Panasonic And Innovators Push Boundaries: Cobalt-free Batteries On The Horizon As Industry Shifts Gears

Tesla's battery supplier, Panasonicrecently announced that they are developing cobalt does not require batteries.Researchers who have developed cobalt-free batteries are also helpingPanasonic.

In 1980, Oxford invented the firstlithium-ion rechargeable battery that required cobalt. Experiments have shownthat cobalt has a very high energy density and is particularly suitable forbatteries that require small amounts of energy but require large amounts ofenergy.

To date, most commercial lithium-ionbatteries use cobalt, but it is expensive. To this end, it has spawned a blackchain of interests: for a long time, there have been human rights violations inthe Republic of the Congo, including the employment of child labor mining.Electronic equipment and electric car companies are reluctant to pay large sumsof money for manufacturing and are not willing to participate in local humanrights exploitation, so they are gradually reducing the amount of cobalt usedin their batteries. Tesla's battery supplier Panasonic recently announced thatthey are developing batteries that do not require cobalt.

The battery has a negative electrodematerial, usually graphite, and a positive electrode material, a composite oflithium, cobalt and oxygen. In an electric vehicle battery pack, the negativeelectrode material portion often contains more nickel component than theelectronic product, which reduces the use of cobalt, but brings higherprocessing costs and is more likely to cause fire on the aircraft. - Forexample, the battery in Samsung Note 7 is that the electrons on the outer trackof the cobalt atom are distributed in pairs, which means that it is small anddense, and is easy to form a layer.

A new generation of battery researchersare turning to research on materials such as manganese and iron. Unlike layeredstructures, these elements form a "rocksalt" structure. Anodescontaining rock salt have been used in some devices, but current rock saltstructures have not yet had the same high energy density as cobalt or nickel.

Researchers and companies are ready foralternatives. “Because cobalt is expensive, the company tries not to use it inbattery manufacturing,” says Goodenough, a professor of engineering at theUniversity of Texas. In the past two years, the price of cobalt has quadrupled.At this stage, portable electronic devices use most of the cobalt on themarket, and the demand for cobalt in future electric vehicle battery packs willbe nearly 1,000 times higher than that of mobile phones. As the global warmingwarms, more and more people are replacing internal combustion engine-driven carswith electric vehicles. Although this is a good thing for the earth, it hasactually pushed up the price of cobalt.

In addition to batteries with stratifiedand rock salt structures, researchers are developing solid-state batteries.Such batteries may require more lithium, but not necessarily cobalt, and aremuch safer than existing lithium-ion batteries. Automotive companies such asBMW, Toyota, and Honda are studying the batteries, but Olivetti believes thetechnology will not meet market demand in 2025. Prior to this, the company willtry to reduce the use of cobalt-containing batteries. Companies such as Appleand Samsung have joined the Responsible Cobalt Initiative program, whichpromises to improve environmental pollution and adverse social impacts duringcobalt production. Recently, Apple has begun to purchase cobalt directly fromthe miners to ensure that the cobalt suppliers' production safety conditionsmeet industry requirements.