A material made from the wood of our plants is being tested to generate sustainable battery power.
Finnish designer Stora Enso have built a new € 10 million manufacturing facility that will produce renewable bio-based carbon by converting trees into batteries. This is achieved through the use of a wood material called lignin.
The facility is located next to the company’s Sunila mill in Kotka, southern Finland, which employs over 150 people and specializes in the production of softwood pulp and biofuels such as tall oil and turpentine.
The company is responsible for the development of a number of wood and biomaterial-based solutions for everyday problems that require environmentally friendly solutions. Their innovative product range ranges from malleable woods to molded fibers Food packaging.
What is lignin and how is it made into batteries?
Not to be confused with the Swedish berry, lignin is the second most common macromolecule in nature after cellulose, which is deposited in the cell wall of plants to make their structure firm and woody so that they do not rot. It makes up about a third of all Overall composition of the wood.
Stora Enso was a long-term investor in sustainable research and development finance with investments of 140 million euros last year. The confidence is high that the Contains carbon in the non-toxic material can be used to replace the fossil fuels and mined metals in our lithium-ion batteries that normally require graphite to function.
Lignin is separated from the wood during the production of cellulose fibers from its pulp. It is then refined into a light carbon powder that is made into electrode sheets and combined with others Battery components to replace graphite.
The company has been producing lignin industrially at the Sunila plant since 2015. The annual production capacity is 50,000 tons, which makes Stora Enso the world’s largest producer of kraft lignin. Expansion of lignin in own production areas and patenting of the technology under the title Lignode®, cement Stora’s intentions for a future of smarter battery travel.
What are the advantages of tree-based battery technology?
The anode in conventional lithium-ion batteries is made of graphite, which is formed through a chemical reaction in non-renewable carbon compounds.
In order for Tesla to achieve its production targets of 20 million electric cars annually, it would have to Extract over 1 million tons of graphite.
Almost all portable electronics today are powered by lithium-ion batteries. There are some concerns that because of their overheating ability, engineers cannot make future commitments to them to power larger machines like airplanes.
This was most vividly demonstrated by the infamous thermal overheating incident on a Boeing 787 Dreamliner Flight from Washington to Charles de Gaulle Airport, Parisalthough Boeing claims that large car batteries used in this manner do not pose an inherent safety hazard.
Stora Enso has outlined five main benefits of moving to their renewable lignode energy technology:
Scalability
- Because of the wide availability of the resource required for their manufacture – trees – it is possible to produce these batteries commercially.
sustainability
- The manufacturers undertake to source their materials from sustainability-certified European forests.
Renewability
- Almost all of the production of LI batteries takes place in China due to poor environmental standards and low production costs. The use of natural resources would completely eliminate this need.
Faster loading
Stora Enso believes that a fully functional Lignode battery has the capacity to charge faster than the fossil fuel leader.
Better performance at lower temperatures
- The battery is ready for use in cooler temperatures and opens doors to power more electric cars.
Meeting the global demand for e-mobility
Lignin-based carbon could still be used to make anything of Consumer electronics to automotive systems. In view of the exponential increase in e-mobility, the latter seems to be the company’s most urgent concern.
It is expected to make a huge contribution to the global battery market, which will grow tenfold over the next five years. A panel from PwC on the subject noted that the pandemic caused general auto sales to decline 14 percent, as opposed to an “excellent growth” of 46 percent for electric vehicles such as e-bikes and scooters worldwide.
It could provide excellent news for our vehicle-related CO2 emissions, however only if the materials used to manufacture them cost less for our environment.
“With Lignode we can offer a bio-based, cost-effective and high-performance material that replaces the conventionally used graphite,” says Markus Mannström, Executive Vice President of Stora Enso’s Biomaterials division.
“To serve the fast growing anode materials market, we are now looking into strategic partnerships to accelerate scale-up and commercialization in Europe.”
