IBM’s lithium-ion battery uses seawater materials instead of heavy metals, charges in just five minutes

"Seawater materials" is kinda vague. We all know it consists of water and table salt, which can be split into hydrogen, oxygen, chloride, and sodium. But you can't make a battery from that, right? So what else does it contain?

I found an article about "mining" minerals from seawater, which explains a bit how, and what minerals can be extracted, including a list of the 40 most common minerals. (More readable list here.)

A few select quotes:

some potassium chloride – also a salt – can be recovered from the sea on a commercial basis.

The metal for which sea and briny lakes are crucially important sources is magnesium. Magnesium is a low-density, and therefore lightweight, metal that produces strong alloys.

Instead of just being dumped back into the sea, this brine could be biologically processed to extract the calcium, magnesium, potassium and sulphur it would contain. On average, every million litres of water contains 1 300 kg of magnesium, 900 kg of sulphur, 400 kg of calcium and 400 kg of potassium.

Japan is a leading, if not the leading, centre for research into extracting metals from seawater. The country started research into obtaining uranium from seawater during the 1960s, as did Germany and India (cooperating with France).

The Japanese, meanwhile, moved on to also seek to extract lithium from seawater. Lithium is, of course, essential to make the lithium-ion batteries that are so important in today’s world, powering laptops, tablets and cellphones, as well as electric vehicles, and providing electrical sources on the latest-generation airliners.

So that gives us a few more to choose from: Hydrogen, oxygen, chloride, sodium, potassium, magnesium, calcium, sulphur, uranium (which I doubt these batteries contain), and the all-important lithium.

There's what appears to be a misquote in the Intelligent Living article:

IBM’s batteries use three materials extracted from seawater

What IBM's press release actually says is:

Using three new and different proprietary materials

So my conclusion is that the batteries use three different (probably high-tech) materials, each composed of some combination of these 10 minerals that can be extracted commercially from seawater.