What Will Happen to All the Dead Electric Car Batteries?
bbc.com
bbc.com
It's just a fluff tech piece like most mainstream tech reporting.
And the people who bought a 25% worn battery for storage would be looking for another new one at some point, at which time they will sell the old one off for recycling.
I’m not saying it couldn’t be true, but I’m quite skeptical…
So there are no batteries to develop an actual industry around, most are just one-offs.
Nissan's early Leafs have the reputation as the cars with the most degraded batteries coming back into the used car market, and some of Nissan's earliest Leafs were sold under a "battery leasing model" where the car was sold but the battery was still under lease from Nissan giving Nissan incentive to replace the battery if it dropped below certain warranty thresholds. Yet despite the "notorious degraded Leaf battery" and decades of the Leafs existence and batteries that possibly owners could call in lease terms for replacements out there, statistics show that the vast majority of Leaf batteries are still in primary usage (people are still driving those "degraded" batteries, there is a used car market for them) and Nissan claims they've yet to see enough batteries enter the secondary use market to build even a single one of their PowerWall-equivalent products.
People massively over-estimate the range they think they need because they don't take things like home charging into account.
From a regular European 230V outlet you can get 100km of range every night easily. Even more if you don't work 16 hour days.
The average commute around here is a bit over 50km a day, both ways combined.
Right now, hobbyists. There's high demand for used Leaf modules - so much so that they're getting fairly difficult to find these days. Golf cart conversions are popular and easy.
This is a problem the market is perfectly capable of solving. Batteries are valuable.
The number one issue people around me have when talking about EVs isn't even range or cold these days, it's that they read somewhere batteries aren't recycled, together with some total cost back of the envelope calculation that showed an EV pollutes at least as much as a fossil fuel vehicle. Some of them are convinced hydrogen and fuel cells are the only way forward.
Now, I try to formulate rebuttals based on my engineering knowledge, but I tried to do my homework and could not find reliable information.
My hunch is EV is a young, rapidly scaling product class/industry/market (compared to entrenched fossil fuel engines) so the process has to scale up to be cost efficient and even work at all, it just can't happen overnight, but that no, they're not going to throw batteries in landfills.
My second hunch is that those otherwise green-biased, reasonable people get strangely irate about the thing to the point of persisting with buying ICEs so I'm thinking there's some agenda carried through memetic manipulative propaganda somewhere around it.
Here in NZ people are importing "cheap" used Nissan Leafs from Japan with 75% battery remaining.
Here a 5 year old, 60,000km Leaf, with 76% battery remaining sells for around US$13,000.
No blackouts ever again and half-rate electricity on nighttime tarriffs. Bargain.
If it's a Tesla with a 300+ mile range, assuming the owner has a home charger, the difference in range really only matters on long road trips, and 225 miles is still adequate to drive long distances, albeit more slowly. The owner is not likely to replace the pack at this level of degradation.
Great for you if it works in your circumstances. For others it doesn’t and I don’t see what the need for the hostility is. Not everyone is exactly like you.
"Real-world data showed that Tesla battery degradation was less than 10% after over 160,000 miles (257,500 km)"
According to the graph there's a slight dip during the first 50k and then it levels out to a steady decline. There is no data for batteries around 60% capacity, since there are none yet :)
About half of the cells are effectively dead, internal shorts or electrolyte leaks. Included in this half are cells with mA discharge currents which is very out of spec. Not suitable for use.
The other half lived with an average capacity of 2050mAh with a std deviation of 150mAh. This is only a degradation of about 30% which was pretty surprising to me.
The death spiral starts at 80%. Newer Macs and iPhones now get pretty aggressive about pushing users to seek service.
Also worth noting that, as of Big Sur, MacBooks that are mostly used plugged-in will not too off past 80% until asked. I expect that this will pay off bigly for consumers.
VW is already attempting to recycle 95% of their batteries: https://www.volkswagenag.com/en/news/stories/2019/02/lithium...
