This Battery Doesn't Need Lithium and It Just Hit Mass Production

Added: 2026-05-25

[00:00:00]In April of this year, CL, the world's biggest battery company, signed the largest non- lithium battery order in history. Right now, lithium batteries are powering your phone, your laptop, and probably the EV parked outside your building. These batteries are the bedrock of the modern world. But they've also had more than their fair share of explosively bad press. But despite this inflammatory reputation, for the last three decades, there has been nothing close to an alternative until now. CL just signed a deal to supply 60 gawatt hours of sodium ion battery capacity.

[00:00:31]Enough to charge every smartphone on Earth at the same time. Today, I want to try and answer why has it taken so long to unear an alternative and answer the question, is this really the end of the road for lithium ion. But to get there, we need to first look at what made lithium so irreplaceable in the first place.

[00:00:48]>> It won't start. Something's draining the battery.

[00:00:50]>> All batteries operate around the same fundamental idea. They have two electrodes, a positive cathode and a negative anode, and are separated by a material called an electrolyte that can transport charged ions such as lithium, but don't transport electrons. When you charge a battery, the voltage forces positively charged ions away from the positive cathode and drives them through the electrolyte towards the negative anode where they need something to attach to. In a lithium ion battery, that something is graphite. The lithium ions slide between the ordered layers of carbon sheets and sit there held in place in a process called intercolation.

[00:01:23]If you disconnect the charger and allow the circuit to discharge, these stored ions want to move back. They deintercolate, sliding out of the graphite and migrate through the electrolyte towards the cathode. And as they do, that positive flow forces negatively charged electrons take the long way round, powering your device.

[00:01:38]Lithium ions are exceptionally good at this process for three reasons. Lithium is smaller and lighter, so you can pack more charge carrying ions into the same mass and volume of battery. That's why lithium ion has a higher W hour per kilogram than most alternative battery chemistries. It's also exceptionally eager to give up its outermost electron.

[00:01:55]And because a battery's voltage is the electrode potential difference between its two ends, lithium's record low electrode potential directly translates into the highest cell voltage of any common chemistry. And since the energy a cell stores equals voltage times charge, that combined with lithium being light enough to pack lots of charge into very little mass gives lithium ion roughly three times the energy density of the nickel cadmium batteries it replaced.

[00:02:18]And finally, at just 76 pome in radius, the ions are small enough to slot cleanly in and out of graphite's layered structure thousands of times without forcing the layers apart or degrading the anode. It is basically a flawless approach to creating a battery, except for the part where it catches fire. So, what is going on there? To move lithium ions effectively, you need a solvent that dissolves lithium salts and conducts ions well. The materials that do that best happen to be organic solvents that are inherently flammable, which are where the problem starts. If the cell overheats, gets punctured, or is overcharged, the electrolyte can ignite, and the heat that it produces triggers neighboring cells to do the same, and generally then you have a bad time. Now, in the early years, lithium ion batteries were used in small handheld devices with modest energy demands. But the thinner that phones and laptops started getting and the more power that they started needing, the manufacturers started pushing higher energy densities while trying to make them cheaper. And that can be an explosive and slightly dangerous mistake. as Samsung discovered in 2016 when they released the Galaxy Note 7.

[00:03:19]And within weeks, reports of devices catching fire on planes, in pockets, and on bedside tables forced a global recall costing $5 billion and a considerable amount of dignity. But that didn't stop the industry. They began engineering around these problems with better thermal control, improved battery management systems, and safer cell chemistries. But the underlying problem never really went away. Right now in New York City, lithium-ion battery fires have replaced electrical fires as the leading cause of fatal fires in the city. And ironically, cold weather is a huge instigator of electric vehicle fires. In cold temperatures, lithium ion moves so slowly that they plate onto the anode surface as a metallic lithium rather than intercolating cleanly between the graphite layers. That plating can grow into a jagged crystalline spike called a dendrite. And if a dendrite reaches from the anode to the cathode, it creates an internal short circuit and then usually a fire.

