Gigafactories are recycling old EV batteries into new ones
economist.com
economist.com
I'm not trying to be drab on the article, nor people who found it to be something new that they just learned.
I will echo your sentiment and add that lead is also listed legally as a "hazardous substance" here in the US which means that incentivizing it to be recycled is the most economical while also being ecological.
Let's take an imaginary model 3 that is 15 years old and it has 170k miles on the odometer. If it still works and the battery has somewhere in the region of 30%~50% capacity this is still a very usable vehicle for many people.
The question is "how much will lithium cost?"
It can be extracted from the ocean, there are undeveloped known mineral deposits and you always expect there are unknown deposits to be found. Production will grow as demand grows, when there is lag because new sources take time to develop and proven demand is needed before someone spends a lot of money developing a new source there will be cost growth, when new sources, recycling, etc. develop, prices will drop.
In 20-30 years one of the alternatives (like sodium batteries, we'll never run out of sodium) aren't so unlikely to be found.
Indeed, and we already have research into using concentrated desalination brine to recover lithium from [0]. Unfortunately, a lot of desalination plants are positioned in Arabia [1], so we'd trade dependency on these dictatorships from oil to lithium.
[0] https://pubs.rsc.org/en/content/articlelanding/2019/em/c8em0...
[1] https://www.aquatechtrade.com/news/desalination/worlds-large...
Recovering lithium from the brine is essentially just using the waste these plants generate as part of their operation.
OTOH you have to buy gasoline regularly. If supply gets cut off, current vehicles are scrap metal.
As we make lithium battery capacity more affordable, it gets applied more broadly, and the rate of use goes up. There is a very finite amount of any resource here on earth, and while we can get things more and more efficient, there will be a moment where we can no longer extract lithium (or other materials) required for battery production. Treating these as an endless resource is the same error we made with fossil fuels, just hopefully without as much climate change as a direct result...
Thats… 200 MWh per person worth of lithium.
Or energy storage equal to 200 tons of TNT.
Unlike fossil fuels it is not consumed and will be recycled.
In short, there’s a few orders of magnitude of more lithium around than anyone will ever need. It all comes down to price of extraction.
Taking enough out of the oceans for everybody to have a Tesla won’t even take 0.1% of what’s there.
More likely, we will stop more lithium extraction, and get most of it from recycling old batteries. 20 years from now is probably too soon for that, but 30-40 seems like it could be possible where we can circularized the lithium economy.
(Circularization assumes that per capita needs are not every increasing, and that population levels off, which seems likely to me but definitely not certain)
The safety part seems to be completely ignored. I would not want to have around me a 10 year old battery pack.
So is petrol for that matter - a Tesla Model 3 extended range battery pack stores 82kWh of energy, whereas a 60L tank full of unleaded is holding 570kWh of energy
— it burns for a long time - it resists suppression
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Incendiary_device
If you want gasoline to meet the definition you have to make napalm out of it.
And disposal of car batteries will never be an issue. Even the smallest and most degraded of Nissan Leaf batteries is worth $2000 or so.
https://cdn.ihsmarkit.com/www/pdf/0722/The-Future-of-Copper_...
For example one of those original Leaf batteries will still fetch nearly £2000. The 40kWh and above much more because they open the possibility of re-batterying an original Leaf.
This is not quite true. The failure rate and capacity decline dramatically incr
In a functional grid, each home shouldn't need its own battery system. But we've neglected ours for so long, both technically and politically, that there's no real hope in improving it in the short term, so homeowners can either take it into their own hands or just go without electricity a week or two out of the year.
With the rapid pace of innovation with battery technologies forecast, the lack of "modular powertrains/batteries" just means many EV's will be antiqued at an unacceptable rate, due to paltry range and archaic charge times. Upgrading battery packs and charging ports with modular design should be standard engineering in the 1st world.
The math to charge a battery with 500 miles of range in under 5 minutes is clear as day, but trickle charging standards just means inadequate infrastructure in a decade or so with their current rollouts.
Multi-cell charging means that in 2022, modern engineering could make multiple charging ports on EV's to lower charge times to 1st world standards. I'm not sure if dually's fill both tanks simultaneously, but aircrafts would not trickle fill their fuel tanks either. 350KW charging times 3 or 4 charge ports gets EV's in the ballpark for 21st century "value for time" without supercooling or anything fancy.
Uninteruptable power supply technology has existed for decades with perfect results. There is nothing stopping EV manufacturers from using different chemistries on the same vehicle either. The switchover is seemless.
And with certain chemistries, the EV industry still refuses to adopt "optimized 0%" and "optimized 100%" capacities to reduce degredation and extend the life of the batteries (2nd life uses for battery storage in other environments, etc). RV battery owners and home battery users already use the 20%/80% or 25%/75% discharge/charge cycles to protect their investments with some battery chemistries. EV manufacturers seem oblivious, with range taking a huge hit with responsible environmental stewardship and 1st world math in the real world. The can charge at constant rates with optimized 0% and optimized 100% too. The legs on many lithium-based technologies is already known.
