7 ms·

The Life Of Lithium

120 points by bertman 2y ago

yogurtboy 2y ago
Seems like an excellent history. Can't stop thinking of the Simpson's World Without Zinc: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jWpPrWHBHcQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jWpPrWHBHcQ
h0l0cube 2y ago
An interesting and well balanced article, but for this (emphasis added): > Anyone who imagines a future of electric passenger planes, long-duration grid storage and air taxis is conjuring a dream founded on lithium. Grid storage doesn’t rely so much on density. Sodium-ion batteries would do (as well as the other numerous storage technologies that don’t rely on lithium)
- drekipus 2y ago
  I've always wanted to look into this but the information is not readily available. I ask my father in law (who works in the energy grid industry) and he just says "if salt batteries work and are cheaper we'd be using them" Well they appear to work, and appear to be cheaper, so why aren't we using them?
  - epistasis 2y ago
    CATL is starting to scale up production, but they haven't been explored much until now. The thought is that they might be similar enough to lithium batteries that they could benefit from much of the same industrial learning. But only time will tell. If lithium prices spike again, it will provide an opening for replacements. Until then, there's little pressure to move off the main path for batteries that can be used in a wider range of applications. Lithium ion's density might not be needed for grid storage, but it also doesn't pose any problems, as you point out.
    - h0l0cube 2y ago
      The first 'large scale' sodium ion grid storage went online in May, so it might take some time for it to trickle down. But I think the economics of it already work today. https://www.pv-magazine.com/2024/05/15/china-switches-on-first-large-scale-sodium-ion-battery/ https://www.pv-magazine.com/2024/05/15/china-switches-on-fir...
- jillesvangurp 2y ago
  Exactly. I wouldn't call this article very balanced. It actually is perpetuating a lot of myths about lithium ion batteries popular with the anti renewables pro fossil fuel crowds. It opens emphasizing the scarcity of lithium. It's actually one of the more common elements on this planet. There is no shortage. We're not going to run out. It's literally everywhere and we've barely scratched the surface looking for rich deposits of it. There are indeed several viable ways to store energy that don't involve using lithium at all. Flammability is of course called out as well. Never mind that most car and truck fires are good old ICE vehicles. Battery electric fires are so rare that most fire men will never deal with one in their careers. Very much unlike ICE car fires which they deal with on a daily basis. And never mind that there are lots of very safe lithium ion batteries now. LFP is pretty safe for example. Calling out long duration storage is another red flag. How much of that is needed? In giga watt hours please. Nobody ever bothers to qualify that. It's just asserted that we need stupendous amounts of it and insinuated that we'd need to bankrupt the planet getting it. As soon as you put numbers on it, it turns into a simple logistics problem. Oh we need X amount of batteries and it's going to cost Y amount of dollars. And of course while people seem to assume that we need stupendous amounts of it we are actually witnessing the effects that very little amounts of short term storage are having already on the electricity markets. It's wiping out coal and gas plants as a viable way to generate power economically. Short term energy storage is a lot cheaper and apparently removing all these plants is not causing any issues as we have still got way more base load than we need. That's another thing that is rarely qualified with a number. A lot of coal and gas plants are facing early closures because of batteries. Modern gas plants designed to run for many decades that came online only recently are already being replaced by short term battery storage. It's simply cheaper and gas is expensive. With relatively predictable and stable daily cycles of peaks and dips in renewable energy production, short term storage is covering most of what we need. Batteries are now being produced at a rate measured in TWH per year. Most of those batteries are kept at a high charge rate most of the time. That's a huge amount of untapped potential energy. It's cumulatively going to amount to hundreds of twh of stored energy that we have just sitting there in batteries designed for short term storage distributed all over the place. That's an enormous buffer of energy expanding every year. Only a small fraction of that is cycled on a daily basis.
  - 2y ago
- adrianN 2y ago
  Grid storage needn’t rely on batteries at all. We could store energy as hydrogen for example. AFAIK that’s the most proven way for storing months worth of energy.
  - LeonM 2y ago
    I haven't familiarised myself with the latest in hydrogen development, but isn't the round trip efficiency absolutely horrible? Not to mention boil off and leakage (afaik no material exists that can store hydrogen without leaking). Hydrogen as energy storage would be amazing, but as far as I am aware it is still far from practical at this point.
    - adrianN 2y ago
