Sustainable Seaweed Hydrogels for Next Generation Lithium Ion Batteries (LIBs)

The climate crisis is a serious global threat of immediate political importance internationally. Limiting future environmental degradation, severe weather events and declining biodiversity whilst securing future supplies of fuel, food, water and crops is essential.

A global effort is needed to achieve the United Nations goal of Net Zero emissions by 2050\. Key to achieving this is the development of new, disruptive technologies to facilitate replacing fossil fuels and derivatives with greener, natural and sustainable alternatives.

Aligned with these goals, this proposed project between Marine Biopolymers Limited (MBL) and the University of Glasgow (UoG) is a collaborative development to revolutionise energy storage technology by exploiting sustainable, naturally-derived seaweed polymers and cutting-edge nanomaterials. Success would deliver innovative silicon-alginate anodes for lithium ion batteries (LIBs), offering step changes in battery capacity and charging rate. Such transformations in energy storage will be vital in transitioning to Net Zero.

Around 6% of global CO2 emissions results from passenger transport (personal vehicles and buses). To achieve Net Zero emissions, greenhouse gas global emissions must be drastically cut. Addressing even this 6% is a major challenge as the global population grows over the coming decades and expectations of (ever-increasing) living standards rise. Improving infrastructure and efficiency while developing innovative energy and transport technologies will help to meet these challenges of population growth, energy demand, greenhouse gas (carbon) emissions and climate change. These are political imperatives and increased regulation promised by lawmakers (such as phasing out fossil-fueled vehicles) means that meeting these grand challenges is a mandatory action.

This collaboration is ideally placed to deliver innovative and superior technology to the battery market and aims to develop new green and sustainable silicon anode technology for LIBs. Achieving this would deliver transformative advances in charging capacity, recharge times and longevity of batteries without compromising on their safety. Adoption of Silicon based batteries has the potential to transform the future development of electric vehicles (EVs), increasing driving range, slashing charging times and downsizing (dimensions/weight) vehicle drivetrains compared to state-of-the-art graphite anode based systems. The disruptive step of replacing well-established graphite anodes in LIBs with silicon will bring a step-change in charge capacity and increase charged battery life by an order of magnitude. This potential revolution can be achieved by tapping into a vast skillset in natural bio-based polymers (MBL) to develop new nanocomposites and prototype energy stores (UoG) for potential adoption into next-generation LIB technology.