4 ms·

> I did the math on those liquid-metal batteries a while back, and figured out that getting an adequate amount of grid storage would take about a thousand years

> I did the math on those liquid-metal batteries a while back, and figured out that getting an adequate amount of grid storage would take about a thousand years of antimony production. Could you elaborate on that? Do you mean at current rates of production? You do realize that supply has no incentive to exceed demand, correct? If demand increases rapidly, there will be a huge incentive to increase production. As far as I know, antimony isn't rare and there's no reason why we could produce significantly more and match demand for these types of batteries.

DennisP 14y ago
Haven't been able to find it...I think it may have actually been 1000 years magnesium, 10,000 antimony, but I'd have to figure it again to be sure. I calculated by assuming each metal was about a third of full-load weight of a shipping container, taking the storage capacity they claimed per container-size battery, and using Tom Murphy's estimates of how much storage we'd need. I did assume current production rates. However, increasing the mining output by a factor of hundreds wouldn't necessarily be trivial. For example, wikipedia reports that China has annual antimony production of 120K tonnes, which is 89% of the world's total. The largest deposit is only 2.1 million tonnes. Wiki also mentions that "antimony was identified as one of 12 critical raw materials for the EU in a report published in 2011, primarily due to the lack of supply outside China." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antimony#Top_producers_and_production_volumes http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antimony#Top_producers_and_prod...
- MikeCapone 14y ago
  I don't have answers, but I know that unless an element is very rare in the Earth's crust, price signals are usually pretty good at making supply rise very rapidly. I was reading about the beginning of the nuclear age and how everybody thought that uranium would be in very short supply, but it turned out that once it becomes a valuable commodity, lots of cash goes into exploration and many new significant deposits are found. If there's no incentive, of course there's no point in even looking for the stuff. I know that's fuzzy, but I would guess that professor Sadoway did what he said that he did, which is to pick an element that is common and that should be cheap. I'm also not sure quite how many of these types of batteries we'd need. There are other methods of storage (ie. hydro power in places like Quebec, Norway, etc, which can act as giant regional batteries) and we can make the grid much smarter about demand-response and things like that. The solution won't be a single silver bullet, but a combination of things, including efficiency (lots of low-hanging fruits there, despite all the progress we've made -- the Rocky Mountain Institute has a lot of good stuff about this).
  - DennisP 14y ago
    That's a good point, but those "price signals" could still result in the element being very expensive for quite a while, if we have to scale up production by two or three orders of magnitude. Hydro power is good as far as it goes, but there's only so much you can build: http://physics.ucsd.edu/do-the-math/2011/11/pump-up-the-storage/ http://physics.ucsd.edu/do-the-math/2011/11/pump-up-the-stor... But that's a good point on uranium. In fact, in Japan right now they're extracting uranium from seawater at about double the current cost of mined uranium. There's enough uranium in seawater to last us millions of years, especially if we went with fast reactors (which can burn U238, a hundred times more common than U235). That seems like a pretty good silver bullet to me.
    - MikeCapone 14y ago
      > That's a good point, but those "price signals" could still result in the element being very expensive for quite a while, if we have to scale up production by two or three orders of magnitude. I'm not saying new supply will come online instantaneously, but it could be faster than most of us expect if price spikes enough. But in any case, grid-scale liquid-metal batteries would no doubt roll out like most other technologies, which is progressively enough to let supply mostly catch up. In the same way that cell phones or computers didn't go from zero to millions in a day, this will probably be done over many years.

DennisP 14y ago

Haven't been able to find it...I think it may have actually been 1000 years magnesium, 10,000 antimony, but I'd have to figure it again to be sure. I calculated by assuming each metal was about a third of full-load weight of a shipping container, taking the storage capacity they claimed per container-size battery, and using Tom Murphy's estimates of how much storage we'd need. I did assume current production rates. However, increasing the mining output by a factor of hundreds wouldn't necessarily be trivial. For example, wikipedia reports that China has annual antimony production of 120K tonnes, which is 89% of the world's total. The largest deposit is only 2.1 million tonnes. Wiki also mentions that "antimony was identified as one of 12 critical raw materials for the EU in a report published in 2011, primarily due to the lack of supply outside China." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antimony#Top_producers_and_production_volumes http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antimony#Top_producers_and_prod...

MikeCapone 14y ago
I don't have answers, but I know that unless an element is very rare in the Earth's crust, price signals are usually pretty good at making supply rise very rapidly. I was reading about the beginning of the nuclear age and how everybody thought that uranium would be in very short supply, but it turned out that once it becomes a valuable commodity, lots of cash goes into exploration and many new significant deposits are found. If there's no incentive, of course there's no point in even looking for the stuff. I know that's fuzzy, but I would guess that professor Sadoway did what he said that he did, which is to pick an element that is common and that should be cheap. I'm also not sure quite how many of these types of batteries we'd need. There are other methods of storage (ie. hydro power in places like Quebec, Norway, etc, which can act as giant regional batteries) and we can make the grid much smarter about demand-response and things like that. The solution won't be a single silver bullet, but a combination of things, including efficiency (lots of low-hanging fruits there, despite all the progress we've made -- the Rocky Mountain Institute has a lot of good stuff about this).
- DennisP 14y ago
  That's a good point, but those "price signals" could still result in the element being very expensive for quite a while, if we have to scale up production by two or three orders of magnitude. Hydro power is good as far as it goes, but there's only so much you can build: http://physics.ucsd.edu/do-the-math/2011/11/pump-up-the-storage/ http://physics.ucsd.edu/do-the-math/2011/11/pump-up-the-stor... But that's a good point on uranium. In fact, in Japan right now they're extracting uranium from seawater at about double the current cost of mined uranium. There's enough uranium in seawater to last us millions of years, especially if we went with fast reactors (which can burn U238, a hundred times more common than U235). That seems like a pretty good silver bullet to me.
  - MikeCapone 14y ago
    > That's a good point, but those "price signals" could still result in the element being very expensive for quite a while, if we have to scale up production by two or three orders of magnitude. I'm not saying new supply will come online instantaneously, but it could be faster than most of us expect if price spikes enough. But in any case, grid-scale liquid-metal batteries would no doubt roll out like most other technologies, which is progressively enough to let supply mostly catch up. In the same way that cell phones or computers didn't go from zero to millions in a day, this will probably be done over many years.