Why Sodium Is Ambani’s Big Battery Bet in the EV Race
Asia’s richest man tacks away from lithium to the more plentiful and potentially more versatile element.
Mukesh Ambani of Reliance Industries Ltd. and his wife Nita, in Mumbai, India, August 2019.
Photographer: Bloomberg/BloombergFrom smartphones to Tesla Inc. cars, lithium-ion batteries are everywhere. But when Asia’s richest man went shopping in England with 100 million pounds ($136 million), he came back with humble sodium.
Sodium-ion is not a bad choice for Mukesh Ambani to kick off his power-storage gigafactory. For one thing, the earth’s crust has 300 times more sodium than lithium. For another, the global adoption rate of electric vehicles is currently so high that not just lithium, but high-grade nickel, cobalt and practically everything else that goes into an EV battery, is getting scarce. BloombergNEF is predicting a five-fold jump in the hunger for metals used to make lithium-ion cells by 2030. For the first time in many years, battery packs may get more expensive in 2022.