Commentators thus far seem mainly interested in applications in cars, in the event this ever makes it out of the lab.
Frankly, cars are not the big deal here. Existing battery technology is good enough for most light vehicle applications, and continues to incrementally improve. A lithium-air battery car could be even better and would solve most of the edge cases (the people who want to tow horse floats across the country at 70mph, for instance, or for lightweight electric sports cars).
However, this would be a transformative technology for electric aviation.
Delivery drones double or triple their useful range. Air taxis go from pushing the limits of structural engineering to being easily doable. Short-haul all-electric airliners become plausible.
Delivery drones: groan. The most compelling use of an advancement such as this should not be so that we can fill the air with constant noise pollution.
Drones are loud, noisy, intrusive things, and really should not be a delivery vector in most places.
This battery tech, with improvements, since the headline is aspiration and not factual, could well be used in commercial aircraft, vehicles, on boats including commercial vessels, or in plenty of other applications where the environmental benefits of having lighter, cleaner technology is important.
Honestly I think most aviation should just go away. There are legitimate reasons for people and high-value cargo and mail to use planes to get places in a hurry, but I'd rather people treat plane flights as a rare luxury rather than a routine thing. The energy costs are enormous, and civilization is kind of in a wile-e-coyote-ran-past-the-cliff-edge-but-hasn't-looked-down situation with respect to climate change.
Electric aviation might be a huge improvement over burning kerosene with respect to CO2 emissions, but also reducing how much we rely on planes would go a long way too. I don't see electric air taxis being a good thing in almost any situation -- they're tremendously inefficient and they make a lot of noise. Air taxis for emergency responders might be an acceptable tradeoff.
If someone can come up with a good way to run a large airliner off of batteries in a practical fashion, then by all means I think that's worth doing, but I feel kind of obligated to be a wet blanket on the idea of the aviation industry suddenly revitalizing itself and everyone flying everywhere just because they can.
> the people who want to tow horse floats across the country at 70mph, for instance, or for lightweight electric sports cars
Casually dismissing people who are likely using the road for commerce is not a great take. In particular, if you ever hope to legitimately electrify anything larger, you should probably consider this serving this segment as a useful precursor to more work.
It seems to be a consistent knee jerk reaction to the idea that the current generation of electric automobiles just aren't a good "drop-in" replacement for the current fleet. We should solve that problem, not demean people who experience it.
This is a bit shallow a take. Current batteries may be wrangled to provide adequate range to cars, but it comes at a significant weight/volume knock-on costs.
A large heavy battery requires increased weights of shielding and frame structure, it's almost exponential. Tesla 3 battery weighs more than its max payload.
Drones and general aviation are obvious markets. Batteries like this will initially be limited in supply and expensive. So targeting them at niche markets makes sense.
There are already a few certified planes flying and a few drones that are getting close to that. E.g. the Beta that flew in the New York area last week. And there will be a lot more in a few years. Current state of the art is a usable but not very long range for electrical planes. 200-250 miles seems to be the maximum range currently and some planes barely get to 100 miles.
Something that not everyone seems to grasp is that planes expend a lot of energy going up but then a lot less cruising from A to B and they can actually recover some energy going down. So, increasing the battery capacity without increasing the weight means you extend the cruise phase of the flight. The take off energy expense is kind of a constant that is mostly dependent on the weight.
Doubling the capacity might extend ranges to more than double what they are currently. A 1200 wh/kg aviation battery would more than quadruple current ranges. That's nice of course if you can get to 1000+ miles. But a more logical thing to do would be to cut the weight by e.g. half and still more than double the range. Also, current electrical planes sacrifice a lot of their maximum takeoff weight for batteries. Losing half that, increases their useful payload size and utility considerably. You can turn a four person plane into an eight person plane, for example. And still extend the range a little too.
I think Elon Musk called out 400wh/kg as the threshold that he considers as a minimum. This more than triples that. More than because of the outlined effects on cruise.
Trucking is still unsolved. This tech would probably start there. It’s entirely possible that a battery generation will cross industries due to process improvements.
No. Still way too heavy for airplanes. “Short-haul” is still 1,000 miles or more, and energy density is still too low to do that practically. Also, metal-air batteries gain weight as they discharge.
