Watch Out!

Early in my career a wise mentor advised me to “Watch out you don’t get ‘blind-sided”.  It’s a warning from football which describes when you’re so busy watching the action in one direction that you get unexpectedly get tackled from another direction. I’ve learned to always keep this in mind in business.

A recent article in the Australian Financial Review entitled “Swedish sodium-ion battery could minimise reliance on China” (22 November 2023, by Richard Milne) reminded me of this. The news for months has been increasingly reporting the frantic scramble by companies and investors for lithium projects that have the potential to be suppliers of a key component of lithium-ion batteries.

The Northvolt group from Sweden has made a breakthrough in a new battery technology that could minimise reliance on China for the energy transition by developing a sodium-ion battery that has no lithium, cobalt or nickel – critical metals that manufacturers are scrambling to secure, leading to volatility in their prices.

Sodium-ion batteries could be a cheaper, safer alternative to lithium-based batteries because they work better at very high and very low temperatures, but the amount of energy they can produce relative to their size is somewhat less than lithium batteries. Northvolt is working on improving this, with increasing success, and hopes to provide the first sodium-ion battery samples to customers next year and reach full-scale production by the end of the decade.

Lithium is a rare earth element. As the label implies, it’s not easy to find lithium occurring in rocks in high concentrations. When it is found, it’s not easy to refine and process for use in batteries.

In stark contrast, sodium occurs in salt and there’s lots of that in the ocean. It’s not too much of an effort separating sodium from salt either.

There’s a lot of research happening to develop other alternatives to lithium-ion batteries, for example solid-state batteries, hydrogen fuel cells, aqueous magnesium batteries, and graphene batteries. All it will take is for one of these alternatives, which a composed of more commonly available materials, to become commercially viable and lithium batteries will go the way of former rechargeable batteries such as nickel-cadmium (NiCd), and nickel-metal hydrogen (NiMH). Although they dominated only a few decades ago they are now history, blind-sided by lithium-ion.

You can find the articles referred to in this commentary here.