We've got 20 years to improve our recycling process from that. I'm not majorly worried.
Buying a real battery for a 2014 MacBook Pro 15" A1398 isn't possible, because Apple says they're obsolete. (long live laptops with USB-A and HDMI!).
I bought a third-party battery, labelled Simplo but apparently made by someone else. It idles at 12V. The original Apple battery idles at 2V, and "wakes up". The third-party battery killed my logic board about a month after I fitted it, when lifted the lid to wake from sleep while outside.
I tried moving the Compeq PCB from the official battery to the new cells, but in the process, got an undervoltage on the TI controller chip BQ20Z45, which set the PF flag (permanent failure). To clear the PF flag, I need an "unseal" password, which isn't the same as the one that Charlie Miller discovered. I wrote a fuzzer, but it'll take 340 days to run. Be2Works haven't answered their email.
So in conclusion: even when your batteries are swollen, they're still better than the fakes. Trying to fix them can make it worse. Don't throw out your Smart Battery control boards.
Are you f------ kidding me? You have just ruined my night.
Figuratively speaking, of course. I won't shoot the messenger!
But I have an A1398 sitting here that's been idle for a few years, ever since the battery started puffing up every time it warmed up and pushed out the center of the bottom case so far that the rubber feet at the four corners were lifted off the table and it would start to twirl as you type.
The machine is in perfect shape otherwise, and even if I'm not using it any more, I'd hoped I could have a new battery put in and give it to someone who would get many more years use out of it.
If there is a solution that would get a safe and reliable new battery into it without futzing with chips, I would be all ears!
Then you should have bought a PC with a battery you can take out, instead of Apple's garbage.
Apple makes their stuff specifically non-disassemblable by third parties. If you buy Apple hardware, you get a repair if Apple wants to give you one, and you pay the price Apple wants you to pay.
I'm proud to say I've never bought a piece of Apple hardware in my life. This is one of the many reasons behind that decision.
Caveat emptor.
Lithium batteries aren't easy to transport.
To be allowed to sell n batteries you need to buy k*n from the garbage collectors. Then just fine tune k, but it can't be 0.
That would provide money flow from people that make vast amounts of money from making things that will ultimately become the garbage, to the people that are dealing with that garbage.
I don't think the batteries are the problem yet, but we might start doing this with manufacturers of plastic packaging.
People are SO VERY WORRIED about the emissions from EV battery use and their recycling.
But at the same time digging up fossil fuels and literally burning them up in smoke is perfectly fine somehow?
Car batteries easier to recycle than consumer electronics, because cars are already scrapped when they get too old because the raw materials in them have value. Consumer electronics are more difficult because the metals in them are in smaller quantities and so people won't want to drive to the recycling center to earn themselves 50¢ but a car may have several hundred dollars in raw materials.
Also note that because the global EV industry is currently scaling and because it may take decades for a car battery to wear out, companies in this space will take time to grow because there just aren't enough dead car batteries out there to make mass scale recycling commercially viable yet.
If not and the journalist were authentically dim, then leave it to the pessimism of British MSM to smear FUD like Nutella on specific, immediate, essential solutions to an existential emergency so we can delay, bikeshed, and hand-wring about how ICEs, burning FFs, and net positive GHGEs are so much better than all this EV claptrap. In the larger picture, it seems like there's always a social opportunist who will automatically espouse the opposite of a prevailing-but-sensible view to garner some sort of following.. like flat earthers but without meetings or conventions.
[0] https://www.thedrive.com/tech/39540/google-tells-search-user...
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battery_recycling#Lithium_ion_...
Right now there are both articles about how lithium mining is terrible and expensive (https://www.wired.co.uk/article/lithium-batteries-environmen... "The spiralling environmental cost of our lithium battery addiction"†) and articles like this one about how we're producing a massive waste stream containing high concentrations of valuable metals like lithium, cobalt, and manganese. (A 2600-mAh 18650 cell contains about 800 mg of lithium, and https://lygte-info.dk/review/batteries2012/Aosibo%20IMR18650... says it weighs 45 g, so it's 1.78% lithium by weight, 35 times as concentrated as the brine. At US$13k/tonne that's about 1¢ of lithium per battery.)
