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Lithium Air Batteries Get Boost From IBM and DOE

Posted by samzenpus on from the power-up dept.

coondoggie writes "The Department of Energy and IBM are serious about developing controversial lithium air batteries capable of powering a car for 500 miles on a single charge – a huge increase over current plug-in batteries that have a range of about 40 to 100 miles, the DOE said. The agency said 24 million hours of supercomputing time out of a total of 1.6 billion available hours at Argonne and Oak Ridge National Laboratories will be used by IBM and a team of researchers from those labs and Vanderbilt University to design new materials required for a lithium air battery."

5 of 240 comments (clear)

  1. Hopefully not vaporware. by samurphy21 · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Because this is a game changing technology, if it pans out.

    1. Re:Hopefully not vaporware. by maxume · · Score: 4, Insightful

      "Affordable" isn't going to be anytime soon, at least not for comparison shoppers. Even at $5 a gallon, a decent sedan will go 100,000 miles on $20,000 of fuel (and neither of those assumptions are particularly aggressive, that $20,000 might get you closer to 250,000 miles).

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    2. Re:Hopefully not vaporware. by Korin43 · · Score: 4, Insightful

      If you're looking to reduce your environment impact, I'd guess that living closer to work will have a much larger effect than buying a different car.

  2. Re:looks like another pinto car by John+Hasler · · Score: 4, Insightful

    > They use highly flammable metals to do this so we will have another round of
    > explosive cars out on the highways...

    Anything that packs enough energy to run a car 300 miles into the volume of a gas tank is going to be potentially dangerous. There's no way around it.

    > ...and being metals they will require some thought into the use of water to
    > put the flames out at accidents.

    Whereas water works real well on gasoline fires.

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  3. Re:Fingers Crossed by John+Hasler · · Score: 3, Insightful

    > Energy-dense storage media have been the missing link in a lot of relatively
    > clean energy generation schemes.

    It isn't density that matters there. It's cost.

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