I want to underline, it's not about any other chemistry overtaking lithium he is talking.
Lithium will almost certainly remain the one, and only mainstream battery chemistry simply because of physics. Lithium ion has the lowest mass per unit of charge.
It's about cathodes, and electrodes which may change, as well as their manufacturing technology.
There's an element above lithium on the periodic table that has an even lower mass per unit of charge. Weird that no one talks about this. Also repeating what I said elsewhere:
> It's bizarre how people refuse to accept that hydrogen fuel cells are technically batteries and have absurdly high energy densities. And if pressed, you usually hear some excuse like poor efficiencies, as if that isn't a powerful justification for pouring billions of dollars into the problem.
I’m always surprised when some dev comes up to me to delicately ask if we can rewrite or remodel something I did my first year at the company. Oh god yes, please.
Some things you did long ago are just plain wrong, others are only eighty percent right. There’s an expectation that something better will come along, even discounting fads. You just can’t see it or have been sucked into worrying about ten other things. Someone should take that baton.
As an inventor I suspect there comes a day where you open the trade journals expecting someone to have supplanted your old inventions. You were trying to improve the state of the art and having lived with it for years or at this point decades, you start wondering where the flying cars went. Please supplant my work.
The other kind of situation is a prototype you wrote before you understood the business and problem well enough, but it was more useful than nothing so is now an integral part of the sales pipeline.
If that is your org’s existing, established, supported, observable, and familiar tool/deployment method for on-call individuals then it would be foolish to use anything else.
Disrupting Li-ion has to do with disrupting the high energy density + high power + high round trip efficiency use cases that it currently dominates. Much of these are existing use cases, like personal electronics and cars. The leading horse there is sodium ion last I checked.
But there are many emerging energy storage use cases for which lithium ion was never a real contender.
Trading off those constraints gets you options like cheap long term energy storage (metal air batteries, flow batteries, heat batteries), or batteries for lower performance vehicles or stationary storage (lithium iron phosphate).
Those are all important but degradation is very important as well and a limiting factor in many use cases, as well as low temperature performance and safety.
LiFePo handle temperature extremes much better than Li-ion, have many times the cycle life, and can be more deeply discharged and charged. The downside is the increased weight.
These are not very good for mobile applications such as vehicles due to the lower energy density but for stationary applications they hold a lot of promise and they are in production already. The volume is still too low though, once that goes up this will be a serious contender for things like home batteries. They have some really interesting properties, one of which is a very long predicted life span (30 years!!).
Nifty chemistry. It seems to have half the energy density of LiFePo4, but double the lifespan. Titanium seems like an expensive cathode material though. Their other standout property seems to be fast charging, which alas would be most useful in vehicles.
Quite interesting indeed. For RVs they are already used, but not so much in regular EVs for obvious reasons.
The perfect battery will probably never become a reality, but the incremental changes may get us specialist solutions that are good enough for all practical applications. Titanium isn't all that expensive in raw form, it's when you start machining it that it gets expensive quickly. Typically it's about 1.5 times whatever the going rate for Aluminum is.
Disrupting lithium for batteries is like disrupting silicon for transistors - sure there are niches and areas where other things, like silicon carbide or gallium can be used! But to any one trying to pour money into something competing with the trillions of dollars invested into the existing techniques I say: good luck with that.
The article actually says that lithium batteries aren't going away any time soon. The "disruptions" the inventor calls for are more about how lithium ion batteries are made, in particular:
- Reducing energy inputs for manufacturing
- Eliminating cobalt from cathodes (largely achieved already, depending on what performance characteristics the application can live with)
- Using clean energy while mining for battery materials, and ensuring that there are regional supply chains around the world
- Expanding battery recycling
These sound more incremental than truly disruptive to me, but mining and heavy manufacturing change on a much slower cadence than microchips and software. So maybe these changes would be disruptive in context.
Lithium is great, the low atomic mass of 4 is close to as good as you can get.
They haven't invested trillions, the lithium ion technology is in a relatively young and poorly optimized state and is similar to the state of the art 40 years ago.
You are right, disruption isn't the correct word. Investment, incremental improvement and niche applications are where we see most progress. Other chemistries are not seeming particularly promising for mobile, lightweight applications.
> It's bizarre how people refuse to accept that hydrogen fuel cells are technically batteries and have absurdly high energy densities. And if pressed, you usually hear some excuse like poor efficiencies, as if that isn't a powerful justification for pouring billions of dollars into the problem.
They've had billions poured in, and have been in development for longer than the modern li-ion + AC motor electric car.
