Page 16 - Georgia Forestry - Issue 3 - Summer 2024

“Wood-derived batteries can potentially be made with more sustainable processing with lower cost and lower energy requirements, which could be more sustainable for manufacturing and beneficial for our society.” — Matthew McDowell, Professor, Georgia Institute of Technology
“Lithium-ion batteries are used in a variety of applications today. Sodium-ion batteries are quite similar, except they use sodium ions instead of lithium ions. A big advantage there is that sodium is much more abundant on Earth,” said McDowell. “Sodium is in our oceans, our table salt. It’s much cheaper. It can be advantageous to develop batteries based on sodium, and lignin in particular can be processed into carbon that is useful for sodium-ion batteries.”
A key difference between the use of sodium and lithium in batteries is that sodium-ion batteries cannot use the conventional battery material graphite, which is used in lithium-ion batteries to store lithium ions. Fortunately, wood
provides a solution.
“We need other forms of carbon to be
able to develop high-performance sodi- um-ion batteries, which is where lignin can come in,” said McDowell. “We can carbonize the lignin to create hard carbon with particular structure and properties, and we can develop high-performance sodium-ion battery materials.”
The natural abundance of both sodium and wood could be revolutionary for bat- tery technology, improving costs, energy requirements and overall environmental impact.
“Battery manufacturing is expanding really rapidly across the world. Here in North America, and here in Georgia, there is massive investment in battery manufac-
turing and electric vehicle manufacturing. One of the challenges is that many of the raw materials are not found or produced in the United States. It’s useful and really nec- essary to have access to these materials to make large quantities of these batteries,” said McDowell. “Lithium-ion batteries are great, but some of the materials used in lithium-ion batteries are either some- what rare or use a lot of energy to make. Wood-derived batteries can potentially be made with more sustainable processing with lower cost and lower energy require- ments, which could be more sustainable for manufacturing and beneficial for our society. I believe that could open some new markets, and potentially add value to the whole supply chain.”
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