This Battery Could Drive A Car 1500 Miles - But There's A Catch | Answers With Joe

imagine you're a diplomat or a head of state in 1855 and you get invited to paris to have a big lavish state dinner with napoleon iii himself and you get there and you find your place setting and you look at it and your utensils are made of gold not too shabby but then you look further at the table and the people sitting closer to napoleon himself they have utensils made out of aluminum and you are insulted insulted i say because actually in 1855 aluminum was worth more than gold that sounds nuts but apparently it's true napoleon iii had a special set of aluminum dinnerware that he would show off to guests at parties and stuff because even though aluminum is one of the most abundant metals on earth it's not something that you can just find in the ground in a thread like say gold or silver it's something that that's bonded with other chemicals and takes a lot of refining and processing to get it out and that process was only discovered in 1825 by a danish chemist named hans christian orsted so yeah for a few decades after that it was pretty rare and because it was rare it was more valuable but beyond the rarity it was super light and easy to work with it was electrically conductive and recyclable it was it was kind of a wonder material for a while there today of course aluminum is cheap and abundant and everywhere and we just wrap our hot dogs in it but it is still a little bit of a wonder material that has some uses that we're still teasing out of it including a potential battery that could give a car 1500 miles of range [Music] all right so today we're going to talk about aluminum air batteries some of you may have seen some of the headlines going around about these over the last few months but before we jump into it i want to make sure and clear up any confusion there might be around this because there are aluminum air batteries and aluminum ion batteries these are two different things i thought maybe some of you would be confused by it because in no way did i spend half a day researching the wrong one yeah aluminum ion batteries are basically the same as lithium ion batteries except obviously they use aluminum instead of lithium in there basically the same in the sense that they both pass charged ions between the electrodes to generate energy see aluminum ion batteries have been making some waves lately because aluminum is cheaper and it's less likely to explode also recent advancements have promised to lower the charging time for aluminum ion batteries versus lithium ion which is also pretty cool but that's not what we're here to talk about today i'm talking about aluminum air batteries which yeah that's a whole different thing and this one has been making some waves because like i said before the title yeah it has the possibility of giving an electric car over a thousand miles of range which would be awesome oh well hello mr asterisk what are you doing here so aluminum air batteries are what are known as a metal air battery and there's a whole family of metal air batteries and they all work fairly similarly they all have the same basic components of any battery anode electrolyte cathode but unlike other batteries the cathode and metal air batteries is open to the outside air and the reason you want the cathode exposed to the air has to do with something else that i did a video on recently oxygen in a middle air battery you have the air cathode in a metal anode and the electricity is produced when oxygen from the air cathode reacts with the metal of the metal anode and there's of course some variations between different types of batteries different chemical catalysts different electrolytes and whatnot now in the case of the batteries we're talking about here today the electrolyte is aqueous which means it's based on water that has various things dissolved into it oxygen reacts with this water to create hydroxyl which has the chemical formula oh then when that hydroxyl meets the metal from the anode that oxygen bonds with the metal producing metal oxide water and free electrons giving you that sweet sweet electricity the water in that equation just gets mixed back in with the electrolyte and the metal oxide well that just builds up as a waste product and eventually prevents the battery from working so you have to kind of purge that from time to time middle air batteries have been around since at least 1860 when a zinc air battery was first patented zinc air batteries are some of the best known because they're used in hearing aids but other metal air batteries are used in marine and industrial and telecommunications processes but aluminum air batteries are especially interesting to researchers because the theoretical high energy density of aluminum but also because the things i said before it's one of the most abundant metals on the planet it's completely recyclable according to the international aluminum institute 65 296 metric tons of aluminum were produced in 2020. that's about 72 000 us tons the weight of 216 boeing 747 jets of course that's only a small fraction of the aluminum that was actually used that year aluminum is one of the few materials that actually cost less to recycle than it does to produce actually way less you use 95 percent less energy to recycle aluminum than produce it and here's a crazy fact over 75 percent of the aluminum that has ever been produced is still in circulation so yeah there's a lot of debate around recycling lately especially plastic recycling that's kind of a whole mess but aluminum recycling it's super legit so yeah there are some companies now that are selling bottled water and aluminum containers like this one this is a