You are not logged in.
I'm creating this post as yet another battery topic, regarding a specific cell chemistry often touted as a potential replacement for Lithium, because Sodium is more abundant than Lithium. In reality, various salts are more abundant than Lithium, but the actual metal extraction process uses about as much energy as making Aluminum, because batteries use salts and acids or ionic liquids for electrolytes. The anodes and cathodes of these cells are made from various conductive metals (Lithium / Sodium / Nickel / Aluminum / Iron) or Carbon or some combination thereof.
Sourcing the very pure metals required to make the huge quantities of batteries required, as opposed to the chemical compounds that those metals are locked up in, drastically limits which cell chemistries could possibly be implemented at a scale significant enough to supplant consumption of enormous quantities of hydrocarbon fuels, all of which are about 1.5 orders of magnitude more energy dense than any kind of battery, even after combustion inefficiency is taken into account.
At present, 100% of mining that produces outputs that matter at a global level, all consume coal, natural gas, and diesel fuel in enormous quantities. The various vanity projects showcasing a literal handful of battery powered haul trucks that cannot complete a single shift in a commercial mining operation without recharging don't count, for all of our counter-example people who are short on math. Beyond that problem, the electricity to power those functionally useless battery powered haul trucks still comes from natural gas or coal.
The power shovels and conveyors and other pieces of mining and smelting equipment already use electricity, and pretty much all of that comes from burning something. Even the supposed "green Iron smelter" Electric Arc Furnace that uses solar panels for some of their power, also admitted that they're tied into the grid. That grid uses natural gas generators. Other "green steel" makers have also asserted that their premium products made with Hydrogen or electricity, all use significantly more energy than the traditional methods for making teel, which is why they charge more money for the exact same product.
Offline
Sodium-Sulfur batteries are projected to cost $40/kWh to $140/kWh (grid scale storage implementation), with 4 actual Sodium-Sulfur 16MW Sodium-Sulfur batteries costing $500/kWh to $1,000/kWh. That would mean 1TWh of energy storage might cost a half trillion to trillion dollars. The US consumed 4,000,000,000,000,000Wh / 4PWh of electricity in 2022, or 10,958,904,109,589Wh/day. Let's assume we had to store 1/4 of that energy per day, so 2,739,726,027,397Wh. That means we'd need to spend $1,369,863,013,699.
1.37 trillion dollars to store a quarter of the electricity we consume per day. I've no idea what maintenance costs over 10 years, but let's round up to 1.5 trillion, because that's a lot of batteries and control electronics, so $150B/year, with a 10 year build-out, and then we're on the hook for $150B until the end of time, because the requirement to store energy with low energy density systems never goes away. Each American (400 million men / women / children) owe around $375 every year, for the batteries alone. It would have to be a federal program, because government regulates what power generating utilities can charge for electricity, and this scheme is wildly uneconomical.
Average federal revenue is $16,615 per tax payer, so I think if we commit to a purchase that large, it has to come with spending reductions in other areas, namely defense and entitlements. For comparison purposes the F-35 program is expected to cost 1.5 trillion over 40 years or so. No battery tech in history has actually achieved a 100X cost reduction, though, which is more of the utter nonsense that the ideologues spout off to ignore technological and physical reality.
That's for 1/4 of one day's worth of electrical storage. 1 full day will cost 6 trillion. 30 days will cost 180 trillion. The 90 day buffer that Professor Michaux thinks we'll need will cost 540 trillion dollars. Oh by the way, that's just for the United States of America. Multiply those figures by 5 for the rest of the world.
Cost estimates come from US Department of Energy (flip to Page 8 of 120):
Storage Cost and Performance Characterization Report Final
"SODIUM IS a small world," says Frédéric Chaminant, sales director of France's Métaux Spéciaux SA, the world's largest sodium metal producer. Global demand of 80,000 to 90,000 metric tons per year is supplied entirely by MSSA, DuPont, and three Chinese companies.