People throwing out valuable metals while other people are spending a lot of money to recover those same valuable metals from highly diluted deposits? This sounds like a case for... capitalism!
(This is completely different from the old battery waste problem, where mercury was included in disposable battery electrodes in order to stabilize the battery chemistry, which is a serious toxicity hazard and a real pain in the ass to separate out. That's never been the case with lithium batteries and has even been eliminated from almost all disposable batteries now.)
As pointed out in https://xkcd.com/808/, if dowsing could tell you what was under the ground, companies would be using it to make a killing in oil prospecting. If casting hexes on your enemies worked, companies would be using it to make a killing in... killing. Military contracting. (Actually, probably military leaders would.) And, when there's a significant waste stream of lithium batteries available, companies are going to make a killing by buying up these used lithium batteries for 10¢/kg and extracting 23¢/kg of lithium from them.
Until then, it's not a problem.
Unless somehow modern capitalism is failing to be ruthlessly profit-focused enough.
______
† The Wired article says "500,000 gallons [of water] per tonne of lithium", which, in non-historical-re-enactment units, is 1.9 million liters per tonne, but probably more accurately 2 million liters. That puts the lithium content of the brine at 0.05%.
Actually, though, I see a major error in my calculations. What cost US$13000/tonne in 02019 wasn't lithium; it was battery-grade lithium carbonate. The molar mass of Li₂CO₃ is 73.9 (amu); lithium itself is only 13.9 amu of that, or 18%. So that's US$69000/tonne for the lithium itself, 5.5¢ per battery, and US$1.23/kg for used batteries.
In 02015 the price was only US$6500 per tonne of lithium carbonate and thus US$35000 per tonne of lithium. Most of that was being extracted from deposits like the ones mentioned above: 0.05% lithium mixed in with 99.95% water and other things. I don't think lithium extraction technology has gotten worse since 02015 (maybe it's gotten better, but probably not worse) so I think that's a reasonable upper bound to the cost of refining lithium from such dilute deposits: US$35000 per tonne, US$35/kg.
But, as I said, the batteries represent a deposit that is 35 times more concentrated than the natural deposits currently being mined. That means that it will be much cheaper to refine lithium from batteries than from the natural deposits, although of course the chemistry of the process will be different.
The revised numbers, then, are that old batteries contain US$1.23/kg of lithium (US$1230/tonne); so, if you spend 50¢/kg (US$500/tonne) to buy the old batteries, you can spend 73¢ per kg of batteries to refine the lithium, yielding 18 g of lithium. In 02015 miners were getting paid 63¢ to refine 18 g of lithium from natural deposits, so I don't know if it'll actually cost 50¢ or 5¢ or 0.5¢ to do that same refining from batteries, but it won't be 73¢.
Except at first, because it'll be chemistry Ph.D.s refining lithium a gram at a time at a lab bench, and it will cost US$1000 per gram. But then you gradually scale up the process.
Your original comment said there was "23¢/kg of lithium" in waste batteries.
Concentration of lithium is not the only concern, and as you point out, we barely have a way to achieve this at any cost. If we're allowed to invoke future technology to solve this, then I'm going to continue driving my ICE car, because soon we will solve the problem of mass CO2 capture.
Yes. Is that unclear? I will try to clarify it further: my erroneous calculation was that each kilogram of batteries contained 23¢ worth of lithium, using a lithium price of US$13 per kilogram and a figure of 18 g/kg of lithium content. That would have meant that if you spent 10¢ per kg of dead batteries, you could spend 13¢ per kg of dead batteries refining the lithium from them before you ate up your profits, which would have been US$7.30 per kg of lithium produced. The corrected figures are US$1.23, US$69 (for 02019), and still 18 g/kg; if we use 50¢ we then derive 73¢ and US$41 per kg of lithium.
