Next-gen batteries and 'dark oxygen'

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This is the podcast of BBC Inside Science, first broadcast on the 23rd of January, 2025.

I'm Marnie Chesterton.

Hello, and coming up over the next half hour, what do we want?

Power!

How do we want it?

Cheaply, sustainably, and as soon as possible, please.

We look at the next generation of batteries and the huge implications for the environment and how we live our lives.

Also, this week, nature's batteries deep in the ocean that may have shaped the world today.

Joining me in the studio are materials scientist Mark Miadovnik.

Hello.

Hello.

And science columnist for the Financial Times Angina Ahuja.

Hello.

Hello.

And you're going to be chatting to us about this week in science.

What have you seen?

Well, my clue to my three stories is going to be animal, vegetable and mineral.

Very vague teas.

Stay tuned for that.

Starting off.

Each of us has a phone in our back pockets and that's an incredible piece of technology.

But I want to talk about some amazing tech that isn't even the phone itself.

Can you imagine how different life would be if you had to power it with one and done zinc oxide AAs rather than our rechargeable lithium-ion options?

But lithium batteries do come with issues.

Last week, the world's largest lithium-ion battery storage plant in California caught fire and 1200 people in the area had to be evacuated.

So these things can be dangerous.

Despite that, lithium batteries are the best option for powering our cars and phones, for now, at least.

Researchers and companies alike are racing to create the next generation of powerful batteries.

But when can we see a change and what will it look like?

Joining me to discuss the present and future of batteries is On the Line Materials and Manufacturing Engineer Jenny Baker and of course here in the studio with me materials scientist and all-round battery fan Mark Miyadovnik.

Before we talk to Jen about the future we're going to start with you Mark on the present.

What is it about lithium-ion batteries that has made us so reliant on them over, say, a standard lead-acid battery?

So if you want the electric power to power our smartphones and our electric cars of the future, then we need a source of power that's highly energy dense.

So it's got to store a lot of energy in a small space.

It's got to be lightweight.

And that is what lithium delivers for you.

And it is really a most fantastic kind of material for that.

Okay.

And how do they work to allow this?

Yeah, so a battery is a chemical reaction in a container.

And people might not sort of realise it, they sort of think it's electronic, but it's actually just a chemical reaction.

But it's one which produces electrons that are mobile.

And in order to get those electrons to move and give you power inside your device, so to go around circuits and so on and power your chips, you have to make them available.

And that's not so easy to do.

But if you think about a AA battery, you have a top, which is like a knobbly bit, and that's the positive cathode.

And you have the bottom which is a flat bit which is the negative and it's those two areas that you have to connect into a circuit and one gets the electrons and the other one has to get the positive charge now how does it do it this is where battery experts like Jenny on the line are absolutely essential because it's atoms charged atoms moving through a liquid mostly called electrolyte that gives you the other end of that and so designing batteries is all about how do you get the electrons out and how do you get the ions to travel It's lithium ions travelling through the electrolyte and that's what gives these batteries their name.

So we say lithium ion, but that's not just one type of battery.

There's many different types that have very different properties.

And the other thing we haven't mentioned is that this chemical reaction is reversible, so you can recharge your battery.

And that's not true of all chemical reactions inside batteries, and it was one of the major things to get right with the lithium technology.

So rechargeable reaction is key here, but obviously the design's not flawless.

What are the main setbacks?

You'll have noticed with batteries that they have a limited life.

Why?

Where's the lithium going?

And it's not going anywhere.

It's actually getting lost in the battery.

And all sorts of bits of this mechanism of getting these ions to travel through the electrolyte, the lithium ions have to store themselves inside them, and

they have faults over time.

And those faults gather up over time, and so it gets less and less efficient at storing those lithium ions and transferring them across the electrolyte.

And so then your energy density goes down until the point you think, well, it's not storing enough energy to get me through the day.

I need a new battery.

And there have been cases in the UK where we've seen house fires, and they're invariably started by someone's e-bike or e-scooter battery, right, Mark?

The problem is the electrolytes are flammable in the lithium ion batteries.

If you get a short on them, which means the electrons travel through that in a very high density, they heat it up, it bursts into flames.

The lithium itself then bursts into flames, and that's a runaway fire.

It's very hard to put out.

So, these terrible tragedies happen because of this safety issue with the lithium-ion batteries.

Currently, lithium-ion batteries can be recycled, and in fact, legally should be recycled.

So, you should not be putting any batteries in your landfill sites.

