A company in Finland will be responsible for supplying the raw material for the battery with wood. The country has already stood out for creating sustainable materials with the use of sand.
Northvolt, an international company formed by former Tesla employees and executives, announced that it is developing studies to create a battery made up of wood. The aim is to remove these wood from renewable Nordic forests. The first base will be formed by anode of raw materials coming from Europe in order to reduce carbon dioxide emissions and their costs, the company is also European.
The giant factory is conducting a battery cell project that would allow the massification of this technology on a multinational scale. With that in mind, they signed a recent agreement with Stora Enso, a Finnish environmental company, which would be responsible for supplying the lignin-based hard carbon anode for the construction of this new development.
This material is one of the bases responsible for protecting all the plant tissues of plants and trees. Currently, it is estimated that trees have at least 20% of their entire composition formed by lignin, being one of the largest sources of carbon. Soon, the base material for the battery would be taken from wood, but it would not be the wood itself.
Producing the material since the year 2015
Stora Enso, which will be responsible for exporting the material removed from the trees to manufacture carbon, has been exporting this product since 2015, as lignin has been one of the pilot materials for projects in the country when it comes to development. So far, the production capacity has been only 50 thousand tons per year, however, this demand can be increased in cases of need arising from the industry.
Northvolt is formed by two executives who left Tesla and decided to form a startup to compete with Elon Musk, considered one of the richest men in the world. Currently, they develop sustainable projects based on nickel, manganese and cobalt, which are 100% recycled. In addition, they have more than 50 million dollars in contracts with companies that produce electric vehicles, such as Scania, which is a reference in the production of trucks.
In addition to the wooden battery, we will also have the sand battery, Finland being the protagonist!
In addition to the battery formed through the extraction of wood and materials that make up more than 20% of the composition of trees, it is estimated that, within a few years, humans will have batteries of sand at their disposal. They are already in the final stage of development by Finnish scientists, who announced that their system is very similar to that of the pyramids, since the sand manages to store energy for a long period of time.
The sand battery is thus able to reduce the dependency that many countries have about lithium, which is currently one of the main metals used for the production of this product. They are not yet available for purchase, however, scientists argue that they are Capable of storing energy for months and, therefore, meet the energy needs of some nations in cases of lack of reserves or exponential rise in coal or oil prices, as happened after the war that broke out between Russia and Ukraine.
Far beyond batteries, scientists create revolutionary products for the environment
It's not just the wooden battery that stands out among the developments of 2022: this year, scientists also discovered that seaweed could be attached to solar panels to produce cheaper solar energy and reduce carbon dioxide emissions.
