Super-sized manganese particles might be able to cheaply and efficiently replace nickel and cobalt in battery cathodes.

Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory experts are developing a new process that could help make abundant (and cheap) manganese a contender to replace nickel and cobalt in energy storage for renewables, personal electronics, and electric vehicles.

Nickel and cobalt are essential components in many clean energy technologies and are usually sourced from limited geographic locations, making their supply chain vulnerable to disruptions, which could drive up scarcity and cost.

Today, more than 20% of U.S. electricity is generated by renewable sources, and roughly one-fifth of passenger vehicles sold in 2023 were electric, according to the U.S. Department of Energy.

New research released in a Berkeley Lab report on cathodes has produced a potential alternative. Scientists long in search of the least-expensive chemistries for batteries without sacrificing the important metrics of safety, storage capacity, and output have positioned manganese – the fifth most abundant metal in the Earth's crust – as that replacement.

"With higher energy demands arising from the need for electric vehicles with extended range and personal electronics that can operate for longer times, the low abundance of nickel and cobalt, and ethical concerns related to cobalt mining, may increase the cathode cost and place a large burden on the supply chain," the researchers penned in the report. "Other, more Earth-abundant transition metals, such as chromium, manganese, iron and copper, lack the intrinsic site stability of nickel and cobalt and require novel crystal and microstructure engineering to be useful as lithium-ion energy storage materials."

The study used a manganese-based material called disordered rock salt. Previous research suggested that to perform well, disordered rock salts had to be reduced to nanosized particles in an energy-intensive process. However, the lab report found that manganese-based cathodes using 1,000 times larger particles unexpectedly excelled in experiments.

"There are many ways to generate power with renewable energy, but the importance lies in how you store it," Berkeley doctoral student Han-Ming Hau said. Now the Berkeley team's newest discovery could help improve battery storage as well as its price tag. "By applying our new approach, we can use a material that is both Earth-abundant and low-cost, and that takes less energy and time to produce than some commercialized Li-ion battery cathode materials. And it can store as much energy and work just as well."

It takes two days (as opposed to weeks) to make cathodes with super-sized magnesium. Researchers found that after the process application, the unique crystalline nanostructure formed by the transformation process enhanced battery performance, with denser storage and energy delivery.

The team combined several cutting-edge analysis technologies to study how battery cycling causes chemical changes to manganese at the macroscopic level using resources at three DOE Office of Science user facilities: the Advanced Light Source and Molecular Foundry (National Center for Electron Microscopy) at Berkeley Lab, and the National Synchrotron Light Source II at Brookhaven National Laboratory.

"By studying how the manganese material behaves at different scales, the team opens up different methods for making manganese-based cathodes and insights into nano-engineering future battery materials," according to the report.

"We now have a better understanding of the unique nanostructure of the material," Hau added. "It's an important step that pushes this material closer to battery applications in the real world."

Berkeley Lab is a multiprogram national laboratory managed by the University of California for the U.S. Department of Energy's Office of Science and the largest supporter of basic research in the physical sciences in the U.S.