Unfortunately, people do, and one of the most common types of batteries or common routes for batteries to get into landfill is through disposable vapes, and these vapes end up in landfill and have caused fires.

Waste processors do need to have controls in place so that they can spot very quickly a fire and deal with it.

But it's really important that those batteries are placed in recycling facilities or at Tesco's, everywhere will collect your batteries to ensure that, firstly, they can go for safe disposal, but that that disposal is actually a recycling route.

And in particular, the

lithium-ion batteries that have cobalt and nickel in them have high-value materials that are very attractive to recyclers.

I mean, I mean, also, don't forget, we're not running out of lithium, but the demand way oversteps the supply.

And 50% of the world's lithium is mined in Bolivia, Chile, and Argentina.

And that has huge environmental effects on the water table and on the local communities.

And so, having gone to all that trouble to get the lithium here and give you your smartphone freedom and give you your electric car freedom.

What you really do not want to do is then throw it away, which is essentially what a lot of people do, I'm afraid.

So, Jenny, I'd like an alternative, please.

What's the future hold?

So, the future holds lots of different technologies that are coming to the fore, I think, even in the next five or ten years.

So, we will stick with lithium ions for a long time, I'm sure, but some of those lithium-ion batteries will be in different forms.

So, for example, lithium-sulphur batteries, these have much higher energy densities than even the current lithium-ion batteries.

They have proved themselves in solar flight, but they do suffer from cycle life degradation, so they don't last as long.

But this is an active area of research to try and improve the cycle life.

And Jen, your particular area of research is solid-state batteries, and there's a lot of funding being poured into these as potential next-generation batteries.

How's that work?

Yes, so a solid state battery works in a very similar manner to a liquid state battery, except that the electrolyte that Mark talked about is in a solid form.

And so the ions will move through the solid state electrolyte, which could be a gel.

or it could be a ceramic material or something in between.

They have great potential because they don't have the organic solvent in the electrolyte, which is what can easily catch fire.

So they're safer in that case.

They also can improve energy densities, particularly if they're used with a metal instead of a metal oxide electrode.

So these are all the potential options.

So there will be not one type of solid state battery.

I mean, Jenny's not really, you know, she's been quite modest here because what you've got to do is you've got to design these electrolytes, the solid ones.

You've got to get ions to travel through them.

So these are ions traveling through a solid and they've got to travel through at very high rates.

That's just an amazing piece of material science.

I'm imagining something that kind of looks like a China version of a battery.

You mentioned ceramics.

I think that's not a bad way of describing it.

Some of the chemistry that's been done, in fact, one of the materials that I work on is called Nasicon, which is a sodium-based solid-state electrolyte.

It was developed by John Goodenough many years ago.

We're using that as a test case to develop new ways of manufacturing because one of the problems with these ceramics is the ceramics are much more stable than gels or liquid electrolytes.

As you can imagine,

they won't sort of change over time, but they require very high temperature processing.

And so some of the research that I'm undertaking is looking at how we can

develop new manufacturing methods for these materials so that we can deposit them on top of the electrodes while still managing that high sintering temperature.

But this is still very early stage how we manage that.

And some of these ideas will be able to get through to the next stages and other ideas will find that that problem's too insurmountable.

However, I would like to mention one of the early stages where I think we will see solid state batteries, which is in medical devices and particularly in internal medical devices.

So this stability is so valuable that the cost and any issues with manufacturing are very different,

how those are valued compared to, say, an electric vehicle.

You know, you only need a small battery, it's not going to be very big, but it needs to be absolutely inert if it's to be placed in the human body.

Thanks, Jen.

And, Mark, wrapping up, what are your predictions for battery tech for the next five, ten years?

What are we going to see that's different?

Well, I think the mobile applications, I mean, it's quite hard to beat lithium because

you know the lightweight, the energy density and also it's now a mainstream technology and and it's and you know so a new technology has to beat the mainstream and and get the costs down and that's going to be tricky I think.

But when you look at grid scale storage, so we're talking about trying to store all the energy from all the wind turbines, you know, when there's a very windy set of weeks, we want to be able to store that energy for later.

That's the so-called grid storage battery.

And that the chemistries for that are really unsettled and I think cheaper chemistries from lithium like you know sodium for instance sodium batteries are very promising so I think that's really another area to really watch and it's going to be very exciting because we're going to have these giant batteries in the UK and other countries storing the energy from the wind turbines and the solar cells.

Well Professor Jem Baker at the University of Bath, Professor Mark Mirdovnik from UCL, thank you both very much.

Thank you.

