New electric batteries will wash away need for fossil fuel

Energy science is moving so fast that what seemed impossible five years ago is now an achieveable reality

The Argonne National Laboratory in the US has essentially cracked the battery technology for electric vehicles, discovering a way to raise the future driving range of standard EVS to a thousand miles or more. It promises to do so cheaply without exhausting the global supply of critical minerals.

The joint project with the Illinois Institute of Technology (IIT) has achieved a radical jump in the energy density of battery cells. The typical lithium-ion battery used in the car industry today stores about 200 watt-hours per kilo (Wh/kg). Their lab experiment has already reached 675 Wh/kg with a lithium-air variant.

This is a high enough density to power trucks, trains, and arguably mid-haul aircraft. The team believes it can reach 1,200 Wh/kg. If so, almost all global transport can be decarbonised more easily than we thought, and probably at a negative net cost compared with continuation of the hydrocarbon status quo.

The Argonne Laboratory is not alone in pushing the boundaries of energy storage and EV technology. The specialist press reports eye-watering breakthroughs almost every month. I highlight this paper because US national labs have AAA credibility. The study is peer-reviewed and has just appeared in the research journal Science. Their solid-state battery has achieved the highest energy density yet seen anywhere in the world. And sometimes you have to pick on one to tell a larger story.

The Science paper says the process can “theoretically deliver an energy density that is comparable to that of gasoline”, a remarkable thought. It is not for today, but it is not for the remote future either. It typically takes five years or so from breakthroughs of this kind to reach manufacturing.

Professor Larry Curtiss, the project leader, told me that his battery needs no cobalt. That eliminates reliance on the Democratic Republic of the Congo, which accounts for 74pc of the world’s production and has become a Chinese economic colony for the extraction of raw materials. Reports by the UN and activist groups leave no doubt that cobalt mining in the DRC is an ecological and human disaster, with some 40,000 children working for a pittance in toxic conditions for small “artisanal” mines. It has become a byword for North-south exploitation.

Needless to say, the horrors of the cobalt supply chain have been seized on by fossil “realists” (i.e. vested interests) and Vladimir Putin’s cyber-bots to impugn the moral claims of the green energy transition. The Argonne-iit technology should make it harder to sustain that line of attack.

Prof Curtiss said the prototype is based on lithium but does not have to be. “The same type of battery could be developed with sodium. It will take more time, but can be done,” he said. Switching to sodium would halve the driving range but it would still be double today’s generation of batteries. Sodium is ubiquitous.

This knocks out another myth: that the EV revolution is impossible on a planetary scale because there either is not enough lithium, or not enough at viable cost under free market conditions in states aligned with Western democracies. (The copper shortage is more serious, but there may be solutions for that as well using graphene with aluminium).

The International Energy Agency estimates that demand for lithium will rise 20-fold by 2040 if we rely on existing technology. The Australians are the world’s biggest producers today. But the greatest long-term deposits are in the Lithium Triangle of Argentina, Bolivia, and Chile, which are in talks to create an Opec-style cartel. China’s Tianqi owns 22pc of the Chilean group SQM, the world’s second-biggest lithium miner.

A lithium recycling industry will mitigate the problem. Lithium can be extracted from seawater. It is highly diluted at 180 parts per billion but research suggests it could be isolated for as little as $5 a kilo. If so, the lithium scare is just another of a long list of seemingly insurmountable barriers that fall away with time. The march of clean tech is littered with such false scares. For readers with a better grip on chemistry than me, the Argonneiit uses a solid electrolyte made from a ceramic polymer based on nanoparticles. This does require expensive materials. It achieves a reaction of four molecules at room temperature instead of the usual one or two. It is able to extract oxygen from the surrounding air to run the reaction, solving a problem that has held back development for a decade.

What the Argonne-iit battery and other breakthroughs show is that energy science is moving so fast that what seemed impossible five years ago is already a discernible reality, and that we will be looking at a very different landscape before the end of this decade.

Germany and Italy last week succeeded in blocking EU plans for a ban on petrol and diesel sales by 2035. They might just as well bark at the moon. Moore’s Law and the learning curve of new technology has sealed the fate of the combustion engine – with or without net zero.

The legacy companies cannot save their sunk investment in fossil motors – unless the EU retreats into fortress protectionism, which would be economic suicide. To try would be to guarantee the destruction of Europe’s car industry.

The only hope of saving it is to go for broke on electrification before global rivals run away with the prize.

The coming battery technology kills the case for hydrogen in cars, vans, buses, or trucks, and perhaps also for trains and aircraft. The energy loss involved makes no sense.

It is much cheaper and more efficient to electrify wherever possible. Clean hydrogen is too valuable to squander. We need it to replace dirty hydrogen used in industry. We do not need it for road transport.

My advice to corporate bosses and ministers: keep up with the world’s scientific literature, or you will be massacred.