The material was lithium cobalt oxide. Lithium cobalt oxide is arranged so that the cobalt and oxygen atoms form tightly bonded layers, with lithium-ions nestled in between. This means that your supply of lithium-ions doesn't just have to come from the dangerous lithium metal on the anode side, it's already there prebuilt into the cathode.
Competing companies like Panasonic and Sanyo raced to catch up. Lithium-ion batteries started appearing in phones, CD players, laptops. Manufacturers actually began to advertise the use of lithium-ion batteries as a key selling point of their products.
crossing a critical threshold. Lithium-ion batteries had become powerful enough and finally cheap enough for something bigger, the return of the electric car. Today, lithium-ion powers a $100 billion industry.
from anything else. And if it burst into fireworks, then at least it's in a container. Lithium only makes up around 20 parts per million of Earth's crust.
So if you have questions, I'd be happy to answer them. Lithium, cobalt, ,, all the rare earths, all these require enormous amounts of energy to be extracted.
until the phone went dead. Lithium ions cruise along and then drop hard in the end.
enough energy per kilogram. So what we're doing is thinking about what's next. So batteries are here, lithium ion and all of the things you hear in the press about lithium ion. If we do great stuff and we are going to do great stuff we get a factor of two in energy density. The dot is actually spherical. And we're sort of at the bottom of that red oval. So we get
you can use a lot of things like this, which is using a patterned array of these titanium oxide tubes. The tubes are hollowed. The lithium can get in and out. It can do all kinds of things. So you can actually do clever things and we're starting to think about using nano technology also to drive the speed and the density. So you're combining these things. So this is just one example. I'm talking
a compact Ye Old you know compact ipack plug the photo in we had some software to shrink it down because the bandwidth lithium batteries die really really quickly so so electricity is a really precious resource uh things with LCD
question as how much ordinary matter is there in the universe so you make predictions for the abundance of helium lithium and dyum and you compare against what you see and the answer is that you predict 24% of the universe in Barons in protons and neutrons is in the form of
When you apply a voltage to recharge, the extra electrons are stripped from the titanium and pulled back to the anode. The lithium-ions are forced out of the titanium disulfide layers into the electrolyte, and they too migrate to the anode where metallic lithium reforms. What Whittingham had created here was a rechargeable battery, one that worked reliably cycle after cycle with incredible consistency.
So we want the lithium to plate evenly across everywhere, but instead, it forms in that one location, and that is what is a lithium dendrite. That lithium dendrite can grow. The length scales of this is on the order of, you know, millimeters, so that would've easily short circuited the battery.
This made Goodenough the oldest Nobel laureate in history, receiving the award at the age of 97. But lithium-ion isn't perfect. - Scary moments aboard a JetBlue plane, a fire erupting after a passenger's backpack suddenly exploded.
from anything else. And if it burst into fireworks, then at least it's in a container. The lithium-ion battery changed the world, but the future of energy storage won't be about just conquering one element, it'll be about mastering many.
So since there isn't quite enough real-world data yet, especially over longer periods of time, some companies are choosing to just sit it out for now and continue developing... regular lithium-ion batteries. And you know, remember those companies I mentioned at the beginning that are all not using Silicon Carbon? The Samsungs, the Apples, the Googles, they're all huge companies.
And we have to address-- this is a picture from Katrina-- the way in which federal resilience and adaptation dollars are not going, right now, to the communities that The lithium ion battery works and delivers power at the scale we need.
table is only 4% en is and and of course everything other than um more heavier than lithium was synthesized in the centers of stars so was synthesized quite late in the universe in terms of the timeline so and it also turns out that our current understanding um
And what happens is that the lithium begins to shuttle. The lithium leaves the cathode, goes over to the anode, leaving all that space open. And in that nanosecond when that happens, oxygen somehow is lost.
When you charge it, the lithium go over to this cathode. And when you discharge it, the lithium filters back into the anode. When you charge it back up like in a lithium battery, you drive the lithium back over into the cathode side. And that's how battery cycles. It's very simple. And this is an advanced idea that we're working on which involves different kinds of cathodes and anodes.
Oh, yeah! - He turned to this, a soft, silvery metal called lithium. What makes lithium unique is not the fact that it has one electron in its outer shell that it wants to get rid of. No, that it shares with the other elements in its group.
This combination of low density and the tendency to give away its electron made lithium perfect for Whittingham's vision of this high energy density battery. But while lithium was easier to work with than potassium, easier still didn't mean easy. I mean, they only let me hold it in this glove box, and matter of fact, here's what happens to lithium if you put it in a glass of water.
But if you could get around the danger, this new electrolyte was a huge perk. It let lithium-ions shuttle between electrodes without breaking down the solvent or the cell, at least not until much higher voltages. Whittingham had unlocked lithium's potential, and in the process, he'd broken through the 1.23 volt ceiling.
