https://www.economist.com/leaders/2023/10/26/sodium-batteries-offer-an-alternative-to-tricky-lithium

 Skip to content

  * Menu
  * Weekly edition
  * The world in brief
  * Search

Log in

  * Opinion

      + Leaders
      + Letters to the editor
      + By Invitation
      + Current topics

          o Israel and Hamas
          o War in Ukraine
          o Climate change
          o Coronavirus
          o The Biden presidency
          o The world economy
          o The Economist explains
          o Artificial intelligence
  * Current topics

      + Israel and Hamas
      + War in Ukraine
      + Climate change
      + Coronavirus
      + The Biden presidency
      + The world economy
      + The Economist explains
      + Artificial intelligence
  * World

      + The world this week
      + China
      + United States
      + Europe
      + Britain
      + Middle East & Africa
      + Asia
      + The Americas
      + International
      + A-Z of international relations
      + A-Z of military terms
  * In depth

      + Science & technology
      + Graphic detail
      + Special reports
      + Technology Quarterly
      + The World Ahead
      + Briefing
      + Essay
      + Schools brief
  * Business & economics

      + Finance & economics
      + Business
      + Big Mac index
      + A-Z of economics
      + Economic & financial indicators
  * Culture & society

      + 1843 magazine
      + Culture
      + Obituary
      + The Economist reads
      + Christmas Specials
  * More

      + Podcasts
      + Newsletters
      + Films
      + The Economist app
      + Subscriber events
      + Online courses
      + Group subscriptions
      + The Economist live

Included in your subscription

  * Podcasts
  * Newsletters
  * Films
  * Live virtual events
  * The Economist app

  * My Economist
  * Saved stories
  * Log out

  * Saved stories
  * Account
  * Log out

Search
[                    ]
Leaders | The green transition

Sodium batteries offer an alternative to tricky lithium

Lithium is relatively scarce and mostly refined in China. Sodium is
neither

A bottle of salt in the shape of a batteryimage: Cristina Spano
Oct 26th 2023
Share
Listen to this story. Enjoy more audio and podcasts on iOS or Android
.

Your browser does not support the <audio> element.

In the early 20th century Britain's Royal Navy converted its ships to
run on oil instead of coal. But whereas coal could be produced at
home, oil had to be imported. That caused jitters: what if those
imports were one day cut off? Winston Churchill, who was in charge of
the navy at the time, argued that the best defence was a diversity of
supply. As he told a fretful Parliament: "Safety and certainty in oil
lie in variety and variety alone."

These days, politicians in rich countries find themselves in an even
tighter bind. They need to switch not just their navies, but their
entire economies from fossil fuels to low-carbon electricity to avert
the worst consequences of climate change. But they worry that doing
so will leave them geopolitically exposed.

They fret in particular about batteries. The green transition will
require huge numbers of them: for cars, lorries and homes, and to
help balance national power grids as they come to rely on
intermittent electricity from the sun and the wind. Although lots of
different types of battery exist, the dominant technology is the
lithium-ion battery, which offers a useful mix of low maintenance
requirements and high energy density. But lithium, an essential
component, is hard to come by, and the refining of it mostly takes
place in China.

Western countries, particularly those in Europe that have spent the
past two years trying to wean themselves off Russian natural gas, are
wary of leaving their future energy security similarly compromised.
Such fears are not merely theoretical. On October 20th China
announced national-security restrictions on the export of graphite,
another important component of lithium batteries. It was the latest
salvo in a trade-and-technology war that began when America
restricted chip-industry exports to China.

Fortunately, lithium is not the only game in town. As we report this
week, a clutch of firms are making batteries based on sodium,
lithium's elemental cousin. Since sodium's chemical properties are
very similar to those of lithium, it too makes for good batteries.
And sodium, which is found in the salt in seawater, is thousands of
times more abundant on Earth than lithium and cheaper to get at. Most
of the companies using sodium to make batteries today are also
Chinese. But pursuing the technology in the West might be a surer
route to energy security than relying heavily on lithium.

Besides its abundance, sodium has other advantages. The best lithium
batteries use cobalt and nickel in their electrodes. Nickel, like
lithium, is in short supply. Mining it on land is environmentally
destructive. Proposals to grab it from the seabed instead have caused
rows. A good deal of the world's cobalt, meanwhile, is extracted from
small mines in the Democratic Republic of Congo, where child labour
is common and working conditions are dire. Sodium batteries, by
contrast, can use electrodes built from iron and manganese, which are
plentiful and uncontroversial. Since the chemical components are
cheap, a scaled-up industry should be able to produce batteries that
cost less than their lithium counterparts.

Sodium is not a perfect replacement for lithium. It is heavier,
meaning sodium batteries will weigh more than lithium ones of an
equivalent capacity. That is likely to rule them out in some cases
where lightness is paramount. But for other applications, such as
grid storage or home batteries, weight is irrelevant. Several Chinese
carmakers are even beginning to put sodium batteries in electric
vehicles.

Perhaps the biggest disadvantage of sodium batteries is their late
start. Lithium-ion batteries were first commercialised in the 1990s
and have benefited from decades of investment. But the rest of the
world is behind China on both fronts anyway. America and the European
Union have announced enormous programmes of green industrial
subsidies. If they are determined to bankroll batteries, some of the
pot should go to sodium. #

For more coverage of climate change, sign up for the Climate Issue,
our fortnightly subscriber-only newsletter, or visit our 
climate-change hub.

This article appeared in the Leaders section of the print edition
under the headline "A chemical cousin"

Leaders October 28th 2023

  * American power: indispensable or ineffective?
  * Argentina's election result is the worst of all possible outcomes
  * Governments must not rush into policing AI
  * How to be a better boss
  * Sodium batteries offer an alternative to tricky lithium

America's test

From the October 28th 2023 edition

Discover stories from this section and more in the list of contents

Explore the edition
Share
Reuse this content

More from Leaders

[20231028_LDD004]

Governments must not rush into policing AI

A summit in Britain will focus on "extreme" risks. But no one knows
what they look like

[20231028_LDD002]

How to be a better boss

Tips from "Boss Class", our new podcast

---------------------------------------------------------------------
[20231028_LDD001]

American power: indispensable or ineffective?

How Joe Biden manages the war between Israel and Hamas will define
America's global role

---------------------------------------------------------------------

  * Subscribe
  * Group subscriptions
  * Reuse our content
  * The Trust Project
  * Help and contact us

Keep updated

  *  
  *  
  *  
  *  
  *  
  *  

Published since September 1843 to take part in "a severe contest
between intelligence, which presses forward, and an unworthy, timid
ignorance obstructing our progress."

The Economist

  * About
  * Advertise
  * Press centre

The Economist Group

  * The Economist Group
  * Economist Intelligence
  * Economist Impact
  * Economist Impact Events
  * Working Here
  * Economist Education Courses
  * Which MBA?
  * Executive Jobs
  * Executive Education Navigator

  * Terms of Use
  * Privacy
  * Cookie Policy
  * Manage Cookies
  * Accessibility
  * Modern Slavery Statement
  * Sitemap
  * Your Data Rights

Copyright (c) The Economist Newspaper Limited 2023. All rights
reserved.