EV jargon shows the generational divide with clarity. Indoctrinated into donkey cart math already makes EV's behind the curve in 21st century vocabulary and math.
So, what makes you think battery prices are going to continue falling ? Isn't lithium mineral the main cost in building these batteries ?
I predict it will rain sometime in the next month at my address. I also predict that it will freeze hard in the same time period.
This is a useful prediction, given that I will be winterizing my yard today.
Making a prediction better than an expert's is hard. Useful predictions are often easy.
If my father in law decides to plant 1000 acres in wheat next year, he is making a prediction about the markets. Given the situation in Ukraine and with global climate, wheat prices are one of the most difficult to predict precisely. But he is a low cost producer compared to many, so he knows he is likely to make a profit whether the price is high or low. A precise prediction would be nice, but producers everywhere operate with imprecise but useful predictions all the time.
So I wonder if you can really rule out that the increase in demand for EV isn't the main factor in lithium's x15 price increase. And if it's the case, I don't see how battery prices could go down in the next decade, since increasing mining isn't spontaneous and demand is not going to decrease.
There are a lot of reasons that would reduce the cost of batteries even if the mining+processing of Li didn't grow (which it will).
Semiconductors spoiled us into thinking we could ride one technology idea down an exponential curve forever, but most technologies don't have that kind of progression. By the way, semiconductors didn't have that kind of progression either - chips from 10 years ago look very different than today's.
Nickel battery production has decreased as they're being replaced with Lithium batteries so they're no longer riding the experience curve.
Semiconductors have a relatively constant price per chip but a regularly decreasing price per transistor.
We need about 1000TWh for the clean energy transition, half for cars and half for the electrical. There might be better substitutes for the electrical grid, but cars are going to use something that looks a lot like a lithium-ion battery, like sodium ion.
So I figure we've got solid demand from our current 500GWh/year up until at least 32TWh/year or so, 6 doublings, which should lower the price by about 90%.
Look at the other side. Tesla's battery day announcement in 2021 promises 56% cost reductions in 4 years via 6 enhancements: silicon anodes, cobalt-free cathodes, dry electrode process, structural batteries, tabless electrodes, larger cells.
Only the dry electrode process is particularly innovative or risky, but the others still add considerable cost reductions. Not all of Tesla's innovations may pan out, but they're just one of many companies and Universities researching batteries, many of whom are more innovative than Tesla is.
Also, Tesla has a very spotty track record on predicting its own innovations (yes, even on battery design), so I wouldn't take that prediction too seriously.
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/DCOILWTICO/
https://www.cnn.com/2021/04/20/investing/oil-prices-negative...
https://www.visualcapitalist.com/breaking-down-the-cost-of-a...
I would expect battery prices to stall on their drop, or even rise a bit, in the next year or two, before dropping again massively in price. There has been a lot of supply chain disruption, and an absolutely massive increase in demand. But lots more production capacity is being built.
(Exception: solar panels, because those have the least processing over raw silicon and are therefore more price sensitive)
Which is a surprise, but so is a x15 increase in a raw material cost.
The other thing is we're innovating in battery chemistry. It would not surprise me if Lithium were only one of many options in ten years, depending on the storage capacity and number of cycles needed per kg. Sodium is a likely candidate, and it's as cheap and available as salt. Iron, aluminum, and others are a possibility, for stationary batteries where weight doesn't matter.
I know people here are very skeptical of every battery advance press release, and rightfully so. But nonetheless, some of that is going to pan out, and the world of energy storage is going to fundamentally change the economics for cars, airplanes, and grid storage within the next decade.
If I look at say my laptop or phone, they definitely aren't compatible with newer batteries even if it's technically feasible so why would we expect cars to be?
This is like suggesting that my computer can't go from AMD to nvidia because they would need to know deep specifics about AMD's proprietary chips to support them. But that's what drivers are for!
Most chemistries can be charged using the same "constant current up to this voltage, constant voltage to the max voltage" method, just need to set the right values.
The reason it's not true for laptops is that batteries aren't standard form factor sizes in laptops.
You might notice that Li-Ion AA batteries CAN'T be charged by Ni-Cd or Ni-MH AA battery chargers. Even a smaller change like Ni-MH to Ni-Zn requires different equipment.
Seeing the 4G rollout was a good economic course in environmental pollution and abandonded psuedo-innovation. All of the older surplus 2G/3G/4G hardware and abandonded software was sold to developing countries. Now every device on tcp/ip has inferior muck with an out-of-date ecosystem.
Desktop computing had it right when the information superhighway still existed. Just install new hardware thats backwards compatible (the hardware was forward compatible by design).
