A lot of this is because of the Japanese government itself.

To Japan, Battery Tech would force them to be reliant on China due to lack of natural lithium deposits, which makes the whole energy reliance aspect of battery tech moot.

To combat this, the Japanese government felt Hydrogen would be the best bet due to

1. An early lead in hydrogen technology

2. A large LNG capacity that could be revamped for Hydrogen fuels

3. Good relations with cheap coal producers like Australia and India to produce brown hydrogen (ie. Hydrogen fuel from carbon resources)

4. The economics and logistics of hydrogen fuel cells can mimic that for Natural Gas, meaning a quicker ramp up.

These are a good overview -

1. Japan’s Hydrogen Industrial Strategy - https://www.csis.org/analysis/japans-hydrogen-industrial-str...

2. Japan Hydrogen Basic Strategy - https://www.whitecase.com/insight-alert/japan-hydrogen-basic...

3. Basic Strategy for Hydrogen (the actual strategy paper. It's in Japanese) - https://www.meti.go.jp/shingikai/enecho/shoene_shinene/suiso...

Seems green hydrogen is the ultimate strategy. What do you think of recent developments of high efficiency electrolysis of sea water without precious metal catalysts? [1]

Hydrogen will be needed for industrial processes as electric power can't generate temperatures high enough and hydrogen in the form of ammonia makes a pretty good energy storage system that does not need any special metals to use for power in a modified ICE. The sweet spot for ammonia engines seems to be long haul container shipping where batteries would be infeasible.[2]

[1]https://www.nature.com/articles/s41560-023-01195-x

[2]https://gcaptain.com/man-reaches-milestone-with-successful-t...

First, I want to stress that I'm a Policy Wonk turned Cybersecurity practitioner. Though I have a STEM education, I haven't touched chemistry or physics in almost a decade.

That said, this paper does look promising and it kind of reminds me of the heavy water electrolysis process used in Nuclear Energy.

Using saltwater instead of fresh+distilled water would be great, though I'm curious about the cost of productionizing this, as the kind of cost and energy outlay needed for this at scale might not be efficient.

That said, I am not a ChemE or Physicist so I could be wrong

> Seems green hydrogen is the ultimate strategy.

Yep, but that will take time to build, hence the idea to use brown hydrogen in the meantime.

It's interesting that I just watched a video[0][1] on Nickel-Hydrogen batteries for grid storage; there are nickel deposits in Japan, so if they really are viable, Japan would not be dependent on anyone for grid storage.

Incidentally, I can't see how being dependent on the US is such an issue for Japan. They are completely and utterly dependent on the US for their national security, without any remaining meaningful popular movement to divorce themselves thereof. The Japanese Socialist party had some language about getting rid of the Anpo treaty, but hilariously, they backed out immediately when they came into power; the Japaense journalist / commentator Akira Ikegami wrote a (Japanese language) book [2] about this era that I thought was pretty enlightening.

[0] Fair notice: the person who runs the channel is an MA and former UI/UX engineer, so YMMV with how far you trust the content.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2zG-ZrC4BO0

[2] https://www.amazon.co.jp/-/en/%E6%B1%A0%E4%B8%8A-%E5%BD%B0-e...

> I can't see how being dependent on the US is such an issue for Japan

It's an issue the same way the US being dependent on Taiwanese Foundries even though they're an ally of our's.

Should some sort of a global commodities crunch occur (eg. hypothetically, China banning all exports of Rare Earth Metals), then prices are going to skyrocket in the global market because it will take 5-7 years for production to scale up in Australia, Bolivia, and the US.

For critical technologies, it's important to have some level of self reliance. This is why the US is now a net energy exporter, after getting burnt by the spike in commodity prices in 2005-2009 leading to a massive bipartisan push for fracking, natural gas, solar, Athabaskan oil sands projects w/ Harper's backing, etc.

Other large countries with limited rare metal supplies like Germany and India have modeled a hydrogen policy similar to Japan for this reason.

> Nickel-Hydrogen batteries for grid storage; there are nickel deposits in Japan, so if they really are viable, Japan would not be dependent on anyone for grid storage

I'm not a MatSE or Physicist so I can't speak to the viability of that. That said, I can assume that rolling out any sort of mining and refining infrastructure would take time to scale out.

For example, it took China 15-20 years and an extreme amount of Govt protectionism to become a leader in the rare metals space. It's not that China has more deposits than other countries - it's just that it wasn't cost effective for most other countries to match the prices China was providing.

Japan depends on continuously imported oil and gas.

The BIG difference for lithium batteries is that you need to import lithium only ONCE then you reuse/recycle.

And yes there's big big money at play, so lots and lots of FUD around lithium and geopolitics, the obvious difference with oil is nearly never mentionned thanks to oil money.

Also : https://asia.nikkei.com/Economy/Japan-to-subsidize-half-of-c...

That's complete nonsense. Almost no lithium is recovered in recycling, and we will need a truly massive increase in virgin materials to even get the process started. It will be just as big of a problem as oil for a very long time to come.

Lithium and metal recycling doesn't exist on earth?

