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Promising New Development in Liquid Sodium Fuel Cells for Transportation and CO2 Sequestration [1]

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Date: 2025-05-30

From TechXplore on Tuesday comes an exceptionally promising new development in the field of liquid sodium fuel cells that could potentially revolutionize major aspects of our various transportation networks (planes, trains, and cargo ships) via electrification, and at the same time not only allow for carbon-free energy production, but help remove CO2 from the atmosphere as well:

Batteries are nearing their limits in terms of how much power they can store for a given weight. That's a serious obstacle for energy innovation and the search for new ways to power airplanes, trains, and ships. Now, researchers at MIT and elsewhere have come up with a solution that could help electrify these transportation systems. Instead of a battery, the new concept is a kind of fuel cell which is similar to a battery but can be quickly refueled rather than recharged. In this case, the fuel is liquid sodium metal, an inexpensive and widely available commodity. The other side of the cell is just ordinary air, which serves as a source of oxygen atoms. In between, a layer of solid ceramic material serves as the electrolyte, allowing sodium ions to pass freely through, and a porous air-facing electrode helps the sodium to chemically react with oxygen and produce electricity. In a series of experiments with a prototype device, the researchers demonstrated that this cell could carry more than three times as much energy per unit of weight as the lithium-ion batteries used in virtually all electric vehicles today. Their findings are published in the journal Joule, in a paper by MIT doctoral students Karen Sugano, Sunil Mair, and Saahir Ganti-Agrawal; professor of materials science and engineering Yet-Ming Chiang; and five others. "We expect people to think that this is a totally crazy idea," says Chiang, who is the Kyocera Professor of Ceramics. "If they didn't, I'd be a bit disappointed because if people don't think something is totally crazy at first, it probably isn't going to be that revolutionary." And this technology does appear to have the potential to be quite revolutionary, he suggests. In particular, for aviation, where weight is especially crucial, such an improvement in energy density could be the breakthrough that finally makes electrically powered flight practical at a significant scale.

Aside from the economics (sodium is literally dirt cheap and easily extracted from common salt deposits — unlike the lithium used in lithium-ion batteries), the byproducts of a liquid sodium-air fuel cell actually have industrial and environmental benefits that go far beyond those of other alternative energy sources for transportation like hydrogen or ammonia fuel cells — let alone biodiesel or conventional fossil fuels.

Not only is there the chlorine byproduct from the extraction of sodium chloride that has a current industrial value sufficient to largely offset the manufacturing costs of the sodium itself, but the sodium hydroxide reaction product is capable of extracting CO2 from the atmosphere to form sodium bicarbonate that can help alleviate the growing acidification of the oceans — a double win for the environment.

In addition, there is also the inherent safety advantage of this type of fuel cell:

Using sodium hydroxide to capture carbon dioxide has been proposed as a way of mitigating carbon emissions, but on its own, it's not an economic solution because the compound is too expensive. "But here, it's a byproduct," Chiang explains, so it's essentially free, producing environmental benefits at no cost. Importantly, the new fuel cell is inherently safer than many other batteries, he says. Sodium metal is extremely reactive and must be well-protected. As with lithium batteries, sodium can spontaneously ignite if exposed to moisture. "Whenever you have a very high-energy-density battery, safety is always a concern, because if there's a rupture of the membrane that separates the two reactants, you can have a runaway reaction," Chiang says. But in this fuel cell, one side is just air, "which is dilute and limited. So you don't have two concentrated reactants right next to each other. If you're pushing for really, really high energy density, you'd rather have a fuel cell than a battery for safety reasons." While the device so far exists only as a small, single-cell prototype, Chiang says the system should be quite straightforward to scale up to practical sizes for commercialization. Members of the research team have already formed a company, Propel Aero, to develop the technology. The company is currently housed in MIT's startup incubator, The Engine. Producing enough sodium metal to enable widespread, full-scale global implementation of this technology should be practical, since the material has been produced on a large scale before.

The whole article is well worth exploring, including the original paper published in the peer-reviewed science journal Joule that deals with alternative energy sources.

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[1] Url: https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2025/5/30/2325025/-Promising-New-Development-in-Liquid-Sodium-Fuel-Cells-for-Transportation-and-CO2-Sequestration?pm_campaign=front_page&pm_source=more_community&pm_medium=web

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