Seawater May Hold The Key To The Next Sustainable Battery Revolution
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By PAGE Editor
As governments, corporations, and energy providers race toward ambitious decarbonization targets, one challenge continues to loom over the clean energy transition: storage. While solar panels and wind turbines have become increasingly efficient and affordable, the ability to store that energy at scale remains one of the defining technological hurdles of the century.
Now, researchers are looking toward an unlikely source for answers—seawater.
Covering approximately 71 percent of the Earth's surface and accounting for roughly 97 percent of all water on the planet, seawater contains abundant materials that could help reshape how future batteries are designed. New research conducted by an international team of scientists from Switzerland, Canada, and the United States suggests that chloride, a naturally occurring component of seawater, could eventually become a sustainable alternative to lithium in certain large-scale battery applications.
The findings, made possible through research conducted at the Canadian Light Source (CLS) at the University of Saskatchewan, represent an important step toward diversifying the materials that power the world's rapidly growing energy infrastructure.
For decades, lithium has served as the foundation of modern battery technology. From smartphones and laptops to electric vehicles and renewable energy systems, lithium-ion batteries have enabled much of the technological progress associated with electrification. Yet demand continues to outpace long-term supply projections. Global lithium production has more than doubled over the past five years, while access to reserves remains concentrated within a relatively small number of countries.
As nations pursue energy independence alongside climate goals, researchers are increasingly asking a critical question: what comes after lithium?
"We're not looking to entirely replace lithium-ion batteries, but we need other solutions in the next few decades if we are going to meet this massive need that the world will have for hundreds of terawatt hours that allow for effective use of solar and wind," said Sarbajit Banerjee, Professor at ETH Zürich and Head of the Laboratory for Battery Science at Switzerland's Paul Scherrer Institute.
That challenge has led scientists to explore chloride-based battery systems. Unlike lithium ions, however, chloride ions struggle to move efficiently through the solid materials required in advanced battery architectures. The limitation has historically reduced their viability as a practical energy storage solution.
The breakthrough came when Banerjee and doctoral researcher Jingxiang Cheng developed a way to create what they describe as a more efficient pathway for chloride-ion movement. By introducing small amounts of calcium, magnesium, or strontium into the atomic structure of lanthanum oxychloride, the team significantly improved ion mobility.
The most promising results emerged from calcium modifications, which accelerated chloride-ion movement by as much as 10,000 times.
While the figure is striking, the broader implication may be even more significant. Faster ion transport addresses one of the core obstacles that has prevented chloride from becoming a serious contender in battery development. The discovery suggests that materials once dismissed as impractical may be re-engineered to support entirely new categories of energy storage.
Using the ultrabright X-ray capabilities of the Canadian Light Source, researchers were able to observe precisely how these modifications altered the material's internal structure. The additional elements effectively softened the crystal framework, creating an environment that allowed chloride ions to move more freely through the battery's solid electrolyte.
The research, published in ACS Applied Energy Materials, highlights how advances in materials science increasingly depend on sophisticated research infrastructure capable of examining atomic-scale interactions.
"We are exploring uncharted territory," Cheng explained. "We're expanding the horizon of the battery field and we're hoping to use this platform to build more on it, and to explore things that lithium-ion batteries are not super good at."
That exploration reflects a broader shift occurring across the energy sector. Rather than searching for a singular successor to lithium, researchers are building a portfolio of complementary technologies designed for specific applications. Lithium-ion batteries may continue to dominate consumer electronics and transportation, while alternative chemistries could emerge as better solutions for grid-scale storage, where sustainability, abundance, and cost often outweigh considerations such as size and weight.
This distinction is increasingly important as utility operators seek ways to stabilize renewable energy generation. Solar and wind resources are inherently intermittent, producing electricity when conditions allow rather than when demand requires it. Effective storage systems serve as the bridge between generation and consumption, making renewable energy more reliable and scalable.
The promise of chloride-based batteries lies not only in performance potential but also in resource accessibility. Unlike lithium, chloride is abundant, inexpensive, and widely distributed across the globe. Materials derived from seawater could reduce geopolitical supply-chain pressures while creating more sustainable pathways for future energy storage deployment.
For Banerjee, the work is less about replacing today's batteries and more about laying the groundwork for tomorrow's energy ecosystem.
"The successful transition from fossil fuels to clean energy demands new solutions for energy storage," he said. "We've done this work to see if we can basically start building the foundations for new types of battery energy storage that will be more sustainable and especially for large scale."
As renewable energy adoption accelerates worldwide, innovations like these underscore an important reality: the future of clean energy will depend not only on how electricity is generated, but on how effectively it can be stored. And increasingly, the answers may come from resources that have surrounded humanity all along.
In the search for sustainable energy solutions, the next battery revolution may begin with the ocean itself.
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Researchers have demonstrated that chloride derived from seawater could become the foundation for a new generation of sustainable, grid-scale batteries, potentially reducing dependence on lithium while advancing the future of renewable energy storage.