Cheap batteries made of table salt and rust could power electrical devices of the future!

The oceans are unending, and with it comes a boundless supply of minerals. Out of them, one of the elements reigns so supremely abundant and useful that it's actually hard to imagine life without it anymore. We're talking about the common salt, of course. And after uplifting food worldwide, the humble mineral is ready to spice up something completely unexpected: batteries!

Researchers from the Worcester Polytechnic Institute have developed a new type of battery that uses the chlorine from seawater at its core, making for an exciting competitor to the reigning lithium-ion king that is being stretched increasingly thin to meet our electrical transition needs.

The increasing switch to electrical appliances and vehicles has placed an urgent and growing burden on many minerals. The limited geographically availability of essential elements required in modern batteries, such as cobalt, nickel and lithum, continues to bottleneck how fast we can realistically make the green switch, even pushing up the prices for electrical applicances substantially.

Therefore, it becomes imperative that we devise batteries made of more bountiful elements, and turns out, chlorine — one half of the stuff that makes up our table salt — can heartily do the trick!

The researchers leveraged chloride ions to enable a previously-difficult redox reaction on iron oxide, or what we know as rust. According to the author, iron, being one of the most common elements on the Earth's crust, is a good alternative to satisfy nearly all criteria for low-cost and safe batteries.

The team devised a small lab-scale aqueous battery prototype using rust and chloride ions, which helped improve the cycling stability of the green Alkaline Iron battery.

The study authors allege that the vast amount of unrecycled scrap iron waste produced by many countries should easily help in mass production of these modern batteries. With the United States alone generating over 15 million tons of such scrap annually, there is certainly some merit to this argument, and will be interesting to see how this unexpected player will tie into the ongoing green transition.

The findings of this research have been published in Chemistry of Materials and can be accessed here.