Battery technology is accelerating at astonishing speeds.Credit:Getty
This is a high enough density to power trucks,trains,and arguably mid-haul aircraft. The team believes it can reach 1200 Wh/kg. If so,almost all global transport can be decarbonised more easily than we thought,and probably at a negative net cost compared with a continuation of the hydrocarbon status quo.
The Argonne Laboratory is not alone in pushing the boundaries of energy storage and EV technology. The specialist press reports eye-watering breakthroughs almost every month. I highlight this paper because US national labs have AAA credibility. The study is peer-reviewed and has just appeared in the research journalScience. Their solid-state battery has achieved the highest energy density yet seen anywhere in the world. And sometimes you have to pick on one to tell a larger story.
TheScience paper says the process can “theoretically deliver an energy density that is comparable to that of gasoline”,a remarkable thought. It is not for today,but it is not for the remote future either. It typically takes five years or so from breakthroughs of this kind to reach manufacturing.
Professor Larry Curtiss,the project leader,told me that his battery needs no cobalt. That eliminates reliance on the Democratic Republic of the Congo,which accounts for 74 per cent of the world’s production and has become a Chinese economic colony for the extraction of raw materials. Reports by the UN and activist groups leave no doubt that cobalt mining in the DRC is an ecological and human disaster,with some 40,000 children working for a pittance in toxic conditions for small “artisanal” mines. It has become a byword for North-South exploitation.
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Needless to say,the horrors of the cobalt supply chain have been seized on by fossil “realists” (i.e. vested interests) and Vladimir Putin’s cyber-bots to impugn the moral claims of the green energy transition. The Argonne-IIT technology should make it harder to sustain that line of attack.
Professor Curtiss said the prototype is based on lithium but does not have to be. “The same type of battery could be developed with sodium. It will take more time,but can be done,” he said. Switching to sodium would halve the driving range but it would still be double today’s generation of batteries. Sodium is ubiquitous.