In recent years, with the frequent occurrence of extreme weather events and the loss of biodiversity, the world is jointly addressing the challenge of climate change. Among the national targets for carbon emissions, science and technology are seen as the main way to solve the problem of double carbon.
At this year's World's Top Scientists Forum, a number of participating scientists talked about thinking about "double carbon".
Steven Chu, winner of the 1997 Nobel Prize in Physics, vice president of the Association of Top Scientists of the World and professor of physics at Stanford University, said at the "World's Top Scientists Carbon Conference: Double Carbon Governance Forum - The Road to the 'Double Carbon Goal' science and technology" held on the 2nd that the main risk facing mankind is rising temperatures, and the main way to solve it is to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.
In his view, the vast majority of greenhouse gases currently come from the chemical industry, and the development of clean energy is the best way. The Earth's temperature has been rising, and the future temperature may rise by 2 to 3 °C, which will bring a series of challenges, if it is to be controlled within 1.5 to 2 °C, it is necessary to achieve negative carbon emissions.
"The good news is that clean energy is developing rapidly, and in 10 to 20 years we will be able to use more clean electricity, and hopefully 60% in the future." Chu said that there are many areas where clean energy can be used, and when we use them for 5%, it is not enough, but if this proportion reaches 60%, 70% or even 80%, the effect will be very large.
At the same time, he mentioned that clean energy also faces some challenges, especially the grid and energy distribution, which need to be improved for transmission and transformation, such as ultra-high voltage and ultra-high voltage; on the other hand, power storage is limited. "Energy storage is even more important, because we already have related technologies for power transmission and transformation, but energy storage is still problematic."
Addressing global climate change and the energy crisis will also require the replacement of traditional fuel vehicles with lithium-battery-powered electric vehicles, and global demand for lithium will increase dramatically in the coming decades. According to sqm (one of the world's major lithium resource suppliers), in 2020, the global lithium demand structure, batteries account for about 75%, is the largest demand side; among them, in the battery, the proportion of power batteries has also increased from 46% in 2019 to 54% in 2020. According to the data, global new energy vehicle sales reached 3.125 million units in 2020, an increase of 41.4% year-on-year; global lithium demand in 2020 was 330,000 tons of lithium carbonate equivalent, an increase of about 7.5% year-on-year.
In recent years, Chu has been involved in the development of new energy batteries. As more and more car companies put forward the goal of full electrification, the supply of materials for electric vehicles has also become a problem. He said they are currently doing some research to explore how to reduce the cost of lithium batteries.
In Chu's view, if the world begins to turn to the development of electric vehicles, cheap materials are more important, and the supply of lithium at this time is facing problems, such as high prices. A previous paper described the technique of extracting lithium from seawater. "We can extract lithium from these very salty waters, which are more than 90% or even 95% rich."