Batteries are everywhere nowadays.

Your phone or laptop that you read this on probably are battery driven.

Maybe the car you are driving is running on its electric cells. Even if you are driving a Otto-engine car, your car still relies on a much smaller battery to get started. And when you leave your cars lights on over night, it won’t turn on the next day (it happened to most of us..).

All of your remote controls, your vacuum cleaner robot, and so much more.

The point is, we are all quite familiar with battery technology. It is the logical extension of seasonal and fluctuational energy production and enriches our daily lives with flexibility and mobility.

Together with hydrogen it will probably be the future of energy storage.

However batteries have a few drawbacks as of today. They have relatively low capacity, high costs, are heavy and probably the worst – will leave a massive amount of toxic waste at the end of their lifetime.

We need some leaps here.

For clarification, I will mostly work with Electric Vehicles (EVs) here. It is the high arts of battery demands.

To understand how batteries work, we first have to understand the current most popular model – Lithium-ion batteries.

As I am no engineer or expert on how these batteries work I’ll let someone else do the job. Also it saves me work (neat!).

This video looks at Tesla batteries and shows you how they work. Generally it makes sense to look at EV batteries, as EVs are the gold standard for battery technology. They require durability, quick charging, safety, good prices and need to use ressources that are plentifully available to reduce environmental footprint.

Having done that, let’s take a look at 5 of the most promising improvements to battery technology and find out if they might be able to eliminate some (or perhaps all) of the problems.

Lithium Metal (or Silicon) Battery Technology

This one is actually interesting in that it not only is thought to be the potential successor of the Lithium Ion battery, but that it also is its predecessor.

In the 1970s M. Stanley Whittingham developed the Lithium Metal battery.

However it was not a really broadly available solution back then as it used titanium. And even though it makes for highly popular songs, it is certainly not very affordable. Uncommercial.

With new research though, already in the next years it will give maybe the greatest comeback since the reunion of Take That. Or something like that.

The stats for sure seem promising – 10 times the density of lithium ion batteries – which means you get 10 times the amount of distance in your EV out of the same weight battery pack. So for it to be more efficient it would only need a ninth of the durability of lithium ion.

Another notable thing is that it is already in production by a company called XNRGI.

Essentially they use layered silicon to produce a 3D surface area which greatly enhances the surface in comparison to graphite 2D surfaces. And with more surface there is more potential for density.

So this technology does make it a lot easier to track if it will actually be succesful in the future. If you buy a storage unit for your house in 5 or 10 years and it runs on lithium silicon it is pretty safe to assume it was succesful.

However questions need to be cleared around durability, charging speed and safety for uses other than home and reservoir storage.

Lithium (or Aluminium) Air Battery Technology

This one is still in development but shows promising first results in EV use.

A car equipped with a hybrid Lithium Ion and Aluminium Air battery has been reported to go around 1.800 kilometers on a single charge.

This is probably every EV manufacturer’s wet dream.

Technologically the battery setup has the traditional lithium layer, which can also be replaced using other metals such as aluminium, gold, silver or even ruthenium.

The anode uses oxygen as the main layer element. As we all might be able to guess, a very abundantly available ressource (citation needed).

By using two chemical processes – Oxygen Reduction Reaction (ORR) and Oxygen Evolution Reaction (OER) – the electricity is stored.

Even though it has been used in a car already, there are two major drawbacks.

Metal air batteries produce a lot of excess energy, mostly in the form of heat. Due to this they degrade very quickly and you need to replace them every few cycles.

The company facilitating the test drive for 1800 km themselves state, that metal air batteries last for around 6 months. After that you drive to your local dealer and get a new one.

Not the solution to the increasing e-waste problem.

In a research paper Alireza Kondori states that solving two main problems are essential to help this technology to break through.

A novel cathode that uses highly active and stable catalysts and a proper electrolyte design for the ORR and OER reactions.

Therefore judging by what we have seen so far from this technology, we can assume that we won’t see anything of it that soon.

But in a quest to bring all these problems under control, we could have a stable alternative to the batteries we are using right now. This might be a good optimisation technology for a market, that has already developed a lot further in the near future.

Solid State Lithium Ion

First: as of right now, this is the biggest hope around EV.

But also: We are still quite some distance away from seeing these.

Solid state batteries are heavily tested by Toyota, which should capture your interest. After all they started the hybrid car.

And what Toyota expects from these is quite spectacular. A full charge in seven minutes. Increased safety for drivers in car crashes. And the applicable weather range is much broader, going from -30° to +100°.

This is much more efficient than the current batteries that range between 15-25°C. This will in turn change durability because it reduces cooling and heating excess of the battery itself.

So why is it so far away?

As per the Toyota scientists, there are no fitting materials for the electrolyte for mass industrial production.

The traditional electrolyte materials that we discussed earlier are liquid, and easily available.

So this poses another engineering challenge on Toyota car’s future.

So far they will have to continue to rely on their incredibly advanced recuperation system.

Sticking with the traditional Lithium Ion Battery but removing cobalt

I don’t know about how people discuss about EVs and electrification of traffic where you are.

Here in Germany conservative people will throw the car industry propaganda material at you, saying that lithium ion batteries are produced using child labour in the Congo to mine cobalt.

That is true. What they love to not say though is that combustion engine cars need cobalt, too. Less, but still. And when you remove cobalt from the battery, EVs are 100% cobalt-free. However combustion engine car manufacturers have made a much smaller effort to remove cobalt from their engines than EV companies are doing.

So it may also not surprise, that removing cobalt is a more a matter of cost than of human rights of people in the Congo.

That is the reality of todays economy. It’s not about human rights in the Congo, not for EV manufacturers, not for combustion engine manufacturers.

Nevertheless, more and moe news spreading about cobalt free battery technology are appearing and most of them include replacing cobalt in the electrode with nickel or some other metal that can substitute cobalt.

Interestingly enough the studies reveal that there is also an increase in performance and sometimes longevity.

So expect a greener battery in the future – both in terms of ecology and human rights.

What Battery Technology can we expect in 2050?

Let me start first with the elephant in the room.

We won’t swap the batteries in our EVs every 6 months. Our increased consciousness for environmental issues will not allow it. So even though we might have a promising and good technology, it will in lack funds and investments in the long run.

Banks won’t give a loan to a company that doesn’t have a sustainability plan in the next years.

But the other technologies are promising and what I believe will become a future is a mix of them. A lot of the technology is interchangeable. Why not have a cobalt free aluminium air solid state battery with 10 times of todays density, full charge in 90 seconds and a green ecological and social footprint?

I think with all the research out there, this will be a reality. We can expect EVs to change our mobility so much that internal combustion engines will mostly vanish for public transport. Expect even busses and trucks to run on these new batteries.

They are just better, and if you take a look at what car manufacturers have in their lineup for new coming cars in the next years, you will loose all doubts about it.

Add into the mix better batteries and we have a really good solution to removing carbon emissions from one of the biggest contributing sectors.

Some people argue that charging will mostly not be an issue anymore, due to shared services. I however am a firm believer that the shared economy will not grow in the future.

As always I want to ask you – what do you think? How far will batteries go?

Let me know in the comments. We can discuss.

Until then,

Philipp