(The seawater energy/battery/sodium/hydrogen revolution kicks off this year thx largely to Chinese brilliance.

As in disruptive brilliance AND defiance.

..and "thanks" also to the (not least) economically catastrophic US v Russia proxy war in Ukraine.

In case you despise and/or ain't paying attention to real-world, large scale cost-slashing and geopolitically unentangled alternative energy solutions:

1) This year China's leading, Tesla-thrashing, bullishly disruptive EV and battery manufacturer BYD is launching three low-cost EVs powered by sodium ion not lithium ion batteries. They use no cobalt or nickel or lithium and are very heat-stable compared to li-ion cells.

One cubic metre of seawater contains 35kg of sodium. And low-cost desalinated water will be a much-needed by-product

BYD's first sodium ion-powered EV costs just $8,600 in China and is appropriately called the "Seagull".

BYD is now wickedly ramping up its ever-so evil export expansionist ambitions - leading possibly to world conquest and full-spectrum market dominance - but in a nice, serves-you-right, life-saving sort of way :

https://thedriven.io/2022/12/02/byd-to-launch-electric-hatchbacks-with-new-sodium-ion-batteries/

2) Green hydrogen(not perfectly green of course) is now being more widely produced and supplied in increasingly large quantities to replace Russia's by definition very un-green and geopolitically disastrously entangled oil and ("natural"?!) gas supplies.

And so here's the news just in: ex-China(surprise surprise) researchers based in Australia have now devised a highly efficient and low-cost method to produce as-green-as-it-gets hydrogen directly from seawater. No 1000-mile+ permanently vulnerable Nordstream-ish pipelines needed - any country and region will be able to produce it from their nearest seawater sources - offshore or close to coast:

https://www.pv-magazine.com/2023/01/31/australian-scientists-unveil-method-to-produce-hydrogen-straight-from-ocean/

Quote:
"University of Adelaide researchers have led an international team to the discovery of a method under which water straight from the ocean can be used in a commercial electrolyzer to efficiently produce green hydrogen."

“We used seawater as a feedstock without the need for any pre-treatment processes like reverse osmosis desolation, purification, or alkalisation,” said Associate Professor Yao Zheng, from the University of Adelaide’s School of Chemical Engineering."
"The team simply filtered the seawater, which came from the Huanghai Sea in China, to remove solids and microorganisms."
“The performance of a commercial electrolyser with our catalysts running in seawater is close to the performance of platinum/iridium catalysts running in a feedstock of highly purified deionised water,” said Zheng."

NB. If any seafaring or adrift-at-sea Lifeboaters are again itching to rant off about naive green, er, "pipedreams" they may wanna check the definition of words and phrases like "supreme irony".
BTW: "BYD" stands for "Build Your Dreams".

Not Pipe Dreams or Nordstream Nightmares and the like...