And yet the cars are more expensive, the refilling stations are expensive to build and only exist in limited geographic regions, the cost to refuel is high, and we don't have infrastructure to provide clean hydrogen in volume to filling stations.
Sure these are solvable problems. But at some point if we want it to actually exist it has to actually be built instead of being a California and Japan toy project.
Then why not pour billions more? We are talking about the potential end of the world, and yet we also proclaim that this cannot motivate us to spend an amount of money that is a tiny fraction of what we spend on military hardware.
How many years and how many billions to create a device the size of a refrigerator that can connect to grid power and refill Hydrogen cars all day long? We have had this for EVs for a decade.
Toyota, Hyundai, GM, and others have been putting money in since at least the 90s. Why haven’t they been able to create a compelling product and bring it to market?
If hydrogen is just a battery, and someone wants to create an EV that happens to use Hydrogen as the battery, and finds a way to charge that battery off of an AC or DC grid connection, then it can use any of the EV infrastructure we are building today.
None of that infrastructure is li-ion specific. It’s for batteries that charge from grid power.
You are aware of what is at stake here? Not even multiple trillions of dollar is a number too high to be unjustified. Anything less than $1 trillion should not even qualify as a serious argument against it.
But we have to weigh probability of success. We can’t spend trillions on dropping ice cubes into the ocean just because the stakes are high and we need to try something.
I could be wrong but I haven’t seen anyone suggest that there is a path to creating a hydrogen charging network that will be as efficient or effective as a direct EV charging network. More money doesn’t change that.
I reject the premise that there is some conspiracy or avoidance to spending money on hydrogen vehicles. Tons of money has been spent and is being spent, with less useful results so far than other battery types.
Every vehicle credit, infrastructure plan, or fleet emissions target I have read already calls out hydrogen alongside EV as qualifying.
For use cases where the technology fundamentally makes sense, such as Aircraft where infrastructure only needs to exist at major airports and the energy density requirements are much more significant, there is active investment and development with a solid path to useful results.
So where is this battery chemistry with even higher energy density? Or comes from a resource more abundant that water? The answer is none that we know of. These are self-evident reasons why we should spend significant resources pursuing this path.
Like I said, the arguments against that are just excuses. And no one is implying that this path comes at the exclusion of everything else either. That just seems like another excuse. We can easily fund everything else while also funding this idea too.
Existing policies are pretty much rigged in favor of li-ion batteries. People sometimes cite fuel cell tax credits, but ignore the part where the government is heavily subsidizing battery factories or paying for charging networks. It is not remotely a fair comparison.
Funding is available for battery projects because the previous funding spent on research has created a market-viable product that can replace a significant part of our vehicle fleet in the next decade.
I didn’t say there was a chemistry with higher density than hydrogen. You’re the one saying people have forgotten hydrogen, or it is somehow generally not being supported.
I haven’t seen any evidence yet that investment in research into hydrogen is lacking compared to other projects.
You say the return on spending more is self-evident, so finding some actual evidence should be easy.
If we could spend $1T and have a high likelihood of a high density storage system that can run on clean grid energy, doesn’t waste large amounts of its input energy, can be viably deployed in all areas where vehicles need to be recharged, I would support that.
> If we could spend $1T and have a high likelihood of a high density storage system that can run on clean grid energy, doesn’t waste large amounts of its input energy, can be viably deployed in all areas where vehicles need to be recharged, I would support that.
You seem intent on missing the point. This is the very reason why people should be open to the idea. Hydrogen is the very thing you are describing here. And let's not forget the issue at hand: the problems of climate change. It demands we spent significant resources tackling it, and thus refusing to spend money on potential solutions is the unsupportable idea.
I know I was talking about hydrogen. That was the point.
The point you are missing is the “high likelyhood”.
Current round trip hydrogen efficiency seems to be below 50%. Is there an actual concrete path to making that 90%? Is spending $1T today going to achieve that?
Would spending that on other chemistries (ex sodium ion) produce better results?
I very much understand the issue at hand. And I do not think we are “refusing to spend money” on hydrogen. In fact I see quite a lot of evidence to the contrary, that hydrogen is getting more funding than other avenues relative to the demonstrated utility thus far, because of that very alluring promise if it were to become viable for broad applications.
> Would spending that on other chemistries (ex sodium ion) produce better results?
You are still acting as if investment in one idea somehow precludes investment in another. This entire time, I was stating that we can easily justify vast sums of R&D in many possible ideas. That should include hydrogen, not coming up with a series of excuses to avoid it. Especially considering that hydrogen fuel cells already exist commercially, and are already well past the lab stage (something na-ion have not gone past).
