Lithium-air batteries are one of those technologies that could be truly revolutionary. With a theoretical maximum energy storage capacity 10 times greater than your garden variety lithium-ion battery, lithium-air batteries could be much smaller and lighter but still provide a huge range. How’s 500-700 miles per charge for you?
Unfortunately, as is usually the case with these sorts of things, the lithium-air revolution has hurdles aplenty. But fortunately, lithium-air batteries have some big guns doing research on them. For instance, IBM has been doing research on lithium-air batteries for the better part of a decade.
And just this week, scientists at MIT have announced that when they substituted gold and platinum for the standard carbon electrodes in lithium-air cells, they were able to obtain much higher efficiencies. The find was significant enough for MIT to claim that their research could lead to lithium-air batteries with 3 times the energy density of lithium-ion. That alone would be a big step forward.