Disclaimer: Some of the links below are affiliate links, meaning, at no additional cost to you, we will earn a commission if you click through and make a purchase. Sodium-Ion Battery: Better than Lithium-Ion? Sodium-ion-battery-better-than-lithium-ion Last updated Mar 30, 2022 We all know that lithium has become the absolute rock star of modern-day energy storage, leaving its close relations in relative obscurity.

But lithium is by no means an inexhaustible resource on our planet. There are only four countries in the world with large reserves – Argentina, Chile, Australia, and China.

China is importing most of the lithium it uses anyway to hoard its own supply ready for when the rest of the world runs out.

Table of Contents

Sodium Beats Lithium
Why Weren’t Sodium-Ion Batteries Rather than Lithium-Ion in the First Place?
    Basics of Sodium-Ion and Lithium-Ion Batteries
    Disadvantages of Sodium-Ion Batteries
Sodium-Ion Battery Progress

Sodium Beats Lithium

The world may well run out if we don’t get our recycling and repurposing systems sorted out properly in the coming years. An average electric vehicle has about 10 kg of lithium in its battery pack. According to PV Magazine, if EV sales continue to rise as expected, there’ll be 3 billion of them on the roads by 2040, and we’ll have got through pretty much all of the existing 26 million tonnes of lithium available today.

It’s pretty difficult to extract, too, requiring large amounts of carbon-heavy energy and causing lots of undesirable environmental impacts. Plus, most lithium-ion batteries require other rare elements like cobalt, which is mainly sourced from the Democratic Republic of Congo with all the environmental and human rights issues that you’ve no doubt heard about.

By contrast, lithium’s less sexy sibling, sodium, is abundantly available all over the place. There’s more than 1,000 times more sodium in the earth’s crust than lithium. It’s a constituent part of sodium chloride, of course, salt.

It’s actually mostly mined from soda ash, but in any case, as the sixth most abundant element on the planet, it’s pretty easy to get hold of, compared to lithium. Why Weren’t Sodium-Ion Batteries Rather than Lithium-Ion in the First Place?

Since the sodium-ion battery is safer, cheaper and cleaner than lithium-ion, why it wasn’t sodium rather than lithium that became the darling of electrochemical engineers worldwide and why our modern lifestyles aren’t all powered by sodium-ion batteries instead of lithium-ion.

That’s a very good question. It looks like the world’s biggest battery maker, CATL of China, agrees with you because they’ve just revealed a sodium-ion battery that challenges existing lithium-ion technology for energy density and longevity, which could genuinely revolutionize the future of energy storage.

So, why didn’t CATL and all the other battery firms just use sodium in the first place?

It wasn’t quite as straightforward as our scientific friends may have hoped for. Basics of Sodium-Ion and Lithium-Ion Batteries

The basics of the two battery types are very similar.

There are two electrodes and two charge collectors, one negative and one positive, which sit on either side of an electrolytic solution with a separator membrane in the middle to block the flow of electrons inside the battery.

As the system charges up, the lithium or sodium atoms release electrons which flow out from the cathode and through the electrical circuit to the anode on the other side where they’re physically captured within the anodes’ structure. Meanwhile, the lithium or sodium ions travel across the electrolyte to reach the same destination.

When the system is connected to a device, the stored electrons move back out of the battery, producing an electrical current that powers the device before returning to its original position in the cathode.

The ions move back across the electrolyte to join them. Disadvantages of Sodium-Ion Batteries

The main drawback of using sodium instead of lithium was energy density and weight. Sodium-ion batteries achieved something like 150 Wh/kg, compared to well over 200 Wh/kg for lithium-ion batteries. That’s a competitive disadvantage that our market-driven economies simply would not tolerate at the time.

Sodium ions are three times heavier, too. Even though the sodium component accounted for only about 5% of the overall battery weight, it still made them heavier than their lithium-based cousins.

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