Finally, the words "high likelihood" is not a well defined claim. You can easily adjust your numbers to justify or reject any idea depending on what you personally feel. In reality, we are strongly motivated to pursue many ideas simultaneously and we do not have the luxury of ignoring options.
> You are still acting as if investment in one idea somehow precludes investment in another.
This is the political reality. Yes we should be doing more.
> I was stating that we can easily justify vast sums of R&D in many possible ideas.
Perhaps we should, I’m not sure that “can easily” applies to spending trillions on R&D.
> That should include hydrogen, not a series of excuses to avoid it. Especially considering that hydrogen fuel cells already exist commercially, and are already well past the lab stage.
Agreed, we should be researching hydrogen for energy storage. And we are. We are also researching other chemistries with different tradeoffs. And a few of those chemistries have become viable as current market products, so they are receiving different kinds of investment to move them from research products to broad implementation.
> In reality, we are strongly motivated to pursue many ideas simultaneously and we do not have the luxury of ignoring options.
Agreed. I have not seen any evidence yet that hydrogen is being ignored as an energy storage medium.
Political realities can change. With enough pressure, governments will take other ideas more seriously. That is arguably the point of this. The same thing happened with green energy to begin with.
They aren't poor excuses. There are fundamentally hard problems about the distribution of clean hydrogen that have not and likely will not be overcome in a way that is broadly competitive with other technologies. Sure, you can use methane as a "transportable hydrogen", but then it's not clean any more. You can make your hydrogen relatively cheaply from natural gas, but then it's not clean any more.
This is not due to lack of focus or funding. Toyota, the largest auto maker in the world, has spent decades trying to make hydrogen-powered cars a reality. And in any honest assessment, it has failed dismally at doing so (indeed, it has spent so much focus and funding on hydrogen that it is woefully behind its competitors in battery electric vehicles).
That is the excuse I'm talking about. We are not having a discussion over whether those problems exist, it is about whether we should spend money on tackling them. After all, we are at in dire need of a battery with higher energy density. And yet the answer has consistently been "sure, it may be exactly what we're looking for, but somehow we already know that it is impossible despite spending very little R&D on it."
Lots of money has been spent on this front already, and it has gone nowhere. There is no magic way to suddenly make hydrogen a nicely-behaved, high-density storable fuel. Military and space applications, who are willing to work with much more troublesome fuels, have tried to improve on hydrogen on-and-off since the dawn of rocketry. The only practical improvement on LH2 is liquid methane.
And guess what, that's exactly the same story with terrestrial transport. Around the world, natural gas powers a lot of vehicles. It is a great storable means of distributing hydrogen - safe enough and well-understood enough that much of the developed world is content at piping it directly into their homes. What it is not is carbon-emission free.
Read what I said to the other guy. We are not having a conversation over whether those problems exist. It's about the motivation to solve them. And the problems of today should give us massive motivation to do so. Even trillions of dollar is not "too much money."
It’s not a lack of motivation to solve the problem. It’s the lack of a viable pathway to solve the problem regardless of funding.
Are there specific avenues of research and development that have a decent shot at bringing roundtrip grid>hydrogen>motor efficiency on par with other EVs, and which are currently starved of funding?
Yes. The fact that hydrogen fuel cells are technically a type of battery, meaning that there is no rationale for why it can't do that. Hence why "efficiencies" is just an excuse.
In fact, this entire argument is a made-up one to begin with. People are being willfully ignorant of the fact that both lithium and hydrogen are on the same column on the periodic table. That they should both behave very similarly to each other in all matters related to battery chemistry.
No. There is no reason to believe that the efficiency can be significantly improved. If the efficiency of clean hydrogen is bad enough and will always be that bad, it's very possible it is more efficient to power vehicles through easily transported liquid hydrocarbons (which are almost certainly always going to be better in effective volumetric and mass energy density) and spend the power saved to run centralized carbon capture.
> both lithium and hydrogen are on the same column on the periodic table. That they should both behave very similarly to each other in all matters related to battery chemistry
Hydrogen is a notoriously difficult element to work with, that behaves in complex and poorly understood ways, even now. Aerospace applications, arguably those with the most experience in handling hydrogen, routinely struggle with its challenges.
That's absurd reasoning. Once you have a battery system, you don't worry about Carnot's theorem and therefore you aren't limited by the efficiency limits of heat engines. It's pretty much an imaginary limit after that, and is similar to all of those people who didn't think Moore's Law could continue past some arbitrary point.
