The global search for sustainable batteries has led to several unusual yet innovative discoveries.
In Finland, a company called Stora Enso is one of the largest private forest owners in the world, and in the digital age, they realised that the demand for paper and office printing has been on a steady decline for years.
Armed with significant resources at their disposal, they started looking at ways in which their abundant forests could offer a sustainable and affordable solution to the burgeoning EV battery market.
The company hired a team of engineers to look at ways of creating EV batteries from trees. Central to this process is lignin, which is a polymer found in trees and accounts for approximately 30% of its make-up.
Lignin is essentially the glue that holds the cellulose fibres together in a tree, making them stiff and tough. As a polymer, lignin contains carbon, which can serve as the perfect component for battery anodes.
Stora Enso is confident that their engineers can extract lignin from the waste pulp of trees before processing it to make a carbon material that could be used for battery anodes, specifically for use in EV batteries.
The process of using lignin for battery anodes is more sustainable than the production of synthetic graphite, which involves heating carbon to temperatures of 3,000C for several weeks at a time. A lot of synthetic graphite comes from factories in China, and it’s widely seen as highly unsustainable.
Stora Enso isn’t the only firm exploring the potential of lignin in battery technology – Bright Day Graphene in Sweden has already made significant strides as far as its use for battery anodes is concerned.
However, Stora Enso has named their carbon anode material “Lignode”, and they are keeping their methodology close to their chest. One thing they have said is that their process ensures that EV batteries can be charged in as little as eight minutes, which promises to contribute positively to the global development of EVs in the near future.
One of the reasons why engineers are excited about the potential of lignin is because of its sustainability. As mentioned, the lignin used for anode production is currently extracted as a by-product from the paper-making process, meaning that additional trees don’t need to be chopped down to make batteries.
A key issue facing the mainstream adoption of lignin as a battery anode is ensuring that manufacturers continue extracting the raw material from sustainable forests, and when global demand increases, it’s unlikely to continue as a mere by-product of the paper production process.
Still, there’s a lot of excitement in the battery industry about the potential of lignin, and it’s certainly worth keeping an eye on, particularly as the global demand for sustainable EV batteries continues to grow in the coming years.
Learn more about Stora Enso’s use of lignin in battery production here.