There are so many different metrics that are important in a battery. wh/kg is a key one, definitely, but the standard Lithium Ion battery meets a bunch of important ones.
What's the wh/volume? Maybe it's light but it's huge?
What's the charging rate? Maybe it holds power well, but takes 3 days to recharge?
What's the discharge rate? Maybe it hold power well, but can't release it quickly?
What's the cost per wh to produce? It's a research thing right now, so probably it's incredibly expensive- but that always is the case with new stuff.
This is the hard part with any new battery announcement. They always yell about how this new battery tech wins at one metric, while quietly not mentioning that there's a lot more where the Li-ion wins out overall.
I have access to the paper. First, the actual measured capacity is 685 Wh/kg, not 1200; the researchers stated they hope to reach the latter figure with further development. In order:
- Wh/L is 619, so the battery just barely floats. The absence of a dense metal oxide cathode probably makes it lighter than the usual lithium battery cell (which have s.g. ~2).
- Charging rate is given as 1 A/g for a 1 Ah/g electrode, so these numbers were measured with a 1-hour charge time. Data for higher charge rates is buried in the Supporting Information (which may be public?)
- Discharge rate is the same.
- Cost to produce is unclear. The electrolyte contains about 1-2% germanium (5 wt% of Li10GeP2S2), and the cathode contains molybdenum. It is difficult to give the Mo concentration with certainty because the specific area of the cathode is given as "250 g/m^2" but it should be as "m^2/g". Assuming a simple typo, the cathode contains 25 mg of Mo per cubic centimeter, which is sometimes written "2.5% w/v". These are rare elements, but the concentrations are rather low. The use of toxic sulfides (H2S risk) may increase production costs.
Coulombic efficiency, which you didn't ask for, starts at 93% and drops to 88% after 1000 cycles, so pretty good but a little lower than you expect from a typical lithium battery.
This is awesome. I hope people realize this came out of public funding and not made by a corp. Although eventually some corp will make a minor tweak to this and copyright the hell out of it. Really excited to see this in a car soon!
> Although eventually some corp will make a minor tweak to this and copyright the hell out of it
Patent rather than copyright, but you are most likely correct - in fact I fully expect at least one company already has a patent which might arguably be infringed by this work, regardless of whether that company has ever made an actual working battery, or really done any meaningful research whatsoever. Such is the insanity of the patent system.
If it’s a minor tweak it’s not patentable. And only the authors can patent it (assuming they do so before presenting it publicly which can set a clock). The authors of course can sell.
Public funding contributes basic research. Corporations contribute other things, like design for actual use and production, production tooling design, production tooling production, factory space and management, distribution management, warehousing, marketing (yes, you do need to spend money to market it in any economy). And by the way, all this results in paying wages and taxes which go back to the public.
Also, in many cases of publicly funded research, the resulting company is owned or partly owned by the researcher(s), which is one of the incentives for doing the research in the first place.
Utility patents cover that which is new and, in theory, non-obvious (although non-obvious is very poorly enforced based own personal experience). Those would include the "tweaks", which may not be as minor as you think, given the difference between the needs of a product that is to be mass produced, vs. a proof-of-concept laboratory device. Patents might also include the methods of production. Design patents cover the appearance and aesthetics, and are a different type of patent in the US.
If commercialized in similar stats, a million mile lifetime battery in a Tesla Model S:
250 kilowatt hour battery ~ 1000 mile range
battery would weight 208 pounds, although pack would probably be more than raw cell weight, let's say 250 pounds. Current Tesla model S is a 1100 pound pack.
Because you are chopping off almost 1000 pounds in pack weight, the car would go even further than current tesla effeciency because of the BEV "rocket equation".
The battery uses oxygen from the air, not purified oxygen unlike others. It is a solid battery design as well, so it should be compact. Materials are claimed to be common.
Of course it can be hard to tell the path to commercialization. Usually research cells are very small, a far cry from BEV / grid and other commercial scale cells.
Enovix is already at 1,500 cycles w/ 88% capacity retention at *889 wh/L per core* (figure ignores packaging, like the Argonne figure) at 6C CCCV charge – 1C discharge.