      Efficiency only matters in so far as it affects cost per MWh. It is plausible (from what I heard at least) that hydrogen is cheaper at the required scale than batteries. After all we will likely have incredible oversupply during long summer days where electricity is essentially free. Scaling battery manufacturing to store enough power for a whole winter is difficult. In any case I think storage is something where „let the market figure it out“ is a reasonable strategy.
    - beAbU 2y ago
      Round-trip efficiency is not the only variable at play here. Storage plant longevity, self-discharge over very long periods of time, cost of installation and maintenance, cost to the environment to source the raw materials etc also play a big role. Round trip efficiency might be way less than any other method of storage, but it might win out on all the other points. I don't know the answer though - just saying it's important in discussions like these to not get hung up on single metrics. We're not playing trump cards.
  - h0l0cube 2y ago
    Never meant to imply that, though hydrogen is just a different manner of chemical storage and wildly inefficient. Pumped hydro (gravity storage) is also doing its part, but not really growing in the exponential manner as battery cells[0]. I'd be curious to know if there's any non-'battery' storage technologies that are on a similar growth curve. [0] https://www.statista.com/statistics/1304113/pumped-storage-hydropower-capacity-worldwide/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/1304113/pumped-storage-h...
- practicemaths 2y ago
  What about second-life use though for lithium batteries in grid storage? We're building a lot of EVs right now. Pretty much any battery has hard to process material in it. Packs for vehicles last between 5-15 years, but there's still a lot of energy storage capacity left. You reduce the amount of processing & mining needed AND make EVs more affordable if you can extend the life of the battery pack beyond just it's automotive application by giving it another life in grid storage.
  - VBprogrammer 2y ago
    I can't see how this works at scale personally. You'd at minimum need standards in cell construction so that you can plug them into some kind of rack. Battery packs as standard come in too many different formats, voltages and cell chemistries etc.
    - trainsarebetter 2y ago
      Not really. Most pack are 96s Chemistry wise the only real major difference for charge profiles is lfp vs standard li-ion. Pretty much every pack spits cell data out over can, and contains hv contactors. Projects like https://github.com/dalathegreat/Battery-Emulator https://github.com/dalathegreat/Battery-Emulator Standardize different pack coms for HV solar inverters. The big hurdle here is insurance. It’s a regulatory nightmare, nobody wants to spend the money to provide the data that these packs are safe for grid tie. Even though they have the data for vehicle safety…
      - VBprogrammer 2y ago
        Taking the Hyundai Ionic 5 as an example you have 3 capacities 58.2kwh, 72.6kwh and 77.4kwh with 114s2p, 180s2p, 192s2p. These have nominal voltages of 523v, 653v and 697v respectively. Even for the same car it's not trivial to use these all in the same system. It might even make most sense to couple them on the AC side but that would mean a lot of small expensive inverters.
        2y ago
chasil 2y ago
This article omits one interesting fact about lithium. '7 Up was created by Charles Leiper Grigg, who launched his St. Louis–based company The Howdy Corporation in 1920. Grigg came up with the formula for a lemon-lime soft drink in 1929. The product, originally named "Bib-Label Lithiated Lemon-Lime Soda", was launched two weeks before the Wall Street Crash of 1929. It contained lithium citrate, a mood-stabilizing drug, until 1948.' https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/7_Up https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/7_Up
- NikkiA 2y ago
  Note that the source for that is a snopes article that merely marks the status 'legend' without any true/false determination.
  - chasil 2y ago
    McGill University in Montreal appears to quote the wiki verbatim here: https://www.mcgill.ca/oss/article/did-you-know-history/7-was-originally-antidepressant https://www.mcgill.ca/oss/article/did-you-know-history/7-was... Gizmodo also has an article on this, but without sources: https://gizmodo.com/7-up-used-to-contain-lithium-1634862072 https://gizmodo.com/7-up-used-to-contain-lithium-1634862072 This page, linked from Gizmodo, has a picture of what appears to be an antique label: https://www.neatorama.com/2012/10/28/What-is-the-7-in-7UP/ https://www.neatorama.com/2012/10/28/What-is-the-7-in-7UP/
- jadbox 2y ago
  Wild. So 7' Up started with a mood drug and so did Coca Cola (1885) https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/cocaine-coca-cola/ https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/cocaine-coca-cola/
  - Tagbert 2y ago
    Most soft drinks of the day started off as health tonics. Health tonics were popular in the late 19th and early 20th century and were often made by pharmacists and sold in their shops. That is why we had "soda fountains" in drug stores for much of the 20th century where you could go and have a drink that originally claimed a health benefit but eventually became just a treat.