The tabloid quality fodder and disposible commerce has always been 3rd world, much in the same way that tcp/ip evolved.
Anything for an inferior integer to stay relevant, huh? The environmental impact is someone elses problem :p
The theoretical energy density of sodium is too low for the weight, this isn't a matter of developing the technology.
What we can look forward to is sodium batteries becoming cheap and reliable, replacing every application of lead-acid, and most, perhaps all, stationary lithium. Great choice for house or grid-level storage, where the lower density is basically harmless.
Batteries are such a major component of an electric car that there's a sort of Rocket Equation which applies: a sodium car with the same range as a lithium one would have to carry so much more battery that one would have to add substantially more just to move the extra weight around.
This will never pencil out.
This is absolutely not clear. Active lithium is just ~60g per kWh in a battery, or ~1% of the mass of a state of the art LFP battery. Even though sodium weighs 3.5 times more for the same charge, if it's use would allow just a few percent reduction in total weigh, either by reduction of inactive cathode material or some other source, it could easily beat lithium batteries.
There is a reason lead ones are not "just" heavy but also physically much bigger than same capacity lithium one.
What will (probably) happen if we get competitive sodium batteries is that they will phase out lithium from the stationary storage so there won't be that huge demand for lithium for everything. Or possibly they will become "cheap EV's battery"
Sodium cannot improve lithium by replacing it in batteries, for physical chemistry reasons which can't be negotiated.
I don't consider it likely that lithium will become so much more expensive that people will want their second-largest purchase, a car, to be inferior in the way that it must be with sodium batteries.
Rather more likely that cheap and good sodium batteries relieve pressure on lithium supply for the enormous amount of battery storage we need to handle intermittent renewables.
By weight, something around 1% of a lithium battery is lithium.
Sodium is seen as an interesting alternative, because there are some indications that it can make that 99% that makes up the rest of the battery lighter. Even though sodium is ~3.5 times worse as a charge carrier, if it's use allows cutting enough weight from that rest, it can be a winner overall.
For example, aluminium is, for complex reasons, not compatible with every part of a li-ion battery, and so they use copper connectors internally, typically containing by weight at least 10 times as much copper as they contain lithium. Sodium batteries can use aluminum everywhere, which saves on not just cost, but also more in weight than the weight difference between equal molar amounts of sodium and lithium.
LFP (lithium iron phosphate) batteries are already used by Tesla and have a gravimetric energy density of 125 Wh/kg, much lower than Lithium-ion.
CATL currently produces a sodium-ion battery at 160 Wh/kg, and they expect the next generation to reach 200 Wh/kg. Even if that doesn't come to fruition, it's already higher density than what's being used in electric cars!
Now consider that sodium-ion is less flammable and doesn't have the risk of thermal runaway. You might be able to drop weight in hazard protection systems. Battery cycle times are competitive with Lithium chemistry. Contrary to your prediction that it doesn't pencil out, I expect sodium-ion to completely displace Lithium batteries for use in electric vehicles because it pencils out so much better. It will just be so much cheaper and doesn't bottleneck on any materials as you scale up.
> It’s also about weight. Trucks today averaging around 5200 pounds -- that’s a jump of more than a half ton since 2000. And things get heavier as electric vehicles look to become our new normal.
> On average electric vehicles are 10 percent heavier than gas powered cars. For instance, the new electric Hummer weighs in at a staggering 9,100 pounds or more than 4 and a half tons. All that weight can have deadly consequences. Researchers have found that for every 1,000 pounds a car puts on, a pedestrian is nearly 50 percent more likely to die if they’re hit and the more a truck weighs the longer it will take to stop.
1. https://www.clickondetroit.com/news/2022/08/08/size-does-mat...
Even if a "lighter" car hits you, it's gonna be a bad day. Better to avoid the collision altogether, no? :)
On the other hand, I think maybe hoping that vehicles become no heavier than modern EVs is at least somewhat realistic.
Tesla uses iron phosphate in its cheaper models, but the high end is still reliant on NMC. I'd be interested to know the maximum range available on LFP.
BYD sells a lithium-iron-phosphate battery with an energy density of 150 Wh/kg. CATL's LFP is 125.
Also, a lithium-iron-phosphate battery is a lithium-ion battery, in that the electrolyte works by lithium ionic conduction. The appropriate contrast would be "lithium-nickel".
>CATL currently produces a sodium-ion battery at 160 Wh/kg, and they expect the next generation to reach 200 Wh/kg.
This is reported as the "single-cell" energy density, and is not directly comparable to the battery pack density.
>Now consider that sodium-ion is less flammable and doesn't have the risk of thermal runaway.
Surely this isn't because of the stability of sodium, which anyone who watched that chemistry demonstration in high school knows, is significantly more reactive than lithium. I expect the risks to be similar; furthermore, the concept of a dense energy storage that has no risk of sudden release is physically unlikely.
