I did not realize EnerDel was also pursuing lithium titanate anodes. That's AltairNano's claim to fame. EnerDel's numbers are not nearly as spectacular, but at least they're working with real companies.

When will Johnson/Saft start making noise?

Chrysler LLC, Ford Motor Company and General Motors Corporation..... sounds political to me.
Where is Valence on the list. To me they are one of the top contenders with real customers.

Not surprising that they are looking at Titanium anodes for HEVs. If the EnerDel batteries results are similar to those of Altair then they will get very good power density ratings and cycle life specs that are so useful in HEVs. Better power density gives better regen capabilities and helps reduce the size of the required batter. Better cycle life removes the necessity of making the battery bigger than necessary to avoid deep cycles.

This seems awfully late in the game. ABC has been in existence more than ten years and they have yet to produce a viable product. The EV1 used plain ol' Pb-acid batteries. Heel dragging, petro-influenced, non-productive consortiums can expect to lose confidence and funding if they cannot yield good quality results in the near term.

Had independent, private sector been given the ABC mandate - I expect we'd have gotten Li titanate technology for EV1 (so GM could squander it).

"The 5Ah LTO-type cell carries a nominal voltage of 2.5V; the 5Ah HC-type cell carries a nominal voltage of 3.6V."

The voltage of the LTO cells is rather low - you'd have to connect a lot of those cells in series. Titanium has really bad electrical conductivity -about 3.1% of copper- so I'm not overly surprised.

Okay, did some rough math to figure out the energy density of these cells.

Enerdel's site has a figure showing the relative mass and volume of a conventional NiMH pack for HEVs compared with that of a hypothetical pack built using Enerdel cells. If you assume that this is a pack from something like a Prius, the NiMH cells can hold ~45Wh/kg. So this 36kg NiMH pack must hold 1.62 Wh. If the Enerdel pack holds the same amount of energy using only 23kg,

(1620Wh)/(23kg)= ~70Wh/kg.

Does anyone know if a technology forecast for energy densities of Li-ion for 0-15 years out has been published or studied yet?

Thanks!
Matt

A lot of research is being focused towards "safer" chemistries, so the energy densities of LiFePO4 cells are probably going to steadily increase. The same probably is going to apply for oxide-based chemistries given the demands of the electronics industry, although I'm not sure how much room there is for improvement without compromising safety.

Some companies are interested in lithium-sulphur chemistries which have extremely high energy density (300-400Wh/kg and above). Last I heard these experimental cells had "acceptable" safety characteristics - take that with a grain of salt.