[bluGill]

Battery technology is governed by the laws of physics and chemistry. I'm not an expert in battery technology, but I trust those who are to know physics and chemistry. We are likely asymptotically approaching a known limit. Perhaps someone who is an expert can tell us where those are.

[johnea]

Thank you for raising this point!

It calls for a couple of specific responses:

- A battery doesn't have to be set on fire to get the energy out of it!

- Energy can be put back into a battery, allowing them to be used over and over again!

- Electricity for putting into batteries can come from many different sources of generation. Gasoline only comes from one place: petroleum, the extraction and burning of which is a very dirty process.

- Battery chemistry is not one thing, there are very many, and the energy densities of different chemistries are increasing rapidly. This leaves a LOT of room for battery energy density to be increased via technical innovation.

- Gasoline has a fixed chemical structure that contains a fixed amount of energy. Unlike batteries, there isn't much innovation that can occur to change that energy density.

[bluGill]

> A battery doesn't have to be set on fire to get the energy out of it!

unfortunately burning things results in a lot more energy than the processes a battery uses.

> Gasoline only comes from one place: petroleum,

Well... We do know how to make gasoline from the atoms - the same process that we use the make synthetic oil can result in gasoline as well. Of course this would case about 4x as much so nobody does. There is more energy in synthetic diesel some races use that since the energy content is part of winning. (generally though race cars use a gasoline engine running an alcohol because they can get more power and don't care about fuel economy).

> Battery chemistry is not one thing, there are very many, and the energy densities of different chemistries are increasing rapidly. This leaves a LOT of room for battery energy density to be increased via technical innovation.

Yes and no. Technology is getting better. The laws of chemistry and physics tell us the limits of this technology, but not how close to those limits we can achieve in the real world.

> johnea 39 minutes ago | parent | context | flag | on: Breakthroughs for batteries could soon make them b...

Thank you for raising this point!

It calls for a couple of specific responses:

- A battery doesn't have to be set on fire to get the energy out of it!

- Energy can be put back into a battery, allowing them to be used over and over again!

- Electricity for putting into batteries can come from many different sources of generation. Gasoline only comes from one place: petroleum, the extraction and burning of which is a very dirty process.

- Battery chemistry is not one thing, there are very many, and the energy densities of different chemistries are increasing rapidly. This leaves a LOT of room for battery energy density to be increased via technical innovation.

- Gasoline has a fixed chemical structure that contains a fixed amount of energy. Unlike batteries, there isn't much innovation that can occur to change that energy density.

Utterly false. Octane is a specific molecule with a fixed amount of energy. However gasoline is many different molecules with different energy content. The total is all close enough to the same that we don't normally think of this, but there are variations that we can measure in the lab.

> Unlike batteries, there isn't much innovation that can occur to change that energy density.

There is, but that would be a lot more expensive (see synthetic gasoline above) and so we don't. More importantly, even accounting for the losses in a ICE, gasoline is still a lot more energy dense than we expect a battery to ever reach.

[therealdrag0]

Well we know gasoline as an organic battery is 50x more energy dense than an EV battery by weight for example and 25x more dense by volume.

[Ajedi32]

And if you want to get really exotic, antimatter is about 83.2 billion times more energy dense. We're not going to be running into fundamental physics limitations for energy storage anytime soon.

Though maybe it's a little unfair to call either of those things a "battery", they seem like fundamentally different technologies to me even if in theory they could fill exactly the same role.

[jeffbee]

250 years ago nobody knew what the hell a battery was. It seems hubristic to assume we now possess ultimate knowledge of the universe.

[bluGill]

While we don't know everything, what we don't know must fit without the things we already know. It seems highly unlikely there is something significant in this area we don't know.

[jeffbee]

I don't agree with this philosophy at all. Current scientific understanding is not and need not be compatible with past scientific belief.

[bluGill]

Not belief, things we have exponentially observed. Either you need to explain why the observation was actually incorrect. Or you need to have a theory that explains the observation. We believe relativity is correct because we have lots of experiments and observations that show that it's correct. That doesn't mean relativity is actually correct. However, it means that if it's wrong, whatever actually is correct must somehow encompass what relativity predicts in the same way relativity currently does.