Does that help?
> Concentration of lithium is not the only concern
The usual term is "purity"—and purity of lithium is generally the only concern to the lithium buyer, apart from cost.
> we barely have a way to achieve this at any cost
On the contrary, the current way we have to achieve this is so incredibly cheap that an 18650 lithium-ion cell that sells for US$3 only contains 5.5¢ worth of lithium. If the price of lithium increased 1000% it would only increase the battery cost by 15%.
> If we're allowed to invoke future technology to solve this
What you are describing as "future technology" I think is probably more like "grinding up a bunch of dead batteries in a tank of water and then leaching the lithium out with some leachants". There are dozens of papers in the field that have demonstrated feasible methods; one of the simplest, from 10 years ago, used 1M sulfuric acid and 30% H₂O₂ for 2 hours at 80° with a 40% suspension of solids to leach out the cobalt (at which point drain cleaner suffices to get the lithium, I think), and another used 2M citric acid, 1.2% H₂O₂, and 60° temperature, with a 3% suspension of solids. These are processes Berzelius could have designed.
There's serious engineering work to be done, but there's no risk that it will turn out to be unprofitably hard, just because dead batteries are such a rich lithium ore.
> If we're allowed to invoke future technology to solve this, then I'm going to continue driving my ICE car, soon we will solve the problem of mass CO2 capture.
This is precisely the opposite extreme. Dead batteries are 1.8% lithium. Mined lithium brines are 0.01% to 0.2% lithium, so they're worse. When you drive your car, you mix the resulting CO₂ into the entire atmosphere, which weighs 5.15 × 10¹⁸ kg. (And into some of the oceans, too.) If you drive your car 501000 km, you've added 128 tonnes to the atmosphere. That's 0.0000000000025%. The whole CO₂ content of the atmosphere is only 0.04%.
Atmospheric carbon capture is a very difficult problem precisely because of the very low concentration of CO₂ you're trying to purify. I do think it's feasible, especially once the massive new solar energy plants come online in the 02030s, but it's pretty far in the opposite direction along the difficulty gradient from battery recycling. Also, it's unprofitable (it provides a public good), and battery recycling is profitable.
Lithium mining from batteries is easier than lithium mining from the ground because the concentration is higher. Atmospheric carbon capture is harder than lithium mining from the ground because no financing structure exists for it and because the concentration is lower.
(Or maybe the olivine stuff will pan out, I don't know. Serpentinized olivine wouldn't be very pure CO₂ but it also wouldn't be acidifying the oceans and melting the glaciers.)
Yes, we all want a battery to be recycled, but recycling batteries is an arduous task that cannot be automated efficiently in any way. No company will spend the man hours on recycling batteries if they're not forced by law, because it's a terrible cost sink. Even with recycling the material gains from taking apart batteries are terrible.
Extracting lithium from a cell is damn near impossible, but the other metal parts can be metled down, so my guess would be that when a large amount of batteries reach their end of life, they'll just be burned and molten, possibly with some filter attached to the smoke stack that'll do the absolute legal minimum to protect the people and environment from the toxic fumes.
Or, what might happen is what has happened to plastic "recycling", we export the stuff to third world countries who offer to "recycle" the stuff for cheap, where they'll just end up in a landfill, waiting for the occasional fire.
Sure, these companies tout that they're going to recycle all of these used batteries right now, but in the end I have very little faith that they'll actually give a damn about recycling. They're not even recycling used cars for more than their metallic elements, so why would we ever believe that they're going to recycle something as complicated as a battery pack?
A close friend of mine gained a Masters's degree in the subject, intending to work towards our new utopian recycling society, and even he doesn't complain any more when I tell him that the best thing we can do with our "Recycling" is highly controlled incineration and heat extraction.