Hydrogen and lithium are both on the same column and have one electron in their outer shell. They should have very similar chemical properties. You're just demonstrating the problem I was talking about: That the facts should be driving a strong motivation to solve these problems. Instead, it is just a series of excuses to not try. As if climate change just wasn't something to worry about.
> hydrogen fuel cells are technically batteries and have absurdly high energy densities.
The devil is in the details - this is only partially right. Hydrogen has absurdly high energy densities when considering weight, however when considering volume it has absurdly low density. The low volumetric density is one of the primary barriers to hydrogen adoption.
The amount of industry that desperately wants better density is stunning and the fact that despite the billions spent we are still stuck with basically the same tech is a testament to its stubborness
There has been steady progress over the last couple of decades in battery tech. Much of it has gone into better Lithium-based batteries. We haven’t exactly stuck with the same tech.
It's bizarre how people refuse to accept that hydrogen fuel cells are technically batteries and have absurdly high energy densities. And if pressed, you usually hear some excuse like poor efficiencies, as if that isn't a powerful justification for pouring billions of dollars into the problem.
The problem is that “charging” that hydrogen battery uses enormous amounts of energy and produces large amounts of CO2. Until you can find a way to get hydrogen that does not produce CO2 and does not require much more energy than the electricity that goes into a li-ion battery, hydrogen is a non-started.
As electrolysis is also an electrochemical process, it is identical in basic nature as charging a battery. These are statements revealing the writer's ignorance of the basic facts, proving the point that people are refusing to explore the existence of superior battery technology.
Yes, I do understand the electrolysis process. I also understand that it is a very inefficient process that takes significantly more energy as input than is produced in the hydrogen output. That is also something that must not be ignored.
I don't think you do. The theoretical efficiency limit is 100% efficiency, same as charging a lithium ion battery. Reality is closer to this than what is in your head I suspect.
Maybe the next big disruption is not about making better batteries based on Li (Lithium) but to ditch Li for most mass use purposes and go with a different material, e.g. Na (Natrium, vulgar name: Sodium)… which unlike lithium is extremely abundant. It would (at least in its early less optimized versions) have a slightly lower energy density at about 200 Wh/kg compared to the current best lithium-based state of the art batteries, but still be in a similar ballpark and easily enough for many applications, especially given the much cheaper price.
Some manufacturers (e.g. CATL in China) are apparently already ramping up for Na battery mass production.
I am sure you're not the first person to not want dependency on foreign countries that have lithium deposits. Why is this not done already with sodium? Is it costly to manufacture with it? Durability?
My guess as a layman would be that AFAIK the reaction of alkali ("group 1") metals with water is more violent the further down it's situated in that column in the periodic table.
Since Na is one down from Li it should react more violently to any water contact (even water vapor in the atmosphere) which would make it inherently more of a safety concern.
Sodium chemistries currently have intractable problems with dendrite growth, limiting the cycle life to a level not viable for use in commercial cells. It's an active field of research though, and probably the most promising lithium alternative if that problem can be solved.
“Abundance” is kind of a tricky concept. 99.999%+ of earth’s resources are not yet within human’s ability to mine. Mostly either inaccessible or too sparsely concentrated or locked in compounds difficult to industrialize.
Titanium for instance is also very abundant. But it hasn’t been until relatively recently that humans were able to mine and process it at industrial scale.
depends by what measure… if it's just about how much lithium is theoretically estimated to exist in the earth crust, then one could twist together an argument for lithium to be somewhat "abundant" (even though even by that measure Sodium is, depending on the source, 1000 to 2000 times more abundant).
But if it's in terms of practicably available (mineable or otherwise practicably extractable at a sub-exorbitant price) lithium reserves, it's quite bleak actually, and we are currently forced to either rely on a small set of limited reserves, mostly concentrated in a few rather uncertain countries of origin… or to resort to extremely expensive low-yield extraction methods.
In contrast: Na (Sodium) is trivially and cheaply extractable from salt, which is readily available everywhere in much larger quantities (be it as sea water or from salt mines which are enormously more common than lithium mining) for cheap.
Also in Austria we have one of the oldest salt mines on earth and it is still very pretty there. Salt mining can be done with very little environmental impact.
It's weird that people have failed to notice that hydrogen has an atomic mass of 1. Far better than both of them. To quote what I said elsewhere:
> It's bizarre how people refuse to accept that hydrogen fuel cells are technically batteries and have absurdly high energy densities. And if pressed, you usually hear some excuse like poor efficiencies, as if that isn't a powerful justification for pouring billions of dollars into the problem.