[00:04:12]But also just generally at cold temperatures, its performance suffers.

[00:04:15]At freezing point, a lithium battery loses 20 to 40% of its range, which may explain why Santa has never upgraded to an electric sleigh. There is also the geography problem. Three countries, Australia, Chile, and China control 90% of the world's mined lithium, with China alone processing approximately 65% of the world's lithium into battery grade material and manufacturing around 75% of all lithium ion batteries. It is this supply chain dependency that makes the West's energy independent strategy and the EV transition exceptionally vulnerable to the whims of world leaders and any small market fluctuations.

[00:04:49]Between 2020 and 2022, lithium carbonate prices increased by a factor of 8. Then in 2023, they crashed by more than 70%.

[00:04:58]Battery manufacturers building multi-year production plans were essentially running their businesses against a commodity that behaved suspiciously like a meme stock. So that makes us ask the question of if lithium is so fragile, then why has it taken the industry 30 years to find an alternative? But first, let me take a moment to thank today's sponsor, Flexispot, whose standing desk and chair are single-handedly keeping me out of the chiropractor's office. Before Flexispot had my back, my editing setup looked like this, which I'd graciously describe as biomechanically suboptimal and usually resulted in me ending each day 2 in shorter than I started. Then Flexispot sent me this chair, the C7 Max. And look, generally, I am someone that avoids accumulating stuff. But this has made such a difference to how I work. The headrest and back rest are fully adjustable, so it's actually set up for my body rather than just some hypothetical average human. These armrests can move in five different directions, which is exactly as many directions as I needed. And the lumbar support is designed around your sacrum rather than just your lower back, making it more ergonomic. Even better, the memory phone seat cushion has reliably survived 12 hours of backto-back Zoom calls without complaint. More than I can say for myself. Flexispot were also kind enough to send me this E7 Pro standing desk and gave me specific instructions to demonstrate to you guys how sturdy this thing is. It runs on a dual motor three-stage leg system and adjusts from 25 to 50 in and holds 440 lb of static load, which I took as a personal challenge to find out if it was true. It held up really well throughout a full series of very rigorous tests that I put it through. And as someone who just struggles to sit down for too long without getting bored, being able to just stand up without leaving my desk has been more useful than I expected. If you want to go more affordable, the E7 desk and C5 chair are the budget friendly options. Or if you want to go the other way, the brand new C7 Morpher has upgraded lumbar support and back rest compared to my model. All this comes with a 30-day risk-free return and at least a 10-year warranty. Flexisport are currently running their brand day and Memorial Day sale with up to 80% off, and you'll also be in with a chance to win free orders. Links are in the description down below, or scan the QR code on screen now. Thank you to Flexis Spot for supporting the channel. Now, back to the video.

[00:07:01]Lithium didn't start as the number one pick for the battery community. In fact, back in the 1960s, sodium was considered the front rudder. So, what changed? Both sodium and lithium are alkaline metals on the periodic table, and they sit directly above each other. This means that they share properties that makes them ideal candidates for batteries.

[00:07:18]Both readily give up a single electron and form a positive ion that can shuttle through an electrolyte and intercolate into an electrode material. Sodium ions do carry a slightly lower electrochemical potential than lithium which means slightly less voltage per cell and they are larger so have a slightly lower energy density but in theory they should operate the same way in a battery. Sodium was actually used in the first high energy density rechargeable battery created by the Ford Motor Company in 1966. It reached 150W per kilogram energy density and was amongst the best at the time. However, the sodium sulfur design was expensive to manufacture and used molten sodium and sulfur electrodes. So, had to operate around 300° C, so both literally and physically burned a hole in your pocket. This prototype, though, kickstarted the race to find an alkali metal battery that could operate at responsible temperatures. The breakthrough that tipped the balance came in 1972 from a guy called Stanley Whittingham, who chose to work with lithium rather than sodium and discovered that lithium ions could intercolate in titanium dulfide cathodes at room temperature. And for the very first time, we had a rechargeable alkaline metal battery that didn't need to be kept in a pizza oven in order to function. As a result, suddenly all of the research focus shifted towards lithium. And just 19 years later, in 1991, Sony put the first commercial lithium ion battery into a camcorder. A decision which arguably changed the direction of batteries forever and also made sure that your childhood antics were captured in full glorious standard definition. The key shift in those 19 years was a material that had been sitting in labs the entire time.

