Argonne National Lab & 14 Companies Create Joint Battery Effort

plug-in

Argon National Lab just teamed up with 14 different companies to create the National Alliance for Advanced Transportation Battery Cell Manufacture. The alliance was created with a goal of perfecting the mass production of lithium-ion vehicle batteries.
The alliance expects to bring in between $1 and $2 billion in US government assistance over the next five years.
The fourteen companies included in the effort are; Johnson Controls-Saft Advanced Power Solutions, 3M Co, ActaCell, All Cell Technologies, Altair Nanotechnologies Inc, Eagle Picher Industries Inc, EnerSys, Envia Systems, FMC Corp, MicroSun Technologies, Mobius Power, SiLyte, Superior Graphite, and Townsend Advanced Energy.
Basically the whole reason behind this is we’re 100% going to lose to China, Japan, and South Korea if we don’t do anything about it right now. Asia currently dominates lithium-ion battery R&D and production.
In other related news, EEStor was just awarded a patent for their lithium-ion battery technology. The stats (although patents can be issued whether the technology works or not) are quite impressive promising to deliver ten times the energy of a lead-acid battery at half the price and a tenth of the weight. EEStor says the batteries will not only last 300 miles, but they will re-charge in 5 minutes. Sounds exciting, I’ll believe it when I see it.