Contributed Commentary by Alex Sammut, Business Development Manager, Thermo Fisher Scientific
February 27, 2025 | As cities around the world electrify public transportation and major vehicle manufacturers pledge to bring electric fleets to market, there is an urgent need for more advanced batteries that are safe, sustainable, and energy-dense. Most electric vehicles (EVs) today are powered by lithium-ion (Li-ion) batteries, but scientists across industry and academia are researching ways to improve battery technology so that EVs can charge faster, travel greater distances, and be more affordable. However, amid the high demand for EVs and renewable power sources, challenges persist in research and development (R&D) and scaling up into production. To ensure continued discovery into new battery technology and avoid data silos, cross-industry collaboration is essential to the continuous research and development into advanced automotive batteries.
Key Considerations In Battery R&D
As battery industry experts work toward developing cleaner battery technologies, it’s critically important that these technologies are safe, sustainable, and allow for supply chain security. Scientists and academics alike are exploring improvements from the standard Li-ion chemistry for clean energy batteries with alternative battery materials, such as solid-state electrolyte (SSE) batteries and sodium-based batteries. Additionally, the higher availability of raw materials in sodium-based batteries could help alleviate the current and future pressures on supply chains with the increased demand for batteries.
Safety is also a top consideration for scientists in battery R&D as they experiment with new chemistries and materials to find the best and most sustainable materials to use in next-generation technologies. Battery safety and stability is also driving R&D, such as a recent paper that uncovered a new sodium battery architecture with stable, repeated cycling that is proving to be a safer, more affordable, and sustainable alternative to other architectures. Some of these alternative materials already have promising results, such as SSE batteries which reportedly have the potential to reduce EV batteries’ carbon footprint by up to 39% due to their ability to prevent thermal runaway. Ensuring that these new chemistries are safe will be a crucial aspect in developing emerging technologies and for the future of the supply chain.
With promising safe and sustainable materials for next-generation battery technologies, it’s critical that the industry ensures that supply chains are resilient enough to support the future demands of the materials. In fact, the International Energy Agency (IEA) found that battery demand in EVs is expected to rise from 6.6 million in 2021 to 350 million in 2050, highlighting the increased urgency for establishing a secure and safe supply chain to meet these demands.
Meeting Growing Demands For Clean Energy Battery Technology
With demand for clean energy batteries expected to exponentially increase in the future, utilizing cutting-edge technologies and analytical solutions will be key to ensuring that future supply chains are supported. For example, electron microscopy, spectroscopy, inductively coupled plasma mass spectrometry (ICP), Fourier transform infrared (FTIR), Raman, X-ray fluorescence (XRF) and chromatography are tools and technologies that can help scientists better understand clean energy technologies that are safe, sustainable, and energy dense.
Traceability is another important consideration as scientists work to meet the growing demand for better battery technology for EVs. To ensure consumer safety, the battery industry must be able to trace any problems back to the raw materials or the manufacturing technology to understand the source of the issue. Having the whole production process from mining raw materials to R&D to manufacturing automatically captured with interconnected digital solutions, such as a laboratory information management system (LIMS) can capture, correlate, and track data back to the source, ensuring that next-generation batteries are not only developed with more sustainable materials, but also enables a sustainable supply chain.
Need for Cross-Industry Collaboration to Develop Clean Energy Batteries
Amid this growing demand, there is an urgent need for cross-industry collaboration to alleviate data silos and encourage knowledge sharing. This collaboration can help researchers apply learnings across the battery industry as they collectively work toward developing clean energy technologies. Creating and engaging with forums where academia and industry experts can come together will be essential as we work toward the future of battery technologies and meet current and future industry demands for electrification. Further, these events help foster an understanding of where new learning can be applied to other use cases—a level of learning that is impossible if researchers remain in their silos. These cross-functional collaborations to determine a collective approach to battery development will be key to uncovering insights on new materials, technological solutions, and applications to propel battery R&D and manufacturing forward.
Shifting Toward The Future Of Clean Energy Automotive Batteries
When developing more sustainable and robust batteries, researchers will need to ensure the safety of new technologies and enable secure and sustainable supply chains. Alternative materials, such as SSE batteries and sodium-based batteries, should be vetted as potential alternatives to the standard Li-ion chemistry of current automotive batteries. The industry must also ensure that they are safe and sustainable and do not overload supply chains by analyzing them with next-generation laboratory tools such as electron microscopes.
With automation across industries enabling the production of newer and cleaner battery technologies, ensuring that batteries and their materials still meet quality standards, sustainability goals, and are more energy dense will be vital to meeting the increased demand for the technology. Supported by cross-industry collaboration, these new battery technologies can help us move collectively toward a clean energy future in advanced automotive batteries.
Alex Sammut is currently a business development manager at Thermo Fisher Scientific, where his focus is on clean energy. Alex previously worked with industry leaders at top automotive companies, such as The Lubrizol Corporation and Chrysler. Alex received a bachelor’s degree in chemical engineering from the University of Michigan. He can be reached at alex.sammut@thermofisher.com.
