Lithium-free sodium batteries exit the lab and enter US production

[usonian]

Last edited Sat May 4, 2024, 01:03 AM - Edit history (1)

https://newatlas.com/energy/natron-sodium-ion-battery-production-startt/

Not only is sodium somewhere between 500 to 1,000 times more abundant than lithium on the planet we call Earth, sourcing it doesn't necessitate the same type of earth-scarring extraction. Even moving beyond the sodium vs lithium surname comparison, Natron says its sodium-ion batteries are made entirely from abundantly available commodity materials that also include aluminum, iron and manganese.

Furthermore, the materials for Natron's sodium-ion chemistry can be procured through a reliable US-based domestic supply chain free from geopolitical disruption. The same cannot be said for common lithium-ion materials like cobalt and nickel.

Sodium-ion tech has received heightened interest in recent years as a more reliable, potentially cheaper energy storage medium. While its energy density lags behind lithium-ion, advantages such as faster cycling, longer lifespan and safer, non-flammable end use have made sodium-ion an attractive alternative, especially for stationary uses like data center and EV charger backup storage.

Founded in 2013, Natron has been one of the pioneers in this new wave of sodium-ion research and innovation. And while most sodium-ion designs remain in the laboratory, Natron has switched on one of the first major production operations globally. It celebrated the official production kick-off earlier this week with a ribbon-cutting ceremony at its Holland, Michigan manufacturing facility, calling it the first-ever commercial-scale production of sodium-ion batteries in the US.

Advantages include charge and discharge at rates 10 times faster than lithium-ion,and an estimated lifespan of 50,000 cycles.
More at the link.


Edit: You made me look.
Here's more info:

https://spectrum.ieee.org/sodium-ion-battery

“From a pure performance point-of-view, sodium-ion batteries are not attractive for portable electronics or electric vehicles,” says K. M. Abraham, research professor at Northeastern University and CTO of lithium battery consulting firm E-KEM Sciences. Lithium-ion batteries boast a higher energy density than sodium-ions, which means a compact lithium-ion will have a longer run time between charges. So far, sodium-ions have demonstrated about half the energy density of lithium, which can reach 285 Wh/kg, he says.

But sodium-ion batteries could give lithium-ions a run for their money in stationary applications like renewable energy storage for homes and the grid or backup power for data centers, where cost is more important than size and energy density. Based on currently available information, Abraham projects the cost of sodium-ion batteries to be about 10–20 percent less than lithium-ion.

...

Natron is one of only a handful of players developing and commercializing sodium-ion batteries. The company is taking a unique approach, making both the cathode and anode from Prussian Blue, the pigment used in paints and dyes. The low-cost material’s chemical structure is very good at soaking up and releasing sodium ions, giving a battery that can charge and discharge in minutes and can deliver quick bursts of energy. The Prussian Blue electrodes can also last longer than carbon- and metal-based electrodes, with more than 50,000 charging cycles possible, Pouchet says.

Looks like half the energy density of Lithium, so perhaps better for home use for now.

Wikipedia says:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sodium-ion_battery
Natron is a spin-off from Stanford University.

[CaliforniaPeggy]

1. It sounds like an excellent source of energy. I wish Natron every chance for success! nt

[usonian]

2. I see so many articles about "scientific breakthroughs" that I couldn't resist posting one that said "production".

That's a pleasant change!

[SunSeeker]

3. They charge 10x faster than lithium-ion? Yes please!

Could it work for cars?

[Aussie105]

4. What form is the sodium in the battery in?

Sodium and lithium in the pure metallic form perform the same, exposure to air and water will cause them to spontaneously combust.

Seems like it would be an improvement in some areas, but fire safety in an accident that ruptures the battery cells is something I haven't yet read about.

[Diraven]

6. Neither use a pure metal

From my understanding it's actually the ethylene carbonate electrolyte in lithium batteries that is highly flammable, not the lithium. Sodium ion batteries can use less flammable electrolytes.

[NNadir]

5. We're saved?

Not really. It will only encourage the absurd and nonsensical view that storing energy is the same as having primary energy.

