The Elements of Innovation Discovered
The Elements of Innovation Discovered
Sorted by date Results 76 - 100 of 176
Critical minerals can be recycled from decades of e-waste The necessity of reclaiming waste as a means to curb the seemingly impossible material requirements of a renewable future is fostering a different kind of industry – urban mining. "When you're in the renewable energy space, you've got to think through the whole lifecycle – where will EV and lithium-ion batteries go when they are no longer useful? It can't be to a landfill. That's not responsible," said Graphite One Pres...
It is going to require enormous quantities of graphite for the lithium batteries powering the electric vehicle revolution, and Nouveau Monde Graphite Inc. has taken another step toward feeding North American EV supply chains with this critical battery anode material. On July 6, the Canadian battery materials company unveiled the results of a feasibility study that demonstrates strong economics for its plan to build a graphite mine and a coated spherical graphite anode...
From flashlights to supercomputers, tin is the glue for an electronic age Lost in the clamor for lithium, nickel and other metals needed for the batteries powering electric vehicles and modern electronics, or the rare earth elements that turn stored energy into motion, is the enormous need for a much more modest metal that is so fundamental to the advancement of technology that it almost goes unseen – tin. While other technology metals are critical to certain products and s...
Replacing this oft-maligned lithium-ion battery metal comes at a cost Traditionally a headline-grabbing metal due to the perceived human rights and monetary costs it adds to lithium-ion batteries and the electric vehicles they power, cobalt is being overshadowed by the enormous demand and price increases for the lithium and nickel that also go into the storage cells that deliver the "E" to the EV revolution. Cobalt, however, continues to be a vital ingredient that improves...
Electric Vehicles require six times the minerals than their fossil fuel forebearers With even the most basic models boasting sophisticated driver-assist, navigation, infotainment, diagnostics, and other advanced digital systems being fed power from oversized versions of the lithium-ion batteries found in your laptop or smartphone, electric vehicles are becoming personal computers that you can drive. While this puts a whole new spin on the term mobile computing, riding around i...
By 2030, batteries will likely need more than 5x all the graphite mined in 2021 While shortages of the lithium and nickel needed for electric vehicle batteries has dominated news headlines over the past year, the massive demand for graphite has largely been overlooked. As the primary ingredient in the anode side of lithium-ion batteries, graphite is the single largest element in lithium-ion batteries and the mining sector's inability to keep pace with skyrocketing demand of...
Shining a light on a metal used in nearly all today's economic sectors Used in everything from beer cans to spacecraft, aluminum is a metal most people interact with nearly every day. What many people don't know is this lightweight metal is also a candidate for next-generation rechargeable batteries with the potential to outperform the lithium-ion cells in use today. The major uses for aluminum metal are generally found in: • Transportation – automobiles, aircraft, tru...
As the development of smaller electronics continues, the ability to manufacture various gadgets and gizmos into portable and even wearable designs has become the norm. Yet, a bottleneck has arisen from the limitations of the materials – they do not function as well on a micro-scale. However, researchers from the Eindhoven University of Technology have utilized a nanomaterial that capitalizes on its unique makeup and allows the conductive material to show its stuff, graphene i...
Researchers from the University of Manchester might have to adopt a new title: alchemists, as they may have discovered the 21st-century version of the philosopher's stone. But unlike the mystical substance of old, the modern golden transformation is thanks to a microscopically thin material that has been growing in popularity due to its miracle-like properties – graphene. "Graphene turns rubbish into gold, literally," said Andre Geim, a professor from the University of M...
At a time when American automakers are looking for potential domestic supplies of the graphite that makes up nearly half of all the materials that go into the lithium-ion batteries powering electric vehicles, Graphite One Inc. offers up details of its plans to develop a mine at its Graphite Creek project in Alaska and processing facility in Washington that would produce roughly 75,000 metric tons of advanced graphite products per year. Earlier this year, S&P Global Platts...
The U.S. Department of Energy's Office of Fossil Energy and Carbon Management announced $6 million in funding toward research and development projects that will repurpose domestic coal resources for products that can be employed in clean energy technologies such as batteries and advanced manufacturing. Projects selected for this funding will support FECM's Carbon Ore Processing Program, which focuses on converting coal and coal wastes into products such as graphite, carbon...
To bolster supplies of the lithium-ion battery materials needed for America's transition to electric vehicles, the U.S. Department of Energy's Loan Programs Office is loaning Syrah Resources Ltd. $102.1 million to expand Vidalia, a processing facility in Louisiana that upgrades mined graphite into a material needed in the lithium-ion batteries powering electric vehicles and modern electronics. "Securing critical materials, such as lithium and graphite, is essential to...
