In China, battery makers bet big on sodium in move away from critical minerals
- CATL and BYD mass producing sodium ion batteries for cars and long-term storage
- Sodium ion batteries, which can be made from seawater, avoids environmental challenges of lithium-ion
- They can perform well at temperatures as low as -40C
- HiNa’s sodium truck battery can fully charge in around 20 minutes
- China’s first sodium storage station expanded from 10 MWh to 50 MWh
March 16 – As the rest of the world tries to catch up with China in making lithium-ion batteries, Chinese manufacturers have already moved into a new battleground: sodium-ion, a technology that is set to revolutionise battery supply chains.
While lithium-ion batteries rely on raw materials mined and processed in a handful of countries, these new-generation batteries use sodium, an abundant element that can be extracted from seawater. They also have superior stability at low temperatures and can be charged more rapidly.
While Chinese companies have commercialised lithium iron phosphate batteries, which do not use cobalt or nickel, lithium is still a choke point: around 60% of the lithium ore China refined in 2024 was imported, mainly from Australia and South America.
According to a report by the International Renewable Energy Agency, sodium is around 1,000 times more abundant than lithium in the Earth’s crust and roughly 60,000 times more abundant in the oceans.
Liu Chenguang, a researcher at Xi’an Jiaotong-Liverpool University in Suzhou, China, says:
This makes sodium-ion batteries less vulnerable to supply-chain risks and raw materials’ price swings,
Phate Zhang, founder of the Shanghai-based EV news outlet CnEVPost, says Chinese battery makers “scrambled to find alternatives” to lithium after prices for the mineral climbed steeply from late 2021, due to COVID-19 lockdowns and strong demand for EVs.
While several startups, mainly in the U.S., are preparing for pilot scale production of sodium-ion batteries, in China manufacturers have already moved into mass production, for both transport and large-scale energy storage.
This year CATL, the world’s largest battery maker, intends to mass-produce Naxtra, a sodium-ion battery that it first launched last April. The company, based in Ningde in southeast China, last year signed a strategic collaboration with Li Auto that will allow its battery technologies, including sodium ion, to be integrated into future EV models.
In February CATL also announced plans with Chang’an Automobile to market a passenger car powered by Naxtra batteries by the middle of this year.
Sodium-ion batteries will also be integrated into CATL’s Choco-Swap battery-swapping network, which enables EV owners to drop their spent batteries in exchange for fresh ones in a matter of minutes. The network had 512 stations across China at the end of August last year.
Another big EV battery player is BYD, which together with CATL, holds over half of the global EV market. It invested heavily in the production of sodium batteries in 2025, and will soon be capable of making 50 gigawatt-hours of them annually, according to Zheng Jiayue, a senior research analyst at consultancy Wood Mackenzie.
A smaller yet influential player is HiNa Battery Technology, a sodium-ion startup founded in 2017 by researchers from the Chinese Academy of Sciences, which is manufacturing sodium ion batteries for a variety of applications, including for electric cars and scooters.
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In China, battery makers bet big on sodium in move away from critical minerals, source
