Antimony battery
Antimony (Sb) has a wide range of applications, including the production of storage battery plates and bearing alloys. Its oxide is an important raw material for flame retardants, catalysts, and clarifying agents. Today, we will discuss another area involving antimony—antimony batteries.
In 2021, Bill Gates' investment company, focused on renewable energy, invested in Ambri, a company that manufactures antimony batteries. Perpetua Resources (a Canadian gold and antimony mining company), an Idaho-based natural resources company, owns the largest antimony deposit in the United States. Ambri has signed a long-term antimony supply agreement with them to ensure a domestic source for its supply chain. In this battery design, antimony is a key mineral in Ambri's battery chemistry.
Will antimony become the next new energy metal after lithium (lithium-ion batteries), sodium (sodium-ion batteries), and platinum (hydrogen fuel cells)? Compared to traditional lithium batteries, antimony batteries have higher energy density and faster charging speeds, making them more effective in modern smartphones, drones, and other micro-devices. In addition, antimony batteries have less environmental impact because they do not contain lithium or other harmful substances. Professor Li Fuhai, vice president and doctoral supervisor of the School of Electrical and Information Engineering at Hunan University, said: "Due to its good chemical stability, low reduction potential, high theoretical capacity, and other advantages, antimony has long been used as one of the negative electrode materials in lead-acid batteries and lithium, sodium, and potassium-ion batteries. Combined with nanotechnology and carbon composite technology, antimony improves various key performance indicators of batteries, and antimony selenide is also used in the preparation of thin-film solar cells. It can be said that antimony has long been recognized by the industry as a new energy metal, but Bill Gates's "celebrity effect" has made people rediscover the value of antimony in the new energy industry."
Why is energy storage definitely the direction of the future? First, our country has set a carbon peak target, and clean energy will gradually replace combustion energy. However, clean energy generally has instability issues, such as wind energy and photovoltaics. In addition to the instability of the energy source itself, the matching between clean energy and human electricity demand is also poor. For example, electricity demand is low at night, but wind energy is abundant; or electricity demand is high during the day, but if it is cloudy, photovoltaic power generation will be insufficient. Therefore, the natural solution is to generate electricity in advance and store it. Since clean energy is inevitable, energy storage is also inevitable, and the explosion of demand is inevitable.
Which technology route will win? The two major schemes currently favored are: potential energy storage, namely pumped hydro storage, which transports water to a high place and then uses potential energy to generate electricity; the second is chemical energy storage, namely batteries. Looking at the two schemes, pumped hydro storage is easy to implement and technologically simple, but it is not convenient for large-scale promotion and has poor applicability. It's simple; not every place has water resources and terrain resources. Therefore, battery energy storage can be widely applied. However, simply enlarging the batteries of electric vehicles and then using them for energy storage is not feasible. In grid-level energy storage applications, lithium batteries currently used in electric vehicles have many problems, such as slow charging and discharging, short lifespan, demanding operating temperature requirements, and low safety (flammable), which are fatal flaws. Therefore, chemical energy storage requires new technologies. Currently, antimony batteries can effectively solve the above problems.
Why antimony batteries? Antimony batteries are a type of liquid metal battery that does not require a diaphragm. They have a simpler structure than lithium batteries, are easier to maintain and recycle, and can achieve very large energy storage capacity. The performance of liquid batteries is superior to current lithium batteries, with fast charging and discharging speeds and the ability to maintain discharge voltage. Antimony itself also has flame-retardant properties.
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