“This is a major win in a larger effort of synthesizing critical materials and battery materials using molten salts,” said Mike Whittaker, a Berkeley Lab scientist who worked on the project. “If you could run this process at low temperatures with really cheap salts, you could have it in a lot of places, and you could generate enough graphite that you could feed into battery supply chains.”

The team’s approach demonstrates a powerful new way to study chemistry inside molten salts, an environment that has been historically difficult to probe directly because of its harsh conditions. The next step is determining the optimal combinations of molten salts, electrode materials, temperatures, and voltages to make graphite and other carbon materials. Researchers will also need to scale up the approach to produce industrially useful amounts.

This work was part of the MINerals for Energy Storage Synthesis (MINES) program funded by the Department of Energy’s Basic Energy Sciences program.

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