As the move from gasoline to electric cars gains steam, there is an increasing demand for batteries and the raw materials like lithium, cobalt, and nickel that make them up and the competition for those fairly rare resources is becoming fierce.
So I was pleased to learn that there is an alternative battery power source that is made from plain old salt.
Lithium – the main component in most electric batteries – can be costly to mine. But researchers have made a breakthrough with alternative ‘molten salt’ batteries.
Your electronics could soon be powered by an ultra cheap sea salt battery.
Researchers have built a new cheap battery with four times the energy storage capacity of lithium.
Constructed from sodium-sulphur – a type of molten salt that can be processed from sea water – the battery is low-cost and more environmentally friendly than existing options.
…Many batteries are built with rare earth metals like lithium, graphite, and cobalt.
To achieve climate neutrality, the EU will require 18 times more lithium than it currently uses by 2030 and almost 60 times more by 2050.
European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen said in September that “lithium and rare earths will soon be more important than oil and gas.”
But these metals come at a cost. Lithium extraction can result in water shortages, biodiversity loss, damage to ecosystem functions and soil degradation.
When the metal is produced using evaporation ponds, for example, it takes approximately 2.2 million litres to produce one metric tonne.
It’s also financially costly to mine at scale. This is where the sea salt battery could provide an alternative.
Chinese car manufacturers are already planning to put sodium-ion battery powered cars on the road.
Today, sodium ion batteries have roughly half the energy density of lithium ion batteries. That means shorter range, which is the opposite of what most people want in their electric cars. However, there are many markets in which people are more than happy to have lower range, especially if the price is right.
China is one such market where low priced, no frills cars are welcome. One of its most popular electric cars is the Wuling Mini, which is built by a joint venture between state owned SAIC and GM. There is even a way to get one for under $3,000, if the buyer elects to lease the battery rather than purchase it. No self respecting American driver would ever consider one of those cars for use in the US — how would you tow a camper or a ski boat with one? — but for people who just need to drive a few miles around town, it may be the perfect vehicle.
As 2024 approaches, two Chinese automakers have announced they will have electric cars powered by sodium ion batteries for sale in the new year. According to CnEvPost, JMEV, an EV brand owned by Jiangling Motors Group, will offer a version of its EV3 fitted with sodium ion batteries from Farasis Energy next year. The first of those cars rolled of the assembly line on December 28, 2023.
That is the problem with the US where larger, faster, and longer-range cars seem to be more desired. While cars have become much more energy efficient, in the US that benefit has been reduced because of cars and trucks getting bigger and more powerful.
But in many parts of the world, such types of cars are not suitable. What people need and want are smaller and cheaper cars for short distance driving. And it looks like China is ahead is meeting that demand.
I wonder if we are seeing the early stages of a repetition of what happened in the 1970s. While oil was cheap, the US was making huge gas guzzlers while Japan was developing smaller, more fuel-efficient cars. When the oil shock of the 1970s hit, suddenly US automakers were left stranded because they did not have fuel-efficient car manufacturing capability and Japanese technology in that area was way ahead.
If there is a supply shortage in lithium, cobalt, and nickel, then the salt-powered small Chinese cars might well surge ahead in sales.
Much more likely: drive around suburbia doing nothing demanding at all.
Sea salt? That will please the gourmets in the US.
Nitpick: the euronews article calls graphite a rare earth element, when it’s just a form of carbon.
Cheap batteries will be a good match for another technology: Cheap, easy to make perovskite photovoltaic cells are finally approaching a lifespan that will make them acceptable for mass production.
Buy a lot of cheap solar cells, charge your cheap molten salt batteries and then recharge your car when you come home.
Sea salt? You know what else is in the sea? Sharks, bigly sharks!
It’s almost as though the policy of forcing the public into buying electric before the technology is ready hasn’t been completely thought through. Say it ain’t so!
I’m looking forward to all the people who bought lithium electric cars finding out what they’re worth on the second hand market when the tech has moved on from that environmentally-disastrous, expensive dead-end.
Personally I’ll be hanging on to my ICE cars to the bitter end, because hey, they’re fit for purpose, a concept e-car manufacturers seem so far unable to build to.
New battery technology breakthoughs are reported about every month, and then they disappear. That article was published in Dec 2022.
And “rare earth metals” means lanthanides. They aren’t that rare, but they are difficult to separate from their ore (and each other). Lithium, graphite (carbon) and cobalt are not rare earth metals.
Lassi @#6,
Sorry I forgot to put in the link for the second quoted passage. I have now done so. That is from just six months ago and it claims that such cars are already on sale.
Thank you, Matt G. and Lassi, that misinformation was making me scream
Molten salts have no organic solvents (Li batteries do), so that won’t inflame, and the first article says that the batteries are based on molten sodium-sulfur salts. But that sounds wrong to me. Those batteries have to be heated to 119 C to melt the sulfur, and are also subject to the same problem as current lithium batteries, which is that the reaction can start to run amok (as in, sometimes during overcharging, say, charging all night) and the battery bursts into flame. Li and Na fires burn very hot and can burn a house down in an amazingly short time. Those metals’ fires are also very difficult to put out: water from firemen’s hoses makes them burn more.