I don’t think anybody has failed to notice this. Toyota and Honda have both had notable failures bringing Hydrogen fuel cell cars to market despite exciting claims along those lines.
I think you’ll have to quote some more authoritative sources to convince people that it could be viable.
This ignores the part where battery powered cars have existed for over a century and have "failed." But recent events have changed the needs of society, and now they have "succeeded."
People are now claiming that this can never happen again or that no innovation is possible in the future for another type of battery chemistry.
It is literally a battery chemistry. It should have broadly the same properties as li-ion batteries. There should not be any challenges, at least not ones that can't be solved via just spending more on R&D.
Not to mention that you are consistently implying that this must somehow come at the exclusion of progress anywhere else. That is an absurdity. The point is that we should take this idea seriously alongside other ideas.
Clearly not, since the original article didn't even mention it and very few in the comments section brought it up either. It is seriously being ignored in a real way.
Fuel cells is not a problem. Hydrogen storage is. Hydrogen is just a very nasty material, it leaks through everything, makes steel brittle and requires extreme pressures to store it at meaningful density. Combine the last two problems together and it's easy to see why there are significant technological barriers to hydrogen adoption.
And lithium is somehow easy to deal with? This is really just another excuse. The point wasn't claiming those problems don't exist, it is asking why we are not seeing those problems as motivation for massive R&D spending in order to solve them.
Different sodium based battery technologies have existed for quite a while (much longer than lithium based batteries actually), and research as well. And there were already a couple niches where some of them managed to establish some foothold, e.g. in the domain of high-temperature batteries.
But most sodium based battery types either had a too low energy density to be competitive or they had other drawbacks that - while sometimes controllable in lab or industrial conditions, made them unsuitable for common mainstream mass uses where lithium batteries are established.
Only quite recently have we reached a point where new Na battery types emerged that simultaneously 1. do not suffer of such problems, 2. have a sufficient energy density AND 3. have made it to a commercially viable alternative to the common Lithium-ion-batteries for mainstream uses. Let's hope this time is the right time for the Na battery revolution. We'll see.
Nowhere in the article does he say the industry is ripe for disruption. Can we please change the title to something more accurate, such as "Lithium ion technology is not going to be disrupted in at least the next 5-10 years, inventor says"?
The title doesn't have to mean that alternative chemistries are around the corner. "Ripe for disruption" can just mean that something needs to be disrupted because it has stagnated and has obvious room for improvement. That's what this guy is saying, by calling for "radical changes in manufacturing, mining, and recycling" of lithium-ion batteries.
I feel like I've seen 10 or so cutting edge separators that allow for the use of metallic lithium without dendrite growth or dangerous rapid discharge. This would apparently lead to a massive increase in power density. Are they all being sat on by patent trolls or what? I'm all for making sure that inventors get paid, but at some point I feel like the US government should just be handing out 10 million dollar prizes to people who come up with humanity saving tech, and then making the tech fully patent unencumbered so anyone can build with it.
Battery tech is too important for the survival of our species to get caught up in these silly hostage negotiations.
> “We need to reduce the 60 to 80 kilowatt hours) of electricity it takes to produce a one kWh battery,”
Was this transcribed correctly? 60-80kWh for a device that can be charged thousands of times doesn't seem that bad... And even for the higher performance lower-cycling number batteries in phones, it doesn't seem that bad.
60-80Kwh is enough to power a house for a week+, for a battery that can store 2 hours of power?
Sure its reusable, but the energy debt is large and it will remain a power consuming device.
Mostly due to charging the battery from non renewable sources, essentially, never paying off the power debt to create it.
Comparing to a house is not insightful unless compared to the function of that 1 kWh. On the grid, 1kWh of battery will shift multiple MWh of energy in its lifetime. The energy for production is on the order of 1% of its utility over time.
If, say, fracking for natural gas produced so much utility for so little energy input, we would have to worry a lot more about natural gas competing with batteries. The primary metric to focus on for batteries should be total cost, which is what will give batteries an even bigger edge over natural gas peakers. Reducing the energy input for 1kWh of capacity from 60 kWh to, say, 6 kWh will have minimal benefit for speeding the transition tk a carbon free energy system. With solar costs as $0.02/kWh, that 60kWh is only $1.20 of a battery pack that costs multiple hundred dollars.
"He called for a U.S. federal government mandate requiring that all products that incorporate lithium-ion batteries by approved by Underwriters Laboratories or an equivalent testing and certification organization."