And that is a commercially relevant sized cell that is being produced at Fab1 in Fremont.
>With further development, we expect our new design for the lithium-air battery to also reach a record energy density of 1200 watt-hours per kilogram
"With further development". Somewhat misleading title. From the published paper:
>The results shown in fig. S9 indicate that this solid-state Li-air battery cell can work up to a capacity of ~10.4 mAh/cm2, resulting in a specific energy of ~685 Wh/kgcell.
Assuming a human can carry 20kg with relative ease (say, in a backpack or strapped to a bike), this new battery allows one to carry around 24kWh - enough to run a North American house for several hours. Or to drive an e-bike for 1,000 miles… Really stretches the imagination.
It's odd to think about the danger of such concentrated energy sources. Right now I'd treat a couple gallons of kerosene with way more respect than a battery. But if this battery tech was deployed, it could be more dangerous than liquid fuels in certain ways.
Anytime you see a "battery breakthrough" article, a way to save yourself some time is just to check if they've patented it. If they haven't, they have zero expectation that it has commercial potential.
Actual paper, paywalled: [1] (Why is this paywalled? It's work done by U.S. Government employees and thus cannot be copyrighted.)
This is a huge advance if it works. But we've heard this before. People have been fooling around with lithium-air batteries since the 1970s.
Previous breakthrough announced in 2022: [2]
Previous "breakthrough" announced in 2021: [3]
Another "breakthrough" announced in 2021: [4]
Not clear if this really runs on "air", or whether it needs a clean gas mixture. Water vapor has caused problems with previous lithium-air systems. That's not a killer problem, though; extracting clean oxygen from air is not that hard. Nor is removing water.
Not directly related, but what are the odds that if I buy an electric car this year, I will be able to upgrade the battery chemistry in 10 years?
If I bought a car today, I'd like to drive it until I can't anymore. If electric batteries are x times better in 10 years than now, it would suck to only be able to replace it with today's lithium ion.
Imagine upgrading your car in 10 years to take it from 200 miles to 10000.
It's a bit disheartening that some part of science were created by a few hundred dudes in the course of a few decades (say, quantum theory in the early 1900s), and we know the name of those persons, and they changed the world for ever while also getting famous pretty fast.
But nowadays, it takes hundreds of teams of unknown researchers to _not quite actually_ make the changes that we desperately need.
Maybe there are some problems that you can only solve "Mannathan Project"-style, as opposed to the normal, slow and steady course of research ?
Must take some courage to realize the urge, and still go the way of the tortoise without loosing your mind.
These are lithium-air batteries, meaning you cannot construct them into normal, cylindrical batteries as they need air intake (and exhaust when charging).
Since this is being developed at a National Lab, do the findings automatically enter the public domain for commercialization, or can the government license the tech and reap the rewards for citizens?
National Labs usually patent tech like this. Sometimes they open-source, usually at the discretion of the researcher and funding entity. If patented, they either:
1. Commercially license to one or more corporate entities
> Licenses to practice inventions covered by patents and pending patent applications owned by the U.S. Government as represented by this Department will generally be royalty free, revocable and nonexclusive. They will normally be issued to all applicants and will generally contain no limitations or standards relating to the quality or testing of the products to be manufactured, sold, or distributed thereunder.
But...
> Where it appears however that the public interest will be served under the circumstances of the particular case by licenses which impose conditions, such as those relating to quality or testing of products, requirement of payment of royalties to the Government, etc., or by the issuance of limited exclusive licenses by the Secretary after notice and opportunity for hearing thereon, such licenses may be issued.
In other words, if it would be in the public interest to impose royalties, exclusivity, or conditions of use, the Government can do so. In this case since it's a high energy density battery, I suppose an argument could easily be made that it would be in the public interest for the government to impose conditions related to quality and testing.
EDIT: With all of that said, it appears that patents related to this project, such as [1], have UChicago Argonne LLC as the applicant and not a US government agency, so the above might not even be applicable in this case. But, again, IANAL.
This is hazily remembering a presentation when I worked at ANL 5 years ago, but commercializable products are owned 1/3 by the govt 1/3 by ANL and 1/3 by the team that worked on it.
