INNOVATION DRIVES DOWN THE COST OF POWERING ELECTRIC CARS.

• Author: Bailey, Ronald

AMERICANS PURCHASED MORE than 500,000 fully electric vehicles in the first three quarters of 2022, accounting for more than 6 percent of all U.S. vehicle sales. The Biden administration wants that number to exceed 50 percent domestically, and the International Energy Agency projects it to exceeed 60 percent globally by 2030. But getting those cars on the road--and storing increasing amounts of intermittent energy generated by solar panels, hydro plants, and wind turbines--would require a lot of lithium-ion batteries.

With current technology and lithium resources, that would be a daunting challenge. But ongoing battery innovation promises to address the gap.

Lithium prices rose from around $5,000 per ton in 2010 nominal dollars to more than $74,000 per ton in 2022. At the 2019 mining rate, according to a 2022 study by Simon Michaux, a professor at the Geological Survey of Finland, it would take more than 9,000 years to produce enough lithium to completely phase out all use of fossil fuels. Michaux also concluded that global reserves of other metals needed to replace fossil fuels--copper, nickel, cobalt, graphite, and vanadiumare "nowhere near adequate."

Michaux's neo-Malthusian projections did not take into account the creativity of inventors and entrepreneurs. Electrochemists are already addressing the shortfalls he described, and their work will drive down the cost of powering electric vehicles.

Natron Energy in the U.S. and CATL in China are working on sodium-ion batteries. At $960 per ton, sodium hydroxide is much cheaper than lithium. In 2022, CATL announced that its...