Empowering our energy future
Australia has the resources to lead the world in battery production and – as Mahdokht Shaibani argues – if we did more than just export those raw materials, we could supercharge our economy.
In the country I come from, Iran, I found myself surrounded at an early age by successful engineers in my family and in society – in Iran there’s actually a large proportion of people engaged in engineering disciplines. It was as clear as day to me that if I wanted to design something, bring about change, create something for the better, to have an impact in life, I should become an engineer. I did my undergraduate studies in materials engineering, which prepared me to become a battery engineer.
Things have changed fast in the battery world. About 10 years ago, the main idea of making a better battery was simply to make it more powerful – to make it last longer. But about five or six years ago, other criteria became extremely important: the idea of making batteries more sustainable, cleaner and more affordable.
Scientists had started to reveal more and more of the downsides – the dirty secrets, if you like – of the production of lithium-ion batteries.
In fact, there have been lots of environmental and humanitarian issues related to mining for the materials that are required to make lithium-ion batteries. We might have thought that by driving an electric car we’re not hurting our environment, but batteries have been produced by emitting carbon. Over the past few years, it’s been important for me and for many in the industry to design batteries that are environmentally friendly in the materials that they use. Basically, we are trying to make low-carbon batteries.
I would say that the lithium-ion battery has proved its superiority for pretty much every application potential. It would be difficult to imagine that there would be a completely new battery chemistry that could compete with lithium-ion. There could be supporting battery technologies – lithium-sulphur batteries, for example, which is one of my areas of expertise. But these aren’t going to be able to cover all of the applications that lithium-ion can accommodate. Lithium-ion is going to be here for quite a long time.
In fact, Australia is the largest producer in the world of lithium, contributing up to 50% of the world’s lithium mine/concentrate. Plus we have large deposits of nickel and cobalt, which are the other critical ingredients for lithium-ion batteries.
Unfortunately, what we mainly do in Australia is dig for the raw materials and ship them overseas for refining, cell production and battery assembly. The fact that we are not involved in downstream processing in the battery supply chain brings us no