have never heard of CATL, but you’ve definitely heard of the brands that rely on its batteries. The company supplies more than 30 percent of the world’s EV batteries and counts Tesla, Kia and BMW amongst its clients. Its founder and chairman, 54-year-old Zeng Yuqun, also known as Robin Zeng, has rapidly emerged as the industry’s kingmaker. Insiders describe Zeng as savvy, direct, and even abrasive. Under his leadership, CATL’s valuation has ballooned to 1.2 trillion Chinese yuan ($179 billion), more than General Motors and Ford combined. Part of that fortune is built on owning stakes in mining projects in China , the Democratic Republic of Congo , and Indonesia , giving CATL a tighter grip on an already strained global battery supply chain.

Enlarge (credit: Tesla )

Last week, Tesla announced a program for California-based owners of its home battery products. Sign up with the company, and you'd become part of what the company calls a "virtual power plant." You would be able to use your battery to keep the grid stable during periods of high demand and be well-compensated for the electrons.

While this may conjure images of Powerwall batteries across the state sending electricity to the grid during a crisis, that doesn't appear to be what's happening here. Instead, the batteries will be taking part in a utility's program that's designed to reduce demand, which the utility company will presumably do by using the battery to supply some of the demand inside the battery owner's house. It's a clever way for homeowners to take advantage of a program that's otherwise limited to commercial users.

It's an emergency

Tesla's announcement of the program says that it will be part of Pacific Gas and Electric Company's (PG&E, a California utility) Emergency Load Reduction Program, which we'll focus on in the next section. At the moment, we'll look at what participants will end up doing.

Tesla’s recycled batteries have provided almost 92% of their original raw materials back to Tesla for future use, according to new information in Tesla’s 2021 Impact Report. Tesla’s factories are already using an in-house, closed-loop recycling system. This allows for all of Tesla’s batteries that it receives to be recycled with up to 92% of the raw materials being used again.

Tesla also shared some details about its battery chemistry, noting that lithium only accounts for around 1.5% of the full battery pack weight. Tesla’s iron phosphate battery packs have neither any cobalt nor nickel.

What's probably most important, though, is that these matters are being focused on, measured, and reported. That's how improvements are gauged and achieved.

See https://cleantechnica.com/2022/05/08/teslas-recycled-batteries-almost-92-reuse-of-raw-materials/

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