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walkitoutR. talks often about iron phosphate, a different kind of lithium battery, but today, Bloomberg had coverage of a very different kind of battery, sodium.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2023-11-21/northvolt-adds-low-cost-cobalt-free-cell-in-battery-race
Not as energy dense, but still very exciting to have more energy storage options, and ones which will hopefully cause fewer spikes and drops in metals markets. R. thinks that the amount of rock salt we put on roads every year is huge compared to the amount of sodium that would be involved in the battery market — I actually have no sense of the relative size of those markets and am struggling to figure out how to compare them. I’ll probably be back here with speculation.
Total annual production, according to sites like Statista and wikipedia of “salt” is about 300 million metric tonnes. Total annual production, likewise, of lithium is around 110,000 metric tonnes.
So, yeah, I don’t know about the rock salt on the roads market, and sure, sodium is heavier than lithium, but also, wow, the volume of sodium “produced” every year is massive versus the volume of lithium “produced” each year.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2023-11-21/northvolt-adds-low-cost-cobalt-free-cell-in-battery-race
Not as energy dense, but still very exciting to have more energy storage options, and ones which will hopefully cause fewer spikes and drops in metals markets. R. thinks that the amount of rock salt we put on roads every year is huge compared to the amount of sodium that would be involved in the battery market — I actually have no sense of the relative size of those markets and am struggling to figure out how to compare them. I’ll probably be back here with speculation.
Total annual production, according to sites like Statista and wikipedia of “salt” is about 300 million metric tonnes. Total annual production, likewise, of lithium is around 110,000 metric tonnes.
So, yeah, I don’t know about the rock salt on the roads market, and sure, sodium is heavier than lithium, but also, wow, the volume of sodium “produced” every year is massive versus the volume of lithium “produced” each year.