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ServePro, like it never even happened.

Many of those precious metals needed for our electronics, so cobalt, nickel, copper, can be found locked up in potato-sized accretions on the sea floor.

And last year saw major international wrangling over whether to mine them.

Naysayers said, hold back, we don't know enough about their role, but now it seems they may be acting as nature's batteries, which is very on theme.

This week, as crucial new research starts to investigate these mysterious sea potatoes, broadcaster and physicist Professor Helen Chersky takes us into the deep.

Planet Earth is home to an amazing range of animal life.

Just think about the differences between geckos, giraffes and giant squid.

But every single animal shares one critical trait.

We all breathe oxygen.

We rely on photosynthesis, on plants harvesting sunlight and producing oxygen in the process.

But that giant squid lives hundreds of meters down in the ocean, well away from sunlight.

There are no plants or algae down there, so where's it getting the oxygen from?

The answer is that in some parts of the world, well-oxygenated ocean surface water becomes more dense and sinks.

It's a bit like a tap supplying new water to the depths.

That water then slowly spreads around the world.

And so a giant squid deep in the Pacific could be breathing oxygen that was created by marine algae hundreds of years before and thousands of miles away.

And that's where all the deep sea's oxygen comes from.

Or so we thought, until the summer of 2024, when an astonishing new scientific paper was published, providing evidence that there is another source of oxygen in the deep sea that's got nothing to do with sunlight.

And that paper gave it a suitably dramatic name, dark oxygen.

It's probably the most surprising ocean science discovery for decades.

The culprit is a weird thing called a polymetallic nodule.

It's about the size of the potato, and they're sometimes called sea potatoes, and it's black or brown and knobbly and takes millions of years to form.

The majority of the ocean is somewhere between three and six kilometres deep, and many of the vast seafloor plains are covered in a single layer of these nodules.

They're made from metals like manganese, nickel, copper, and cobalt, and some companies and countries are eyeing them up as a resource of critical minerals for the green energy transition.

So much so that one mining company called them a battery in a rock.

And that turned out to be truer than they'd anticipated, because the way that the nodules appear to be producing oxygen is just like using a battery to electrolyse water, which is something you might have done in school science class.

The mixture of metals can generate an electrical voltage, and that can split water into its component gases, hydrogen and oxygen, the H and the O of H2O.

And this seems to be the source of the dark oxygen.

That first study just told us that this seems to happen sometimes, but what we really want to know is how much it matters.

Is this just the nodule equivalent of a rare party trick?

Or are deep sea nodules creating a substantial fraction of the oxygen the really deep sea animals need to survive?

There's also interest in the hydrogen that's made at the same time.

A 2023 study showed that hydrogen could be an important energy source for some marine microbes, and that lots of microbes have the genes to consume it.

Perhaps there are nodule equivalents on other planets or moons, producing hydrogen and oxygen and changing the conditions for potential life.

So NASA is also keeping a close eye on all this.

The big take-home message here is that the deep sea is a fascinating place and not just a barren void.

I can't wait to see what this new research project finds out.

But until then, I'll take a moment every now and then to think about those vast numbers of deep sea polymetallic nodules quietly existing in the dark depths and find comfort in the idea that the last great wilderness of Earth still has so many surprises in store.

Thank you to Helen Chersky from University College London.

Mark, you were on our Christmas episode and you picked this as your favourite story of last year.

Like a lot of science discoveries, there's loads of people in the science world sort of questioning the data at the moment.

But really think about the significance here.

Like the only reason we have an oxygen-rich atmosphere

on the Earth is because of life.

Like life has produced oxygen.

It's a kind of toxic gas for some of the bacteria that started to grow in the early years of life getting established.

If you look around the universe and you see oxygen, because it's such a reactive gas, it must be continually being produced.

So people thought that's the signature of life.

This discovery means it might not be, right, the signature of life.

You might find an oxygen-rich planet somewhere in the universe and think, and that may not be a hallmark of life.

So there's so much to discuss and to discover here.

I wrote about polymetallic nodules last year because it was one of those issues where

you don't really think about it until you start writing about it, you realise how little you know.

and I think at the time the reason I was writing about it was because I think it was called the International Seabed Authority were discussing whether these you know resources should be exploited and it just struck me how different it was writing about the bottom of the sea and how little was known compared to writing about what's going on on other planets and you know we have all these robots and explorers and landers and and actually very little goes down to the depths that Helen was talking about.

Have either of you held one of of these things?

No.

No, we collect materials at UCL in our materials library and I would love, if anyone wants to offer us one,

one for our materials library,

sea potato, please, please send us one.

