
New lithium-based battery chemistries will emerge from laboratory over next 20 years
Lithium-ion batteries are becoming the dominant battery technology, largely due to their favourable capacity-to-weight ratio, according to the Canadian National Energy Board.

Lithium batteries already have widespread use in mobile phones and personal devices, but the quantity of lithium used for these applications is relatively small.
Larger batteries, such as those in electric vehicles or to back up electrical grid power, require significantly more lithium and experts predict their increased use will have a large impact on lithium markets.
“We’ve seen a great deal of growth in stationary energy storage in the last year or two. It’s mostly been with Li-ion batteries. They’ve been more for short duration applications, but are starting to venture a bit more to longer duration, four hours or so,” said Tim Grejtak, battery analyst with Denver-based Lux Research, which released the study Future Costs of Stationary Energy Storage: Evaluating Li-ion and Flow Battery Cost Reductions and Application Fit in March.
Lithium prices have increased 100 per cent since 2012, and industry analysts expect lithium demand to more than double by 2020.
As a result, companies are developing lithium resources across the world. Bolivia and Argentina are home to the largest resource bases, followed by Chile, China, and the U.S Canada has approximately 2 million tonnes – about 4 per cent of the world’s known lithium resources, although this number may increase as exploration continues.
If demand for lithium metal remained around its current level of 37,800 tonnes, there are enough world resources to last over 1243 years, assuming all resources can technically and economically be developed and not accounting for mineral recycling.

If demand increases by 250 per cent, which industry analysts expect by 2020, 47 million tonnes of resources would last about 497 years.
Canada’s lithium resources are dispersed across the country.
Mineral resources have been discovered in Québec, Ontario, Northwest Territories, Alberta, Manitoba, Nova Scotia, New Brunswick, and Nunavut. Canada’s only producing lithium mine ceased production in 2014 but resumed production in March of 2017.
Proposed new projects include five in Quebec and five in Manitoba.
In addition, Canadian lithium battery manufacturing has also increased in response to growing global demand.
In addition to conventional lithium-ion batteries, metallic lithium batteries are being developed to improve electric vehicle charge distances and safety.

Dr. Haleh Ardebili, an electro-chemistry researcher at the Univ. of Houston, says lithium metal was used for batteries before lithium-ion came into the picture. While the technology showed great promise, with an energy density of almost 20 times current li-ion EV batteries, there are technical issues that currently prevent li-metal from being a practical battery.
“Our research focused on using polymer electrolytes to mitigate these [technical] problems, but if we can bring back lithium metal that would enhance the performance of the battery,” she said in an interview.
“Both lithium metal, I would say, and silicon are viable options for future.”
Nanotechnology-enabled lithium-based batteries are also being explored which have the potential to more than double the energy capacity of lithium-ion batteries, although the technology is still in its early stages.
“Originally, the silicone anode suffered from the cracking during cycling due to the very large expansion – over 300% in volume – during charge and discharge. That caused mechanical fatigue,” said Ardebili.
“Researchers addressed that by introducing nano-particles and nano-tubes or nano-wires [into the battery structure]. If the material fatigue issue is mitigated, li-silicon can compete well with other current types of li-ion battery technologies.”
