Why Lithium Is Dangerous But PERFECT For Batteries

Our chemistry book has a diagram of a battery in the electrochemistry chapter, and I discuss that battery for a bit before explaining to my students that the basics of ACME (anode, cathode, metallic path, electrolyte) hold for every battery but that the engineering of modern lithium-ion batteries is far different from the diagram in the book.

This video - again leaning into the algorithm-rewarded longer and longer format - explains some battery basics involving the activity series, the history of the development of the lithium-ion battery, and the methods of fiery failure when the battery overheats.

This is, as Dr Derek says, a technology that has allowed our modern, battery-dependent world.

High demand and prices for lithium send mines into overdrive

Source - NPR article

We need lithium.

We didn't used to need nearly as much lithium as we do now, and we're going to need way more lithium going forward because lithium is used to make pretty much every high tech battery - like those in electric vehicles. Those batteries need a whole lot of lithium.

I've posted about the one lithium mine in the United States and how it's running into conflicts with environmentalists over the destruction of habitat for Tiehm's buckwheat.

Today's article from NPR - which also has a 7-minute audio story in case you had some students who would be helped by reading along - shows some photos from the aforementioned Silver Peak mine in Nevada and explores other possible sources of lithium including seawater and geothermal power plant brine.

Electric Vehicles' Battery Problem

"To replace the UK (not the UK) 31.5 million gasoline cars will require 236,000 tons of lithium carbonate." ~ quote from about 1:00 in the above video.

That would - again, according to the video - require all the world's output for 9 months.

And that metal comes from some countries with awful human rights records and workers' protections.

Then, if we mine the US's lithium, we have to use up water and leach arsenic into the water supply of Nevada...and dig into land holy to Native Americans...and destroy habitat for endangered animals.

It's the frickin' Kobayashi Maru, man.

Then we have to look at the cobalt mining.

To quote a magnet I got from the University of Utah, "what's your is mined," but clearly what's mined is bad for the planet and people.

America's electric cars need lithium so badly it may wipe out this species

Source - Center for Biological Diversity

The challenge of balancing conservation versus commerce is ages old and not getting any simpler.

Whether it was the desires of companies to harvest timber in the Pacific Northwest running into conservationists attempts to protect the spotted owl in the 1990s or the more modern concerns of lithium miners who see the Nevada desert as a 'gold' mine running afoul of lovers of Tiehm's buckwheat which, according to a cnn.com article, "grows on 10 acres in... Southwest Nevada... and... can grow nowhere else in the world", the concerns are infinitely more complicated than they first appear.

The environmental side of me says that we need lithium. We need it because that's one of the keys to shifting from internal combustion to electric vehicles.

But is it worth the extinction of a single species to accomplish that?

Man, it's not my place to say, but it's not as easy a question as it might at appears to be to some on either side of the question.

(Update: As of October, Tiehm's buckwheat looks to be headed toward the endangered species list and all the protections that involves at the urging of the Center for Biological Diversity.)

Millions of electric cars are coming. What happens to all the dead batteries?

Source - https://usgreentechnology.com/recycling-reusing-electric-car-batteries/

A few years back I remember reading an article comparing the initial energy deficit that a rechargeable made for a hybrid car like a Prius compared to a Hummer (a stereotypically environmentally unfriendly vehicle). 

I haven't been able to find that article which - from my admittedly distant memory - stated that a Prius would have to be driven for a year and a half before it made up the initial energy deficit from the purification of elements in its rechargeable battery allowed it to catch up to a Hummer which took less energy to source its components.

I have, however, found a couple of articles that address similar concerns around the battery problem with electric vehicles. Creating batteries - particularly modern, high performance batteries - requires sourcing easily oxidized elements such as lithium, purification that requires massive amounts of energy output. Those batteries, sadly, aren't eternal and eventually have to be replaced and recycled. 

And there's the rub. What to do with those batteries once they're spent?

• From Science.org "A Dead Battery Dilemma: with millions of electric vehicles set to hit the road, scientists are seeking better battery recycling methods"
• From Wired.com "Cars Are Going Electric. What Happens to the Used Batteries?"

The Future Of Energy Storage Beyond Lithium Ion

I've watched enough videos about renewable energy to know that one of the biggest issues with increasing our use of renewables isn't necessarily the actual energy production but rather the storage of the energy from times when it's produced to times when it's needed.

There's lithium ion storage batteries...3:15-4:05...

...flow batteries...4:10-7:50...

...pumped hydroelectric...8:15-8:40...

...energy vault (the most entertaining storage method if you ask me)...8:40-10:15...

...thermal storage...10:20-11:40...

...compressed air...11:50-12:00...

...cryogenic storage...12:00-12:15

Oh, and I absolutely love the joke at 1:28...energy storage methods all have 'serious potential'...

See, because stored energy is potential...it's funny.

Researchers build aluminum battery that can be charged in one minute

The aluminum-graphite battery being displayed in the video (and in the post) sounds a little too good to be true. It's flexible, safe even if drilled, rechargeable in minutes, made of environmentally safe materials, and theoretically cheap.

I assume somehow it'll be found to kill puppies every time your recharge it.

Something has to be wrong with a battery like that, right?

Small in size, big on power: New microbatteries a boost for electronics

Either the Borg are about to assimilate that yellow cube, or we've got a new type of battery on our hands.

The article - from the University of Illinois's news bureau - summarizes research published in the April 16, 2013 issue of the journal Nature Communications under the far more technical title "[h]igh-power lithium ion microbatteries from interdigitated three-dimensional bicontinuous nanoporous electrodes".

 To summarize (enough to whet your whistle)...

With currently available power sources, users have had to choose between power and energy. For applications that need a lot of power, like broadcasting a radio signal over a long distance, capacitors can release energy very quickly but can only store a small amount. For applications that need a lot of energy, like playing a radio for a long time, fuel cells and batteries can hold a lot of energy but release it or recharge slowly.

The new microbatteries offer both power and energy, and by tweaking the structure a bit, the researchers can tune them over a wide range on the power-versus-energy scale.

The batteries owe their high performance to their internal three-dimensional microstructure. Batteries have two key components: the anode (minus side) and cathode (plus side). Building on a novel fast-charging cathode design by materials science and engineering professor Paul Braun’s group, King and Pikul developed a matching anode and then developed a new way to integrate the two components at the microscale to make a complete battery with superior performance.

Maybe supercapicitors aren't the answer after all...