The second law of thermodynamics is not subject to repeal by wishful thinking. Storing energy wastes it, and the energy that will be stored (and wasted) will largely, as is the case now, be produced by fossil fuels, dumping the waste directly into the planetary atmosphere, where it's killing everything.

Storing energy makes things worse, not better.

[Diraven]

7. I think the point

Is that the sodium batteries are better for the environment because sodium extraction doesn't require mining and toxic chemicals.

[NNadir]

8. Things that waste energy are not "better for the environment."

If something is slightly less obnoxious than something else, it is still obnoxious.

Prussian Blue, by the way is made from cyanide.

[Hermit-The-Prog]

10. It may be a while before we have fusion reactors in our phones.

Meanwhile, we need ways to carry some energy to places where we can't otherwise source or distribute it.

We have a pretty good distribution system. We're just messing up at each end of the wires.

We are not doing enough to produce truly "clean" energy and we're not doing enough to reduce our waste of energy produced by fossil fuels. ( Just caught a bit of a tv show where an engineer was talking about using enough energy to light a city the size of Sacramento to pump water up over a mountain to get to L.A. He seemed to be bragging about that fact. Siphons stopped working after the Romans quit building them? )

[NNadir]

11. Absurd jokes of this nature are not helpful.

Our distribution system is, in many places, a disgrace, because it is designed to connect unreliable systems that work more or less at random.

A smaller distribution system is both more mass efficient and energy efficient and involves the use of less land surface area and less maintenance. I note that grid started fires in areas facing extreme heat are prominent users of so called "renewable energy."

Obviously small batteries are necessary in some settings, but the fact is that this crap is hyped as a "solution" to the unreliability of so called "renewable energy," which is not sustainable either on the basis of mass and land area.

Grid based batteries are a crime against future generations, a reflection of our stupidity our wastefulness, our faith based dogma, and our unrealistic reactionary views.

[Hermit-The-Prog]

13. What absurd joke?

A century ago, my mother was 4 years old. She would have been expected to feed the chickens, gather the eggs, and carry out the ashes from both fireplace and kitchen stove. Her mother would have heard of telephones and electric lights, but she probably didn't see the need for them. Her house was lighted by "coal oil" ( kerosene ) lamps a couple hours before dawn and a couple hours after sunset. If someone showed up with tales of some pocket-sized device that would permit instant communication with people on the other side of the world while also providing instant access to world-class encyclopedias and all major news sources, she might have encouraged them to leave the premises at the business end of a 10 gauge shotgun.

If the general public can get over its irrational fear of nuclear reactors, we might get back on track with their development.

[NNadir]

16. Fusion reactors in our phones...

This ranks up with the very unwitty "joke" about "nuclear powered cars" to which I've had to listen over the years, given by rather mindless and witless people.

Now of course, it requires a certain amount of bourgeois myopia to think that the ownership and convenience of cars is actually more important than water or air, food, wilderness and ecosystems, but in general, antinukism relies on the elevation of the criteria of fools.

As for sodium batteries, they've been discussed for a very long time, but they will have worse energy density than (already unsustainable) lithium batteries. I must have come across thousands of "sodium battery" papers over the years. I don't usually read them in any detail beyond the abstracts, if that, but when I do, they usually have some de rigueur evocation of the wonderful "renewable energy" faith, adherence to which has left the planet in flames and is accelerating collapse of the atmosphere.

Since nuclear fuels are by their very nature high temperature, they allow for high exergy recovery in the presence of heat exchange networks, and then, they might be used to make liquid fuels from carbon dioxide, a subject often discussed, my favorite instance being Nobel Laureate "Martian" George Olah's papers published near the end of his magnificent life:

Anthropogenic Chemical Carbon Cycle for a Sustainable Future George A. Olah, G. K. Surya Prakash, and Alain Goeppert Journal of the American Chemical Society 2011 133 (33), 12881-12898

My point is that many people like to point, unhelpfully, to technologies without which humanity lived for the majority of its existence.

