Is it possible these batteries will ever be commercially viable?
I don’t know that future telling is within the domain of General Questions…
As I understand it, the current issue with Lithium-Air is that the name itself is a misnomer. They should properly be called Lithium-Oxygen batteries. Specifically, it seems that water and carbon dioxide slowly corrode the electrodes, rendering them inaccessible to the air flow. If it was just water, I suspect that creating a filter or separator that could process large quantities of air in a reasonably short period of time might not be too hard to craft (though, I am far from an expert on that question). Quickly and cheaply filtering CO[sub]2[/sub] out of the air, though, that’s a more difficult proposition. Efficient carbon dioxide scrubbing is, in reality, its own branch of dedicated research and, I expect, one which would get noticed by the Nobel committee in a few decades.
Personally, my suspicion would be that by the time a fast, cost effective CO[sub]2[/sub] scrubbing technology came along that was suitable for this application, we would have already improved battery technology via nano-carbon structures, solid state technology, or something else. By the time Li-Air becomes feasible, it will just be one option among many, and the specific engineering application will determine what is used in any one case. While Li-Air should be the clear winner from a theoretical standpoint - after all, you’ve jettisoned half the mass - that’s no used if you gain an equal amount of weight back in the form of filters, plus a whole bunch of maintenance that goes into keeping them clear.