Last week, Swedish battery manufacturer Northvolt announced that it had entered into a joint development agreement with Finnish forestry company Stora Enso, which will use lignin-based hard carbon produced from renewable wood in Nordic forests. Battery.
(Photo source electrek)
This is also the world’s first anode industrialized battery entirely using European raw materials, aiming to reduce carbon footprint and production costs.
Stora Enso is famous for producing paper products and has 85 production plants around the world. As an 800-year-old renewable materials company, it is one of the largest owners of non-public forest assets in the world and the largest forest products company in Europe. one.
Based on the core concept of “making the world out of trees”, Stora Enso is committed to the sustainable development of natural resources. And Northvolt’s main focus in battery manufacturing is renewable energy and smaller carbon dioxide emissions. The cooperation between Northvolt and Stora Enso can be described as a hit-and-miss, a powerful combination.
Turning waste into treasure: the production of waste achieves a new form of new energy battery
Lignin is a polymer derived from plants, and it is also a natural strong adhesive. It is mostly found in bark or wood. Trees are composed of 20%-30% lignin. The main function is to form interweaving. mesh to harden the cell wall.
Through physical and chemical treatment of natural wood, researchers can obtain a piece of organic fiber containing lignin. This organic fiber can act as a stabilizer, and is non-toxic, harmless, and pollution-free. It is a pure green environmental protection product.
Wood fiber (Source: Sohu IT)
Lignin was originally a waste by-product in the paper industry. So far, more than 95% of lignin is directly discharged into rivers or concentrated and burned in the form of “black liquor”, which is rarely used effectively. Now it has transformed itself into an important material for making batteries.
With the rapid reduction of global lithium resources and the large amount of carbon emissions generated by the mining process, the market is also looking for more environmentally sustainable solutions, aiming to develop more environmentally friendly battery types. Wooden batteries are one of the most mentioned environmentally friendly battery types.
Among the power batteries currently equipped for new energy vehicles, lithium ion is the most important element. The content of lithium, cobalt, and nickel required for lithium-ion batteries in the earth’s crust is only 17ppm (parts per million), 30ppm and 90ppm, and most of them are concentrated in South America. Opposite to the huge market demand is the reduction in the supply of lithium.
Scientists from Poland and Sweden first noticed lignin from plants, which they oxidized and then combined with a substance called polypyrrole to create multilayer polymer electrodes.
This kind of electrode is cheap to make, but the charge density it carries can reach 70-90 mA per gram, which is comparable to or slightly better than the level of current lithium-ion batteries.
Wood batteries will be used in pure electric vehicles in the future
Wooden batteries are not a completely new concept.
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In 2013, the University of Maryland developed a rechargeable environmentally friendly wooden battery, the biggest highlight of which is the use of wood as the main raw material;
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Last year, researchers at Imperial College London invented a new technique that could enable more sustainable sodium-ion batteries to replace lithium-ion batteries by producing carbon from lignin, a waste by-product of the paper industry.
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In Japan, Nippon Paper and Mikio Fukuhara of Tohoku University in Japan successfully produced a new type of “wooden battery” using wood raw materials. Nippon Paper considers using this “wooden battery” for pure electric vehicles in the future.
With the popularization of new energy vehicles, the market demand for pure electric vehicles has expanded, and the batteries that power vehicles have also entered a high-speed development stage of recycling and scrapping.
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On the one hand, the supply of battery raw materials has decreased and prices have risen;
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On the other hand, more attention has been paid to the recycling technology of used batteries and the pollution to the environment.
According to research, a battery the size of a button is thrown into the water, which can pollute 600,000 liters of water, which is equivalent to the water consumption of a human life. If the battery is buried underground, the rare heavy metals contained in the battery will seep out and pollute the groundwater and soil.
In order to deal with the above problems, it has become urgent to find new alternative raw materials to make new batteries.
Last Friday, at the World Power Battery Conference held in Yibin, Sichuan, the issue of power battery safety and low-carbon environmental protection was also discussed.
Northvolt is working with Stora Enso to develop cost-effective battery anodes made from renewable wood, bringing wood-based batteries to the fore once again.
We expect that with the development of technology, the wooden battery can have the performance comparable to that of the current lithium battery, and even better than the battery energy capacity of the lithium battery, which will draw a strong stroke on the blueprint of human environmental protection.
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