So I'd guess they will patent this and that's who will get the money when they do something commercial (make or license).
> “The chemical reaction for lithium superoxide or peroxide only involves one or two electrons stored per oxygen molecule, whereas that for lithium oxide involves four electrons,” said Argonne chemist Rachid Amine. More electrons stored means higher energy density.
I find it odd and surprising that the limiting factor is electrons per oxygen, not electrons per lithium. Oxygen is freely floating in the air, while lithium is in a fixed amount in the battery. Possibly something about the electrode makes it store a limited quantity of oxygen.
Please can someone explain the chemistry better? The article seems to say it takes O2 from air and makes Li2O as output? Won't that somehow expend the battery over time .. or is the O2 released back on recharge?
The O2 content of air varies seasonally in both the Northern and Southern Hemispheres and is decreasing from year to year. Also Oxygen is more disperse at higher altitudes. Interesting how it affects such batteries.
[+] [-] rgmerk|3 years ago|reply
Frankly, cars are not the big deal here. Existing battery technology is good enough for most light vehicle applications, and continues to incrementally improve. A lithium-air battery car could be even better and would solve most of the edge cases (the people who want to tow horse floats across the country at 70mph, for instance, or for lightweight electric sports cars).
However, this would be a transformative technology for electric aviation.
Delivery drones double or triple their useful range. Air taxis go from pushing the limits of structural engineering to being easily doable. Short-haul all-electric airliners become plausible.
[+] [-] anakaine|3 years ago|reply
Drones are loud, noisy, intrusive things, and really should not be a delivery vector in most places.
This battery tech, with improvements, since the headline is aspiration and not factual, could well be used in commercial aircraft, vehicles, on boats including commercial vessels, or in plenty of other applications where the environmental benefits of having lighter, cleaner technology is important.
[+] [-] elihu|3 years ago|reply
Electric aviation might be a huge improvement over burning kerosene with respect to CO2 emissions, but also reducing how much we rely on planes would go a long way too. I don't see electric air taxis being a good thing in almost any situation -- they're tremendously inefficient and they make a lot of noise. Air taxis for emergency responders might be an acceptable tradeoff.
If someone can come up with a good way to run a large airliner off of batteries in a practical fashion, then by all means I think that's worth doing, but I feel kind of obligated to be a wet blanket on the idea of the aviation industry suddenly revitalizing itself and everyone flying everywhere just because they can.
[+] [-] chris_va|3 years ago|reply
(am a occasionally ga pilot and have been watching metal air batteries for a while)
[+] [-] akira2501|3 years ago|reply
Casually dismissing people who are likely using the road for commerce is not a great take. In particular, if you ever hope to legitimately electrify anything larger, you should probably consider this serving this segment as a useful precursor to more work.
It seems to be a consistent knee jerk reaction to the idea that the current generation of electric automobiles just aren't a good "drop-in" replacement for the current fleet. We should solve that problem, not demean people who experience it.
[+] [-] geff82|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jojobas|3 years ago|reply
A large heavy battery requires increased weights of shielding and frame structure, it's almost exponential. Tesla 3 battery weighs more than its max payload.
[+] [-] jillesvangurp|3 years ago|reply
There are already a few certified planes flying and a few drones that are getting close to that. E.g. the Beta that flew in the New York area last week. And there will be a lot more in a few years. Current state of the art is a usable but not very long range for electrical planes. 200-250 miles seems to be the maximum range currently and some planes barely get to 100 miles.
Something that not everyone seems to grasp is that planes expend a lot of energy going up but then a lot less cruising from A to B and they can actually recover some energy going down. So, increasing the battery capacity without increasing the weight means you extend the cruise phase of the flight. The take off energy expense is kind of a constant that is mostly dependent on the weight.
Doubling the capacity might extend ranges to more than double what they are currently. A 1200 wh/kg aviation battery would more than quadruple current ranges. That's nice of course if you can get to 1000+ miles. But a more logical thing to do would be to cut the weight by e.g. half and still more than double the range. Also, current electrical planes sacrifice a lot of their maximum takeoff weight for batteries. Losing half that, increases their useful payload size and utility considerably. You can turn a four person plane into an eight person plane, for example. And still extend the range a little too.
