Completed Clean Energy Chemistry

An O2 Electrode for a Rechargeable Lithium Battery

Funder EPSRC (part of UKRI)
Recipient organisation University of St Andrews
Funding £1.6M
Period Jun 2007 — Jun 2011

In plain English

AI plain-English summary

A lithium battery that breathes oxygen from the air could store five to ten times more energy than today’s best versions. Current rechargeable lithium batteries rely on a lithium cobalt oxide electrode that can only store about 130 milliamp-hours per gram. Even the most optimistic improvements to this design would at most double that figure. The researchers propose replacing that electrode with a porous carbon one, allowing lithium ions and electrons inside the cell to react with oxygen drawn from the surrounding air. Their early tests show the oxygen-based cell can be recharged and cycled repeatedly. If this works at scale, the impact on clean energy would be direct and large. Transport accounts for roughly 30% of carbon dioxide emissions, and better batteries are the main bottleneck for electric vehicles. A battery with five to ten times the energy density of current lithium cobalt oxide cells would also make micro-grid and off-grid solar storage far more practical. The oxygen supply is effectively infinite, and removing the expensive cobalt oxide electrode cuts cost significantly. The project is applied materials science, not fundamental research. It tackles the specific chemical and structural problems—such as electrode stability and side reactions—that currently prevent a non-aqueous oxygen electrode from working reliably over many charge-discharge cycles.

View original technical description
Energy storage has an important role to play in addressing global warming. It is vital to develop a number of storage technologies. One of the most promising is the rechargeable lithium battery. Such batteries are the technology of choice for hybrid electrical vehicles (some 30% of CO2 emissions arise from transport) and they can make a critical contribution to the storage of clean energy, including for micro-grid and off-grid applications.Currently rechargeable lithium batteries are composed of a graphite negative electrode, an organic electrolyte and LiCoO2 as the positive electrode. Li is removed from the layered intercalation compound LiCoO2 on charging and re-inserted on discharge. Energy storage is limited by the LiCoO2 electrode (0.5 Li/Co, 130 mAhg-1). All the research taking place worldwide aimed at improving the positive intercalation electrode can only hope to double the energy storage to 1 Li/Tm (300 mAhg-1). We propose a step change in rechargeable lithium batteries by replacing the LiCoO2 electrode with a porous carbon electrode and allowing Li+ and e- in the cell to react with O2 from the air. The capacity to store energy can be raised by 5-10 times compared with LiCoO2, supply of O2 is in-effect infinite and the cost is reduced significantly (LiCoO2 is the most expensive component of current batteries). Our preliminary studies have shown that the O2 cell is rechargeable and can sustain cycling. The proposal addresses a number of the materials issues necessary to realise this radically new high energy storage battery based on a non-aqueous O2 electrode.

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Researchers

Keith Scott (Co-Investigator)P Bruce (Principal Investigator)Peter Hall (Co-Investigator)

Related Research

Grants with similar aims, by meaning.

High Voltage Charge Storage Processes in Beyond Li Batteries
Role of Electrocatalysts in the Electrochemistry of Oxygen in Non-Aqueous Electrolytes
Bioinspired green manufacturing of next generation energy storage materials
Crossing Boundaries in Energy Storage
The Calcium-Air Battery

Original classification

Research Grant

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