90,000t per year, almost identical to annual total global Lithium metal production. Sodium-Sulfur batteries are not as energy dense as Lithium-ion chemistries, at around 150Wh/kg to 200Wh/kg (80% of Lithium-ion gravimetric cell capacity, at most), so the end result is that we need more metal than all the world's suppliers produce every year, merely to never come within a country mile of meeting demand for a single country, namely the United States. It takes an absolute minimum of 5.22kWh of electricity per 1kg of Sodium metal produced. In reality, it's about as efficient as making Aluminum metal from Alumina, so more than double that figure. Getting the material is not a particularly difficult problem, though. There's plenty of salt in nature, at least here on Earth. A better question might be what we do with all the Chlorine gas produced. We could use it to make solvents and plastics. Worldwide salt production is around 300Mt (39.3% of salt is Sodium metal, by weight) per year, so we don't lack the salt, only the metal. Worldwide Sulfur production is more problematic, being much lower.
From Wikipedia:
Despite their low cost, molten sodium-sulfur batteries suffer from safety and durability issues, such as a short cycle life of fewer than 1000 cycles on average. As a result, these batteries have not achieved significant commercial deployment.
...
Like many high-temperature batteries, sodium-sulfur cells become more economical with increasing size. This is because of the square-cube law: large cells have less relative heat loss, so maintaining their high operating temperatures is easier. Commercially available cells are typically large with high capacities (up to 500Ah).A similar type of battery called the ZEBRA battery, which uses a NiCl2/AlCl3 cathode in place of sulfur, has had greater commercial interest in the past, but as of 2023 there are no commercial manufacturers of ZEBRA. Room-temperature sodium-sulfur are also known. They use neither liquid sodium nor liquid sulfur and operate on entirely different principles and face different challenges than the high-temperature molten Na-S batteries discussed here.
...
For operation, the entire battery must be heated to, or above, the melting point of sulphur at 119 C. Sodium has a lower melting point, around 98 C, so a battery that holds molten sulphur holds molten sodium by default. This presents a serious safety concern; sodium can be spontaneously inflammable in air, and sulphur is highly flammable. Several examples of the Ford Ecostar, equipped with such a battery, burst into flame during recharging, leading Ford to give up on the concept.
Yeah, if you consider 3 years worth of daily cycles to be "economical". Well, just forget what I said about cost before. Take all those numbers I posted and triple them, because these batteries only last for 3 years. We can easily see why this battery-powered pipe dream will never happen. We don't have the energy to make enough of the metal and we're either going to stop using salt for all other purposes or we need entirely new extraction schemes to supply enough salt. The Sulfur is more problematic. Take careful note that I also reduced my initial projected installation cost estimate by $169/kW over what's shown on Page 8, so 25% lower than what DoE thinks Sodium-Sulfur will cost in 2025, which is less than 2 years away, and well below what actual installed grid scale Sodium-Sulfur systems cost at the present time, which is near the latter half of 2023.
"Historically, global mining capacity for any metal has never increased by a factor of more than 2 to 3, over a 10 to 20 years." - Dr. Simon Michaux, Professor of Mines and Engineering
All of these non-working ideas are averting resources away from valid and economical plans to actually solve problems. Liberals love options, but can't make tough decisions, especially ones involving money and basic math.
They didn't want nuclear power at a time when nuclear power would've stunted a lot of over-consumption of hydrocarbon fuels. Now they cannot admit to themselves that low energy density systems require low energy density materials. Earth and Mars both have Iron and water coming out the wazoo. Here on Earth, most of the water is liquid, whereas on Mars it's ice buried under regolith. All low energy density systems require extreme abundance of the materials they consume, ease of recycling, and low input energy costs to obtain the raw materials.
Salt is very common, but Sodium metal does not occur in nature, because it's locked up within an oxidized mineral containing Oxygen or Chlorine or some other extremely electro-negative element like Fluorine. The same is true of Iron, it just takes a lot less energy to "un-bind" it, as compared to Aluminum or Sodium.
This is yet another "we'll just make more batteries out of something else" plan that did not survive cursory technical scrutiny when compared to material abundance reality. There's a running theme here. Someone proposes something that seems like a great idea, they do absolutely zero homework to know whether or not their plan could feasibly work, and then they proclaim in the media that our electrification problems are solved because we have this "new" technology that's existed for years, that almost nobody actually uses, because it's wildly impractical for most use cases.
The Sodium-Sulfur plan is less practical than the Lithium plan.