But the article on the cars just says “sodium ion batteries”, and several of those operate at room temperature, which means they can perhaps start only less nasty fires, because the reagents aren’t liquid. So, the new batteries may be just room-termperature sodium salts, perhaps even in a solid matrix without organic solvents!
I’d love this: I am waiting to buy an electric car until the problem of the battery being able to cause completely out-of-control fires is addressed.
The supply alarmism is not really warranted; currently, there’s global oversupply of both lithium and cobalt.
https://www.australianmining.com.au/whats-next-for-australian-lithium/
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https://www.abc.net.au/news/2024-02-27/cobalt-blue-broken-hill-project-scaled-back-due-to-oversupply/103517746
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This YouTube channel https://www.youtube.com/@JustHaveaThink/videos has put out a lot of quite informative videos about nascent green tech, including a ton of battery chemistries and grid storage options. Dave is not following-up and updating news on previously mentioned tech, years on.
Which made the grade, how close to deployment, that sort of thing.
What people forget is that cars and devices want a small form factor with good power storage, whereas grid storage doen’t care too much if the energy density is lowish — so what if modules are the size of a house instead of the size of a shipping container? LiOn will be seen, I reckon, as a transitional tech in years to come.
[oops]
Dave is now following-up — as in, currently.
To be honest, I’m never too sure how optimistic we can be about anything…. And ironically, if you’ll excuse the pun(s), I already take most headlines with a grain of salt, so I guess the situation is still “normal” somehow, but not in the sense that anyone ought to approve of it being so “normal.”
Wired, June 18: Instead of Mining the Deep Sea, Maybe People Should Just Fix Stuff
By now, the biggest problem regarding greening of the electric grid is basically grid storage, due to the intermittent nature of the best-developed renewable technologies (solar, wind); obs, there are others, such as geothermal and tidal, but those two are already by far the cheapest generating methods.
A thousand flowers are blooming now that it’s obvious the grid (and associated storage) is the next big thing that needs changing. Right now, a shitload of PV energy is wasted as many localities generate more than they can use during the day.
Reason it’s sorta “expensive” to this day is that (a) fossil fuels get vast subsidies, and (b) that externalities are still not properly included in their pricing.
Anyway, much activity at the moment.
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For example (just an example!) I hear Kankaanpää in Finland is putting up a hot sand “battery”:
https://www.euronews.com/green/2024/03/10/sand-batteries-could-be-key-breakthrough-in-storing-solar-and-wind-energy-year-round
[drollery]
“As the move from gasoline to electric cars gains steam […]”
Steam-powered cars were once a thing; maybe they could be again?
(Maybe not with hot sand batteries, though)
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BTW, those old-fashioned cars used the original ECE (External Combustion Engine) rather than ICE.
(factoid!)
#5 Son
Who was forced?
@Holms, #14: you have applied the incorrect tense to the question. Also, I don’t know what jurisdiction you’re writing from. I’m in the UK.
The UK government mandated that after 2030, it would illegal to sell internal combustion engine cars.
Then, presumably, someone who understands engineering managed to force a concept of reality through their thick, resistant skulls and they
realised it was a terrible idea and gave it updelayed the deadline by five years.The clear intended effect is to force the public out of their fit-for-purpose vehicles and into ones that are more expensive to buy, more expensive to maintain, present risk of catastrophic fires that are nigh on impossible to put out, and are, not coincidentally, way more expensive to insure (if you can even get insurance), and that have range issues that nobody has even bothered to address.
What would YOU call making ICE vehicles illegal if not forcing the public into electrics?
Short-shrift fact-checking:
https://www.cargurus.com/Cars/articles/EV-vs-ICE-Maintenance
Excellent line, Mano! Your tidal wave of metaphors is kicking up a real storm!
There are a few lithium battery chemistries which aren’t subject to thermal runaway, for example Lithium Iron Phosphate (LiFePO4 or LFP), which you’re already likely to find in domestic energy storage (fixed and portable), goods vehicles, and (apparently) a Tesla. (Energy density with LFP is lower than LiPo/LMC, hence those particular applications.)
It’s easy to find videos of people trying to destroy LFP cells or set them on fire: the cells barely notice at first and then fail grumpily with a small puff of smoke.
In the UK it will only be the sale of new cars which becomes restricted. So, #5 & #15, you’ll be fine in the UK until 2040–2045, by which time you’ll be complaining loudly about “how far they force me to travel to re-fuel”.
For those people like me currently stuck with ICE vehicle: substantial amounts of cobalt is used in refining all those thousands of gallons of fuel the car happily turns into air pollution and kinetic energy. Even more for the older and less efficient ICE vehicles. So the (current) use of cobalt in a EV battery which lasts 100,000–200,000 miles and is then able to be recycled seems like a positive engineering and environmental option.
Running an ICE car is fast becoming (already has become for most people) a poor environmental choice.