[00:08:49]graphite cheap, stable, and with interlayair spacing almost perfectly sized to accommodate lithium ions.

[00:08:54]Sodium researchers looked at the same material and saw the same opportunity.

[00:08:58]The problem though was that sodium ions are 102 pometers across, roughly 35% larger than lithium ions. And when sodium ions try to intercolate into graphite, it doesn't slot cleanly between the layers. It forces them apart, destabilizing the structure and degrading the anode with every single charging cycle. This means that practical sodium storage capacity of graphite is essentially zero. And as the community adopted graphite, it solidified the hold of lithium ion batteries and secured their future.

[00:09:26]Following Sony's launch, approximately $1 trillion has been spent in subsequent investment, manufacturing, infrastructure, and R&D attention. And this has allowed lithium ion batteries to progress from around 80 to 100 W hours per kilogram in early commercial models to around 250 to 300 W per kilogram that we see in the best cells today. The industry may have found its chosen chemistry, but researchers in the background were still trying to make sodium happen.

[00:09:51]>> It's not going to happen.

[00:09:52]>> For decades, it seemed like the match made in heaven between lithium and graphite was never going to be beaten.

[00:09:58]So, what changed? I'mma batteries size.

[00:10:03]>> Sodium's redemption arc began in the year 2000 when a group from Delhauszy University in Canada discovered that a material called hard carbon was able to similarly reversibly store sodium ions in the same way graphite can store lithium. Where graphite is a neat stack of parallel layers all spaced slightly too closely together to effectively let sodium ions in. Hard carbon is the opposite. It's formed by taking organic precursors, biomass, resins, and even glucose, and almost any carbon-rich material, and heating them to between 1,00 and 1,400° C in an oxygen-free environment. But because the process happens too fast and at too high a temperature for all carbon atoms to organize into neat graphite layers, they freeze in place in a permanently disordered state, full of nanopores and random layer spacings and irregular gaps. This material became the perfect place for sodium ions to intercolate into. But it took another 16 years of research before the attention of major players in the industry could be pulled away from lithium. In 2016, the world's largest battery manufacturer, CL, began their first sodium program, and they invested about $1.5 billion over the following decade. Despite the major advantage that hard carbon can intercolate sodium ions, that is also its main disadvantage. The same pore filled irregular structure makes it a sponge for soaking up water straight from the air. and even trace amounts of moisture will react with the electrolyte inside the cell, generating gases that degrade performance and shortening the cell's life cycle. To overcome this problem, CL turned to two major innovations. The first was to make hard carbon itself water resistant. They did this by replacing the hydroxal groups on the carbon surface that naturally attract water with hydrophobic compounds that block water molecules from entering the pores entirely. One of the major innovations was their ability to control the pore dimensions that are set during the high temperature production process.

[00:11:49]They found that they could be tuned by adjusting the temperature and precursor materials. But if they made them too narrow, the sodium ions couldn't enter efficiently, but too wide and they would be wasting space that could be used to store charge. They were able to precisely control the pore dimensions to the angstrom scale, allowing them to precisely tune how many sodium ions the material can hold and how easily they can move in and out. This optimized material was then bonded to an aluminium current collector, the foil that carries electrons in and out of the cell using a binder formulation specifically developed for hard carbon's irregular surface. This anode alongside other advances across the rest of the cell combines to produce a battery that CL calls NRA with a performance level that seems basically implausible for sodium ions even just a few years ago. The Nextra battery achieves 175W hours per kilogram energy density. that is comparable to the LPF lithium batteries currently used in most affordable EVs.

