Salt batteries are starting to shake the market, and though most “salt batteries” don’t use the salt in your salt shaker, they are salty nonetheless.

You may recall from your chemistry class (or maybe you are taking such classes now) what salt is in chemical terms. You may recall the reaction you got when you mixed a small (very small) amount of sodium hydroxide with hydrochloric acid — you got some very expensive table salt. Salt forms when you mix an alkaline substance with an acid.

However, the salt that ended up in our oceans formed over millions of years. Rainwater is intrinsically acidic due to carbon dioxide in the air. Over millions of years the rain gradually reacted with sodium- and chlorine-based ions in rocks, forming salts that drained into the oceans. This is also how many other compounds formed.

Did you know that seawater contains all the 92 naturally occurring elements — including gold, silver, and platinum? Some appear only in trace radioactive forms that decay rapidly, making them very hard to detect.

Now that we have a basic understanding of salt, at least for this column, let’s fast-forward to how these salts connect to today’s energy-storage news.

One more caveat: lithium-ion batteries are not classified as salt batteries for several reasons. I could spend the entire column explaining this, so please accept that lithium is excluded here for convenience.........

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