Enlarge (credit: MirageC)

The race is on to generate new technologies to ready the battery industry for the transition toward a future with more renewable energy. In this competitive landscape, it’s hard to say which companies and solutions will come out on top.

Corporations and universities are rushing to develop new manufacturing processes to cut the cost and reduce the environmental impact of building batteries worldwide. They are working to develop new approaches to building both cathodes and anodes—the negatively and positively charged components of batteries—and even using different ions to hold charge. While we can't look at every technology that's in development, we can look at a few to give you a sense of the problems people are trying to solve.

Cleaner manufacturing

The California-based company Sylvatex has developed a water-free, efficient process for manufacturing cathode active material (CAM). “This process innovation reduces the total cost of CAM by 25 percent, while using 80 percent less energy and eliminating water use and sodium sulfate waste streams,” said Virginia Klausmeier, CEO and founder of Sylvatex.

Enlarge / These are piles of lithium harvested in Bolivia; Exxon's site in Arkansas will look almost entirely unlike this as it will use direct lithium extraction, not evaporation, to harvest the mineral. (credit: Getty Images)

Earlier this year, new electric vehicle tax incentive rules went into effect. Thanks to the Inflation Reduction Act, an EV's tax credit is now linked to the amount of domestic content in its battery pack, an amount that needs to increase year on year.

Automakers had an inkling that would happen, so we've seen a flurry of announcements for new battery plants in the United States that will make the cells and assemble the packs for future EVs, but we've heard slightly less about new local sources of lithium. But today, Exxon revealed it is about to extract the stuff from a rich deposit in Arkansas.

At one point, California's Salton Sea looked like a promising source of lithium, but working with the corrosive brine has proven extremely challenging to industrial equipment.