High-performance seawater magnesium batteries for marine application

General Information

Autonomous subsea observatories, oil, gas and aquaculture activities are operating in increasingly remote locations without the possibilities of permanent cabled power supply or data communication. The necessity to integrate high capacity, reliable energy sources has greatly increased due to the ambition to further extend service intervals, reduce operational cost and to utilise complex sensors systems with greater power demands. Today, by far the most common source of power supply is provided by primary batteries cell and in particular lithium primary batteries for demanding, long term deployments. However, commercially available battery solutions are subject to strict regulation and suffer severe limitations, either regarding cost, safety, pressure at which they can operate and availability as it is the case for lithium based cells, or regarding energy density, weight and long term endurance for alkaline based cells.
The SeaMag project consortium aims to develop high capacity and cost efficient magnesium (Mg) based seawater batteries with increased environmental compatibility suitable for long term operation of marine observatories. Aqueous primary Mg batteries have several advantages for marine applications as they can operate at any pressure, have greater power storage capacities and are cheaper than lithium-ion batteries. Furthermore, since the unlimited supply of seawater serves as the electrolyte, the size and weight of the battery system can be considerably reduced.
Five partners from both research and industry in three countries are collaborating to improve the performance of Mg-seawater batteries in different hydrodynamic conditions by finding the optimum combination of anode material, electrolyte additives and cathode design. The project goal is to develop a battery system with longevity of minimum 5 years and a capacity of 25kWh.
Hereon leads the work package entitled “Magnesium anodes and electrolyte additives”. SeaMag is funded in the frame of MarTERA (Maritime and Marine Technologies for a New Era), which is an ERANET Cofund scheme of Horizon 2020 of the European Commission.

EU-Programme Acronym and Subprogramme Area	ERANET MarTERA
Project Type	ERANET MarTERA project
Contract Number	03SX457B
Co-ordinator	Imari AS (NO)

Funding for the Project (€)	Funding for Hereon (€)
1,456,100	353,187

Contact Person at Hereon

Dr. Darya Snihirova, Institute of Surface Science Electrochemistry and Big Data, MOD, Phone: +49 4152 87 1956 E-mail contact

Participants

develogic GmbH (DE), Imari AS (NO), National Academy of Sciences of Belarus (BY), SINTEF (NO)

Last Update: 16. April 2021