2021 roadmap for sodium-ion batteries

Increasing concerns regarding the sustainability of lithium sources, due to their limited availability and consequent expected price increase, have raised awareness of the importance of developing alternative energy-storage candidates that can sustain the ever-growing energy demand. Furthermore, limitations on the availability of the transition metals used in the manufacturing of cathode materials, together with questionable mining practices, are driving development towards more sustainable elements. Given the uniformly high abundance and cost-effectiveness of sodium, as well as its very suitable redox potential (close to that of lithium), sodium-ion battery technology offers tremendous potential to be a counterpart to lithium-ion batteries (LIBs) in different application scenarios, such as stationary energy storage and low-cost vehicles. This potential is reflected by the major investments that are being made by industry in a wide variety of markets and in diverse material combinations. Despite the associated advantages of being a drop-in replacement for LIBs, there are remarkable differences in the physicochemical properties between sodium and lithium that give rise to different behaviours, for example, different coordination preferences in compounds, desolvation energies, or solubility of the solid-electrolyte interphase inorganic salt components. This demands a more detailed study of the underlying physical and chemical processes occurring in sodium-ion batteries and allows great scope for groundbreaking advances in the field, from lab-scale to scale-up. This roadmap provides an extensive review by experts in academia and industry of the current state of the art in 2021 and the different research directions and strategies currently underway to improve the performance of sodium-ion batteries. The aim is to provide an opinion with respect to the current challenges and opportunities, from the fundamental properties to the practical applications of this technology.

Automated summary

The increasing focus on the sustainability of lithium sources has highlighted the potential of sodium-ion batteries as a cost-effective alternative, but the differences in physicochemical properties between sodium and lithium require further research to achieve commercial viability.