In 2023, CATL said Chinese automaker Chery would be the first to use its sodium-ion batteries.
But cost competitiveness is a challenge right now because lithium prices are unusually low. The global supply of lithium has grown more quickly than demand since 2022, leading to lower prices. Researchers and analysts expect that sodium-ion batteries will have a cost advantage over lithium-ion in the long run.
Lithium-ion batteries dominate today’s market. This year, global production of lithium-ion batteries was about 1,500 gigawatt-hours, and production of sodium-ion batteries was 11 gigawatt-hours, or less than 1 percent, according to Benchmark Mineral Intelligence.
A second sort of Li-ion battery, a so-called polyanionic design that uses lithium iron phosphate (LFP), does not need nickel or cobalt. But such batteries cannot store as much energy per kilogram as layered-oxide ones. A clutch of companies, though, think they have an alternative: making batteries with sodium instead.
It is also expected that demand for lithium-ion batteries will increase up to tenfold by 2030, according to the US Department for Energy, so manufacturers are constantly building battery plants to keep up. Lithium mining can be controversial as it can take several years to develop and has a considerable impact on the environment.
"Sodium solid-state batteries are usually seen as a far-off-in-the-future technology, but we hope that this paper can invigorate more push into the sodium area by demonstrating that it can indeed work well, even better than the lithium version in some cases," Deysher said. The ultimate goal?