What if the very carbon dioxide being blamed for global warming was the secret ingredient of massive batteries for the storage of renewable energy meant to prevent additional CO2 from entering the atmosphere in the first place? Italy-based startup Energy Dome has created such a battery that could help fully utilize low-carbon energy while also helping to stabilize electrical grids. The primary problem with renewable energy sources like wind and solar is the electricity they...
Global mining and metals company Rio Tinto has entered into a strategic partnership that includes a roughly US$10 million (C$12.5 million) investment in Nano One Materials Corp., a British Columbia-based company that has developed a technology equivalent to the "Instant Pot" of lithium battery cathode materials. While there has been a lot of buzz about the hundreds of factories being constructed around the globe to manufacture the lithium batteries needed for the electric...
Researchers at the University of Cambridge, with academics at Imperial College London, have developed a bismuth leaf that may one day be able to produce clean hydrogen from water and sunlight, overcoming some of the basic challenges of producing this emerging green energy fuel. Hydrogen fuel is expected to play a critical role in the transition to decarbonization and in reaching many countries' goals of net-zero emissions. With most hydrogen currently supplied from fossil...
With the ability to charge faster, store more energy, and be less likely to catch fire than their liquid lithium-ion battery counterparts, solid-state lithium batteries are considered by many in the automotive industry as the Holy Grail of the electric vehicle revolution. With the June 6 announcement that Solid Power Inc. has completed a pilot production line, Ford Motor Company and BMW Group are one step closer to realizing their vision of producing longer-range, lower-cost,...
Though scientists have tried with limited success for more than a decade to synthesize a new form of carbon called "graphyne," a team of researchers at the University of Colorado Boulder has finally succeeded in creating the material in bulk. Graphyne has long interested the scientific community because of its similarities to graphene, another form of carbon highly valued by industry. Yet despite decades of work and theorizing, only a few fragments of graphyne have ever been...
In a major step toward achieving its mission to help accelerate the mass adoption of electric vehicles by providing an alternative to the graphite anode materials typically used in the lithium-ion batteries that power them, NEO Battery Materials Ltd. plans to invest US$20 million (C$25 million) to build and expand a silicon anode plant in the province of Gyeonggi, South Korea. As an anode material, silicon has demonstrated the potential to have up to 10 times more storage...
The International Energy Agency warns that traffic jams threaten the clean energy future. Not on global highways congested with electric vehicles, nor in lines of these EVs waiting to top off their batteries with low-carbon electricity at charging stations. Instead, this gridlock is more likely to happen in automotive and battery factories that cannot find plentiful and affordable supplies of the minerals and metals needed. "Prices of many minerals and metals that are essentia...
In a significant step forward for the electric vehicle industry, Mercedes-Benz announced the next step in its partnership with Sila Nanotechnologies, to incorporate Sila's silicon anode chemistry in batteries for its upcoming Mercedes-Benz G-Class electric vehicles. Aptly located in Silicon Valley, Sila Nano has developed a silicon-based anode battery technology that is expected to enable lighter, safer, and higher energy density batteries for EVs, longer-lasting portable...
Lithium-ion battery recycling company Li-Cycle Holdings Corp. has entered into a strategic partnership with Glencore plc, with an initial investment of $200 million toward improving the electric vehicle supply chain. "We are thrilled to have Glencore as a long-term strategic investor and global commercial partner," said Li-Cycle CEO Ajay Kochhar. "Bringing our complementary capabilities together will accelerate the path to a circular economy for critical materials in the...
A leading innovator in metals recycling, Aqua Metals Inc. has achieved a new milestone in proving its recycling technology by plating high-purity nickel metal, one atom at a time, from black mass recovered from a variety of lithium-ion batteries. "The only Li-battery recycling method commercially in use today is smelting, which produces an alloy of the metals that needs multiple pyrometallurgical steps of processing to achieve the product we produce right out of our system," s...
With its lithium-ion battery materials park in Canada on pace to begin ramping up production in phases beginning at the end of this year, Electra Battery Materials Corp. continues to expand a cobalt deposit in Idaho that could provide the United States with an environmentally sound and socially acceptable domestic supply of this metal critical to electric vehicle batteries. "At a time of heightened geopolitical risk, America has committed to securing a domestic supply of...
With mining giant Glencore AG agreeing to buy the nickel and cobalt recycled from spent lithium-ion batteries over the next two years, Electra Battery Materials Corp.'s vision of developing an eco-industrial park in Ontario that serves as a one-stop-shop for the materials needed for the batteries powering 1.5 million electric vehicles per year is one step closer to reality. The Electra Battery Materials Park is being developed around the company's cobalt refinery about 250...
Since its invention nearly 140 years ago, the modern steam turbine has represented the apex of efficiency when it comes to converting thermal energy into electricity. Now, engineers from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and National Renewable Energy Laboratory have created a heat engine with no moving parts that exceeds the efficiency of the turbines used in today's coal, natural gas, and nuclear power plants. Reminiscent of the photovoltaic solar cells that convert...
