As more industries electrify and our use of portable electronics increases, the more our supplies of raw materials that can be turned into battery components via toll processing decreases.
Lithium-ion is a material that is relatively abundant but is rare in the purity required to make high-quality rechargeable batteries. However, researchers have been exploring the potential of using other, more abundant materials to make batteries.
One of the most exciting projects in this field is making batteries using sodium, which can be found in nearly every food we eat as sodium chloride.
Sodium-ion batteries have significant potential, as the chemical composition of lithium and sodium are similar in some ways, particularly in their reactions to water, as has been seen in hundreds of school demonstrations.
As well as this, much of the infrastructure used to make lithium batteries can be effectively adapted to create sodium-ion batteries as well, and as sodium is far more readily available and does not rely on cobalt, more batteries can be produced.
There are a few caveats, however, that have hampered efforts to create sodium-ion batteries in the past. The first one is that sodium is a larger element than lithium, which means that the amount of energy that can be stored in a particular sized battery is reduced.
Whilst efforts have been seen in making batteries more efficient, this could make them less useful for portable devices and electric vehicles in the short term.
However, they are ideally suited to creating a battery store for alternate energy, such as wind and solar power. This would help to make them more consistent energy sources.