UK battery developer Faradion and US energy company Phillips 66 have launched a technical collaboration to develop sodium-ion anode materials.
Faradion has previously developed ‘carbon-containing starting materials’ for sodium batteries from animal faeces.
The multi-year collaboration aims to fast-forward large-scale industrialisation of Faradion’s hard carbon anodes, beginning with the technical collaboration, before moving to pilots, commercialisation, then mass rollout.
The company says its batteries offer cell-level energy densities in the range of 160Wh/kg. At 100Ah pouch-cell scale, it’s projected to reach a specific energy of 190Wh/kg later this year.
Research and development will be conducted in the UK (Oxford and Sheffield) and in the US (Oklahoma and Houston).
A spokesman for Faradion told BEST: “Carbon, in the form of graphite, works well as an anode material in lithium-ion batteries, but it is electrochemically less active towards sodium.
“So one area that needed more attention is the development of new anode electrode materials, particularly for sodium-ion batteries. In our patent, we take carbon-containing starting materials from animal-derived material— or in other words, animal faeces— and process it into hard carbon for use in our anodes.
“We can now produce high-value sodium-ion battery materials from resources such as waste water and poultry manure.”
The batteries will be designed for stationary and mobile storage applications