I think Elon Musk called out 400wh/kg as the threshold that he considers as a minimum. This more than triples that. More than because of the outlined effects on cruise.
[+] [-] hinkley|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] _hypx|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nlitened|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mabbo|3 years ago|reply
What's the wh/volume? Maybe it's light but it's huge?
What's the charging rate? Maybe it holds power well, but takes 3 days to recharge?
What's the discharge rate? Maybe it hold power well, but can't release it quickly?
What's the cost per wh to produce? It's a research thing right now, so probably it's incredibly expensive- but that always is the case with new stuff.
This is the hard part with any new battery announcement. They always yell about how this new battery tech wins at one metric, while quietly not mentioning that there's a lot more where the Li-ion wins out overall.
[+] [-] scythe|3 years ago|reply
- Wh/L is 619, so the battery just barely floats. The absence of a dense metal oxide cathode probably makes it lighter than the usual lithium battery cell (which have s.g. ~2).
- Charging rate is given as 1 A/g for a 1 Ah/g electrode, so these numbers were measured with a 1-hour charge time. Data for higher charge rates is buried in the Supporting Information (which may be public?)
- Discharge rate is the same.
- Cost to produce is unclear. The electrolyte contains about 1-2% germanium (5 wt% of Li10GeP2S2), and the cathode contains molybdenum. It is difficult to give the Mo concentration with certainty because the specific area of the cathode is given as "250 g/m^2" but it should be as "m^2/g". Assuming a simple typo, the cathode contains 25 mg of Mo per cubic centimeter, which is sometimes written "2.5% w/v". These are rare elements, but the concentrations are rather low. The use of toxic sulfides (H2S risk) may increase production costs.
Coulombic efficiency, which you didn't ask for, starts at 93% and drops to 88% after 1000 cycles, so pretty good but a little lower than you expect from a typical lithium battery.
[+] [-] throw93|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Moissanite|3 years ago|reply
Patent rather than copyright, but you are most likely correct - in fact I fully expect at least one company already has a patent which might arguably be infringed by this work, regardless of whether that company has ever made an actual working battery, or really done any meaningful research whatsoever. Such is the insanity of the patent system.
[+] [-] vlovich123|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mesoman|3 years ago|reply
Also, in many cases of publicly funded research, the resulting company is owned or partly owned by the researcher(s), which is one of the incentives for doing the research in the first place.
Utility patents cover that which is new and, in theory, non-obvious (although non-obvious is very poorly enforced based own personal experience). Those would include the "tweaks", which may not be as minor as you think, given the difference between the needs of a product that is to be mass produced, vs. a proof-of-concept laboratory device. Patents might also include the methods of production. Design patents cover the appearance and aesthetics, and are a different type of patent in the US.
[+] [-] AtlasBarfed|3 years ago|reply
250 kilowatt hour battery ~ 1000 mile range battery would weight 208 pounds, although pack would probably be more than raw cell weight, let's say 250 pounds. Current Tesla model S is a 1100 pound pack.
Because you are chopping off almost 1000 pounds in pack weight, the car would go even further than current tesla effeciency because of the BEV "rocket equation".
The battery uses oxygen from the air, not purified oxygen unlike others. It is a solid battery design as well, so it should be compact. Materials are claimed to be common.
Of course it can be hard to tell the path to commercialization. Usually research cells are very small, a far cry from BEV / grid and other commercial scale cells.
Five years ago they were at 750 cycles (https://today.uic.edu/new-design-produces-true-lithium-air-b...), unreported density.
[+] [-] java-man|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] malchow|3 years ago|reply
And that is a commercially relevant sized cell that is being produced at Fab1 in Fremont.
https://ir.enovix.com/static-files/667425e2-44ef-4ab0-978b-9...
[+] [-] Retric|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] MisterPea|3 years ago|reply
Putting the same weight of this into a Tesla Model Y would easily give over 1200 miles of range
[+] [-] scythe|3 years ago|reply
"With further development". Somewhat misleading title. From the published paper:
>The results shown in fig. S9 indicate that this solid-state Li-air battery cell can work up to a capacity of ~10.4 mAh/cm2, resulting in a specific energy of ~685 Wh/kgcell.
https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.abq1347
Still impressive, but not 1200 Wh/kg!
