The use of lithium in batteries has been a huge area of growth as the energy transition to electric vehicles gathers pace. In addition to cars, lithium batteries are being increasingly used in scooters, e-bikes and non-transport items such as mobile phones.
While lithium has many valuable qualities as a battery material, it comes with problems, partly from global supply shortages (although this is arguably being resolved by new discoveries), but also through safety concerns as they are highly flammable. While rare, accidents can bring fierce fires.
However, chemical processing firms may find they soon switch much of their focus to a new material discovered using AI technology developed by Microsoft and the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory.
This identified a hitherto unknown material that acts as a solid-state electrolyte. The use of AI and supercomputers helped narrow down 32 million potential candidate materials to 18 in under a week and further work has enabled scientists to go from inception to a prototype battery in nine months.
Speaking to the BBC, executive vice president of Microsoft Jason Zander said Microsoft aims to use AI in this way to “compress 250 years of scientific discovery into the next 25″.
However, lecturer in chemical engineering at the University of Strathclyde Dr Edward Brightman sounded a note of caution about the research and development work achieved thus far.
He remarked: “It could throw up spurious results, or results that look good at first, and then turn out to either be a material that is known or that can’t be synthesised in the lab.”
Even so, the use of such technology means that even as lithium use grows and Britain’s first lithium processing plants will soon be up and running, the use of ‘white gold’ in powering the electric energy revolution may not be anywhere near the tale of dominance some might have expected.