company called path but if you see any of these in a convenience store go this route it might be an extra dollar or whatever but you can reuse this a million different ways and when you're done with it it's almost completely recyclable so it's a good option and of course there's a lot of aluminum on the moon bonded with oxygen which i talked about in the moon mining video so that might be a way that moon colonists would get oxygen and speaking of going to the moon aluminum plays a big part in the solid rocket boosters on the sls yeah the srbs use atomized aluminum powder for fuel and they're expected to deliver one million eight hundred thousand pounds of thrust each so yeah it's pretty energy dense and aluminum air batteries are a clean efficient way to extract that energy and use it to power our world so yeah it's it's kind of genius oh hello again mr asterisk do you have something to add like can you tell us why aluminum air batteries haven't just taken over the world yet oh yeah they're not rechargeable since the energy is generated by oxidizing aluminum once that metal has been oxidized there's no more energy to get out of it and you can't just re-oxidize it by plugging it in so yeah an aluminum air battery is really more like this than the batteries that power this but unlike this battery the components in an aluminum air battery almost completely recyclable so when people talk about getting a thousand miles of range out of an electric car powered with an aluminum air battery what that means is that you have to replace the battery at the end of that thousand miles which isn't great but it's also not an insurmountable hurdle tesla famously flirted with battery swap stations a few years back and decided against it but they're not the only ones working on the idea chinese company neo announced they'd be creating battery swap stations and a battery as a service subscription last year saying it would reduce the price of their cars but you would need to pay a subscription for the battery service in fact proponents of battery swap technology call it mechanical recharging and it's not the worst idea it would definitely be faster than having to recharge a car at a charging station might even be faster than filling up your car with gas and it would of course require building out an entirely new infrastructure but if that infrastructure meant that we had an entirely closed loop system where nothing was wasted and everything was recycled and used all over again there's an argument to be made there all the energy going into this circular system would be in the recycling part which if that came out to anywhere near the same as the amount of energy required to charge lithium-ion batteries and then recycle those later on then we may be on to something so one person making this argument is a guy named trevor jackson his company mao research limited has been developing an aluminum air battery that could power an electric car for 1500 miles jackson says the energy cost would be cheaper than a lithium ion electric car on a per mile basis but is this true he claims that his car would get about seven pence uk pence per mile which comes out to about 10 cents per mile here in the u.s and according to a recent article on electric tesla model 3 owners pay about 4 cents per mile that's more so the trick to understanding jackson's math is the assumption that an electric car owner will have to replace his battery at a certain point and he estimated that to cost between ten thousand and twenty thousand dollars now elon has said that a tesla model three battery replacement would be somewhere between seven and five thousand dollars but some anecdotal experiences have been quite a bit more than that there's a story out there out there of a guy who had to get his replaced and it was like 16 000 of course this was probably an extreme case which is why it made headlines but in reality these batteries are actually designed to last the entire lifetime of the car the range loss has actually been less than we thought it would be really the only reason you would need to replace your battery is if you're in some kind of an accident and that's what insurance is for and when these battery packs do come to the end of their life cycle there are second life solutions for grid storage applications and whatnot and when it's completely done there are some companies like redwood materials which is run by former tesla exec jb straubel they are working to completely recycle these lithium ion batteries when it's all said and done at least that's the dream but the reality is most of these battery packs are winding up in landfills right now so yeah the idea of a completely closed loop system where the batteries are totally recycled made out of one of the most abundant elements on the planet sounds great and if i had the infinity gauntlet and could snap my fingers and make it happen i would probably do so but the infrastructure required would be massive more so than hydrogen way more so than electric charging not to mention that these heavy batteries would have to be transported to and from the stations by the thousands which would just add more energy into the mix i mean at least with hydrogen there's the potential to create the hydrogen there on site with electrolysis and solar panels and whatnot with this trucking in is the only option but then there's a question of convenience you know again one thing hydrogen has going for it is that it's quick to fill up and assuming that the infrastructure is built out it would be very similar to the habits and lifestyles that people currently have with their cars and just going to the gas station and filling up and i made the argument in my hydrogen video