Scientists are looking for sustainable battery materials as electric car sales rise.
Finnish papermakers realized the world was changing eight years ago. Paper was declining due to digital media, office printing, and postal decrease, among other issues.
One of the world’s biggest private forest owners is Finland’s Stora Enso. It has many trees to create wood goods, paper, and packing. It also hopes to build eight-minute electric car batteries. Engineers investigated utilizing tree-derived lignin. Depending on the species, trees are around 30% lignin & 70% cellulose.
What’s the Deal With Lignin?
Lignin is the glue in the trees that sort of glues the cellulose fibers together and also makes the trees really rigid. Carbon is in lignin. Carbon is ideal for battery anodes.
Lignin may be utilized in batteries other than anodes. Italian researchers released a study on lignin-based electrolytes in April. It permits ions to move between the rods and directs electrons through the battery’s electrical circuit. It stops electrons from bouncing between electrodes, which would kill your smartphone.
Synthetic graphite requires weeks of heating carbon to 3,000C (5,432F). Wood Mackenzie said Chinese coal-fired power facilities provide the energy. All batteries have cathodes and anodes, the positive and negative electrodes where ions flow. Lithium or sodium ions go from the cathode to the anode and settle like vehicles in a multi-story car park with a charged battery.
Wyatt Tenhaeff of Rochester University in New York State has also created lignin-derived anodes in the lab. Lignin, a byproduct with multiple applications, is “very interesting,” he adds. He and his colleagues used lignin to construct a self-supporting anode without glue or a copper-based current collector, a typical part in lithium-ion batteries.
According to International Council on Clean Transportation researcher Chelsea Baldino, more trees won’t be cut to make batteries if the lignin necessary for anode manufacturing is collected as a byproduct from paper-making.
Stora Enso’s engineers decided to remove lignin from the waste pulp at certain of their factories and turn it into battery anode carbon. The business wants to make batteries in 2025 alongside Swedish company Northvolt.
In the next years, battery demand will rise as more people purchase electric vehicles and store energy at home. As the world shifts away from fossil fuels, McKinsey predicts that by 2030, the world’s battery reserves would need several thousand more gigawatt hours (GWh). Today’s lithium-ion batteries rely on ecologically harmful manufacturing processes and mining. These batteries use hazardous, hard-to-recycle ingredients. Many are also human rights violators.
Magda Titirici from Imperial College London and colleagues have shown that lignin-derived carbon anodes may be used to generate conductive mats with complicated, irregular carbon structures and many oxygen-rich flaws. Titirici claims these faults increase the anode’s reactivity with ions from the cathode in sodium-ion batteries, shortening charging periods.
According to International Council on Clean Transportation researcher Chelsea Baldino, more trees won’t be cut down to create batteries if the lignin necessary for anode manufacturing is collected as a byproduct from paper-making.
According to a Stora Enso representative, all lignin utilized by the business is “a side stream of the pulping process” and does not increase the number of trees cut or wood needed in pulp-making.
It may power the wooden electronic components reported in research earlier this year. Perfect treehouse tech, right? Is that excessive?