As a prospective buyer of an electric car – as is everyone – I found this NewScientist (11 January 2020) report intriguing:
A new lithium-sulphur battery with an ultra-high capacity could lead to drastically cheaper electric cars and grid energy storage.
Mahdokht Shaibani at Monash University in Melbourne, Australia, and her colleagues have developed a battery with a capacity five times higher than that of lithium-ion batteries. The battery maintains an efficiency of 99 per cent for more than 200 cycles, and a smartphone-sized version would be able to keep a phone charged for five days.
While they discuss how Shaibani’s team got around the problems with electrodes, and how sulfur is a common element, they don’t discuss whether there are difficulties, environmental, economical, or otherwise, in the manufacture and recycling of such batteries. They do note that there remain ethical difficulties to surmount:
However, lithium-sulphur batteries may face similar ethical problems to lithium-ion batteries. The metal oxides in lithium-ion batteries are typically nickel, cobalt or manganese, which are expensive and diminishing in natural stores. They also have associated ethical problems: a significant proportion of cobalt is sourced by child miners in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, for example.
“In order to have much cheaper energy and more ethical batteries, we need a radically new energy storage system,” says Shaibani. The researchers will further test battery prototypes with a view to manufacturing them commercially in Australia in coming years.
Extending the range of an electric car would certainly make them more viable, as well as cheaper, alternatives to fossil fueled cars in the minds of many consumers.
