The Race to Crack Lithium Ion Recycling
wired.com
wired.com
Fortum, a Finnish clean energy firm (correction provided by @Sharlin), has reached an 80% recycling rate as of 2019 [2].
It's always going to be cheaper to pour end of life cells into a remanufacturing process than to extract raw lithium from brine ponds, so it makes economic sense to do the R&D to do so. It's also going to be cheaper to reuse existing, functioning cell modules (such as folks harvesting cell packs from Teslas and other EVs for stationary storage) than to landfill or recycle those materials.
Batteries are mostly recyclable currently, full stop, although there is work required to make them 100% recyclable.
[1] https://www.redwoodmaterials.com/
[2] https://www.pv-magazine.com/2019/03/25/innovation-boosts-lit...
Uhuh, Fortum[1] is not exactly a startup. It is a state-owned corporation with annual revenue of about 5 billion and one of the largest players in the Nordic energy sector.
SOME lithium batteries are recyclable, but ALL oldschool lead acid batteries are recyclable. For installations where weight/size are secondary concerns, old fashioned wet car batteries are more "green" than anything involving lithium.
A used lead-acid battery is not a liability. It is a useful and profitable product that can be easily turned into other useful products... today.
https://www.regionalrecycling.ca/auto-car-battery-recycling/
"Did you know you can make money recycling your old lead-acid batteries? Why not put a little extra cash in your pocket this season. *Earnings vary depending on weight. If you have 3 or more, please call (855) 701-7171 for a quote. It pays to recycle. "
There's a regulation at least in the US that says the HV system also has to be physically disconnected when the car isn't being used so if the 12v battery dies you're still stuck like a regular car, because you need the 12v battery to close the HV relay.
The funny thing is, I can imagine a future where "jumper cables" isn't a hefty set of thick wires intended to supply the current needed for a starter. Instead, people will have a 20' long cable with cigarette lighter plugs on both ends. The HV relay can't require that much current to close, right?
But if the 12V is dead, the stuff running off of it will also be out
I interpreted the original quote "Batteries are mostly recyclable currently, full stop" to mean "all batteries are mostly (i.e., >=80%) recyclable" i.e., even lith-ion batteries are ~80% recyclable and 80% constitutes "mostly". The original quote is confusing, and I think you might be interpreting it as "most batteries are recyclable" or perhaps "most lith-ion batteries are recyclable". In whatever case, I wanted to jump in and clarify.
Efficiency depends on fuel cell type and operating conditions and such, but I think it’s generally pretty high for the useful life of the catalyst material. (The catalyst is another materials challenge itself, since I think most of the good materials are super expensive like Pt/Pd alloys, and they’re vulnerable to carbon monoxide poisoning)
Edit: this DOE program page has some good detailed discussion of the current status, including on compressed liquid/gas storage systems, which I’m not as familiar with: https://www.energy.gov/eere/fuelcells/hydrogen-storage-curre...
Used a lot in mathematics, substituting "proof" for "evidence".
Can't they leak hydrogen, potentially causing an explosion? I admit my only knowledge of this comes from perusing the Wikipedia page on them and an episode of Mr. Robot.
This is a major point to assume away.
I would be willing to make a Long Bet [1] on this point. Accountability is important.
Aluminum and iron recycling is viable because they are elements in their own right.
Musk has stated publicly that they will recycle Tesla batteries once they become available in enough volume to make it viable. He'd be stupid not to -- they will be a cheaper source of nickel and cobalt than digging it out of the ground.
But reuse is better than recycling, so recycling should remain in the future as long as possible.
The old mantra "reduce, re-use, recycle" is in that order because that's the order of "greenness". Recycling should be the last resort.
Batteries are a way too important source of valuable materials to not be recycled.
If Tesla is ending up with all these batteries in the end, we've also done another good thing for recycling, which is forcing Tesla, the producer, to deal with how to dispose of them, which is not the case with oil companies
e: hm, somehow my comment switched chains?
It plays well with renewables, in the role of peaker plants.
So I think coal is dead but fracking is here to stay.
Especially given that fracking also has a role in geothermal. It's an industrial capability that we'll want to keep.
Then there is the practical question. You have a 5 year old EV that doesn't get enough miles for your use any longer. So, you have someone swap out the batteries for new ones. Do the people who swap out the batteries actually resell them for reuse or try to recycle them? If it's not easy or financially viable they will likely not do it.