It let lithium-ions shuttle between electrodes without breaking down the solvent or the cell, at least not until much higher voltages. Whittingham had unlocked lithium's potential, and in the process, he'd broken through the 1.23 volt ceiling. His new chemistry delivered nearly double, a huge 2.4 volts per cell.
The electrons arriving through the circuit are taken up by the titanium atoms and the titanium disulfide. The positive lithium-ions slide between the layers to balance out the negative charge of the electrons, and they become locked in place. And this process is reversible.
- Everything's fine until all of a sudden it's not fine. So we want the lithium to plate evenly across everywhere, but instead, it forms in that one location, and that is what is a lithium dendrite. That lithium dendrite can grow.
Whittingham published his design in 1976, and Exxon licensed the patent to a few manufacturers, but with no funding and no momentum, the first lithium battery revolution died before it had a chance to take off. Fortunately, a copy of Whittingham's paper made it across the Atlantic to Oxford University in England, where it caught the attention of John B. Goodenough,
But what was even more surprising was the fact that this compound already had lithium in it. The material was lithium cobalt oxide. Lithium cobalt oxide is arranged so that the cobalt and oxygen atoms form tightly bonded layers, with lithium-ions nestled in between.
from anything else. And if it burst into fireworks, then at least it's in a container. - This is a classic lithium-ion battery, and today we're gonna do something I always wanted to do.
from anything else. And if it burst into fireworks, then at least it's in a container. A modern lithium-ion battery like this one here contains very little lithium, ironically.
Sure. We're talking about all of these things that you take out of the ground, whether it's lithium, antimony, which is in all these devices, in every device, in your car battery, it's in your missile systems and your advanced weaponry that keeps you safe at
And this combined with biofuels made from waste and these vacuum flasks combined with lithium batteries, all of this created an energy system that was 100% unique. And we planted 2,000 trees to offset and make our whole thing carbon positive by about 75%.
But you have to be pretty stupid and fairly resilient to actually walk the talk and drag an extra 20 kilos of solar panels and ice melters and biofuel and all of this stuff and lithium batteries and vacuum flasks and all of this stuff to prove a point that if we can survive in Antarctica for two months of clean energy, why can't we do it more in London?
They're going to go through the same transition we did. We talk about lithium, because we're all expecting a battery revolution.
So there's a little timer which runs along the .. What is the lithium 7 problem, a horizon fragment-- I mean, there are lots of different details which were too complicated to put in.
And so, even in our case, if you grip, you're not going to, you know, likely move the thumb wheel forward. I think that lithium ion battery technology is going to define a lot of the direction because we've really nailed the experience in terms
We've got a lithium polymer 10-milliamp power battery on top, so we're able to inductively power this device at 13 megahertz from a cage that a rat would sit in.
and trace amounts of lithium.
And then on the grid side, on the power systems, I've been doing a number of interviews around here in the Bay Area with companies that are creating large lithium ion batteries for homes-- for your homes, businesses, malls, factories, and the idea being that you can cut your power bill by up to 80%.
like Japan that burn oil in order to create electricity, that they install batteries. They install these large lithium ion batteries in their electricity system. And they're using whatever.
I mean, why can't you just use lithium ion that we have right now? And then lithium itself, lithium is recyclable.
What about lithium? Well, lithium, there's enough lithium we know of in resources for three point three billion vehicles. And there are about eight hundred million vehicles right
of something called lithium carbonate which is an essential component in the lithium-ion
that is true for lithium, that is true for cobalt, that is true for rare earth elements, a family of metals of 17 metals that happen to be mined today almost entirely in China.
If you have lithium-ion battery you probably gonna have more neodymium; so each battery chemistry requires different materials.
- This is what the inside of a lithium-ion battery looks like. It's not exactly high tech, just two meters of foil coated in black paste, all packed into this tiny 45 gram cylinder.
- Oh my God. - The latest incident involving a lithium-ion battery. - So how did something so rudimentary looking end up in almost every electronic device on the planet?
- So, Whittingham had to switch out the water-based electrolyte for something else, and that change unlocked the possibility of higher voltages. He turned to a solution of lithium salt in an organic solvent, and it worked, but it came with serious risks. The solvent was volatile, the lithium salt was chemically unstable.
- The problem was the anode. Whittingham's design used pure lithium, which worked brilliantly, until it didn't. - We've made a special cell.
Prices dropped and Exxon's urgency evaporated. The company shut down its lithium battery program. Whittingham published his design in 1976, and Exxon licensed the patent to a few manufacturers, but with no funding and no momentum,
Lithium cobalt oxide is arranged so that the cobalt and oxygen atoms form tightly bonded layers, with lithium-ions nestled in between. This means that your supply of lithium-ions doesn't just have to come from the dangerous lithium metal on the anode side, it's already there prebuilt into the cathode. So theoretically, you don't even need lithium metal at all.