120 points by bertman 2y ago

Seems like an excellent history. Can't stop thinking of the Simpson's World Without Zinc: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jWpPrWHBHcQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jWpPrWHBHcQ

h0l0cube 2y ago

An interesting and well balanced article, but for this (emphasis added): > Anyone who imagines a future of electric passenger planes, long-duration grid storage and air taxis is conjuring a dream founded on lithium. Grid storage doesn’t rely so much on density. Sodium-ion batteries would do (as well as the other numerous storage technologies that don’t rely on lithium)

drekipus 2y ago
I've always wanted to look into this but the information is not readily available. I ask my father in law (who works in the energy grid industry) and he just says "if salt batteries work and are cheaper we'd be using them" Well they appear to work, and appear to be cheaper, so why aren't we using them?
- epistasis 2y ago
  CATL is starting to scale up production, but they haven't been explored much until now. The thought is that they might be similar enough to lithium batteries that they could benefit from much of the same industrial learning. But only time will tell. If lithium prices spike again, it will provide an opening for replacements. Until then, there's little pressure to move off the main path for batteries that can be used in a wider range of applications. Lithium ion's density might not be needed for grid storage, but it also doesn't pose any problems, as you point out.
  - h0l0cube 2y ago
    The first 'large scale' sodium ion grid storage went online in May, so it might take some time for it to trickle down. But I think the economics of it already work today. https://www.pv-magazine.com/2024/05/15/china-switches-on-first-large-scale-sodium-ion-battery/ https://www.pv-magazine.com/2024/05/15/china-switches-on-fir...
jillesvangurp 2y ago
Exactly. I wouldn't call this article very balanced. It actually is perpetuating a lot of myths about lithium ion batteries popular with the anti renewables pro fossil fuel crowds. It opens emphasizing the scarcity of lithium. It's actually one of the more common elements on this planet. There is no shortage. We're not going to run out. It's literally everywhere and we've barely scratched the surface looking for rich deposits of it. There are indeed several viable ways to store energy that don't involve using lithium at all. Flammability is of course called out as well. Never mind that most car and truck fires are good old ICE vehicles. Battery electric fires are so rare that most fire men will never deal with one in their careers. Very much unlike ICE car fires which they deal with on a daily basis. And never mind that there are lots of very safe lithium ion batteries now. LFP is pretty safe for example. Calling out long duration storage is another red flag. How much of that is needed? In giga watt hours please. Nobody ever bothers to qualify that. It's just asserted that we need stupendous amounts of it and insinuated that we'd need to bankrupt the planet getting it. As soon as you put numbers on it, it turns into a simple logistics problem. Oh we need X amount of batteries and it's going to cost Y amount of dollars. And of course while people seem to assume that we need stupendous amounts of it we are actually witnessing the effects that very little amounts of short term storage are having already on the electricity markets. It's wiping out coal and gas plants as a viable way to generate power economically. Short term energy storage is a lot cheaper and apparently removing all these plants is not causing any issues as we have still got way more base load than we need. That's another thing that is rarely qualified with a number. A lot of coal and gas plants are facing early closures because of batteries. Modern gas plants designed to run for many decades that came online only recently are already being replaced by short term battery storage. It's simply cheaper and gas is expensive. With relatively predictable and stable daily cycles of peaks and dips in renewable energy production, short term storage is covering most of what we need. Batteries are now being produced at a rate measured in TWH per year. Most of those batteries are kept at a high charge rate most of the time. That's a huge amount of untapped potential energy. It's cumulatively going to amount to hundreds of twh of stored energy that we have just sitting there in batteries designed for short term storage distributed all over the place. That's an enormous buffer of energy expanding every year. Only a small fraction of that is cycled on a daily basis.
- 2y ago
adrianN 2y ago
Grid storage needn’t rely on batteries at all. We could store energy as hydrogen for example. AFAIK that’s the most proven way for storing months worth of energy.
- LeonM 2y ago
  I haven't familiarised myself with the latest in hydrogen development, but isn't the round trip efficiency absolutely horrible? Not to mention boil off and leakage (afaik no material exists that can store hydrogen without leaking). Hydrogen as energy storage would be amazing, but as far as I am aware it is still far from practical at this point.
  - adrianN 2y ago
    Efficiency only matters in so far as it affects cost per MWh. It is plausible (from what I heard at least) that hydrogen is cheaper at the required scale than batteries. After all we will likely have incredible oversupply during long summer days where electricity is essentially free. Scaling battery manufacturing to store enough power for a whole winter is difficult. In any case I think storage is something where „let the market figure it out“ is a reasonable strategy.
  - beAbU 2y ago
    Round-trip efficiency is not the only variable at play here. Storage plant longevity, self-discharge over very long periods of time, cost of installation and maintenance, cost to the environment to source the raw materials etc also play a big role. Round trip efficiency might be way less than any other method of storage, but it might win out on all the other points. I don't know the answer though - just saying it's important in discussions like these to not get hung up on single metrics. We're not playing trump cards.
- h0l0cube 2y ago
  Never meant to imply that, though hydrogen is just a different manner of chemical storage and wildly inefficient. Pumped hydro (gravity storage) is also doing its part, but not really growing in the exponential manner as battery cells[0]. I'd be curious to know if there's any non-'battery' storage technologies that are on a similar growth curve. [0] https://www.statista.com/statistics/1304113/pumped-storage-hydropower-capacity-worldwide/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/1304113/pumped-storage-h...
practicemaths 2y ago
What about second-life use though for lithium batteries in grid storage? We're building a lot of EVs right now. Pretty much any battery has hard to process material in it. Packs for vehicles last between 5-15 years, but there's still a lot of energy storage capacity left. You reduce the amount of processing & mining needed AND make EVs more affordable if you can extend the life of the battery pack beyond just it's automotive application by giving it another life in grid storage.
- VBprogrammer 2y ago
  I can't see how this works at scale personally. You'd at minimum need standards in cell construction so that you can plug them into some kind of rack. Battery packs as standard come in too many different formats, voltages and cell chemistries etc.
  - trainsarebetter 2y ago
    Not really. Most pack are 96s Chemistry wise the only real major difference for charge profiles is lfp vs standard li-ion. Pretty much every pack spits cell data out over can, and contains hv contactors. Projects like https://github.com/dalathegreat/Battery-Emulator https://github.com/dalathegreat/Battery-Emulator Standardize different pack coms for HV solar inverters. The big hurdle here is insurance. It’s a regulatory nightmare, nobody wants to spend the money to provide the data that these packs are safe for grid tie. Even though they have the data for vehicle safety…
    - VBprogrammer 2y ago
      Taking the Hyundai Ionic 5 as an example you have 3 capacities 58.2kwh, 72.6kwh and 77.4kwh with 114s2p, 180s2p, 192s2p. These have nominal voltages of 523v, 653v and 697v respectively. Even for the same car it's not trivial to use these all in the same system. It might even make most sense to couple them on the AC side but that would mean a lot of small expensive inverters.
      - 2y ago