Let's see how many of these half-baked ideas we have to waste time / money / energy on before we finally get off the insufferably stupid idea that we're going to power human civilization using electronics and batteries in the next 20 years.
Next!
Offline
The following post is about Lithium-Sulfur, but was posted here because then there can be no complaining about where it was placed, because I created the topic:
From Statista:
The price of sulfur in the United States reached approximately 150 U.S. dollars per metric ton in 2022, a significant increase compared to previous years. The United States is one of the largest producers of sulfur in the world.
...
In 2022, the average price of battery-grade lithium carbonate was estimated at 37,000 U.S. dollars per metric ton.
In 2023, Sulfur is up around $200 per metric ton. The good news is that the US actually makes a significant amount of Sulfur. The bad news is the sheer quantity needed. That said, I wonder if we could find a home for the Sulfur by producing more "sour" crude oil containing significant amounts of Hydrogen-Sulfide. This would be one way to increase the stockpile of Sulfur while accessing the energy required to create the stockpile.
From CNEV, May 18th, 2023:
The price of battery-grade lithium carbonate reached RMB 300,000 ($42,740) per ton in China today, up RMB 15,000 per ton, or 5.26 percent...
Those are prices for the raw material, not the Lithium metal itself, and certainly not the batteries made with the Lithium.
From Axios:
Lithium prices putting pressure on electric vehicle costs
From the Axios article:
Lithium prices have more than quadrupled over the last year as the rush from automakers to produce electric vehicles gains momentum.
...
The global weighted average price of lithium carbonate was $59,928 per metric ton in August, up from $13,924 in August 2021 and $6,128 in August 2020, according to Benchmark Mineral Intelligence.
...
Average EV prices rose 15.6% in August, compared with a year earlier, to more than $66,000, according to Kelley Blue Book. That's about $18,000 more than overall average new vehicle prices.
This is the inevitable result of supply-and-demand. Demand is ever-increasing, which means prices increase, with the end result that all types of batteries are now more expensive. This trend will continue over time, because that's how supply-and-demand works.
Lithium is 18.78% of Lithium Carbonate, so 1,000kg of Lithium Carbonate contains 187.8kg of Lithium metal.
A typical EV battery has about 8 kilograms of lithium, 14 kilograms of cobalt, and 20 kilograms of manganese, although this can often be much more depending on the battery size – a Tesla Model S' battery, for example, contains around 62.6 kg (138 pounds) of lithium.
62.6kg goes into 187.8kg about 3 times, so the Lithium from the Lithium Carbonate in Tesla Model S battery costs about $20,000 USD. That must mean Tesla has a lower price locked in on the Lithium market, because the Tesla Model S replacement battery only costs about $20,000 USD.
Can you make a less costly battery when your Lithium supply now costs 10X more than it did 3 years ago? Obviously not. Any cell chemistry involving Lithium is going to cost a lot more now, because it has to. If steel costs 10X more than it did 3 years ago, then the same issue would apply to steel.
What are these new batteries going to be used for, or to do?
Obviously nothing that the existing Lithium-ion cell chemistries don't do. All the same claims are made by Lithium-Sulfur as have been made by other companies Lithium-polymer, Aluminum-air, etc, and absolutely zero specific information is given, because that would immediately indicate no actual progress. Naturally, they also have no commercial product in current production, so attempting to compare and contrast it with other products is not possible. They're simply going to charge more money to produce the same product in a slightly different way, because it's a more expensive cell chemistry. There was not one word about how they intend to recycle these new battery cells made with nano-materials, either. That's par for the course. That's someone else's problem, and they haven't thought that far ahead.
I'm creating "new stuff" over here. I can't be bothered with any "big picture" thinking. Let's just spend more money on my product to see what happens. If the past is any predictor of the future, then the same old problems still exist, but to an even greater degree. The low flammability is a nice enhancement, but lower when compared to which specific cell chemistry and design?
