Emerging Automotive Battery Chemistries: Hedging Market Bets

Abstract

<div class="section abstract"><div class="htmlview paragraph">There is an urgent need to decarbonize various industry sectors, including transportation; however, this is difficult to achieve when relying solely on today’s lithium-ion (Li-ion) battery technology. A lack of sufficient supply of critical materials—including lithium, nickel, and cobalt—is a major driving force behind research, development, and commercialization of new battery chemistries that can support this energy transition. Many emerging chemistries do not face the same supply, safety, and often durability challenges associated with Li-ion technology, yet these solutions are still very immature and require significant development effort to be commercialized.</div><div class="htmlview paragraph"><b>Emerging Automotive Battery Chemistries: Hedging Market</b> identifies and evaluates various chemistries suitable for deployment in the automotive industry and describes advantages, disadvantages, and development challenges for each identified technology. Additionally, it outlines development timelines, contending that, to benefit from these new technologies in a decade or so, commercialization needs to begin today (e.g., de-risking critical material supply chains, developing circular approaches). The report also proposes policy interventions to enable developments of these new chemistries and to allow those immature technologies to compete with well-established Li-ion batteries.</div><div class="htmlview paragraph"><a href="https://www.sae.org/publications/edge-research-reports" target="_blank">Click here to access the full SAE EDGE</a>^TM<a href="https://www.sae.org/publications/edge-research-reports" target="_blank"> Research Report portfolio.</a></div></div>