chasil 2y ago

This article omits one interesting fact about lithium. '7 Up was created by Charles Leiper Grigg, who launched his St. Louis–based company The Howdy Corporation in 1920. Grigg came up with the formula for a lemon-lime soft drink in 1929. The product, originally named "Bib-Label Lithiated Lemon-Lime Soda", was launched two weeks before the Wall Street Crash of 1929. It contained lithium citrate, a mood-stabilizing drug, until 1948.' https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/7_Up https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/7_Up

NikkiA 2y ago
Note that the source for that is a snopes article that merely marks the status 'legend' without any true/false determination.
- chasil 2y ago
  McGill University in Montreal appears to quote the wiki verbatim here: https://www.mcgill.ca/oss/article/did-you-know-history/7-was-originally-antidepressant https://www.mcgill.ca/oss/article/did-you-know-history/7-was... Gizmodo also has an article on this, but without sources: https://gizmodo.com/7-up-used-to-contain-lithium-1634862072 https://gizmodo.com/7-up-used-to-contain-lithium-1634862072 This page, linked from Gizmodo, has a picture of what appears to be an antique label: https://www.neatorama.com/2012/10/28/What-is-the-7-in-7UP/ https://www.neatorama.com/2012/10/28/What-is-the-7-in-7UP/
jadbox 2y ago
Wild. So 7' Up started with a mood drug and so did Coca Cola (1885) https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/cocaine-coca-cola/ https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/cocaine-coca-cola/
- Tagbert 2y ago
  Most soft drinks of the day started off as health tonics. Health tonics were popular in the late 19th and early 20th century and were often made by pharmacists and sold in their shops. That is why we had "soda fountains" in drug stores for much of the 20th century where you could go and have a drink that originally claimed a health benefit but eventually became just a treat.