Electric vehicle range anxiety? Researchers develop new battery that could be a cure

By Ashley Miznazi, Miami Herald

They call it range anxiety, the fear that an electric vehicle could run out of juice, say somewhere south of Yeehaw Junction on the way to Disney World with three cranky kids aboard.

Such scenarios are one of the big hesitations for many people pondering the purchase of an EV.

Research going on at Florida International University could go a long way toward curing that concern. The work is focused on a new type of battery, made of lithium-sulfur, that could potentially triple an EV’s range and also be cheaper, lighter and better for the environment.

But lithium-sulfur batteries have long had fatal flaws: they don’t recharge well and lose their juice after a year or two of use. Now, Professor Bilal El-Zahab, who runs FIU’s state-of-the-art battery lab, and a team of researchers have developed a promising breakthrough in battery composition detailed in a recent science journal paper.

“We’ve been working on this solution for at least ten years,” El-Zahab said “This battery will definitely last for more time than a typical battery.”

While still likely years from commercial development, he estimated that FIU’s change in battery chemistry could take an EV range from 300 miles to about 1000. That would certainly all but eliminate range anxiety on long trips and potentially transform the multibillion-dollar EV battery industry. For many everyday commuters, for instance, such improved performance could be the difference in charging every other week or every several weeks, instead of weekly, El-Zahab said.

Without trying to explain the complicated chemistry that makes batteries work, FIU’s team found that adding a metal catalyst, platinum, made lithium-sulfur last for more charging cycles. El-Zahab said to think about power flowing through battery pathways like a five-lane highway that suddenly slows to one open lane.

“So likelihood of accidents, likelihoods of losses, likelihood of anything wrong to happen, increases,” he said. “So what does platinum do? It acts like a traffic officer. It just goes in and guides people where to go and helps open up more lanes,” El-Zahab said.

The work was conducted in FIU’s battery lab — filled with flashing chargers, humming fans, pumps cycling the air, temperature controllers and other gear — has everything needed to make batteries from scratch. The researchers use large, black neoprene gloves that look something out of a sci-fi movie to work in oxygen and humidity-free chambers to assemble the batteries. They start by making a small battery, about the size of an AirTag, and scale their experimental versions from there.

Weighs and costs less

Since the early 90’s the battery of choice to power everything from our phones to satellites to EVs has been lithium-ion. But lithium-ion, El-Zahab said, is at “theoretical capacity” which means they can only produce so much energy — at least not without substantially raising the price.

El-Zahab says there are numerous other advantages to lithium-sulfur.

Today, EV cars are expected to run at least 200,000 miles and a typical EV vehicle might need a replacement battery to make it to the cars grave. The lithium-sulfur battery would eliminate the need for a replacement battery, which creates less waste in the environment. While gas cars batteries are typically recycled, the massive packs EVs use need special dismantling and could explode if done wrong. That doesn’t necessary mean they’ll end up at the landfill, but many sit in storage awaiting a recycling date.

Lithium-sulfur also offers another option — a much smaller battery which would enhance the safety of the car and cost, El-Zahab said. The sulfur batteries in the FIU battery lab can be made two to three times lighter than the ion batteries, he said.

Lithium-sulfur also costs much less to produce than lithium-ion. A typical lithium-ion battery is made for $100 per kilowatt hour, so a mid-range EV’s 75 kilowatt per hour battery would cost $7,500. Lithium-sulfur would cost $4,500 for a battery with the same capacity. The heavier lithium-ion batteries also wear down tires faster.

“The lithium-sulfur will make electric vehicles cheaper, and possibly will increase the adoption of these vehicles for people who cannot really nowadays afford the average electric vehicle cost,” El-Zahab said. “The battery is the single most expensive part or component in an electric vehicle today.”

Published studies including in IEEE and Science Direct suggest lithium-sulfur is the most environmentally and climate-friendly battery option. Sulfur is our 10th most abundant element and is already a byproduct of oil and gas processing.

“Regulations force us to remove the sulfur from natural gas, so we produce literally mountains of it,” El-Zahab said.

Some of those key materials used in the lithium-ion batteries — like nickel and cobalt — are not abundant, he said. And increasing competition for them will continue to drive up costs and extracting them comes at an environmental cost.

Business & Human Rights Resource Centre conducted a report that looked at how the biggest EV manufacturers — Including Toyota, Volvo, Tesla and Audi — sourced their batteries from Indonesia which led to deforestation and other issues.

“We are overburdening the mining industry in the supply chain by using so much. Based on existing battery technologies, if everyone wants a piece of the pie we won’t have enough — or the prices will be insane,” El-Zahab said.

FIU, of course, is far from the only player in the game looking for new ways to make the car charge faster and run longer. Researchers at Purdue University found using recycled plastic could advance sulfur’s battery life. Monash University researchers in Australia said they cracked the challenge too by using a different catalyst, “polyvinylpyrrolidone complex” (a chemical compound commonly used as an antiseptic) in their batteries.

Estimates of the market value of the EV battery industry range widely, from $40 to $80 billion and financial analysts expect that to double or more in coming decades. Global automakers are planning to spend more than half a trillion dollars on EVs and their batteries through 2030, according to a Reuters analysis. El-Zahab’s work is funded with $4 million from Canada-based Lion Battery Technologies, which plans to commercialize the technology over the next several years.

“We’re looking forward to take our technology and bring it to the world,” El-Zahab said. “It may be available by 2030, maybe a couple of years later than that would be more realistic. But eventually, I do believe lithium-sulfur is going to be a viable technology.”

Ashley Miznazi is a climate change reporter for the Miami Herald funded by the Lynn and Louis Wolfson II Family Foundation in partnership with Journalism Funding Partners.

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