Please invite me to come and look at it.

I'd quite like

this is Inside Science and in the studio with me are Mark Mirdovnik and FT science columnist Ange Ahuja.

Ange, your day job at the FT involves reading through the latest science research, dozens of different publications.

So, we've asked you to look through the science of the week for us.

And what's the first story that's grabbed your fancy?

I'm going to be very cheeky and choose the subject that I wrote about this week.

Now, do you remember that global seed vault that's buried away in the Arctic?

I went there.

In Svalbard,

lucky you.

The best gig ever.

Do you have to go down a big vault?

I mean, it's called the Doomsday Vault, isn't it?

So, it's this giant repository of the world's seeds.

And the idea is that if there was an apocalypse, that we could, you know, humanity could start again and grow crops and so on to eat.

So it's about food security.

Now, one of the people behind that vault has coordinated a letter that was published last week saying that we need a new green revolution to feed the world.

And if we don't develop the science and use the science that we already have, then we are heading for a crisis of hunger by about 2050.

So we've already had a green revolution, right?

And that was kind of massively

increasing yields.

That was.

But of course, since the 60s and 70s, things have moved on.

So we have things like genetic modification, genetic editing.

There are lots more things that are in the pipeline or need to be done because there's a mismatch between supply and demand when it comes to the business.

And don't forget, like, I mean, 50% of the nitrogen in our food today that we eat is from the Haber-Bosch process.

And that's the discovery of fertilizer at the beginning of the 20th century and that's another revolution which doesn't often get factored in.

Like

if we didn't have that, if we weren't getting nitrogen from the air, which is what it allows you to do, we had to rely totally on nitrogen just fixation through kind of legumes and so on, you know, we would not, we'd be in a much worse position now.

So we've science really has played a major role in making food available to a larger population.

Moving on, next story that you picked.

Now, we've done vegetable, again away, with the crops.

I'm hoping that Mark doesn't mind me calling it mineral because it's a kind of matter.

So, scientists at the California Institutes of Technology claim to have created what they're calling a new form of matter.

And it behaves in some circumstances like a liquid or like a fluid, and others like a solid.

And they've compared it to chainmail, which you can think of as kind of solid, but it's also quite flowing.

And they've called it chainmail on steroids.

And the name of this material is called polycatinated

architected materials or PAM for short.

And I'm really hoping Mark can tell me

who or what PAM is because it sounds absolutely fascinating and I'd love to be able to understand it more.

Yeah, we've been working with some of this in our lab too, and it is a really fascinating material.

So think of it like this.

So you've got chainmail.

So these are links of metals historically.

And essentially, you can make a fabric out of them.

You can wear the fabric.

And in battle, that's what it's designed for.

It's got the hardness of the iron and steel because it's made out of iron and steel.

So you get the hardness of it.

So that's

the solid side of it.

But you can wear it.

It's a fabric.

It drapes.

So it's kind of got a fluid-liquid side of it.

And so that's what chainmails been around, it's been around for thousands and more years.

The reason why this is coming back up the agenda is that we have 3D printers now.

So you can print these links out of pretty much any material you want, and you can arrange the links to connect to each other in and whichever way you want.

And so, what this group have done is connect these links in very interesting structures so that when they are hit or pressed or pulled, they behave in either a liquidy fashion, so they flow, or they completely seize up and resist.

So, they were talking about this in the paper where you could use it for safety helmets.

So, you know, you can put it on, it's very flexible, it's very comfortable, but then in a crash, it would seize up and protect you and break break in a very controlled way which would absorb energy, it's what you want from a safety equipment.

Can I bring custard in at this point?

Yes, non-Newtonian behaviour.

There we go.

So when you said can be a liquid, can be a solid, my brain instantly goes to custard and the fact that if you make a really thick paste of it,

if you smack it, you can walk on it like a like a solid, but you can stir it up like a liquid.

Can you stir this chainmail stuff like a liquid?

So that's the difference.

And no, you can't, but because it's actually the link, the topology of each link connected to each other is fixed.

So it can't flow like a liquid in the sense that that custard does because all the molecules are not actually permanently connected to each other.

But that's actually useful in another way because you can make these fabrics.

And what we've been looking at is the ability to make assistive technology fabrics.

So imagine I've got a weak arm or I'm unable to use my elbow.

Could we make a fabric you can wear underneath your clothes?

No one knows you've got an assistive technology.

It's like an exoskeleton.

But but it's made of this PAM material, this architectured material, and it exactly fits you.

