This is still good and should be looked at seriously to recover the lithium already in circulation, but I can’t help but feel like this is coming at the end of lithium as a battery material. Sodium batteries seem posed to supplant it in the near future.
Sodium batteries aren’t seriously expected by anyone to supplant Lithium ones. The two things Sodium can theoretically do better than Lithium are being cheaper as a raw material, and working well at low temperatures, but it’s always going to be heavier and larger for a given capacity. Most applications for batteries care about their size and weight, and so the extra cost of Lithium will be worth paying.
Chemically, Sodium and Lithium are very similar, so any improvement that applies to one should be pretty applicable to the other. That’s actually one of the main strengths of Sodium batteries - most of the research that’s already gone into making Lithium batteries can be reapplied with minor tweaks. However, Sodium is inherently larger and heavier than Lithium, with fewer atoms fitting into the same space and those atoms weighing more. If research for Sodium batteries catches up with Lithium ones, they’ll still be worse just because of that, and at that point, research would get easier gains from improving Lithium batteries than Sodium ones.
You are correct, and the critical number is that sodium is over 3 times as massive as equivalent lithium.
But to keep in perspective, we are talking about an element that’s only about 5-7% of a pack, so theoretically you could maybe get to only 10-15% more massive as a penalty for swapping out lithium. Which is some applications is still unacceptable,but broadly we have seen a lot of accepting that same tradeoff going from NMC to LFP…
Yes I am, because that’s a safe assumption, just like assuming gravity will keep working. We’d need to discover new physics to make Lithium and Sodium plausibly form different compounds as our current understanding of physics predicts them to behave nearly the same. At this point in time, there’s nothing to indicate there’s anything wrong with that part of physics.
This is still good and should be looked at seriously to recover the lithium already in circulation, but I can’t help but feel like this is coming at the end of lithium as a battery material. Sodium batteries seem posed to supplant it in the near future.
Sodium batteries aren’t seriously expected by anyone to supplant Lithium ones. The two things Sodium can theoretically do better than Lithium are being cheaper as a raw material, and working well at low temperatures, but it’s always going to be heavier and larger for a given capacity. Most applications for batteries care about their size and weight, and so the extra cost of Lithium will be worth paying.
That assumes research has stopped on sodium battery chemistry.
Chemically, Sodium and Lithium are very similar, so any improvement that applies to one should be pretty applicable to the other. That’s actually one of the main strengths of Sodium batteries - most of the research that’s already gone into making Lithium batteries can be reapplied with minor tweaks. However, Sodium is inherently larger and heavier than Lithium, with fewer atoms fitting into the same space and those atoms weighing more. If research for Sodium batteries catches up with Lithium ones, they’ll still be worse just because of that, and at that point, research would get easier gains from improving Lithium batteries than Sodium ones.
You are correct, and the critical number is that sodium is over 3 times as massive as equivalent lithium.
But to keep in perspective, we are talking about an element that’s only about 5-7% of a pack, so theoretically you could maybe get to only 10-15% more massive as a penalty for swapping out lithium. Which is some applications is still unacceptable,but broadly we have seen a lot of accepting that same tradeoff going from NMC to LFP…
You are assuming there will not be different sodium compounds.
Already, sodium chemistry works better in cold, and sodium batteries can charge faster.
Yes I am, because that’s a safe assumption, just like assuming gravity will keep working. We’d need to discover new physics to make Lithium and Sodium plausibly form different compounds as our current understanding of physics predicts them to behave nearly the same. At this point in time, there’s nothing to indicate there’s anything wrong with that part of physics.