International team shows that with minor modifications chloride is effective electrode material for solid-state batteries
Seawater covers most of the globe and makes up around 97 per cent of all water on Earth. It could also hold the key to cheaper and greener batteries for storing green energy collected from wind turbines and solar cells.
Using the Canadian Light Source (CLS) at the University of Saskatchewan, an international research team involving scientists from Switzerland, Canada, and the United States, has shown that with some minor modifications, chloride – a sustainable and readily available component of seawater – could one day be the material that shuttles ions back and forth between the electrodes in solid-state batteries used for grid-scale energy storage.
Lithium is currently at the heart of modern batteries, powering everything from our smartphones to e-bikes and electric cars. But there’s a very real risk that the material could become scarcer and more expensive in the future. According to Natural Resources Canada, lithium production has more than doubled world-wide in in the past five years. And a handful of countries hold most of the planet’s lithium stores. Canada’s supplies amount to only 4.4 per cent of the total worldwide.
“We’re not looking to entirely replace lithium-ion batteries, but we need other solutions in the next few decades if we are going to meet this massive need that the world will have for hundreds of terawatt hours that allow for effective use of solar and wind,” said Sarbajit Banerjee, professor at ETH Zürich, a public university in Switzerland, and Head of the Laboratory for Battery Science at Switzerland’s Paul Scherrer Institute.
Read more on the CLS website
Image: Seaweed batteries – X-ray Excited Optical Luminescence Spectroscopy
