I think we can agree that a battery improvement would be welcome everywhere. However, this new tech will probably be in distinct markets years before it reaches our AA and AAA batteries. Many people just don't see the reason to buy the expensive batteries for common household electronics. EV batteries would be a hot market as well as mobile phones. As far as how it would affect the prices of current battery materials, I would not immediately worry. I'm sure the current process for making this metal is far from efficient and wouldn't be any difference from any other manufacturer. Until we start pulling away from the combustion engine we probably won't see any supply shrink besides the going mobile phone growth.
An example of supply shrink due to innovation (sort of): Moving away from drilled oil was ethanol. Ethanol was the cheap alternative to oil. The Gov't subsidies allowed ethanol to compete with oil, even though it really was not and I don't even know if it's efficient enough to continue w/o the Gov't yet. Now the price of corn along with other grains have increased at an insane rate, instead of having $2/bu corn like in 2002 it's almost $8/bu today. So our Gov't paid money to create an industry that can't support itself, has increased the price of corn that put other businesses out of business, lost jobs and will cost every American household more money to feed their family. My family is involved in agriculture. Ethanol was a great answer to increase the price of corn to make agriculture as a whole more competitive, but with the overuse of subsidies it has been a cannibalistic change that favors one portion of that industry.