That would be interesting given how far away we've moved from that. You can find sketchy electrical products now not just on AliExpress or Amazon, but in lots of US retail stores.
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[ 3.9 ms ] story [ 176 ms ] threadLithium will almost certainly remain the one, and only mainstream battery chemistry simply because of physics. Lithium ion has the lowest mass per unit of charge.
It's about cathodes, and electrodes which may change, as well as their manufacturing technology.
> It's bizarre how people refuse to accept that hydrogen fuel cells are technically batteries and have absurdly high energy densities. And if pressed, you usually hear some excuse like poor efficiencies, as if that isn't a powerful justification for pouring billions of dollars into the problem.
Some things you did long ago are just plain wrong, others are only eighty percent right. There’s an expectation that something better will come along, even discounting fads. You just can’t see it or have been sucked into worrying about ten other things. Someone should take that baton.
As an inventor I suspect there comes a day where you open the trade journals expecting someone to have supplanted your old inventions. You were trying to improve the state of the art and having lived with it for years or at this point decades, you start wondering where the flying cars went. Please supplant my work.
I did touch on it, with a ten foot pole.
That’s a conversation that requires beers.
But there are many emerging energy storage use cases for which lithium ion was never a real contender.
Trading off those constraints gets you options like cheap long term energy storage (metal air batteries, flow batteries, heat batteries), or batteries for lower performance vehicles or stationary storage (lithium iron phosphate).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lithium-titanate_battery
These are not very good for mobile applications such as vehicles due to the lower energy density but for stationary applications they hold a lot of promise and they are in production already. The volume is still too low though, once that goes up this will be a serious contender for things like home batteries. They have some really interesting properties, one of which is a very long predicted life span (30 years!!).
The perfect battery will probably never become a reality, but the incremental changes may get us specialist solutions that are good enough for all practical applications. Titanium isn't all that expensive in raw form, it's when you start machining it that it gets expensive quickly. Typically it's about 1.5 times whatever the going rate for Aluminum is.
- Reducing energy inputs for manufacturing
- Eliminating cobalt from cathodes (largely achieved already, depending on what performance characteristics the application can live with)
- Using clean energy while mining for battery materials, and ensuring that there are regional supply chains around the world
- Expanding battery recycling
These sound more incremental than truly disruptive to me, but mining and heavy manufacturing change on a much slower cadence than microchips and software. So maybe these changes would be disruptive in context.
They haven't invested trillions, the lithium ion technology is in a relatively young and poorly optimized state and is similar to the state of the art 40 years ago.
You are right, disruption isn't the correct word. Investment, incremental improvement and niche applications are where we see most progress. Other chemistries are not seeming particularly promising for mobile, lightweight applications.
> It's bizarre how people refuse to accept that hydrogen fuel cells are technically batteries and have absurdly high energy densities. And if pressed, you usually hear some excuse like poor efficiencies, as if that isn't a powerful justification for pouring billions of dollars into the problem.
And yet the cars are more expensive, the refilling stations are expensive to build and only exist in limited geographic regions, the cost to refuel is high, and we don't have infrastructure to provide clean hydrogen in volume to filling stations.
Sure these are solvable problems. But at some point if we want it to actually exist it has to actually be built instead of being a California and Japan toy project.
How many years and how many billions to create a device the size of a refrigerator that can connect to grid power and refill Hydrogen cars all day long? We have had this for EVs for a decade.
Toyota, Hyundai, GM, and others have been putting money in since at least the 90s. Why haven’t they been able to create a compelling product and bring it to market?
If hydrogen is just a battery, and someone wants to create an EV that happens to use Hydrogen as the battery, and finds a way to charge that battery off of an AC or DC grid connection, then it can use any of the EV infrastructure we are building today.
None of that infrastructure is li-ion specific. It’s for batteries that charge from grid power.
You are aware of what is at stake here? Not even multiple trillions of dollar is a number too high to be unjustified. Anything less than $1 trillion should not even qualify as a serious argument against it.
I could be wrong but I haven’t seen anyone suggest that there is a path to creating a hydrogen charging network that will be as efficient or effective as a direct EV charging network. More money doesn’t change that.
I reject the premise that there is some conspiracy or avoidance to spending money on hydrogen vehicles. Tons of money has been spent and is being spent, with less useful results so far than other battery types.
Every vehicle credit, infrastructure plan, or fleet emissions target I have read already calls out hydrogen alongside EV as qualifying.
