UMD Joins $50M Sodium Battery Consortium

Lithium-ion batteries power everything from your phone to the growing fleet of electric vehicles (EVs) on roads the world over, but they rely on polluting elements that often lie at the end of long supply chains that could be affected by politics, war or natural disasters.

To help develop alternative batteries that are both sustainable and use easily available components, the University of Maryland has joined a $50 million partnership to develop high-energy, long-lasting batteries based on sodium rather than lithium.

The five-year effort led by the Department of Energy’s (DOE) Argonne National Laboratory includes five other national labs and eight universities that make up the Low-cost Earth-abundant Na-ion Storage (LENS) consortium.

“We are very excited to be part of this team. UMD’s work will focus on developing advanced electrolytes that enable sodium-ion batteries to achieve a long cycle life in wide temperature ranges, with the capability of fast charging,” said Chunsheng Wang, a professor in the Department of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering and an investigator involved with LENS.

At present, lithium-ion batteries dominate the global energy storage market for both vehicles and stationary storage of energy from renewable sources like solar and wind. Relying on any single battery chemistry creates vulnerabilities for the United States, and the dominant battery technologies today include critical elements like cobalt and nickel in addition to lithium. Sodium, however, as an abundant element, can reduce risk and increase supply chain resilience by providing a wider variety of cost-effective options.

Sodium-ion batteries have the potential to eliminate not just lithium in some applications, but also cobalt and nickel. The U.S. is well-suited to supply both the raw materials and innovation for sodium-ion technology because the country produces a substantial amount of the world’s sodium chloride (table salt) and sodium.

However, sodium-ion batteries store less energy per unit weight and volume, which results in a lower driving range—a major hurdle for such batteries to compete with lithium-ion batteries.

“The challenge ahead is improving sodium-ion energy density so that it first matches and then exceeds that of phosphate-based lithium-ion batteries while minimizing and eliminating the use of all critical elements,” said Venkat Srinivasan, director of the LENS consortium and of the Argonne Collaborative Center for Energy Storage Science. “Importantly, any improvements must not compromise other performance metrics such as cycle life and safety.”

Each LENS participant brings deep experience studying sodium-ion batteries. Collectively, they will work to discover and develop high-energy electrode materials, improve electrolytes and design, integrate and benchmark battery cells.

The consortium also includes DOE’s Brookhaven National Laboratory, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, Sandia National Laboratories and SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory. Additional university partners include Florida State University, University of California San Diego, University of Houston, University of Illinois Chicago, University of Rhode Island, University of Wisconsin–Madison and Virginia Tech.

With the involvement of all 14 partners, LENS will play a key role in training a new generation of battery scientists and researchers. Additionally, an advisory board of both well-established and emerging companies will provide the consortium with valuable industry perspectives, with the goal of nurturing a U.S. ecosystem for sodium-ion batteries.

LENS, which is supported by the DOE’s Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy’s Vehicle Technologies Office, will be part of a growing portfolio within DOE on sodium-ion batteries, which includes research into the use of this emerging chemistry in electric vehicle and grid storage applications.

Also, earlier this month, UMD announced it had joined another research alliance studying the possibilities of sodium-ion batteries for grid energy storage—the storage of energy generated by wind and solar facilities in large, stationary batteries.

Led by the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, the Sodium-ion Alliance for Grid Energy Storage will focus on demonstrating high-performance, low-cost, safe sodium-ion batteries for grid applications to help meet the rising demand for renewable energy, expected to double in the next four years.