Why China Could Master the Next Big Battery Breakthrough

In Changsha, deep in the Chinese interior, thousands of chemists, engineers and manufacturing workers are shaping the future of batteries.

The city’s South Central University produces graduates who are advancing technology, just as Stanford University shaped the careers of Silicon Valley entrepreneurs who pioneered microchips. Across the Xiang River, vast factories mix minerals into the highly processed compounds that make rechargeable batteries possible.

These batteries, mostly made of lithium, have fueled the rise of mobile phones and other consumer electronics. They are transforming the auto industry and could soon start doing the same for solar panels and wind turbines, crucial in the fight against climate change. China dominates its refining and chemical production.

Now China is positioning itself to command the next big innovation in rechargeable batteries: replacing lithium with sodium, a much cheaper and more abundant material.

Found around the world as part of salt, sodium sells for 1 to 3 percent of the price of lithium and is chemically very similar. Recent advances mean that sodium batteries can now be recharged daily for years, eliminating a key advantage of lithium batteries. The energy capacity of sodium batteries has also increased.

And sodium batteries have one big advantage: They retain almost all of their charge when temperatures drop well below freezing, something lithium batteries typically don’t.

In Changsha, graduates from the leafy campus of Central South University are working on sodium battery technology at nearby research labs run by companies like Germany’s BASF, the world’s largest chemical manufacturer. One of the first large sodium battery chemical factories is already under construction just a few blocks from the laboratories.

Chinese battery executives said in interviews that last year they figured out how to make sodium battery cells so similar to lithium ones that they can be made with the same equipment. Chinese giant CATL, the world’s largest maker of batteries for electric cars, says it has discovered a way to use sodium and lithium cells in the battery pack of a single electric car, combining low cost and weather resistance. of sodium cells with the extended range of lithium. cells. The company says that it is now prepared to mass-produce these mixed battery packs.

“We are ready to industrialize it,” Huang Qisen, vice dean of CATL’s research institute, said in an interview at the company’s headquarters in Ningde, China. CATL, which is short for Contemporary Amperex Technology Ltd., relies in part on Changsha Chemicals and recently built its first full-scale sodium battery assembly line in Ningde.

Multinational corporations are taking notice of sodium.

“It will reduce the peak demand for lithium,” said Mike Henry, chief executive of BHP, the world’s largest mining company. “I’m sure we’ll start to see sodium replace lithium for certain applications.”

Research into the use of sodium for batteries began in earnest in the 1970s, then led by the United States. Japanese researchers made crucial breakthroughs a dozen years ago. Since then, Chinese companies have taken the lead in commercializing the technology.

Of the 20 sodium battery factories now planned or already under construction around the world, 16 are in China, according to Benchmark Minerals, a consulting firm. In two years, China will have nearly 95 percent of the world’s capacity to make sodium batteries. Lithium battery production will still eclipse sodium battery production at that point, Benchmark predicts, but advances in sodium are accelerating.

At next week’s Shanghai auto show, auto and battery makers are expected to announce plans for sodium batteries in at least some limited-range subcompact cars for the Chinese market.

The most immediately promising use for sodium batteries is for power grids, the networks of cables and towers that transmit electricity. Grid batteries are a fast-growing market, especially in China. Tesla said this week that it would build a factory in Shanghai to make lithium batteries for energy providers.

Sodium batteries must be larger than lithium batteries to hold the same electrical charge. That’s a problem for cars, which have limited space, but not for grid storage. Utility companies switching from lithium to sodium can simply place twice as many large batteries in an empty lot near solar panels or wind turbines.

Utilities around the world have a growing appetite for massive amounts of battery storage as they shift to climate-friendly sources like solar and wind. They need to be able to store energy while the sun is shining and the wind is blowing, and then use it as a replacement for coal- or gas-fired electricity.

Electricity in a large Chinese province, Shandong, already sells up to 20 times more in the early afternoon, when demand is high, than at noon, when the grid is flooded with more solar power than factories and factories need. the homes. Power generating companies use lithium batteries to distribute their renewable electricity for longer hours.

But some utilities, like the Three Gorges Corporation in west-central China, are beginning to experiment with sodium batteries. Many provinces have started requiring newly built solar or wind farms to install enough batteries to store 10 to 20 percent of the electricity they generate, said Frank Haugwitz, a consultant specializing in China’s solar industry.

CATL has installed lithium batteries the size of minivans at electric car charging stations in cities like Fuzhou. The batteries are automatically charged when electricity is cheap, such as at night or when the sun shines on the charging station’s rooftop solar panels, and are ready when motorists come by to recharge. CATL is studying whether sodium can be used in those places.

Unlike lithium batteries, the latest sodium batteries do not require scarce materials such as cobalt, a mineral mined mainly in Africa under conditions that have alarmed human rights groups. Newer sodium batteries also do not require nickel, which comes mainly from mines in Indonesia, Russia, and the Philippines.

However, as China races towards leadership in sodium, it still faces challenges. For starters, there is where to get the sodium.

Although salt is plentiful, the United States accounts for more than 90 percent of the world’s easily minable reserves of soda ash, the main industrial source of sodium. Deep under the desert of southwestern Wyoming lies a vast deposit of sodium carbonate, formed 50 million years ago. Soda ash has long been mined for the United States glass-making industry.

With minimal natural reserves of soda ash and a reluctance to rely on imports from the United States, China produces synthetic soda ash in coal-fired chemical plants.

China’s synthetic soda ash industry has a history of dangerous water pollution. That includes the collapse of an alkaline slag heap in east-central China in 2016 that washed away cars and polluted a major river. The country’s environmental agency is working to clean up the industry.

Another question hanging over sodium is whether lithium will continue to be expensive. Lithium prices quadrupled from 2017 to last November, but have since fallen by two-thirds.

There are also doubts about the durability of sodium batteries. Power companies want to see sodium batteries perform for years in the open air, not just in labs, said David Fishman, a power sector consultant at Lantau Group, a consulting firm.

But Mr. Fishman and others are now closely watching the development of sodium batteries. Demand for batteries is growing rapidly and lithium is unlikely to remain the dominant material indefinitely.

“Yes, sodium has a role,” said BHP’s Mr Henry. “China is at the forefront of conducting research on this.”

li you contributed research.