| > This blog post is all over the place. Which is sad. He has something useful to say, but destroys his credibility by not focusing.
Here's the "poster wall" of the organization he claims to head.[1] "Disciplinary convergence through creative story telling".
For a much better summary of the subject, see the cover story in this week's Economist. OK, how cheap can batteries get, really? Well, the price of lithium dropped 80% in the last year.[2] Overproduction at the moment. Exxon has a lithium production unit, and they're expanding.
New, large lithium mines under construction in Nevada, Sonora (Mexico), five new mines in Western Australia, Quebec, Zimbabwe...
Plus, of course, recycling old batteries, a far more concentrated source than anything in the ground. Lithium supplies do not look like a problem.
The prices do go wildly up and down because the price of raw lithium doesn't affect car sales much in the short term. That's normal behavior for minor commodities. This also means that sodium batteries will probably be unnecessary. This is good, because of the fire risk. For fixed installations and low end car, lithium iron phosphate is cheap, not subject to thermal runaway, and in most of BYD and CATL products right now. (APS, please get with the program and start shipping small UPSs with LiPoFe batteries so those things last 10 years.) Coming along next are solid state batteries. Huge hype, a few samples, and production cost problems.[3]
Here's the manufacturing process at lab scale, at the Franuhofer Institute.[4] Works in the lab.
Here it is at production test scale.[5] The IEEE consensus is that solid-state battery production technology is about 10 years behind existing lithium-ion production. With production in test everywhere from Shenzhen to Belgium to Maryland, progress is being made rapidly. This is the kind of process that gets cheaper as it scales up. Solid-state batteries are important because 10-minute charging is needed to increase consumer acceptance rates. Between solar and battery technology, fossil fuels are going to be crushed. Soon. [1] https://neonresearch.nl/poster-wall/ [2] https://www.reuters.com/markets/commodities/lithium-producer... [3] https://spectrum.ieee.org/solid-state-battery-production-cha... [4] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j5SVrp8N-1M& [5] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_eZGuDaqZAE |
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> This also means that sodium batteries will probably be unnecessary.
If we're overproducing this doesn't follow. Lithium prices will rise back to the price of production. I'm not an expert but quickly glancing at the futures market and it looks to me like there is only a small rebound predicted ($13.30 -> $17.00/contract over a few years, highly illiquid market so take prices with a grain of salt) so the actual story might be "lithium production has become much cheaper".
It also doesn't really matter if you're trying to estimate "it will cost at most this" by looking at sodium ion batteries. I don't think the author really cares if the batteries are sodium or lithium based, just that they don't cost more than sodium based batteries would cost.
> This is good, because of the fire risk
One of the selling points for Sodium ion has pretty consistently been that they are non-flammable. Admittedly this is a function of the electrolyte they use and not a fundamental property of sodium vs lithium, so it might change in the future, but I don't believe it has/it is in anticipated to?