A couple of things stood out for me:
"cathode is that it is made of molybdenum phosphide, which is abundant and inexpensive" - molybdenum is not that cheap, it is 3x the cost of Cobalt, or particularly abundant (less than 2x production of Cobalt). Apparently there in increased demand from the steel industry, and producers are really struggling to increase output.
"they developed a lightweight polymer-ceramic composite" - does not sound easy or cheap to make.
"One key problem with using Li2O at room temperature is that the transition state — Li2O2 –would rather donate its electrons back to oxygen. How do the researchers keep that from happening when by definition there is lots of oxygen available? They freely admit they don’t fully understand the process yet" - Lots of theoretical work still to do.
The actual paper this is based on is in Science
https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.abq1347
Looking at the suplementary material (I don't have access to the actual paper) the production processes they used are costly in energy and time, they would have to be completely changed for mass production.
Based on AAAS member comments, (the parent of Science is the American Academy for the Advancement of Science,I am a member) it seems that there appears to be high probability that these processes can be made both economical and practical. As usual with scientific advance, production at scale is an engineering problem, not scientific. I rather suspect most of us have high respect for Tesla engineering.
This does establish, if it can be replicated, of course, that broad based widely diverse applications can be practical. Before this such things as long range aircraft, ships and others might not be possible, just he stuff of science fiction. Once this has been replicated by others, the truly giant efforts would begin very quickly.
This is really different than most other approaches because the science is clear enough that engineering can begin, once these results have been replicated by others. Given their funding sources the commercial applications will not be impeded over much by patent issues.
Finally, Tesla/SpaceX have certainly been well aware of this and have been examining the possibilities. In my very humble opinion, given the evidence suggested abundance becomes a minor issue simple because of the enormous efficiency offered, so the total resource requirements would be a tiny fraction of those used in the current best practice.
Further discussion belongs in a different thread. For this one the lesson I believe is appropriate is that the growth we all assume will be limited by scarce materials mining, refining and recycling. Despite the scarcity of, for example, molybdenum phosphate and the novel manufacturing challenges, this or other similarly beneficial solutions will happen within a few years. Given the worldwide efforts I think we'll see li-ion technologies replaced within a decade.
Once all the debates have happened, endless threads have been filled and scientific efforts worldwide develop cheap and efficient alternatives the lesson is that we are only a couple decades away from renewable dominance, whether this is the Holy Grail or not.
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