Perhaps we still can have some of these things, albeit distributed to the wealthy and deprived to the poor (we still have over 2 billion people without access to clean toilets), but overall the modern consumer lifestyle is not sustainable.

It is not lithium, by the way, nor even cobalt that is a threat to cell phone sustainability. It's tantalum. We ought to consider, as an element of environmental justice, future generations. We are consuming the world's best ores in an orgy of consumerism, and one may reasonably wonder whether people in the future as far away in time as we are to when your mother was a 4 year old will manage to live as well as she did without cell phones, cars, etc., etc...

We are leaving to future generations a destroyed atmosphere, badly damaged oceans, vast burned out ecosystems, mine tailings, plastic, and very dangerous intractable chemical pollutants including but not limited to the PFAS class, to future generations while prattling on about "progress."

As for antinuke fear and ignorance; things are improving slightly, but the chanting morons still dominate the conversation, calling for the bulldozing the planet with roads, processing semiconductors and strewing them over vast areas, string a crazed maze of wires, hauling steel towers into the bulldozed and clear cut sites, and then proclaiming themselves "green." No amount of ineffective destruction is "too expensive" or "too dangerous" but nuclear energy, and only is still widely described by unthinking automatons as "too expensive" and "too dangerous."

The results of this public "fusion powered cell phone," "nuclear powered car" etc. witlessness are in:

Week beginning on April 28, 2024: 426.85 ppm
Weekly value from 1 year ago: 423.88 ppm
Weekly value from 10 years ago: 402.00 ppm
Last updated: May 04, 2024

Weekly average CO2 at Mauna Loa

Things are getting worse faster.

I, for one, am not amused.

History will not forgive us, nor should it.

Have a pleasant Sunday.

[hunter]

12. Most of the energy used pumping water up the mountains is reclaimed on the way down.

California's large water projects are also used as a battery to smooth out fluctuations in supply or demand.

The Castaic Power Plant, for example, has a rated capacity of 1,247 megawatts.

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

For water at atmospheric pressure the height of a siphon is limited to about 10 meters.

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

No amount of energy conservation and efficiency is going to save us from the hazards of fossil fuels. We have to ban them entirely. Like it or not, the only energy resource capable of displacing fossil fuels entirely is nuclear power.

Waiting around for fusion power to save us would be a foolish thing to do. Fusion might not ever be an economically viable source of electric power.

[Hermit-The-Prog]

14. There is no silver bullet. We must attack our energy problem at every level, with every tool.

Fossil fuels have to go the way of the dinosaur.

[Hermit-The-Prog]

15. Try a limit of 180m

https://www.jstor.org/stable/24967685

[sl8]

17. As the article says, those aren't true siphons, they're inverted siphons.

They crossed a valley with a pipe running down one hill, then up the hill on the other side. You've using the weight of the water going downhill pushing water uphill.

A true siphon goes from a low point to a high point to a low point.

These folks managed to get a siphon to work at 15m:
https://www.nature.com/articles/srep16790#:~:text=This%20limit%20arises%20because%20the,to%20boil%20breaking%20the%20column

I don't know how useful their method would be in practice. Regardless, even 15m (or even 180m) isn't much help when you need to cross a mountain.

[tornado34jh]

9. Just because it is sodium and not lithium doesn't mean it still can't be dangerous

Both lithium and sodium are alkali metals. Both are very reactive and are oxidizers. In addition, both are dangerous to handle in water because it produces corrosive and flammable byproducts. It apparently is a high risk in certain batteries. But I think there needs to a lot more data to really see if it can be an alternative to lithium ion batteries.

[hunter]

18. These are being marketed as an alternative to lead-acid batteries in stationary applications.

If they prove to be as robust and predictable as lead acid batteries in these applications, the next question is their recyclability.

The lead-acid battery recycling industry is well established, although it requires constant regulatory vigilance to keep it clean.

How will these sodium cells be recycled?

One of the advantages advertised by Natron is the abundance of the materials used to make them. That becomes a problem for recycling, as it is for plastic. If it costs less to simply dump old batteries than recycle them that's what many people are going to do.

The problem will be especially bad in places where environmental regulations are not enforced or do not exist.