
Chemistry Nobel Goes to Lithium Battery Innovators - tu7001
https://www.quantamagazine.org/chemistry-nobel-goes-to-lithium-battery-innovators-20191009/
======
Robotbeat
I consider rechargeable lithium chemistry batteries just as crucial to the
21st century as the internal combustion engine was to the 20th. And we're only
two decades in.

1) Practical electric cars.

2) Practical and scalable (both directions) and geographically independent
grid storage.

3) High performance cellphones and smartphones.

4) Practical laptops and tablets.

5) Other wearable smart devices (smartwatches, portable VR/AR, fitness
trackers, etc)

6) Medical devices (insulin pumps, CPAP, wearable artificial kidneys, portable
oxygen generators, portable artificial heart, etc)

7) Electric trucks.

8) Electric aircraft (low range now, will soon be 1000km range, eventually
will get long range and full size using more advanced chemistries like lithium
sulfur, lithium anode, or even lithium air in a few decades).

9) Battery electric trains (including things like Hyperloop or Loop people
movers).

10) Battery electric ships.

11) E-cigarrettes.

12) Various personal mobility devices like e-scooters, those funny hoverboard
things, e-bikes, etc.

13) Lightweight spacecraft energy storage.

14) Aerial Drones. Both the ubiquitous quadcopter/DJI types and the more
advanced winged flight delivery drones like Zipline is using to revolutionize
high speed medical product delivery in places like infrastructure-hobbled
Africa or rural India and may eventually become commonplace in the rest of the
world for more products.

15) Greatly enhanced submarine propulsion, especially for underwater drones.
(I have a feeling we're just scratching the surface with this one.)

16) Robotic prosthetics/assistance devices.

17) Animal or humanoid robotics like Boston Dynamics.

18) Ground based delivery drones.

19) Other ground-based drones like more compact robotic vacuums, those silly
robotic trashcans, etc.

20) Secondary power sources, like for hybrid cars or APUs for aircraft or
launch vehicles (such as SpaceX's Starship).

It's actually remarkable how big of an impact lithium ion batteries have
already had. In some cases, it's just significantly extending the performance
and convenience of things already marginally viable using lead acid or NiMH
batteries, and in others it's truly enabling. And we're just getting started.

I truly believe the impact of the rechargeable lithium chemistry battery in
the 21st Century will be just as great or greater than the internal combustion
was for the 20th century.

So this prize is well-earned.

~~~
cjbenedikt
...and how big an impact mining it will have on environment and water
use...just saying

~~~
Robotbeat
It will likely have some (small) impact just due to the scale of its use.
However, the process is not too different from sea salt production... You're
evaporating a brine, usually. And you're displacing fossil fuel use with a
material that can be recycled, so instead of constantly mining for fossil
fuels, we can just extract the material once.

Additionally, it can be extracted from seawater at a price that isn't insane,
most affordably through desalination discharge brine. So in that sense, it
could actually improve water usage by helping offset the cost of desalination.

So a huge net positive compared to our current system and with a pathway to
eliminate the negative impact entirely.

~~~
tverbeure
> And you're displacing fossil fuel use with a material that can be recycled,
> so instead of constantly mining for fossil fuels, we can just extract the
> material once.

I was wondering about the recycling aspects of Lithium.

According to Wikipedia, it's not a thing (yet?), because mining lithium is 5x
cheaper than recycling. But they're working on it...

~~~
Robotbeat
It's a thing, but it's done at a small scale. And prices of lithium have
started to climb to the point that it is looking attractive.

And there's a simple solution, here: have companies (including foreign, via
tariffs) pay for the fully burdened cost of the environmental damage they're
inflicting. That'll end virtually all fossil fuel usage and enable recycling
and/or exclusively low-impact mining techniques.

~~~
rory096
>including foreign, via tariffs

Border adjustments, not tariffs.

------
Merrill
It appears that Whittingham did his work at Exxon, and Yoshino did his at
Asahi Kasei. So both were at industrial research labs when they did the Nobel
prize-winning work.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M._Stanley_Whittingham](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M._Stanley_Whittingham)
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Akira_Yoshino](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Akira_Yoshino)

~~~
MichaelApproved
How does the prize money work in relation to the employer? If they did the
work as part of their employment, would the employer have a claim to that
money?

~~~
ajross
It's certainly not impossible that you could have an employment contract where
the employee agrees to assign rights to stuff like prize money to the
employer. I'd be shocked beyond belief if such a contract existed here though.

~~~
ceejayoz
> I'd be shocked beyond belief if such a contract existed here though.

Even if it existed, the PR backlash of "Exxon steals Nobel Prize from
scientist" would probably prevent its enforcement.

------
elamje
If you want to see an accomplished life, look up John Goodenough on Wikipedia.
Casually fought in WWII, developed Lithium-Ion, still going strong in his
90’s.

