Californian battery research leader says 200km EVs 20 years or more away

With Mitsubishi and Nissan forging a path for the auto industry to get something battery powered to market at a mass market price point sooner rather than later, few auto makers have yet to show an EV at a motor show somewhere in the world. Even Rolls-Royce is putting it out there, with its all-electric 102EX on a stand at this year's Geneva show.

But a leading battery technology researcher has raised questions about whether the optimism imparted through the marketing might be premature.
That was the suggestion put forward at a conference of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) in February, by a spokeswoman for one of the world's better respected research facilities.

Kristin Persson, a research chemist at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in California, told ABC Science Show host Robyn Williams at the conference she thinks plug-in hybrids will remain the most viable alternative means of mobility for 20 years or more.

Persson believes lithium-ion will form the basis for battery improvement in years to come, but the process is not likely to speed up exponentially any time soon.

Persson and her fellows currently look at a range of 200km or more in much the same way as 1940s aeronautical engineers viewed the sound barrier. They're not finding it easy to penetrate.

Few current Li-ion powered vehicles are good for more than 160km from full to flat, and that's driven with care. Somewhere around that mark, the cost of every few extra kilometres of range skyrockets.

Even pushing range to just 300km would easily double the cost of an average sized car, Persson told Williams. "If you estimate that a lithium ion battery costs about $500 per kilowatt hour, which is fairly cheap compared to today's where they cost almost up to $1000, your battery is going to cost $25,000 for one car. The battery pack [for 200 miles]."

Persson is spearheading the search for a next-big-thing in chemicals capable of producing and storing electrical energy. Using laboratory research and computational modelling, she and her colleagues at the Berkeley facility are working their way through a vast array of chemical structures to find some substance or combination to transcend the energy density and range limitations imposed by current electrochemical formulas. "[And] even if I come up with something today, it's not going to be on the market before 15 years from now."

This is not about the cost of lithium, the key ingredient, Persson told Williams. "I don't think there is a risk we're going to have a lithium scarcity anytime soon." In fact, much of the cost resides in the other parts. "The cathode material is usually quite expensive... [The] electrolyte is not that cheap. There is a separator, that costs money. The engineering that goes into making these battery packs is quite expensive too."

The Lawrence Berkeley facility's research takes in existing and invented materials, the latter 'dreamed up' by Persson using computational modelling. This works by data mining on the crystal structures of known compounds to work out how they might be remodelled into new forms.

Modelling new materials in virtual form, she shifts atoms around inside known crystal structures and calculates the resulting changes in their properties. Those which show promise she refers to her experimentalist colleagues who realise them in the lab.

They also work with organic materials. "Sometimes we come up with things in the dirt, that you can just dig up and that people just haven't considered as battery materials. Sometimes we actually come up with materials that nobody has ever seen before," she told Williams.

Asked if they have found anything that's worked so far, she told of "one known existing one that wasn't considered as a battery material before, and one that is completely new that has never been seen in nature."

At the moment, she continued, they are "not performing according to expectations. But they are battery materials, they do cycle lithium like we predict at the voltage we predicted. We can't get as much in and out as we would like to – yet."

Asked by Williams if her experience to date indicates it's only a matter of time before they find some silver bullet to make EVs truly viable, Persson was circumspect. "I would love to say yes, that there is a wonder material out there, I don't know. But if there is. We'll find it... Nature isn't like the human genome. It isn't nearly as complicated when it comes to minerals."

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