Lithium

Credit: Joule (2024). DOI: 10.1016/j.joule.2023.12.022 A team in Cornell Engineering has created a new lithium battery that can charge in under five minutes—faster than any such battery on the market—while maintaining stable performance over extended cycles of charging and discharging.…

Stardust Power, a lithium refiner supplying the EV sector, is going to build the US’s largest battery-grade lithium refinery in Oklahoma. The refinery will be in Southside Industrial Park in Muskogee, Oklahoma, southeast of Tulsa, and is expected to be capable of producing up to 50,000 metric tonnes of battery-grade lithium annually. Connecticut-based Stardust Power said it selected Muskogee because of the state’s central US location for delivery and shipment. Muskogee also has a skilled…

China’s leader EV maker, BYD, has held “active” discussions with lithium producer Sigma Lithium as it looks to expand its battery business. After topping Tesla in EV sales in the final three months of 2023, BYD is not slowing down. The Chinese EV maker is now eyeing expanding its EV battery business. BYD’s Brazil head, Alexandre Baldry, said discussions were held over a possible supply agreement, joint venture, or acquisition of Sigma Lithium, according to the Financial Times. Sigma began…

In the early 20th century Britain’s Royal Navy converted its ships to run on oil instead of coal. But whereas coal could be produced at home, oil had to be imported. That caused jitters: what if those imports were one day cut off? Winston Churchill, who was in charge of the navy at the time, argued that the best defence was a diversity of supply. As he told a fretful Parliament: “Safety and certainty in oil lie in variety and variety alone." These days, politicians…

Microsoft and the US Department of Energy have used AI and supercomputing to 'discover' a new substance that would reduce lithium usd in Li-ion batteries by up to 70 per cent. Lithium, apart from being a very rare metal is also very polluting to mine…

But lithium-ion (Li-ion) batteries have downsides. Lithium is scarce, for one. And the best Li-ion batteries, those with layered-oxide cathodes, also require cobalt and nickel. These metals are scarce, too—and cobalt is also problematic because a lot of it is mined in the Democratic Republic of Congo, where working conditions leave much to be desired. A second sort of Li-ion battery, a so-called polyanionic design that uses lithium iron phosphate (LFP), does not need nickel or cobalt. But such batteries cannot…

Sand, salt, iron, copper, oil and lithium — these foundational materials are literally what the modern world is built on. Without sand for glass, say goodbye to our fiber optic internet. No copper means no conductive wiring. And a world without lithium is a world without rechargeable batteries.For the final installment of Hitting the Books for 2023, we're bringing you an excerpt from the fantastic Material World: The Six Raw Materials That Shape Modern Civilization by Ed Conway. A finalist for the Financial Times and…

Fourth Power says its ultra-high temperature "sun in a box" energy storage tech is more than 10X cheaper than lithium-ion batteries, and vastly more powerful and efficient than any other thermal battery. It's hoping to prove it with a 1-MWh prototype.As a grid-level energy storage solution, Fourth aims to compete with big lithium battery arrays in the short-duration 5-10 hour range – basically storing excess solar energy during the heat of the day for use in the evening and at night when generation drops off. But the…

There’s a bit of a battery manufacturing boom going on. In 2021, battery manufacturing in the United States totaled approximately 55 gigawatt-hours’ worth of cells, or roughly enough batteries to produce 700,000 EVs. By 2030, that production is expected to top 1,000GWh, growing by nearly a factor of 20. Billions of dollars in incentives such as the Inflation Reduction Act and Bipartisan Infrastructure Law have spurred the creation of a so-called Battery Belt across the southeastern US, all fuel to fire an anticipated…

California’s infamous Salton Sea has been a known hotbed of lithium for years, but no one has known how much “white gold” was found there. Now a new study quantifies that, and it’s impressive: The huge underground reserve of scorching hot brine located underneath the lakebed contains enough lithium to build batteries for 375 million electric vehicle batteries, making it one of the largest lithium brine deposits in the world. A new study from the US Department of Energy released this week is the…