A paper company wants to make a wooden rival to car batteries
Image: Nippon Paper Industries Co.
It’s a potential leap in technology that most scientists remain skeptical about, but which a Japanese paper producer is determined to pursue: using trees to develop a successor to lithium-ion batteries for electric cars.
Nippon Paper Industries Co. is targeting new breakthroughs in the use of cellulose nanofibers — materials produced by refining wood pulp to the size of hundredths of a micron or smaller, and currently used in products like diapers or food additives — with the aim of creating supercapacitors that could store and release energy with vastly improved performance, and less environmental impact, than existing batteries.