Hyperdrive
A Paper Company Wants to Make a Wooden Rival to Car Batteries
Japan’s Nippon Paper is advancing technology that it claims could one day be capable of powering vehicles.
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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.