All I see are more glittering generalities with nothing approaching the information required to make a news article worthy of being delivered to the general public as news. This is more marketing drivel for the battery production industry. Any honest reporter of news would tell these attention-seekers to go pack sand unless they came with samples of their product to an in-person interview, ready to have cell current and voltage measured, ready to pass a bullet test (without their cell catching fire or exploding; functioning as a battery following the test is not expected), a short-circuit and over-charge / over-discharge test, as well as ready to pass lifespan and duty cycle tests. Each test battery should nominally be of a form factor suitable for powering a cellphone or flashlight. It's not very big, so it shouldn't cost the company that much money, assuming they're serious about production. If a battery company does all that and their product functions to whatever claims they specified, then we can and should sing their praises from the mountain top. That's an actual accomplishment worthy of praise.
In other news, if all EVs were Tesla Model S vehicles, then the entire Lithium mining industry produced 737,000t of Lithium Carbonate in 2022 or 138,408,600kg of Lithium metal, which means we can make 2,211,000M Tesla Model S vehicles.
Overall, in 2021, Tesla produced 930,422 EVs and delivered 936,222, thereby setting a new record.
1,500,000,000 / 2,211,000 = 678.4 years to make all vehicles Tesla Model S style EVs.
Known global Lithium metal reserves:
89,000,000,000kg (known world Lithium reserves, economical or not) * 0.1878 (percentage of Lithium metal from Lithium Carbonate) = 16,714,200,000kg of Lithium metal
16,714,200,000kg / 62.6kg per 100kWh Tesla Model S battery = 267,000,000M Tesla Model S cars
Tesla could keep making EVs for another couple of lifetimes, if they were the only ones making them, but they're not. Don't worry, though. Market forces will make Lithium grossly unaffordable before it's all gone. When you go to buy a cell phone, the battery will cost as much as the entire device presently does.
That means 82.2% of all cars presently in use around the world (1.5 billion pasenger vehicles) will not be powered by Lithium-anything. Battery powered airplanes and helicopters? Fuhgeddaboudit. Ain't happenin', Cap'n. Battery powered cities? What a crock. That will leave zero kilograms of Lithium metal for cell phones, laptops, and cordless power tools. Cordless Lead-acid power tools? Lead-acid powered cell phones? The Nickel will also be gone, so NiMH and NiCad won't be available, either. Good luck, future laptop and cell phone users. You're going to need it.
The Japanese pursuing Hydrogen fuel cell vehicles doesn't look quite so stupid now, does it?
I've met vanishingly few Japanese people who couldn't do basic math.
Who here wants to bet that the Japanese car makers, like Toyota, figured out that there wouldn't be enough Lithium to actually replace combustion engines?
What are the odds that all of them are tinkering with "fool cells", as Elon Musk called them, because none of them can do math?
I'm aware that math sucks (which is why I became a programmer instead), but by the time we graduated from grammar school we knew enough math to figure out that this was never going to work. None of us were likely curious enough to know this would be a problem, but that's why we pay the big bucks to people with "PhD" behind their names. As I've said many times before, education only works when you choose to use it. Some of us are more persistent in our attempts to ignore materials reality than others, but reality doesn't care.
I don't find this depressing at all, because it means we can finally pursue solutions that might actually work at the scale required, none of which involve the use of electro-chemical batteries. I have no actual idea why so many people are pursuing this fool's errand, but it's probably because their ideology and therefore core identity are tied to it in some way. I don't have an ideological dog in this fight, because I don't care what the solution is or looks like. So long as it's an actual factual solution that doesn't mandate absurdities that utterly ignore materials reality, I'm good with whatever we come up with. So long as we continue to have quality food / homes / cars / power / education / health care / etc, it makes very little difference. I tend to temper optimism / futurism with realism and a trip down memory lane to look at how long it took technology to solve energy and technology problems in the past (simpler problems with simpler solutions, yet the problems were solved over time). I remain open to the possibility of new technologies revolutionizing energy usage and economy, but I've seen nothing to date that makes me think it's a replacement for hydrocarbon fuels.
Offline
I am in Crete on holiday at present. It has given me chance to catch up on some books that I have wanted to read for a while. I am about halfway through Robert Zubrin's 'The Case for Nukes'. Zubrin makes the point that if it were possible to build light water reactors in the same time frame as they were completed until the early 1970s (3-5 years), 1000MWe units would today cost $700 million and would generate power 24/7 at a cost of $0.02/kWh. This is cheaper than long amortised hydroelectric power. The difference is that NPPs can be built almost anywhere. We would be living in a more prosperous world if nuclear power had been permitted to fulfill its potential. In reality, nuclear powerplant construction routinely takes up to 16 years and costs are inflated around 10x what they would be in a sensible world. Zubrin estimates that capital cost is proportional to the square of build time. Cost increases are due to regulatory ratcheting intended to make the industry unproffitable. They have done very little to enhance safety.