Just having technology isn't enough. It needs to be accessible to the people who will engage with it.
Yes! Used Nissan Leaf battery packs and individual cells sell for quite a bit.
True and I agree, however batteries have a limited lifetime, and at the end of said lifetime, lithium batteries become dangerous. Does anyone risk putting a secondhand battery in their phones for example? Might be okay for old Nokia style batteries, but the integrated ones, not a chance.
Another problem is that with EV battery packs, they're not really viable to be disassembled and repaired (e.g. by replacing individual cells), they're built pretty solid and integrated. Not saying it's impossible, just that it's likely not viable, not to mention very dangerous work. I could be wrong though.
The fact that you can sell a dead EV battery pack for good money indicates that it is viable.
Clearly addressed in TFA.
For those that don't know, LFP is only going to be in the short range M3 until more improvements in density (or better integration) hit mainstream.
We need widespread renewable electricity generation first anyway. Otherwise our electric cars will be running on coal.
1. Reduced dependency on oil = less money in oil = less money for a lot of countries that historically act quite poorly on the world stage.
2. 100% better for global warming than combustion cars.
3. Is mining lithium & disposing on lithium batteries incorrectly worse for the environment than oil manufacturing, production & transport? I don't know 100% but the massive oil spills we regularly have would make me think lithium is actually better here.
4. Lithium batteries at grid-scale reduce blackouts which means you don't spin up a bunch of local generators. They also make wind & solar power generation available off-peak reducing reliance on coal & natural gas.
5. Are car batteries likely to be improperly recycled? I would think legislation would minimize the problem. Even without legislation, my impression is that today's used car batteries are still extremely valuable & end up being reused rather than recycled.
6. More investment in lithium ion batteries = more money & investment in better batteries (lithium ion or otherwise). This improves efficiency across the board for mobile applications, cars, grid applications, etc (something we don't get with internal combustion engines).
The incomplete reasoning in your post is you're evaluating lithium standalone instead of examining the cost vs replacement (how does lithium ion fare against alternatives? are there better alternatives). Can you propose what you see as better alternatives rather than just making blanket complaints and blaming corporate democrats? (Also, lithium batteries are now a left/right idealogy thing? WTF).
I though the point was that the high energy-density was convenient for mobility, but poor on most other metrics, including manufacturing complexity, stability, and safety.
Grid-scale wouldn't need to care so much about energy density versus stability and maintenance, in which case lead-acid, or compressed-gas storage should shine.
Australia has a few now.
https://www.popularmechanics.com/science/a31350880/elon-musk...
For your other points, I believe you are correct, but the reason lithium gets used anyway is because it’s now really cheap compared to the alternatives.
https://rmi.org/clean-energy-is-canceling-gas-plants/
Lithium ion is currently king here, it's easy and fast to deploy, with lots of off the shelf components, and cheap.
Texas' grid composition responds really quickly to economic changes, because anybody can connect and start making money. More highly regulated grids have been much slower to adapt to the new reality of cheap storage.
https://blog.ucsusa.org/dave-reichmuth/new-data-show-electri...
Lithium is a mine once, use forever resource. It's an element. It will cost energy to recycle it, but that energy is increasingly sourced by clean energy sources. Let me cite the oil company, BP.
https://www.bp.com/en/global/corporate/energy-economics/stat...
Coal is in terminal decline. Solar and wind have been growing exponentially, and are on a path to pass coal within the decade. Projections to the contrary have to explain why decades of industrial economics theory are wrong, where manufactured goods (like solar and wind generators) get cheaper by a fairly consistent % every time you double production. This creates a virtuous cycle that will drive coal and other fossil fuels out of business through profit seeking alone. (We are past the tipping point on costs here.) The burden of proof is on the fossil fuel advocates like yourself at this point. (This article is from 2015, and the IEA and similar keep getting it wrong since then.)
https://pv-magazine-usa.com/2015/11/17/why-the-iea-is-consis...
The article goes into why this is incredibly difficult. The vast majority of lithium batteries are in landfills, compressed between all our other garbage because maybe 2% of people on the planet properly dispose of e-waste.
