Low cost, large-scale energy storage is the key to accelerating the renewable energy revolution, and now shrimp have been enlisted in the cause. The aim is to push down the cost of flow batteries by using bio-based materials such as shrimp shells. That would help ramp up the transition out of fossil fuels and into clean power, thus saving the planet in time to avert a climate catastrophe. Thank you, shrimp. Wait, what is a flow battery?
Shrimp (May) Be The Key to Energy Storage That Flows
We’ll get to that flow battery thing in a minute. First let’s clarify the news about shrimp shells and energy storage, which has been zooming all over the Intertubes in recent days.
The news involves research published in April at ACS Sustainable Chemical Engineering under the title, “Exploration of Biomass-Derived Activated Carbons for Use in Vanadium Redox Flow Batteries.”
The research team did not exactly determine that shrimp shells are the best bio-based material for flow batteries. What they did was compare shrimp shells to pine wood, in order to develop a method for determining the performance of a wide variety of bio-based materials and develop a general set of design principles.
Got all that? Good! Shrimp could still come out on top, but shrimp shells are just one of many bio-based sources that could be used to produce the activated carbon used in flow batteries.
The bio-based approach is relatively new, so before anybody skips to the front of the line, there needs to be “a systematic approach to advancing biomass-based functional materials for use in energy applications,” as the research team explains.
If you know your atoms, you know what the team means when they conclude that “electrochemically accessible surface area, rather than the heteroatom composition” is a more effective representative of the material’s performance.
Spoiler alert: surface area is a big deal in energy storage performance.
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