Sodium Ion Highlights
An important tidbit from the Battery 2030+ Excellence Seminar
Battery 2030+ consists of a core group of 23 organizations from 14 countries who bring together the most important stakeholders in battery research to help Europe meet future environmental goals established by the United Nations. The organization has an overall vision of helping Europe enable long-term leadership in existing and emerging markets.
Recently, a Battery 2030+ Excellence seminar hosted various speakers who presented on sodium ion technology and the developing market.
Sodium ion chemistry has been under development for years, but recently it was made public by CATL in July of this year when the Company announced that the technology could be cheaper than LFP and provide equivalent performance to existing lithium ion batteries. The lithium ion battery supply chain has experienced significant squeezes during the second of half of 2021, so this announcement comes at a critical juncture given that cathodes and solid state battery anodes require lithium. We can foresee even more demand from the planned expansion of US and European electric vehicle manufacturers, and an alternative technology such as Na-ion will be needed to balance the market.
The speakers at the conference spoke about the science of Na-ion and its potential market. A snapshot of agenda is below.
Highlights
The first speaker was professor Kristina Edstrom who introduced Battery 2030+ and talked about the institution’s vision and goals for enabling Europe to grow its presence in existing and emerging markets.
The second speaker, Prof Montserrat Casas from CiCenergigune in Spain (14:34 mark) talked about the technical specifics around Na-ion materials and the potential for the chemistry as a drop-in replacement to Li-ion. She also shared a nice slide on the most promising active material chemistries for consideration and elaborated on the potential cost reduction versus lithium ion batteries.
She goes into many more technical details that would be helpful for researchers of all types!
The third speaker, Johan Soderbom, of Innoenergy (40:00 mark) spoke about the potential Na-ion market, and particularly stated that the growing market is the result of the combination of technology/cost breakthroughs, consumer acceptance, and a favorable regulatory environment.
Finally, the panel discussion (55:00 mark) was a particularly interesting general conversation around the potential of Na-ion. Dr. Stephen OuYang, the CTO of CATL made a bold prediction on the commercialization of the technology. At around the 1:25 mark the host asked him a specific question about when Na-ion would be ready.
His response. Two years for both electric vehicle and energy storage applications.
The market is moving fast, and this bit of information is ground-breaking. If you thought a lot happened in 2021, imagine what is in the pipeline for the next couple of years.
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