The EV battery race intensified this week with the announcement that a startup
financially supported by the U.S. Department of Energy had released a lithium
ion battery that stores more energy than the 250 Wh EV industry benchmark.
The company, 24M, said its semi-solid state nickel-manganese-cobalt
battery had achieved an energy density of 280 Wh and that its approach to
battery building would allow it to hit a target of 350 Wh by the end of the
year. The target was set by the U.S. Advanced Battery Consortium that,
together with the Department of Energy, provided 24M with US$7 million in
funding back in 2016.
The company said it had already delivered 280 Wh batteries to business
partners but did not disclose the names of the partners or the size of the
deliveries. However, it did say it had managed to achieve the higher energy
density levels at a lower cost, which is a major hurdle on the path to mass
adoption of EVs.
It looks like semi-solid and solid state batteries will be an important
battlefield in EV technology as they allow for greater energy densities than
typical lithium ion cells. Last year we heard news of silicon being experimented
with in batteries to improve their energy density as well as replacing the
liquid electrolyte with a polymer, which in addition to improving the energy
density of the battery reduces its flammability—another problem with the
dominant technology.
Lithium ion is still the dominant battery chemistry on the market, but
challengers abound. While many of them will only remain a success in the lab
but impossible to scale and commercialize, some will sooner or later emerge
as serious competitors given the amount of work that is going into new
battery research.
There is even emerging flow
battery technology that could make car batteries refillable instead of
rechargeable, solving the long-charging-times problem in a very elegant way.
One company actually claims to have developed a liquid alternative to lithium
ion batteries that contains 60 percent water and 40 percent chemicals and
works by producing hydrogen through hydrolysis and generating electricity
from it in a hydrogen fuel cell.
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While this may sound quite complex, which usually means too expensive, the
company that has developed it, Australian-Israeli Electriq-Global, says the
fuel is actually cheaper than lithium ion batteries and substantially, at
that: at half the price of batteries, the company says, its fuel has twice
the range.
The race for the energy storage technology of the future is on and it’s
pretty intensive. Lithium ion proponents are not sitting idly, either. None
other than Tesla earlier this year announced
plans to buy an energy storage company, Maxwell Technologies, for US$218
million in an all-stock deal to improve its battery technology.
The deal is not final as Maxwell shareholders are seeking to block it but
it is indicative of the stakes: whoever comes up with scalable, cheap, and
reliable battery technology will dominate the market in a future when EVs are
mainstream, whatever the chances of that happening in our lifetimes are.
By Irina Slav of Oilprice.com