Looked at in this context, grid scale battery systems are a solution looking for a problem. We would not need them in a grid dominated by LWRs, because nuclear reactors do not drop off load when the sun goes down or wind speed drops. If one plant trips due to an internal fault, a grid containing a lot of LWRs can naturally pick up excess load. We do not need any fundamentally new technologies to build an electric grid that will supply every human being with abundant electricity. Conventional LWRs are fully capable of doing that job. The changes that we need are political. It is a waste of time searching for technical solutions to political problems that never made sense in the first place.
Below is a link to the 2015 Quadrennial energy review, produced by the US department of energy.
https://www.energy.gov/quadrennial-tech … eview-2015
Go to Section 10, Table 10.4 for a summary of materials inputs into several different types of powerplant in ton/TWh. Here is the tally for pressurised water reactors, per TWh: 760t concrete / cement; 3t copper; 0t glass; 160t steel; 0t aluminium.
The US uses 11TWh of electric energy per day. To meet this need using PWRs, would require some 480GW of nuclear capacity containing about 15 million tonnes of steel in total. But these powerplants will last at least 50 years. So in reality, we need to replace perhaps 10 units per year, amounting to 300,000te of steel. That is about 0.015% of global steel production. Materials pose no limitation on expansion of nuclear power.
Last edited by Calliban (2023-07-06 15:06:41)
"Plan and prepare for every possibility, and you will never act. It is nobler to have courage as we stumble into half the things we fear than to analyse every possible obstacle and begin nothing. Great things are achieved by embracing great dangers."
Offline
Calliban,
I don't think any of these people are even slightly interested in practical solutions to their energy conundrums. Nuclear power is the most obvious practical solution that requires no new technology development, only construction, and no material resource limits will be encountered. We could cease Uranium mining entirely, reprocess all of our existing fuel, and we have enough to last 1 to 3 centuries here in the US if LWRs provided 100% of the electricity. The most obvious solution is not an option for them, because the people who think batteries and wind turbines and photovoltaics are the only possible solution are both too ignorant to know what they're asking for. While they continue to tinker with their electronics toys, we're burning through the rest of the coal / oil / gas for sake of satisfying ideology.
I just laid out, using basic multiplication and division, exactly how many Tesla Model S vehicles we can theoretically make using the entire known global reserves of Lithium extracted by existing methods, irrespective of cost. After we do that, 100% of the Lithium that comes from land-based sources is exhausted, so then it has to come from seawater or unknown reserves. 82% of the existing fleet of passenger cars will still be powered by something besides Lithium-anything if we're intent on depleting the land-based reserves but fail to make seawater extraction economical. That's how little Lithium there is on land. If we can figure out how to economically mine Lithium from seawater, there's enough Lithium for multiple generations of passenger cars. Obtaining 62.6kg of Lithium by filtering it out of seawater, means processing 363,080 metric tons of seawater (180 parts per billion average Lithium concentration in seawater), per additional 100kWh Lithium-ion battery required. I've no idea where all the Copper and other expensive metals will come from, but Lithium extraction from seawater is the first major technological hurdle to clear to do anything but come up absurdly short.
It seems to me that nobody really thought any of this through. Scientists never ask themselves why they're doing something. It's fun / interesting / exciting, so they do it. Consequences are something someone else has to deal with. Knowing that sufficient Copper and Lithium reserves existed was a really good place to start if we're intent on Lithium batteries. I assume that everyone involved thought this was a reasonable plan, so they should've thought about this. I certainly have.