[+] [-] ttul|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] SoftTalker|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] droopyEyelids|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] michaelteter|3 years ago|reply
20 pounds maybe... but 20kg (44lb) would be a serious effort for most people.
[+] [-] causi|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Animats|3 years ago|reply
This is a huge advance if it works. But we've heard this before. People have been fooling around with lithium-air batteries since the 1970s.
Previous breakthrough announced in 2022: [2]
Previous "breakthrough" announced in 2021: [3]
Another "breakthrough" announced in 2021: [4]
Not clear if this really runs on "air", or whether it needs a clean gas mixture. Water vapor has caused problems with previous lithium-air systems. That's not a killer problem, though; extracting clean oxygen from air is not that hard. Nor is removing water.
[1] https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.abq1347
[2] https://www.forbes.com/sites/davidrvetter/2022/02/01/how-thi...
[3] https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2021/05/210506104801.h...
[4] https://www.advancedsciencenews.com/breakthrough-design-offe...
[+] [-] mdkdog|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] idontwantthis|3 years ago|reply
If I bought a car today, I'd like to drive it until I can't anymore. If electric batteries are x times better in 10 years than now, it would suck to only be able to replace it with today's lithium ion.
Imagine upgrading your car in 10 years to take it from 200 miles to 10000.
[+] [-] phtrivier|3 years ago|reply
But nowadays, it takes hundreds of teams of unknown researchers to _not quite actually_ make the changes that we desperately need.
Maybe there are some problems that you can only solve "Mannathan Project"-style, as opposed to the normal, slow and steady course of research ?
Must take some courage to realize the urge, and still go the way of the tortoise without loosing your mind.
[+] [-] dvh|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Tuna-Fish|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] multiplegeorges|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] smeeth|3 years ago|reply
1. Commercially license to one or more corporate entities
2. Spin up a start up and license it themselves
[+] [-] nvrspyx|3 years ago|reply
> Licenses to practice inventions covered by patents and pending patent applications owned by the U.S. Government as represented by this Department will generally be royalty free, revocable and nonexclusive. They will normally be issued to all applicants and will generally contain no limitations or standards relating to the quality or testing of the products to be manufactured, sold, or distributed thereunder.
But...
> Where it appears however that the public interest will be served under the circumstances of the particular case by licenses which impose conditions, such as those relating to quality or testing of products, requirement of payment of royalties to the Government, etc., or by the issuance of limited exclusive licenses by the Secretary after notice and opportunity for hearing thereon, such licenses may be issued.
In other words, if it would be in the public interest to impose royalties, exclusivity, or conditions of use, the Government can do so. In this case since it's a high energy density battery, I suppose an argument could easily be made that it would be in the public interest for the government to impose conditions related to quality and testing.
Source: https://www.ecfr.gov/current/title-34/subtitle-A/part-6/sect...
---
EDIT: With all of that said, it appears that patents related to this project, such as [1], have UChicago Argonne LLC as the applicant and not a US government agency, so the above might not even be applicable in this case. But, again, IANAL.
1: https://image-ppubs.uspto.gov/dirsearch-public/print/downloa...
[+] [-] qqqqqqqqqqqq111|3 years ago|reply
So I'd guess they will patent this and that's who will get the money when they do something commercial (make or license).
[+] [-] timerol|3 years ago|reply
I find it odd and surprising that the limiting factor is electrons per oxygen, not electrons per lithium. Oxygen is freely floating in the air, while lithium is in a fixed amount in the battery. Possibly something about the electrode makes it store a limited quantity of oxygen.
[+] [-] jacknews|3 years ago|reply
https://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/acs.jchemed.5b00333
[+] [-] melony|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jmartrican|3 years ago|reply
Any downsides to this air battery that wasn't mentioned in the article?
[+] [-] Iv|3 years ago|reply
These are the downsides. These are promises. Not actual performances.
[+] [-] throitallaway|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sebnukem2|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sriku|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] gloosx|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pengaru|3 years ago|reply
If only we could have EV batteries instead make use of CO2 in the air...