Whenever electric car owners plug in they are reminded that charging takes longer than filling up with petrol and seldom gets them as far down the road. Whenever an electric car or smartphone catches fire, they remind us all that fossil fuels don’t have a monopoly on flammability.
For more than a century the holy grail of battery technology has been a combination of materials that can match the energy density of refined crude without costing the earth. In this respect even the latest lithium-ion batteries in Elon Musk’s most expensive Teslas do not come close. By arranging hundreds of them in a massive oblong close to the ground he has been able to promise a range of nearly 300 miles per charge, and superb handling. But pound for pound, lithium-ion cells still pack only a tiny fraction of the punch of petrol.
That could change. Researchers at Lancaster University have stumbled on a new form of carbon that can hold twice as many lithium ions per unit of volume as conventional batteries. It can charge and discharge many more times, and so far it has not caught fire.
The material doesn’t have a name yet. A paper in the German journal Angewandte Chemie refers to it only as OSPC-1. But it has attracted the attention of battery specialists elsewhere, one of whom tells The Times the Lancaster group could be on to “something big”.
We have, in many ways, been here before. In the mid-1990s British work on carbon nanotubes as potential stores of hydrogen raised hopes of a 5,000-mile hydrogen tank for cars propelled by fuel cells. It came to nothing. A decade later, in Manchester, Sir Andre Geim and Sir Kostya Novoselov found a way to produce super-strong, electrically conductive carbon one atom thick. It was called graphene and was supposed to change the world. Maybe Lancaster will get there first.