[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_B._Goodenough](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_B._Goodenough)

~~~
peterholcomb
It would have been pretty heartbreaking (to me at least) for him to have
passed before getting the Nobel. Glad they finally gave it to him.

~~~
labster
Would have been impossible too: Nobel Prizes are bestowed only on the living,
so as to fund their research.

------
michannne
Well deserved. We would not be anywhere where we are today without Li-ion
batteries.

"Goodenough" is also a surname I have never heard in my life and it is as odd
as I expected it to be.

~~~
irrational
You can see here

[https://projects.newsday.com/databases/long-island/census-
la...](https://projects.newsday.com/databases/long-island/census-last-
names/?where=name^goodenough&offset=0)

the number of people in the US Census with that surname.

~~~
dmix
1,656

------
searine
Aside from the topic, which is interesting in its own right, I find it neat
that the prize went to faculty at lesser known universities. Nobody is
surprised to see Harvard or Oxford listed.

SUNY at Binghamton however is an outlier. Congrats to SUNY.

~~~
leemailll
SUNY stony brook has several laureates
[https://www.stonybrook.edu/commcms/provost/faculty/awards/aw...](https://www.stonybrook.edu/commcms/provost/faculty/awards/awards-
notable#view-nobel)

------
archeantus
It's fascinating to look at what this technology (not perfect, but definitely
Goodenough) has accomplished. And it is also crazy to think that it was almost
more of a discovery, than an invention.

Does this mean that the next breakthrough is hiding in plain sight, waiting
for someone to put the perfect cocktail of raw materials together? I have no
bg in chemistry, but the thought of being part of making a next-level battery
sounds very exciting.

~~~
amelius
Perhaps someone could automate the discovery process: build a robot that mixes
stuff together, then test how well it works as a battery, then make
incremental improvements perhaps using a genetic algorithm.

~~~
selimthegrim
People have done it for photoelectrochemical cells like Nate Lewis at Caltech

------
theandrewbailey
I listened to an interview with Goodenough last month. Pretty interesting
story. [https://cen.acs.org/people/profiles/Podcast-97-lithium-
ion-b...](https://cen.acs.org/people/profiles/Podcast-97-lithium-ion-
battery/97/i35)

~~~
selimthegrim
Goodenough is making a physics pun with “Braga glass” that the interviewers
don’t catch - there is a well known phenomenon in solid state physics called a
Bragg glass

[https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-018-03267-z](https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-018-03267-z)

[https://www.nature.com/articles/35096534](https://www.nature.com/articles/35096534)
also arXiv here ([https://arxiv.org/abs/cond-
mat/0110592](https://arxiv.org/abs/cond-mat/0110592))

~~~
tinganho
Is it good enough to brag about it?

------
orliesaurus
weirdly enough a few months ago (maybe like a close to a year...) someone on
HN shared an article on J.B. Goodenough which I had read. Today, before
clicking on the link I assumed because of the fact that someone had shared the
article here before, that he would be one of the Innovators who had won the
Nobel. Thanks HN for making me learn and remember little details like this!

------
privacy_esq
I went to SUNY Binghamton for undergrad. Great school and exciting to see!

~~~
thebenedict
Me too -- studied Materials Science while Dr. Whittingham was department co-
chair circa 2005. I never worked with him but it's a happy surprise to see him
and Binghamton in the news.

------
pier25
Clean, sustainable, and efficient energy storage is probably the most
important thing humanity needs right now.

The big problem with renewable energy is that generally it's not available on
demand.

~~~
manfredo
Solved by nuclear, which is renewable through uranium seawater extraction.

~~~
Obi_Juan_Kenobi
Nuclear is an economic un-reality.

In theory, with large-scale cooperative government support, nuclear can
happen. We can develop the next generation of nuclear infrastructure and have
safe and affordable generation. Without that, nuclear is an un-economic pipe-
dream that gets more expensive as renewable generation gets more affordable.

Realistically, with over-provisioning, grid upgrades, and modest lithium
battery storage, renewables can and will scale.

~~~
manfredo
> In theory, with large-scale cooperative government support, nuclear can
> happen.

Not just in theory, France did exactly that and did it successfully. They're
paying half the cost of electricity as Germany while emitting less than half
as much carbon. South Korea has also made large gains in nuclear power. US
nuclear power would have been considerably more cost effective if plants
weren't closed before the end of their planned lifecycle - the "nuclear plants
are expensive, let's close them" meme is self fulfilling.

> Realistically, with over-provisioning, grid upgrades, and modest lithium
> battery storage, renewables can and will scale.

Places like California and Germany have attempted this. They have both
realized that efficient storage remains a fantasy and use gas plants to
provide energy when intermittent sources do not produce power. Most renewable
energy projects are, in reality, combined cycle gas plants supplemented by
renewables. This is good, because combined cycle gas plants are much cleaner
than the coal plants they are replacing. But they still emit carbon and in
Europe's case creates dependency on Russia for energy.

