![]() ![]() “Cobalt’s expensive and people will do their best not to use it,” says Goodenough, who still works as an engineering professor at the University of Texas. Researchers and companies are ready for the alternatives. The rocksalt cathodes are already in use in some devices, but they don’t yet have the same high energy density as cobalt or nickel. Instead of layers, these elements come together into a “rocksalt” structure, so called for its resemblance to our favorite tableside seasoning. ![]() And they have some help: Goodenough and other researchers have also developed rechargeable batteries that don’t need cobalt.īut a new wave of battery researchers, including Goodenough, are moving to materials like manganese and iron. Panasonic, Tesla’s battery supplier, announced at the end of last month that they are developing batteries that don’t need cobalt. Electronics devices and electric car companies don’t want to pay big bucks and connect themselves with these atrocities, so they have tried to cut down on the amount of cobalt their batteries use. But it also has a darker cost: a long history of human rights violations, including child mining, associated with production in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Today, cobalt appears in most commercial lithium-ion batteries-but it comes at a price. 1 So Goodenough made the cobalt himself, heating the precursors at very high temperatures. Experiments had already established that the metal is energy-dense, perfect for small batteries that need a lot of power. When John Goodenough created the first lithium-ion rechargeable battery at Oxford in 1980, he needed some cobalt. ![]()
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