As far as clean energy, have you watched Planet of the Humans (2020)? I want to say, I despise Michael Moore emotional bullshit, but despite his influence on the film's production, the case it makes is solid: the vast majority of "renewables" are actually trees. When you hear "woodchips" .. there is no amount of industrial wood scrap waste that is viable without also cutting down trees. You start burning fast-growing trees (often planted for paper or lumber) for fuel and you get a system of power production that makes no sense over traditional gas or oil.
Solar and wind may have been growing exponentially, but they still require oil/gas standby plants. They also take a lot of resources to make. Wind turbines aren't currently recycled.
The fact of the matter is, we have one real hope left. The ITER. If real fusion power is possible, we'll find out once it's completed. If ITER fails to produce sustainable and efficient power, it's unlikely anyone else will get the funding to build a bigger reactor.
It's not coal that's in terminal decline ... it's everything. No amount of increasing consumption or building "more green" is going to change that. We need to consume less, and let's face it ... that's fucking impossible.
Old style giant, expensive nuclear power plants are a non starter, but small modular reactors have a lot of promise, are zero emissions once running, and can be built using green energy in factories instead of constructed on site.
Fission power plants are pretty much the only way to go fully "green"... renewables are great and have a big place in the future, but unless humanity wants to drastically change their consumption of technologies and products requiring large amounts of energy for production (like Aluminum), they don't provide power in the right amounts and time spans.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peak_uranium
Unless there are major breakthroughs in nuclear technology which become commercially viable in the near future - that is, in this 21st century - nuclear power, as it stands, is running out of time, and it does so faster then most people assume.
The decisive factor of change I can see here is the unproven commercial viability of alternatives at the moment as Uranium is still cheap. Whether or not those alternatives become viable once Uranium prices increase isn't easily predicted.
So, I remain highly skeptical towars claims that dismiss the issue as merely a problem of "politics and lack of funding".
You can create fuel for the SMRs via a centrally administered and controlled (to avoid nuclear proliferation) reactor, so no need to worry about uranium... in fact, it might make sense to avoid the ecological impact of uranium mining anyway.
SMRs are being developed that use other fuels, too, that are available in abundance, like Thorium:
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S030645491...
Nuclear weapons didn't use much uranium, they manufactured and processed plutonium.
By the way, a lot of nuclear fuel in the past few decades has been reprocessed material from weapons that were decommissioned. I believe the US even traded with the Russians for their spare plutonium.
So is the sun, and they will both last for roughly the same time, i.e. 5 billion years.[1]
... having a counter on the bottom which says:
> The number of hits on this page since 1996 Feb 12
... a HTTP Response Header
> Last-Modified Sat, 27 Jan 2007 02:38:36 GMT
Stating that these aren't "the latest insights" would be putting it mildly.
My comment referred to commercial viability. It at this point in time, Uranium has only been extracted from seawater in a laboratory setting, per the Wikipedia article I referenced.
Yes, there's always "but technology will advance to a point where it will be viable". But then I'd argue: Beware of optimism bias when predicting the future. You don't know whether economic, social and political circumstances will converge over the next decades towards such trajectory that extracting uranium from seawater and using it in nuclear reactors becomes a commercial viable enterprise.
You yourself may be confident they will, but that doesn't make it so.
Nuclear power isn't constrained by fuel scarcity at all. If anything, we have too much fissionable material.
That is, how a transition to these alternatives would conceivably integrate in and have an impact on larger market dynamics, and they way they might be either furthered or impeded by local, regional or geo-political dynamics.
Yes, John McCarthy hasn't updated his web page in a while, because he's been dead for nine years. Have some respect for the man who invented Garbage Collection!
But more importantly, do you think a lot of uranium has disappeared in the last 13 years? Has the use of uranium increased by an order of magnitude in the last 13 years? Have we forgotten how to extract uranium from low grade ore in the last 13 years? No?! Then how the hell is the age of this web site (13 years) or Bernard Cohen's book (35 years) even relevant?
> My comment referred to commercial viability.
Don't move the goal posts! You specifically wrote "Uranium is finite", and the counter point is that it is practically infinite. As McCarthy points out, this doesn't even depend on seawater extraction, because low grade uranium ores (phosphate ores, later Conway granites) are plentiful.
Is this representative of small electronics and not vehicles? It will obviously be a lot harder and more economically significant to improperly dispose of a battery pack for a car than a cell phone.