And you think, well, how's that possible?

You go, well, we just 3D scan your elbow and we print this material to order with all the links exactly as we want.

So it'll allow you to bend your arm, but perhaps it won't let you to twist it.

So if you're recovering from an injury, it would stop you twisting and allow that muscle or ligament to recover.

And these are happening.

I mean, these technologies are happening.

It's very exciting stuff.

Sounds like a bond sleeve or something.

I mean, could it also be used to enhance your own sort of natural strength?

Yeah, so that's the next step.

So, we're trying, what we and many others are trying to do is put little

actuators, so-called, so things that can tense up or relax into the architectured material so that it would actually be able to give you power to pick something up that

your muscles wouldn't be able to pick up.

So, yeah, exactly.

That would be the next step.

And it's just very hard,

it's just very hard to get that to work at the moment.

Details, details.

Now, and you mentioned animal, mineral, vegetable.

We've done the vegetable and the mineral.

We have.

So

we know about contagious yawning, don't we?

So I yawn, you might well yawn.

What about contagious urination?

Well,

is that kind of a sound though?

Because there is that thing when someone pee, you can hear them peeing.

There is that.

And you immediately think, oh, hold on a minute.

I think I may also now.

Right.

Oh, wow.

That's really interesting.

Well, there is a paper this week in Current Biology which has clocked the phenomenon of contagious urination in chimpanzees.

Okay, I'm not making this up and it's not April the 1st, I promise you.

So scientists at Kyoto University looked at this colony of about 20 chimpanzees and noticed that when

one went off to have a wee,

it was quite common for others to do so quite quickly afterwards.

And

they've produced this paper kind of looking at the urination behaviour of these chimpanzees over 600 hours,

how often they urinate within one minute of each other and it seems to be a contagious behaviour.

And the really interesting thing is there's also a status aspect to it.

So a lower status chimp, if they see a higher status chimp having a wee, they're more likely to go off and have a wee themselves, which I think we've got to call the trickle-down phenomenon.

Nice.

That's good.

And obviously, now we.

Because the opposite is also true.

Are they not allowed to go for a wee until the high-status chimp has weed?

Well, that I don't know.

Is it to promote social cohesion?

And what does it mean for us, you know?

And I...

Are we?

I mean, just sorry, because I'm just thinking, are we the, because I always thought that amazing humans were the only ones who were embarrassed about weing and pooing because we had these social structures but now you're saying there are other animals that might have cult is that what we're talking about some sort of cultural attitude towards those things so it's a form of social contagion yeah so the question is why but i think you're right in a way because apparently one of the commonest dreams you can have is about going to the toilet and being seen to go to the toilet.

So I'm just wondering if we're channelling our inner chimp here.

Yes.

So, yes, so many questions.

So we think it's from civilization, but actually goes way back.

It seems to be, but

who knows what's going on.

And parents with small children will often make the noise in order to encourage their child on the potty to actually just go.

All of which fascinating science makes me really, really need the loot, actually.

I wish I hadn't drunk so much water now.

Shall we all go together?

No, we've got to work out who's got the highest status and they need to go first.

And on that note, my thanks to all of my guests this week.

We've had Professor Jem Baker and my studio guests, Professor Mark Miyadovnik, and if we're using titles, Dr.

Ange Ahuja.

Thank you both very much.

Thank you.

Thank you.

And as this week President Trump withdrew the largest economy in the world from the Paris Climate Agreement, Inside Science is going to be picking over the details next week.

If we haven't kept 1.5 alive, what does each fraction of a degree of warming actually mean for our future?

If you have any questions on that topic, please do email them in insidescience at bbc.co.uk.

And Vic Gill will be the presenter.

So, from me, bye for now.

You've been listening to BBC Inside Science with me, Marnie Chesterton.

The producers were Ella Hubber, Sophie Ormiston, and Gerry Holt.

Technical production was by Diffanne Rose.

The show was made in Cardiff by BBC Wales and West.

And to discover more fascinating science content, head to bbc.co.uk, search for BBC Inside Science, and follow the links to the Open University.

Suffs, the new musical has made Tony award-winning history on Broadway.

We demand to be home!

Winner, best score!

We demand to be seen!

Winner, best book!

We demand to be quality!

It's a theatrical masterpiece that's thrilling, inspiring, dazzlingly entertaining, and unquestionably the most emotionally stirring musical this season.

Suffs!

Playing the Orpheum Theater October 22nd through November 9th.

Tickets at BroadwaySF.com.