For use cases where the technology fundamentally makes sense, such as Aircraft where infrastructure only needs to exist at major airports and the energy density requirements are much more significant, there is active investment and development with a solid path to useful results.
Like I said, the arguments against that are just excuses. And no one is implying that this path comes at the exclusion of everything else either. That just seems like another excuse. We can easily fund everything else while also funding this idea too.
Existing policies are pretty much rigged in favor of li-ion batteries. People sometimes cite fuel cell tax credits, but ignore the part where the government is heavily subsidizing battery factories or paying for charging networks. It is not remotely a fair comparison.
I didn’t say there was a chemistry with higher density than hydrogen. You’re the one saying people have forgotten hydrogen, or it is somehow generally not being supported.
I haven’t seen any evidence yet that investment in research into hydrogen is lacking compared to other projects.
You say the return on spending more is self-evident, so finding some actual evidence should be easy.
If we could spend $1T and have a high likelihood of a high density storage system that can run on clean grid energy, doesn’t waste large amounts of its input energy, can be viably deployed in all areas where vehicles need to be recharged, I would support that.
You seem intent on missing the point. This is the very reason why people should be open to the idea. Hydrogen is the very thing you are describing here. And let's not forget the issue at hand: the problems of climate change. It demands we spent significant resources tackling it, and thus refusing to spend money on potential solutions is the unsupportable idea.
The point you are missing is the “high likelyhood”.
Current round trip hydrogen efficiency seems to be below 50%. Is there an actual concrete path to making that 90%? Is spending $1T today going to achieve that?
Would spending that on other chemistries (ex sodium ion) produce better results?
I very much understand the issue at hand. And I do not think we are “refusing to spend money” on hydrogen. In fact I see quite a lot of evidence to the contrary, that hydrogen is getting more funding than other avenues relative to the demonstrated utility thus far, because of that very alluring promise if it were to become viable for broad applications.
You are still acting as if investment in one idea somehow precludes investment in another. This entire time, I was stating that we can easily justify vast sums of R&D in many possible ideas. That should include hydrogen, not coming up with a series of excuses to avoid it. Especially considering that hydrogen fuel cells already exist commercially, and are already well past the lab stage (something na-ion have not gone past).
Finally, the words "high likelihood" is not a well defined claim. You can easily adjust your numbers to justify or reject any idea depending on what you personally feel. In reality, we are strongly motivated to pursue many ideas simultaneously and we do not have the luxury of ignoring options.
This is the political reality. Yes we should be doing more.
> I was stating that we can easily justify vast sums of R&D in many possible ideas.
Perhaps we should, I’m not sure that “can easily” applies to spending trillions on R&D.
> That should include hydrogen, not a series of excuses to avoid it. Especially considering that hydrogen fuel cells already exist commercially, and are already well past the lab stage.
Agreed, we should be researching hydrogen for energy storage. And we are. We are also researching other chemistries with different tradeoffs. And a few of those chemistries have become viable as current market products, so they are receiving different kinds of investment to move them from research products to broad implementation.
> In reality, we are strongly motivated to pursue many ideas simultaneously and we do not have the luxury of ignoring options.
Agreed. I have not seen any evidence yet that hydrogen is being ignored as an energy storage medium.
This is not due to lack of focus or funding. Toyota, the largest auto maker in the world, has spent decades trying to make hydrogen-powered cars a reality. And in any honest assessment, it has failed dismally at doing so (indeed, it has spent so much focus and funding on hydrogen that it is woefully behind its competitors in battery electric vehicles).
And guess what, that's exactly the same story with terrestrial transport. Around the world, natural gas powers a lot of vehicles. It is a great storable means of distributing hydrogen - safe enough and well-understood enough that much of the developed world is content at piping it directly into their homes. What it is not is carbon-emission free.
Are there specific avenues of research and development that have a decent shot at bringing roundtrip grid>hydrogen>motor efficiency on par with other EVs, and which are currently starved of funding?
In fact, this entire argument is a made-up one to begin with. People are being willfully ignorant of the fact that both lithium and hydrogen are on the same column on the periodic table. That they should both behave very similarly to each other in all matters related to battery chemistry.
No. There is no reason to believe that the efficiency can be significantly improved. If the efficiency of clean hydrogen is bad enough and will always be that bad, it's very possible it is more efficient to power vehicles through easily transported liquid hydrocarbons (which are almost certainly always going to be better in effective volumetric and mass energy density) and spend the power saved to run centralized carbon capture.
