Beyond lithium: how a Swedish battery company wants to power Europe’s green transition with salt

Northvolt has developed a sodium-based battery, which doesn’t require critical minerals and could help break European dependence on China for the technology

Northvolt’s sprawling battery research facility stands out as a modern cubic building of wood and steel between groves of birch trees and tall firs in eastern Sweden.

The Swedish company’s labs form the largest campus for battery research in Europe. It’s here, in a former industrial zone on the outskirts of the town of Västerås, about 100 kilometres northwest of the capital Stockholm, that one of the continent’s best-funded climate tech companies could write the future of batteries.

In November 2023, Northvolt – Europe’s only major home-grown EV battery maker – announced a breakthrough in battery development.

The company had manufactured a first-of-its-kind energy storage battery by replacing widely used critical minerals – such as lithium, cobalt, nickel and graphite – with cheaper and far more abundant sodium – a chemical element which is found in table salt – as well as iron, nitrogen and carbon.

“This is a fundamentally new technology,” Andreas Haas, head of Northvolt’s sodium-ion programme, told Climate Home News in an interview.

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