Batteries, Lithium and difficulties with Industrial Scaling
Nonlinear Science is Counter Intuitive
Nonlinearities are hard to teach, although efforts in science education have tried to keep up. Remember the hierarchy of the food chain, with producers and apex predators? That concept was oversimplified to the point of fallacy. The food web is a better model. Nature is nothing if not nonlinear. Coyotes and Badgers both work together AND be enemies. Things are complex. From the standpoint of ecology and evolution, this complexity is a feature, not a bug. Nonlinearities are an integral part of big, natural systems.
Climate change is a real problem, but it is strongly related to other problems like ecological collapse and the loss of biodiversity.
Bovine agriculture puts carbon back in the soil, reversing desertification, but most industrial animal agriculture still uses an enormous amount of fossilized carbon. Even entirely plant-based agriculture at scale is inherently extractive. Solutions exist, but linear-minded policies like simply going all electric or all plant-based won’t solve these problems. But will going electric?
Leaving the Carbon Economy is a Nonlinear Problem
The carbon economy is fraught with nuance, and escaping it is too. Our electrical gird serves power on demand. Oil is a great store of energy, but it’s literally burning our planet down. Hydroelectric dams also store immense energy, but their literal downstream effects destroy entire ecosystems which also contributes to regional climate change. Hydrogen fuel cells were historically popular because of how easily they could be sourced from hydrocarbons. While hydrogen might be worth revisiting in the age of solar, batteries are the current big idea.
Batteries and their Cost
Battery technology has improved dramatically in recent decades, but they depend on minerals and elements obtained only through mining. Big, open pit mining is nothing if not devastating. Small scale, illegal mining in the Amazon is also driving deforestation and habitat loss. Some elements - particularly Cobalt - are extremely rare and come with devastating humanitarian concerns.
Much of contemporary battery technology depends on Lithium, and Lithium needs to be mined (usually as a brine). David Kramer has a nice review of the status of mining for minerals used in battery production in the current issue of Physics Today. The TL;DR? Unlike Cobalt, fortunately, there does not appear to be a shortage of Lithium to be mined.
Building a Better Battery
Batteries involve the transfer of electrolytes from one end to the other. Typically, these electrolytes exist in a two-dimensional, liquid state. Recent advancement of solid-state, three-dimensional, copper-foam batteries should not only dramatically improve performance and safety, but also reduce the strain on the Lithium and rare earth market.
Professor Amy Prieto at Colorado State has been working to build such three-dimensional batteries. By opening up the third-dimension, heat can be more efficiently dissipated as more charge can be stored. Prieto has a start up company designed to build these batteries, and prototypes have already proved successful. Her research group at CSU is also pushing a lot of other novel approaches to energy storage.
