A small group of companies is finding ways to stretch supplies of rare minerals further. Or build batteries that don’t need them at all.
The sharp uptick in electric vehicle sales in the past two years holds both promise and peril for clean energy. Promise, because it shows that the days of the combustion engine truly are numbered. But peril, because spiking demand for the lithium and cobalt used in their batteries poses a new type of uncertainty: unreliable global supply lines.
From the oil crisis in the 1970s to Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait in 1991 and now Western Europe’s dependence on Russian natural gas pipelines, the politics of energy security has stoked climate change, wars, regional instability and the rise of corrupt petro-states. Politically unstable or repressive countries are now locking up both mining and processing capacity for rare minerals. That raises the grim prospect of replacing the geopolitics of oil with the geopolitics of lithium.
“China has used access to resources as a weapon,” observes Ron MacDonald, CEO of Zinc8 Energy Solutions, a 50-person Vancouver firm commercializing a so-called “zinc-air” energy storage system. “There is a lot of worry about security of supply.”
EVs aren’t the only new source of demand for lithium. In a few years, much of our world could depend on batteries. They will play an important role in greening electricity grids by storing energy for use when conditions aren’t right to generate wind or solar power. Data centres need them as emergency backups. And emerging ideas like electric-powered cargo vessels can’t happen without them.
But the current scramble for lithium is revealing that these plans rest on shaky foundations. Now, a small but growing coterie of clean-technology ventures are stepping up with technologies that could ease the shortage—or lead to entirely new kinds of batteries.
Hunting for cheaper alternatives
Lithium is used in consumer electronics and EVs because it is energy dense and can pack a lot of power into small spaces. Yet lithium-ion batteries may have worked too well. “Lithium-ion is a victim of its own success,” says Ryan Brown, CEO of Halifax-based Salient Energy, another zinc-based energy storage firm. He points to soaring lithium prices, which have risen a bracing 600 per cent in the past year, as an indicator that the supply of raw materials needed for batteries is not keeping up with demand. “Our goal,” he says, “is to fix that.”
Zinc and iron are two common metals that hold promise for building larger-format batteries that don’t rely on lithium. In the past few years, they have been the focus of intensive research and investment, especially for applications such as energy storage for buildings or power grids, where compact battery size is less important than in EVs. “In 2019, if you said you were going to replace lithium, you would have been perceived as crazy,” says Brown, who describes the new interest as a 180-degree pivot in expectations.
The appeal of these metals lies in their abundance. As James Larsen, CEO of Toronto-based energy storage company e-Zinc, explains, zinc is readily available, easily recycled and can also be extracted from sources such as copper mine tailings. “No one controls the supply of it,” he says.