The Future of the Lithium-ion Battery Industry

Monday, July 8, 2024

Alternative energy sources offer an avenue to combat climate change, reduce carbon emissions and lower energy costs. Rechargeable, high-capacity energy storage materials, such as lithium-ion (Li-ion) batteries, play a key role in supporting these goals. Thus, interest in these materials has soared in recent years.

However, the production and manufacturing of lithium-ion batteries is an extremely sensitive, complex process where failure can be catastrophic. Today’s instrument manufacturers are working to bring powerful and sensitive solutions to scientists across the entire battery research workflow, from mining to raw materials, contaminants, QC, recycling and more, in order to push these batteries—and the alternative energy sources that rely on them—toward their full potential.

Labcompare recently published a documentary on this topic. This article—Roundtable 2—focuses on where the lithium-ion battery industry is headed in the near future. The previous article, Roundtable 1, discusses the challenges associated with lithium-ion batteries, specifically testing and analysis.

Q: Where do you see the lithium-ion battery industry in 5 years, or even 10 years, from now?

Alan Taub

Director, Electric Vehicle Center University of Michigan Electric Vehicle Center

There's no question in my mind that the transition to battery electric vehicles is going to happen. It is the right technology at the right time. Today, the world is approaching 90 million vehicles produced per year—that's about one vehicle for every seven people on the planet. We're just beginning the transition and penetration of battery electric vehicles into that marketplace. The demand for raw material production for the battery plants is going to continue to increase because that transition is the right thing to do for the environment—and it also delivers a better vehicle for the consumer.

Ross Ashdown

AAS, MP-AES & ICP-OES Marketing Manager, Agilent Technologies

In five years, I can envision that lithium-ion batteries for electric vehicles will increase in demand by roughly two- or three-fold. This will lead to acceleration of the use of electric vehicles, whereby you could expect 6- to 7-fold increase in electric vehicle purchases by 2030 to 2034.

Lithium-ion batteries going into electric vehicles reduces CO2 production compared with internal combustion engines, so that's a really great step forward to help governments meet CO2 reduction targets.

What I think would be fantastic, where more R&D probably needs to be placed, is the reduction of CO2 production across the entire lithium-ion battery chain. So not just the use of the end product, which is the electric vehicle, but all the way from the mine site through to the production of the battery through to putting the battery in the vehicle. Every aspect really needs to have a degree of scrutiny placed on it and better processes included to reduce CO2 production all the way through the lithium-ion battery value chain.

Vick Singh

Senior Vice President of Technology, Dragonfly Energy

In five years, I think the battery industry is going to have a more diversified supply chain. I think you'll see chemistries such as sodium-ion batteries become more prevalent in the marketplace. I also think you're going to see innovations in manufacturing—a lot of work being put toward reducing cost and CO₂ emissions and increasing the sustainability of batteries. Longer term, maybe 10 years, we will hopefully see some solid-state batteries hit the market for new industries—electrifying longer range vehicles, maybe rail and who knows, maybe even flight.

Jon Peters

Senior Market Manager—Chemical and Energy, Shimadzu Scientific Instruments

Sustainability is key. Of course, we would love to be able to have the same energy density with sodium-ion batteries or other technologies that are much more abundant and easily accessible. But I think the long -erm solution is to perfect the recycling effort so we can recover the majority of lithium and other materials, graphite for example, that are difficult to pull out of the environment. We can do this inexpensively enough to have it economically viable. This is going to create a more sustainable system for lithium-ion batteries, generally.

Jonathan Knapp

Director of New Business Development, Hitachi High-Technologies Corporation

The transition from providing automotive power from liquid sources like gasoline and diesel to lithium-ion batteries is going to be a change equal to that of the transition from steam power to gasoline or from shale to steam. Those transitions all took more than 50 years to go from the initial commercial introduction to widespread adoption. The innovation phase can be expected to last at least 50 years. I expect that in the next 5 to 10 years, what you're going to see is batteries transition from that innovation phase into the growth phase. The major technologies will be highly developed within the next 10 years and we will start to see those critical thresholds for adoption—charge time, capacity and price—really fall within the mass market.