Wow that's some FUD, I didn't expect this one...

https://electrek.co/2023/03/02/tesla-cofounders-redwood-show...

"These packs weighed a total of half a million pounds, and Redwood managed over 95% efficiency in recovering important metals from them. This is incredibly high efficiency – especially compared to the 0% recycling efficiency of gasoline, the energy storage device for competing vehicles."

Note: I just took the first one from https://www.recyclingstartups.org/top/battery/

That’s the claim, but no such process has been implemented yet. At best we’re in the early stages. One thing to be aware is just how much BS there is around this topic. It is classic greenwashing and it is similar to the plastic recycling story.

> The batteries are valuable and recyclable, but because of technical, economic, and other factors, less than 5% are recycled today.

https://cen.acs.org/materials/energy-storage/time-serious-re...

Of course recycling 0.02 kg smartphone batteries is not viable, but 500 kg BEV batteries is (plus it's mandatory in lots of the world including where I live).

And the redwood process is in production since last year with so "no such process has been implemented yet" is just a blatant lie. Quantities are modest because number of BEV being scrapped is tiny due to their yound age.

Article you cite is from 2019, we're in 2023 in case you don't know.

And the BEV world moves really fast.

You should just stop continuously spreading FUD about BEV in all HN discussions, this is boring...

So it’s impossible at small scale, but suddenly it’s doable as large scale? A risky bet.

Also, the battery chemistries and pack structure are wildly different between different cars. One of the reasons why lead-acid batteries are recycled is because they’re always the same design. But it’s the Wild West in the BEV world. Nothing is the same between any two car models. How the recycling process could even work is not at all explained.

We heard this story before with plastic recycling. But then we found out that only pristine plastics can be recycled. The rest is just trash. In the li-ion battery world, you’re guaranteed to get a giant mishmash of different chemicals and metals in the end. It’s almost literally just battery shrapnel because they have to grind it all up to get at the metals. So it sounds a lot like the stories of plastic recycling.

More FUD, I'm starting to believe you're a hired PR pro.

Here is what the DOE experts think about scaling up battery recycling with a cool 2 billions dollars:

https://www.energy.gov/lpo/articles/lpo-offers-conditional-c...

"Redwood Materials will use both new and recycled feedstocks—comprised of critical materials like lithium, nickel, and cobalt—to produce approximately 36,000 metric tons per year of ultra-thin battery-grade copper foil for use as the anode current collector, and approximately 100,000 metric tons per year of cathode active materials"

"At full production capacity, the project’s anode copper foil and cathode active material output is anticipated to support the production of more than 1 million EVs per year,"

And this is only for one plant...

I'll believe any time DOE experts to judge wether an existing proven process is scalable or not over a continously FUD spreading forum poster.

And for your information lead-acid batteries are not all the same, see various electrolytes in AGM (fibers...), Gel, ...

Since when did we trust the government to give a correct answer on a complex technical subject? The person is just repeating what he was told.

There's no evidence anything of significance being recycled. All of this is projections of future recycling achievements.

Like I said, it's the same story as plastic recycling. No one should believe any of the claims made.

AGM and gel lead-acid batteries are recycled in a separate pathway compared to flooded lead-acid batteries. This is okay because there aren't that many variations and the chemistry is basically the same. Li-ion batteries on the other are effectively hundreds of different chemistries spread across many different packaging methods. It is a complexity nightmare and no one has given any answer as to how it will all be solved.

DOE has a good track record, better than a random forum "poster".

Evidence about recycling taking place has been given multiple times, you just choose to ignore it.

Ah then there's different lead acid battery recycling methods, you said the contrary in the post above ...

And since you obviously didn't read or learn anything about lithium battery recycling you make a fool of yourself.

DOE has no “track record.” It just funds things based on government policy.

Again, no evidence that this recycling is happening at scale. And given the enormous complexity of the problem, something no one has even bothered analyzing, it seems unlikely to be solvable anytime soon.

At this point, I can just proclaim that plastic recycling is 95% effective with the same amount of evidence. You’d have no choice but to believe me on this since you already believe the same thing about li-ion batteries.

Good point.

I brought up the oil aspect in my comments below, but because this was a battery tech related convo I decided to bring up the (relatively minor) lithium portion. Though the battery tech issue did play a role in Toyota's decision to develop the Prius and the Mirai

Japan's hydrogen strategy is definetly a reaction to oil shocks a la 2008 and 1973

Wrong. It is the smartest choice we can think of. It is batteries that is just an irrational reaction to oil shocks of the 2000s. Hydrogen is actually a fully sustainable idea and will eventually be adopted across the board. Batteries are just going to be a temporary stopgap.

I was responding to his point about Oil dependency.

His point is backwards. You want to switch to hydrogen if you want to avoid future crises. Batteries just create the same situation.

It's incredibly short-sighted to think like this. There will be a huge supply of hydrogen at some point in the future. This is due to it being the only truly sustainable energy storage technology. Nearly all others will have to be abandoned.

> in the future.

Yes, and that's where it will stay in the future. Unfortunately, we need solutions that exist in the present.