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• Lithium-ion batteries are the backbone of mobile devices and electric cars, but lithium can be costly and explosive.

• Proton batteries—which rely on more abundant materials—have been touted as a good replacement, and a new anode material could help overcome some of their shortcomings, such as limited voltage range.

• This new material can last 3,500 cycles of recharging, maintain high capacity, and operate in colder weather, but scientists still need to improve manufacturing costs and cathode performance before proton batteries can go mainstream.

.Lithium-ion batteries are the top dogs of the battery world. This 50-year-old technology forms the electronic backbone of billions of mobile devices around the world, and is the current frontrunner for powering the world’s electric-vehicle future. But that doesn’t mean there isn’t competition.

When it comes to storing renewable energy, for example, other concepts like iron-air batteries (which use oxidation to store energy) could potentially be better options than the more expensive and explosive lithium. And more options are being explored all the time. For instance, the idea of proton batteries—which use protons split from water which then bond with a carbon electrode—is starting to grow in popularity. This is good news, seeing as proton batteries don’t require rare elements such as lithium. And now, scientists at the University of New South Wales (UNSW) Sydney want to make them mainstream.

“There are many benefits to proton batteries,” Sicheng Wu, a Ph.D candidate at UNSW Sydney, said in a press statement. “But the current electrode materials used for proton batteries, some of which are made from organic materials, and others from metals, are heavy,” and still cost quite a lot.

In addition to this cost, the few carbon electrodes that do exist have a limited voltage range, and both of these shortcomings currently make proton batteries unfit to be true lithium-ion replacements. However, UNSW Sydney scientists have developed a new carbon electrode called tetraamino-benzoquinone (TABQ) to fix the problem. The team first started with a small molecule called Tetrachloro-benzoquinone (TCBQ), which doesn’t have a high enough redox potential to be a cathode or a low enough potential to be an anode.

So, Wu’s team replaced the four chloro- groups in the molecule with amino- groups (hence the name change), and found that the resulting lower potential both made TABQ a great anode candidate and improved the material’s ability to store protons. While still paired with a TCBQ cathode, the all-organic battery could sustain 3,500 cycles of fully recharging, maintain high capacity, and perform well in cold conditions—a helpful side effect, as we’ll need battery farms, especially in the colder, darker parts of the world, and lithium loses efficiency when it gets too cold.

Oh, and another bonus: they don’t explode.

“The electrolyte in a lithium-ion battery is made of lithium salt, a solvent which is flammable and therefore is a big concern,” Chuan Zhao, a professor at UNSW Sydney, said in a press statement. “In our case, we have both electrodes made of organic molecules, and in between we have the water solution, making our prototype battery lightweight, safe, and affordable.”

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