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A New Battery Breakthrough That Could Save Electric Vehicles During a Recession
Gas prices are plummeting, but GM’s new EV Hummer will debut a game-changing battery
Another unsuspecting victim of Covid-19 should be electric vehicles: Oil prices have cratered, making gasoline-fueled cars dirt-cheap to run. But a little-noticed breakthrough in automotive batteries has shaken up China’s EV market, and now is about to arrive in the United States, where GM and VW already have their hands on it.
The advance is the result of a global race to substantially reduce expensive cobalt in lithium-ion batteries. Until now, cobalt has been 20% to 33% of the cathode, the heart of lithium-ion batteries. The advance reduces that to 10%, a drop that researchers were calling highly unlikely just six months ago, cutting the price of an electric vehicle and adding up to 25 miles of range. Cobalt — sometimes called “blood cobalt”— also comes largely from a controversial supplier, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, where workers toil in often horrible conditions. “This leap is big because it gets harder and harder to remove the last bit; 33% to 20% is less challenging than 20% to 10%,” said Venkat Viswanathan, a professor at Carnegie Mellon University. “It becomes exponentially harder to get the cobalt out.”
