Stories of Innovation: Lithium-ion Batteries

Alimata Djire, R&D Engineer - Lithium Extraction: Don’t you know what lithium-ion batteries are? Sort of spelt like lion. Actually you do know what they are, and you use them a lot. Let me explain.

Welcome to Stories of Innovation, a series of podcasts from TotalEnergies. In each episode, our employees explain how the innovations that have changed the world of energy came to light. Want to find out more? Let's go!

Alimata Djire: Lithium-ion batteries are light, with much higher energy density than batteries using lead or nickel, for example. They are rechargeable, and we use them to power electric devices, such as smartphones, laptops and drills. And they can be largely credited to the three laureates of the 2019 Nobel Prize for Chemistry. A battery’s performance depends mainly on two components: the cathode and the anode. In the Seventies, Stanley Whittingham combined an anode of lithium, a very light, reactive material, with a titanium disulfide cathode. The result was a 2V non-rechargeable battery. But it tended to catch fire… oops! In 1980, John Goodenough proposed lithium cobalt oxide for the cathode, increasing the battery’s voltage to 4V. But the new battery was still unstable because of the lithium anode. Finally, Akira Yoshino combined a carbon anode with a lithium cobalt oxide cathode, to make a stable, rechargeable battery. And guess what, in 1991, Sony put the first lithium-ion batteries on the market, revolutionizing consumer electronics. It would still take years of improvements before they achieved the ubiquity of the 2010s, especially in electric cars. And thanks to industrialization and mass production, they now cost a tenth of the price of fifteen years ago!

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