Lithium will continue to lead

Lithium chemistries have taken a large lead in R&D in the battery industry. And this doesn't look like it is going to change anytime soon.

Even with battery breakthroughs in the lab that don't include lithium, the dominance of lithium will continue until those new chemistries can be time-tested and be put into mass production. That will probably mean at least 10 years before another chemistry can take over.

But with all the R&D going primarily to lithium, even a breakthrough for non-lithium chemistries will have a taller hill to climb as the research in lithium chemistries makes them even better.

Looking at the graph of cost over time, lithium cell prices keep coming down and capacity keeps going up.

And the latest data shows the capacity had continued to go up while the costs went down even further. GM is supposedly paying $145 per kWh from LG Chem for the Volt/Bolt battery.

Projections show this trend to continue for the next few years. The Gigafactory is projected to have costs down below $100 per kWh for the Tesla vehicles by next year despite rising lithium costs.

So any non-lithium chemistry will have to be especially high performance, inexpensive, and very safe to jump ahead of lithium cells even in the next ten years. The reason for this is that lithium has a lot of great properties for batteries while other materials that might offer theoretically higher capacity have been either hard to work with or are expensive.

That's not to say that there haven't been some great breakthroughs in the lab. Silicon, sulfur, carbon, and other materials and alloys have been promising a better battery. And we don't mind them proving their point. If relatively all of the lithium investment will go for naught because of a breakthrough with another chemistry, we should welcome the change.