The new sulfur battery promises 300% more autonomy in electric vehicles. This increase would be at a fraction of the cost.
German battery company Theion is promising new sulfur battery technology that could help conventional electric cars deliver nearly 1,500km of range on a single charge.
And best of all compared to lithium-ion batteries, sulfur is cheap.
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Current battery problem.
Electric car batteries are filled with rare earth minerals. This makes their production expensive and, with rare exceptions, ethically problematic.
German company Theion is committed to making a cost-effective battery that avoids all of this, basing its technology on much more abundant minerals than those used in “classic” lithium-ion cells.
The key: sulfur.
Compared to lithium, sulfur requires much less energy to produce and only costs pennies to produce, according to the company.
Current battery technology uses nickel, manganese and cobalt for the cathode. It is called NMC 811, because it is composed of 80% nickel, 10% cobalt and 10% manganese.
In our case, we substitute this NMC 811 for sulfur. So we have no nickel, no manganese, no cobalt, and we’re replacing the current collective plies of copper and aluminum with graphene, so we also have no aluminum or copper in our cells.
The only things we have in our cells are sheets of lithium metal, sulfur and carbon.
Dr. Ulrich Ehmes, CEO of Theion.
This all sounds very familiar to us, as we published similar research on sulfur batteries a few months ago. In this article, we talked about EV battery research that was being conducted at Drexel University and promising similar benefits to Theion.
Theion’s next step is to ship its hardware later this year to aerospace customers as part of the qualification phase. Next, it plans to service air taxis, drones, cellphones and laptops before moving into the electric vehicle sectors in 2024.