Last month, the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE, www.energy.gov) announced that two Energy Innovation Hub teams would receive a total of $125 million ($62.5 million to each team) in funding over five years to “seed and accelerate next-generation technologies beyond today’s generation of lithium (Li)-ion batteries.” The two Energy Innovation Hub teams are the Energy Storage Research Alliance (ESRA) and the Aqueous Battery Consortium (ABC).
Energy Innovation Hubs
ESRA will focus on developing compact batteries for heavy-duty transportation and grid energy storage. The ESRA team consists of nearly 50 researchers, led by DOE’s Argonne National Laboratory (ANL, www.anl.gov) with both Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) and Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL) as co-leaders. Twelve universities are partnered with the three national laboratories in this effort. ESRA will ground its work in basic science to address challenges in battery development, including achieving safety, high-energy density and long-life using inexpensive, abundant materials. In its press release, ANL says, “ESRA seeks to enable transformative discoveries in materials chemistry, gain a fundamental understanding of electrochemical phenomena at the atomic scale and lay the scientific foundations for breakthroughs in energy storage technologies.”
ABC aims to establish the scientific foundation for large-scale development and deployment of aqueous batteries for long-duration grid-storage technologies. Stanford University (www.stanford.edu) and SLAC (Stanford Linear Accelerator Center; www.slac.stanford.edu) will lead the team of 31 scientists, engineers and physicists from 12 universities, SLAC, the U.S. Army and Naval Research Labs. ABC will work toward developing an aqueous battery with a higher energy density than current lead-acid batteries that is environmentally safe and considerably less expensive than Li-ion batteries. Both ESRA and ABC will prioritize using materials that are abundant to avoid supply-chain bottlenecks.
In this issue
Today’s rechargeable batteries are dominated by Li-ion technology. The growing demand for these batteries in everything from small electronics to electric vehicles to large-scale energy storage is prompting a surge in the need for lithium. This month’s cover story examines the current state of lithium supply and processing in the U.S. (see Lithium Landscape: Activity is Charging Forward in the U.S., pp. 22–26).
In the meantime, researchers are following multiple pathways to improve battery technologies beyond the Li-ion standard, with goals that include achieving higher energy densities, better safety and cost-effectiveness. One promising pathway is leading toward solid-state batteries (SSB). A number of the challenges involved with SSB development are discussed in our Solids Processing article (Controlling Process Variables for Solid-State Battery Performance, pp. 41–43). Advances in energy storage technologies are surging (see for example Solid-State Battery Advances, p. 9), and Chemical Engineering will continue to follow and report those advances. ■
Dorothy Lozowski, Editorial Director