[00:12:42]In a vehicle, that translates to a range of over 500 km on a single charge. And once it's run flat, charging back to 80% takes just 15 minutes. And it can last for more than 10,000 charge cycles before significant degradation. Roughly three times the road life of the lithium ion cells it's gunning to replace. Even if you charge it in a single day, that is 27 years of use. There is also one more advantage that the energy density figures don't quite capture. the cold weather problem. At 0 degrees Celsius, where lithium ion batteries become viscous enough to slow ion transport down until the whole mechanism stops entirely, sodium ion cells use a different class of electrolyte.

[00:13:17]Etherbased solvents that stay fluid at temperatures as low as -58° C. This means that at -40° C, Nactra retains 90% of its charge capability. And then there is the price. Sodium and aluminium are both abundant and cheap. And by developing a scalable production line, CL can capture that raw material advantage in the final sale price. They are claiming to have bought sodium ion cell costs down to around $19 per kilowatt hour. By comparison, lithium ion cells usually sit somewhere between $55 and $70. Depending on lithium carbonate prices and how the week is going geopolitically. So the question is, if sodium is cheaper, longerlasting, and better in the cold, is lithium finished for good?

[00:14:00]While sodium might look like it's winning on cost, life cycle, cold weather, and supply chain stability, it isn't a universal replacement. There are applications where sodium will likely never be able to compete with lithium because of its energy density. Electric aviation is the clearest example. Where every gram of battery weight directly costs range, sodium's lower energy density is a fundamental handicap. also in things like consumer electronics where the battery has to fit inside a device that already has no spare space.

[00:14:26]This will almost certainly remain lithium territory for the foreseeable future. And I think CL themselves understand this, which is why they're not positioning sodium as a replacement in its entirety for lithium. Their framing seems to be all about two chemistries with different strengths and different jobs. The Freeoy dual battery power pack is divided into two completely independent energy zones, one sodium and one lithium. managed by software that decides in real time which chemistry to draw from based on temperature, speed, and state of charge.

[00:14:55]Sodium handles the cold starts and low temperature driving where lithium struggles, and lithium provides the energy density for longer range. Neither chemistry is being asked to do something that it was never actually designed for.

[00:15:06]All of this potential is what has led to the 60 gawatt hour hyper strong deal. To put how big that is, in the whole of 2025, CL shipped approximately 122 gawatt hours of energy storage batteries in total. This single contract represents roughly half of that entire annual output for a technology that was pre-commercial just 12 months earlier.

[00:15:26]This lithium sodium story teaches us something fundamental about how technologies actually develop. And that's what I want to end on.

[00:15:33]>> A little from column A, a little from column B. For years, the main complaint about sodium was that the energy density was just never going to compare to lithium. The first commercial deployment of an alkaline metal battery into a handheld camcorder was the start of the weight to energy ratio fixation. It deepened through the smartphone era where every gram of battery was a gram of device and sodium lost on that metric and so was dep prioritized because the energy density had become the only language that the industry spoke. The problem with monocultures, whether it's in agriculture, in ecosystems, or in technology, is that when you only optimize for one variable, you create a system that is catastrophically vulnerable to the moment that that variable stops being the right one to actually optimize for. The low temperature performance issues, the explosive tendencies, and the scarcity of the material, none of these were really secrets, but they were tolerated because the industry hadn't come up with a better alternative. As with all things, it was the money that was the real motivator for change. The Oxford Institute for Energy Studies documented that R&D attention on sodium ion, measured in patent filings, research papers, and corporate investment, sparked suddenly in 2022, tracking almost perfectly the lithium price rally. I find it super interesting that a supply chain shock forced a re-evaluation of what metrics actually mattered. And suddenly a chemistry that had been viable for grid storage for years became the most interesting problem in the battery industry.

[00:17:01]Guys, thank you so much for watching. I want to do a better job of talking about what it is that I actually do when I am not on YouTube. I've started a free newsletter. If you would like to subscribe and follow along to some of the antics that I get up to when I'm not talking to a camera in an overly hot room, I'll leave a link to it in the description down below. Thank you very much for watching. I'll see you guys next time. Goodbye.