~~~
philipkglass
California, at least its CAISO grid [1], is more like "renewables supplemented
by combined cycle gas plants." The change is fairly recent.

Annual real power [2] generated by gas plants in CAISO reached its all time
high in 2014 at 11707 MW. In 2014 generation from renewables was only 5418 MW.
Renewables have increased and gas has declined every year since. The crossover
first happened in 2017 when gas power dipped to 7396 MW and renewables rose to
9671 MW. For 2019, gas is down to 6835 MW (to date) and renewables are up to
10507 MW (also to date).

Sorry that I don't have a quick citation for these numbers, but the raw data
is here:

[http://content.caiso.com/green/renewrpt/](http://content.caiso.com/green/renewrpt/)

I've downloaded all the daily *.txt files and cobbled together big CSVs from
them to track these sorts of statistics.

[1]
[http://www.caiso.com/about/Pages/default.aspx](http://www.caiso.com/about/Pages/default.aspx)

[2] Annual real power meaning number of megawatt hours generated in the year
divided by number of hours in the year; this implicitly accounts for differing
capacity factors.

~~~
manfredo
This directly contradicts the first results I find:
[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_in_California#/media/...](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_in_California#/media/File%3ACalifornia_Electricity_Generation_Sources_Pie_Chart.svg)

Solar and wind add up to 25.5% of generation, as compared to over 40% natural
gas. Add hydro and geothermal and renewables rise to 43%, still far from the
100:70 renewable to gas ratio you claimed. But hydroelectric and geothermal
are geographically limited, the plan is still to build more solar and wind,
with gas plants for use when demand exceeds the renewables' production.

~~~
philipkglass
That chart says that natural gas was 43.8% in 2018. It also gives:

Solar, 19.0%

Hydro, 12.3%

Wind, 6.5%

Geothermal, 5.7%

Wood/biomass, 2.7%

Add those renewable sources together and you get 46.2%, more (but only
slightly more) than natural gas. It looks like the chart-maker's data source
is the Energy Information Administration. The greater dominance of renewables
that I found may be because I'm just tracking the CAISO grid. The EIA would
have data covering Southern California as well.

------
throwawaybbq1
I was at an event today where Al Gore spoke positively about LiON battery as
energy storage. I was a bit surprised .. is this sustainable tech?

~~~
Obi_Juan_Kenobi
Ultimately, yes.

There are a variety of lithium battery technologies, so it's important to
recognize that there are differences, and that the state-of-the-art does
change with some frequency. But, if nothing else, the metal inputs to battery
production can be smelted and recovered, and Lithium is plentiful.

"Good" recycling of batteries would involve recovering the electrode materials
directly and easily 'refreshing' them. This would make batteries very
sustainable. Work on developing this process for various chemistries is
ongoing, but not yet ready. Research and development of recycling-friendly
chemistries and production is just beginning.
[https://cen.acs.org/materials/energy-storage/time-serious-
re...](https://cen.acs.org/materials/energy-storage/time-serious-recycling-
lithium/97/i28)

The batteries themselves will be getting much more durable. A JES article was
recently published that made quite a few headlines as a 'million mile' car
battery, but it's not hype.
[http://jes.ecsdl.org/content/166/13/A3031](http://jes.ecsdl.org/content/166/13/A3031)
This is extant technology (indeed, at least 3 years old) that's proving to be
exceptionally durable. This gives batteries at least two decades of nearly-
full capacity, with the potential to last much longer with useful capacity.

We're not there yet, but there's no physical or chemical reason that Lithium
battery technology can't be sustainable.

------
anderspitman
The batteries in the banner image look to be 18650s, an extremely popular lion
form factor. There are more than 7000 of them in each Tesla battery.

~~~
Tuxer
Tesla moved to 21700 on model 3 and newer models

~~~
anderspitman
Apparently my information is out of date, thanks.

------
bvssatish
Long overdue.

------
excalibur
Better late than never!

~~~
KIFulgore
No kidding... the Nobel committee seems to aim for nearly-posthumous far too
often.

------
cagenut
I consider it a glitch in the simulation that the guy who _may_ have saved us
from self-immolating on carbon with an alternative that _may_ prove out to be
just barely good enough... is named Goodenough.

~~~
rgoulter
Explained that way, it's a good aptronym.
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aptronym](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aptronym)

~~~
wackro
It could be a case of nominative determinism. Driven by fate to create good-
enough solutions.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nominative_determinism](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nominative_determinism)

------
scrumbledober
Johnny B Good (enough)

------
BurningFrog
So in a way, these guys are the fathers of the modern cell phone.

------
imvetri
Shouldn't they be accountable for toxicity in environment.

~~~
simonh
Why do you think they hold responsibility for the actions of others?