that might make it easier for people to switch over to than going the full ev battery route and the same could be true for aluminum air batteries in theory you know if the infrastructure got built out it you know the average driver drives around 12 000 to 15 000 miles a year so maybe every three to four weeks you would need to pop into a battery swap station get it done real quick and and just be on your merry way again in theory except yeah yeah i know i'm just about to yeah with some of these batteries apparently you have to refill the water and the electrolyte every 200 miles or so that feels like a lot now i'm sure that's something that we worked out and made more convenient maybe there could be a water tank that can get refilled whenever you replace the battery at the swap station or something the point is the experience of having an aluminum air car would be a lot more similar to having a gas car than a traditional ev except you would still have the zippy torquey ev motors now as somebody who can plug in my car in my garage and wake up every morning with a full tank of electrons i am perfectly happy with that experience and apparently a lot of other people feel the same way the company plug-in america did a survey and found that 96 of ev owners would buy another ev but i know there's a lot of people that don't have a garage to plug into or ready access to to charging for whom an aluminum air battery might be a better option again assuming the infrastructure can be built out now i just spent a whole lot of time talking about how these batteries could work in cars because that's what all the big headlines around these batteries have been all about but i heard a rumor and correct me if i'm wrong about this but apparently um you can put batteries in things other than cars i may need to check that boats for example a company in israel called finergy showed off an aluminum air battery system in 2019 that could be housed in a 20-foot shipping container and provide 5.8 megawatt hours of energy for context there's an e-ferry called the ellen that carries cars and passengers on trips of 22 nautical miles between two islands in the baltic sea and it uses a 4.3 megawatt hour lithium ion battery there's also a company called corvus energy that converts diesel ships to electric that plans to launch a fully electric tanker in 2022 with a 3.5 megawatt hour battery for context this is about the same as 40 model s battery packs this tanker will be powered by lithium-ion batteries and will ironically be transporting diesel fuel because we now live in the upside down because i mentioned this project because it's smaller than finergy's proposed 5.8 megawatt hour system in fact finergy says that they could fit 7.2 megawatt hours in the same space so yeah basically double the capacity and this is not insignificant the shipping industry contributes three percent of global warming emissions around the world that's more than the airline industry does and the infrastructure wouldn't have to be quite so intense because it could just be located in specific strategic you know ports of call as opposed to like you know on every other block now one last option that's worth mentioning is the potential for hybrid lithium ion and aluminum air batteries this could be the best of both worlds you've got the rechargeability of the lithium-ion batteries and then use that aluminum air battery as a bit of a range extender finergy tested this exact idea in 2013 in a car that was supposed to get 1100 miles of range though the test drive ended at around the 205 mile mark but yeah in theory this could be the best of both worlds a car that you could charge in your garage but then have that extra range extender for long road trips and then also the infrastructure wouldn't have to be quite so massive because you could just be in specific places kind of central hubs where you know you might pass through on long trips and only use them then now it's it's definitely an interesting idea it would it would definitely put an end to any range anxiety people might have and it would outperform gas cars in pretty much every way but is this the off touted lithium-ion killer do we really even need a killer can't we all get along you know given the challenges we face on the planet right now um i say the more energy storage options the better and you know you never know research into this might lead to some advancements that we can't even think of yet but what do you think how else could this battery solution be used and what other battery solutions would you like to hear about there's there's a lot of them out there let me know in the comments and if you want to stay up to date on technology news be it renewable energy cryptocurrency space stuff well uh you know you can subscribe to my channel but even better than that you could sign up for a subscription to morningbrew morningbrew is a free daily newsletter that's delivered to your inbox every monday through sunday so unless they invent a new day it's pretty much every day of the week now i know what you're thinking your inbox is probably full enough i know i've been clearing out my inbox as well but i can honestly say morning brew is one of the few email subscriptions is definitely worth having it only takes a few minutes and then you're caught up in the latest tech and business news as well as just interesting stuff going on in the world and it's not boring it's written in a fun and entertaining way kind of like how i would do it if i were running 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Channel: Joe Scott

Views: 523,762

Keywords: answers with joe, joe scott

Id: xtlwVMASbWQ

Length: 15min 51sec (951 seconds)

Published: Mon Oct 18 2021