Lithium-ion Batteries Remade the World — They Need to Change

Our mobile world would be impossible without them, but the technology is flawed and battery tech is due for an upgrade

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The smartphone you are holding in your hand is more powerful than the entire NASA computing network used to put a human on the moon in 1969. It delivers instant, superfast connectivity to the largest mass communication network ever created, and can do it from almost anywhere in the world. And yet, all this would be useless if it wasn’t powered by another technological miracle — its powerful, chargeable and long-lived battery.

The first rechargeable lead-acid battery was developed in 1859 by the French physicist Gaston Planté. In 1980, John Goodenough, then a scientist at the University of Oxford, developed the lithium-cobalt-oxide cathode, which was commercialized by Sony and used for cellphone batteries in 1991; in October he was awarded a Nobel prize for this work, along with fellow chemists M Stanley Whittingham and Akira Yoshino.

Lithium-ion batteries work by combining a lithium oxide cathode (the positive electrode), an anode (the negative electrode) and an electrolyte (the separator) used as a conductor. When the battery is charged and discharged, ions move between the electrodes and create energy the battery can then use.

Just five companies in Japan, China, and South Korea produce 62% of the world’s lithium-ion batteries. Demand has grown significantly since 2015, when China began to aggressively push production of domestic electric vehicles (EVs), on top of continued global growth of smartphone, tablet, and laptop sales. China now manufactures 60% of the world’s EVs, and is attempting to secure control of lithium, an abundant natural mineral found in brine water and produced mostly in Bolivia, Chile, and Argentina. The Chinese company Tianqi Lithium last year paid $4 billion for a stake in the Chilean mining company Sociedad Química y Minera, effectively giving it control over half the global production of lithium. The industry Tianqi is focused on, the lithium-ion battery market, is forecast to increase in size from $33 billion in 2018 to more than $73 billion by 2024, according to Global Market Insights.