... and human labor, and other chemicals. I'm not sure if you read the article, but it claims that recycling is still a somewhat tenuous economic proposition vs digging more out of the ground. This is especially true given the glut of lithium, while cobalt and other rare minerals are slowly being phased out of battery designs.
It sounds like their main problem at this point is continuing to scale the business to meet supply (they are already the largest lithium recycler in the US), and that the challenges there are logical, not the underlying technology.
What human labor and chemicals are you referring to?
And if a mine can be automated to yield orders of magnitude more material than recycling for the same labor costs, you would need some other financial incentive (government subsidies, backroll by Tesla for marketing purposes) to make it viable.
It's not at all obvious to me that recycling is easy/practical. E.g. recycling the alloy from alloy steel is not done because it is too costly to separate. I'm not sure why batteries would be much different.
It’s not. Other poster is just ignoring reality that it’s currently cheaper to use new lithium than to recover it.
Even this is preferable to internal combustion engines. ICEs really aren’t very efficient, and electric car is easily 3x more energy efficient than an ICE. Which means that’s even if you include transmission losses and heat losses at a coal power station, you’re still ahead. Because of coal power stations are significantly more efficient than ICE.
All that is ignoring the other benefits like being able to perform carbon capture at source, filtering waste gasses for pollutants etc. Additionally as the grid gets greener, so does your electric car. Something that will never be true of an ICE car.
> Lithium batteries will pollute the world. We will exploit impoverished counties and extract their lithium reserves while destroying their environments.
This is clearly a concern, and thankfully we’re taking big steps to reduce the amount of rare Earth metals needed to manufacture batteries. Additionally that largest produces of lithium aren’t small countries, they’re places like China and the US.
But heavy metal pollution, and toxins produced through the refining process are still a serious concern. But I would argue less a concern than CO2 release. At least the heavy metals a d toxins can be easily contained, they don’t have a tendency of floating into the atmosphere and spreading around the earth.
Simple fact is that modern western society is currently unsustainable, just because we don’t have all the answers, and don’t have perfect solutions, doesn’t mean we shouldn’t try. I suspect even you wouldn’t be prepared to make the sacrifices needed for a sustainable future using only the technology we have readily available to us today.
The catalysts used in oil refining do on the other hand - specifically Lanthanum.
That is, with the exception of control hardware - but you have the same in regular cars - around a pound of rare earths on average.
Likewise, when people upgrade to the latest iPhone every generation, they aren't thinking about their recycling program, let alone the environmental cost of extraction of rare earth materials, or the workers at Foxconn.
That Elon Musk didn't bother working on the waste part of the equation, doesn't surprise me.
With modern coal plants, that isn't _too_ bad actually. Modern coal plants reach 46% efficiency[0], compared to the 30-35% for modern passenger cars (older cars = less efficient). This is a 30-50% [1] efficiency gain, while also emitting 30-45% more CO2 for the same amount of energy released (gasoline vs bituminous coal and anthracite, for diesel it's 25-40%).
So, depending on the coal burned, the efficiency of the car that is replaced, and the coal plant making the electricity, you could quite reasonably have a lower carbon footprint by driving a car 100% on coal-powered electricity instead of gasoline or diesel.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thermal_power_station#Thermal_... [1] https://www.eia.gov/tools/faqs/faq.php?id=73&t=11
[0] https://web.archive.org/web/20100210022620/http://www1.ipcc....
I do agree electric vehicles are a pretty big lie. You can't buy yourself out of an environmental disaster. We can't just consume more. The "Green New Deal" is about replacing tons of buildings and infrastructure that are perfectly fine, and will cause TONS of new waste in an effort to .. reduce waste.
The best thing you can do for the environment: don't buy a new car. Just keep driving your current gas vehicle and maintain it (so long as it was made within the past 20 years with good fuel efficiency) and when you do decide to toss it for an electric: buy a used one if possible.
All you have described, the environmental impact, exploitation, pollution, etc... applies to current fossil fuel usage, if not more, so it's not a black and white choice, as you seem to present it. Fossil fuel had over a century of ever-increasing usage and global environmental damage without having to do anything significant to mitigate the effects. Whereas the relatively new high performance battery industry is already tackling this issue. Without the widespread need generated by electric cars it's questionable if that would happen. It is very rare, possibly unheard of, for such a significant technology to be launched with a perfectly formed lifecycle management in place. The market is created only once the need arises.