Proving out recyclability of the batteries and other materials was where we had to end up. Anything short of that was an extravagant waste of time and money. No serious effort has been devoted to either problem. Now reality is catching up with this unworkable plan. We're running short of all metals, but Copper and Lithium remain the most problematic. Mining of both metals is not increasing at anything near the rate required to maintain EV production for more than a decade or so. Even if we can get the Lithium from seawater, the Copper requirement is impossible unless we start mining somewhere besides Earth. There's nowhere near enough Copper for all the electronic gizmos these people want to have. That makes the entire plan highly questionable, regardless of technological possibilities. A PhD in electrical or chemical engineering should come to an acceptance of material resource limits. We freely accept that the Gold supply is strictly limited, but not Lithium and Copper. It's bizarre, to say the least.
Offline
Zubrin makes the point that if it were possible to build light water reactors in the same time frame as they were completed until the early 1970s (3-5 years), 1000MWe units would today cost $700 million and would generate power 24/7 at a cost of $0.02/kWh. This is cheaper than long amortised hydroelectric power. The difference is that NPPs can be built almost anywhere.
If it were possible, why haven't any countries done it? There are countries with largely nuclear powered grids, e.g. France and South Korea, but they don't get anything like the costs Zubrin seems to think they should get. I do not find it credible that there is some kind of anti-nuclear conspiracy no country will defect from.
Use what is abundant and build to last
Offline
Calliban, it appears there is some interest in nuclear power .... there are topics better suited.
This topic was set up (as far as I can tell) to focus upon Sodium-Sulfur Batteries.
I'd like to see the discussion about nuclear fission power continue full force in an appropriate topic.
(th)
Offline
Zubrin makes the point that if it were possible to build light water reactors in the same time frame as they were completed until the early 1970s (3-5 years), 1000MWe units would today cost $700 million and would generate power 24/7 at a cost of $0.02/kWh. This is cheaper than long amortised hydroelectric power. The difference is that NPPs can be built almost anywhere.
If it were possible, why haven't any countries done it? There are countries with largely nuclear powered grids, e.g. France and South Korea, but they don't get anything like the costs Zubrin seems to think they should get. I do not find it credible that there is some kind of anti-nuclear conspiracy no country will defect from.
South Korea and China have both built plants with capital cost circa $2000/kWe in 4-5 year timeframe in recent years. These have been Gen 3 designs with passive safety features. The French reliably achieved these build costs until the 1990s. Everything went to pot when they threw their entire nuclear build programme behind the EPR, which has proven to be very difficult to build. The US used to be able to build LWRs in 5 years or less, but seems to have lost this capability since the 1970s. In the UK, the Hinkley C EPRs will cost somewhere in the region of £8000/kWe when the finally come online in 2028. That is 4-8× the cost of PWRs completed in France and the US as recently as the 1990s and 4× the cost achieved for advanced reactors in South Korea and China today. The cost of building NPPs in western countries has nothing to do with lack of technology. It is political. A lot of people think that nuclear power isn't safe unless its economics are driven into the ground and build times stretched into decades. But none of it is neccesary. Other countries can and do build powerplants far more rapidly and cheaply.
Calliban, it appears there is some interest in nuclear power .... there are topics better suited.
This topic was set up (as far as I can tell) to focus upon Sodium-Sulfur Batteries.
I'd like to see the discussion about nuclear fission power continue full force in an appropriate topic.
(th)
I appreciate that. But my point is that sodium-sulphur batteries are a poor technological fix for an artificial problem. Batteries are niche solutions that are suitable for storage of small quantities of energy in high value applications. Enough analysis has been done now to know that they cannot function as alternative power sources for the grid or for transportation. We could never build enough of them to be useful in those applications.
Last edited by Calliban (2023-07-08 15:20:34)
"Plan and prepare for every possibility, and you will never act. It is nobler to have courage as we stumble into half the things we fear than to analyse every possible obstacle and begin nothing. Great things are achieved by embracing great dangers."
Offline
Northvolt develops new sodium-ion battery
Northvolt says the cell has been validated for an energy density of over 160 watt-hours per kilogram at the company’s R&D and industrialisation campus, Northvolt Labs, in Västerås.
The company says the validated cell is produced with minerals such as iron and sodium that are abundant on global markets, making it purportedly more sustainable than conventional nickel, manganese and cobalt (NMC) or iron phosphate (LFP) chemistries.
It is based on a hard carbon anode and a Prussian White-based cathode, and does not contain lithium, nickel, cobalt and graphite.
Offline