Ultralight lithium-sulfur batteries for electric airplanes
> Oxis recently developed a prototype lithium-sulfur pouch cell that proved capable of 470 Wh/kg, and we expect to reach 500 Wh/kg within a year.<p>Meanwhile, gasoline / petrol /  benzin (wherever you are in the world) has an energy density of 12200 Wh/kg.<p>In other words, even in a world where all petroleum is perfectly depleted, we would still be producing synthetic gasoline for high-demand applications and capturing 100% of the emissions for recycling —  essentially using gasoline as a battery. It’s just too good an energy storage to ignore.<p>I’ve been looking at cars and geeking out on internal combustion engines for the past few weeks since I had to buy a car, and for the usual Silicon Valley guy such as yours truly whose standpoint on cars hadn’t been much more than ‘I want a Tesla’, it was an outright revelation.<p>ICEs are real technology — and for a software guy it is easy to understand because the complexity is bounded by physical dimensions of parts (i.e they don’t work past a certain small size) so you literally see human-size machinery with human size movements. It’s been a refreshing change from potentially unbounded complexity of software.