> both lithium and hydrogen are on the same column on the periodic table. That they should both behave very similarly to each other in all matters related to battery chemistry
Hydrogen is a notoriously difficult element to work with, that behaves in complex and poorly understood ways, even now. Aerospace applications, arguably those with the most experience in handling hydrogen, routinely struggle with its challenges.
Hydrogen and lithium are both on the same column and have one electron in their outer shell. They should have very similar chemical properties. You're just demonstrating the problem I was talking about: That the facts should be driving a strong motivation to solve these problems. Instead, it is just a series of excuses to not try. As if climate change just wasn't something to worry about.
The devil is in the details - this is only partially right. Hydrogen has absurdly high energy densities when considering weight, however when considering volume it has absurdly low density. The low volumetric density is one of the primary barriers to hydrogen adoption.
The amount of industry that desperately wants better density is stunning and the fact that despite the billions spent we are still stuck with basically the same tech is a testament to its stubborness
It's a hard problem.
50% extra energy density with the same performance characteristics as lithium ion otherwise would probably level us up as a civilization.
A problem is that lithium is more or less the best choice for materials, and we've been pouring resources into developing it.
And quite a lot of others: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_battery_types
“Eternally five years away? No, batteries are improving under your nose” https://arstechnica.com/science/2021/05/eternally-five-years...
Some manufacturers (e.g. CATL in China) are apparently already ramping up for Na battery mass production.
https://archive.is/qJQPn
Titanium for instance is also very abundant. But it hasn’t been until relatively recently that humans were able to mine and process it at industrial scale.
But if it's in terms of practicably available (mineable or otherwise practicably extractable at a sub-exorbitant price) lithium reserves, it's quite bleak actually, and we are currently forced to either rely on a small set of limited reserves, mostly concentrated in a few rather uncertain countries of origin… or to resort to extremely expensive low-yield extraction methods.
In contrast: Na (Sodium) is trivially and cheaply extractable from salt, which is readily available everywhere in much larger quantities (be it as sea water or from salt mines which are enormously more common than lithium mining) for cheap.
> It's bizarre how people refuse to accept that hydrogen fuel cells are technically batteries and have absurdly high energy densities. And if pressed, you usually hear some excuse like poor efficiencies, as if that isn't a powerful justification for pouring billions of dollars into the problem.
I think you’ll have to quote some more authoritative sources to convince people that it could be viable.
People are now claiming that this can never happen again or that no innovation is possible in the future for another type of battery chemistry.
> People are now claiming that this can never happen again or that no innovation is possible in the future for another type of battery chemistry.
Who is claiming this?
> Who is claiming this?
You are claiming that. You seem intent to not accept the fact that hydrogen fuel cells are a form of battery technology that can advance.
Not to mention that you are consistently implying that this must somehow come at the exclusion of progress anywhere else. That is an absurdity. The point is that we should take this idea seriously alongside other ideas.
Yes. Especially in LiFePO batteries.
Grid connected or off grid storage seem like a far more apt use for the tech.
The interesting thing of course is that 'few percent' which means theoretically there is a lot of room for improvement.
But most sodium based battery types either had a too low energy density to be competitive or they had other drawbacks that - while sometimes controllable in lab or industrial conditions, made them unsuitable for common mainstream mass uses where lithium batteries are established.
Only quite recently have we reached a point where new Na battery types emerged that simultaneously 1. do not suffer of such problems, 2. have a sufficient energy density AND 3. have made it to a commercially viable alternative to the common Lithium-ion-batteries for mainstream uses. Let's hope this time is the right time for the Na battery revolution. We'll see.
The relevant bit is here: “Otherwise please use the original title, unless it is misleading or linkbait; don't editorialize.”
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Battery tech is too important for the survival of our species to get caught up in these silly hostage negotiations.
Was this transcribed correctly? 60-80kWh for a device that can be charged thousands of times doesn't seem that bad... And even for the higher performance lower-cycling number batteries in phones, it doesn't seem that bad.
If, say, fracking for natural gas produced so much utility for so little energy input, we would have to worry a lot more about natural gas competing with batteries. The primary metric to focus on for batteries should be total cost, which is what will give batteries an even bigger edge over natural gas peakers. Reducing the energy input for 1kWh of capacity from 60 kWh to, say, 6 kWh will have minimal benefit for speeding the transition tk a carbon free energy system. With solar costs as $0.02/kWh, that 60kWh is only $1.20 of a battery pack that costs multiple hundred dollars.
That would be interesting given how far away we've moved from that. You can find sketchy electrical products now not just on AliExpress or Amazon, but in lots of US retail stores.