In theory 490 km, in practice, 380 km. Because they don't degrade as much, after a few years they are closer to what you call the high end models.
Correct, I want to point out that John Goodenough was responsible for the basic research which lead to all lithium-ion batteries.
I explicitly intended LiFePO to be included, and I hope for a variety of reasons that it's much more popular than cobalt-heavy formulas in ten years.
They offer a lithium-nickel chemistry without cobalt. If it can be proven in practice, it would allow comparable density to the best car batteries in a scalable chemistry. The founder is a researcher at the University of Texas who wrote several papers on the chemistry:
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdf/10.1002/adma.2020027...
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S240582972...
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdfdirect/10.1002/aenm.2...
If you split salt into sodium and chlorine, and use the sodium for batteries, what do you do with the chlorine?
On serious note, Chlorine is widely use chemical, used in cleaning products, bleaching paper and cloth, pesticides , rubber, and some solvents.
If you had to dump it, you'd probably react it with something cheap to make it inert. This would generate energy, it's akin to combustion with oxygen. You could use that energy to decrease the energy requirements of splitting the NaCl in the first step.
Something that might work on a small scale could become an ecological threat on the scale of a billion electric cars.
This would be preferred anyway: HCl is nasty, and carbon dioxide is not.
There’s also a limitless source in the ocean. If prices got high enough we could just filter ocean water.
No, and I have no idea why anyone would think that. Raw material costs are generally not that significant, most costs in manufacturing come from labor and capital.
The lithium in a $15000 75kWh battery pack costs around $1600 at current prices. There is a lot of room for the price to fall even with rising raw material costs, as manufacturing gets more efficient and capacity is built out.
And also, rising raw material prices will cause production to expand, which will eventually push prices back down.
IIUC 50% of the cost of a battery is coming from lithium
Manufacturing is only about bout 25%
Which is precisely why the industry is moving to chemistries that don't use cobalt, pushing the materials price back down.
As to cost, it depends on chemistry but you need ~0.16kg of Lithium metal/kWh or 16kg for 100kWh battery pack. At current prices that’s ~1,300$ worth of lithium meaning the majority of battery pack costs are still from manufacturing and other materials.
https://www.dailymetalprice.com/metalpricecharts.php?c=li&u=...
But yeah, on average if you look to previous price, maybe it's more of x8 price increase. 18 month ago was the all time low of the data on tradingview, I give you that.
About the weight details, are you sure your figures are correct? First result on google gives me way higher numbers (minimum 80g/kwh, but likely more than 160g/kwh) https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/how-much-lithium-li-ion-vehic... Also, another comment in this thread gives 60g/kwh, and another 160g/kwh
160g/kwh is 0.16kg/kWh… But yes, it varies based on chemistry. 0.16kg/kWh is on the high end but hardly the limit. There are a lot of different electrode options: Lithium Cobalt Oxide, Lithium Nickel Cobalt Aluminium Oxide, Lithium Nickel Manganese Cobalt Oxide, Lithium Manganese Oxide, etc
In general if you assume high lithium prices then we would expect lower lithium use per kWh given sufficient time for the manufactures to adjust.
https://joinyaa.com/guides/nio-battery-swaps-coming-to-ameri...
I kinda wish Tesla would merge with them in China.
The car companies should standardize their batteries as well and provide market differentiation on how the car makes efficient use of the power. That would eliminate a lot of waste, kinda like the USB-C standard for mobile devices. EU needs to get on this.
I wouldn't be surprised if we will see this tech in the US soon. Especially after we get back to a somewhat normal business environment with China. Next election I hope. Consumers win when they have more choice.
Maybe it might be possible for heavy plant machinery where removing the battery and transporting it to the charger is easier than transporting the machine back to the charge point.
But yeah, that seems more viable for stuff like electric scooters/motorcycles, as the cost of infrastructure would be much lower.
However, there are so many cars coming out (particularly from startups with manufacturing in China) at the moment that it could quickly overwhelm the efforts of the limited number of car hackers to keep up. There should be a reasonable path to detailed specifications if / when manufacturers no longer are willing to supply a replacement battery.
A bit like I've kept my iphone for ~5 years now but did a battery refresh halfway through. Its the best option within constraint given
When the vehicle comes up for sale, a regular person could buy it for $x, or a gigafactory will buy it for $x, put a new battery in it and then sell it for $y.
Seems fine to me, and exactly what happens now if you buy a used vehicle as-is, or if an intermediary buy its, rebuilds the engine and trans, puts new tires on, etc. etc. and then sells it for cost+
Why do you think that the battery degrades that much? Do you change the engine and the transmission on your petrol car every three years when the warranty runs out?
https://batteryuniversity.com/article/bu-808-how-to-prolong-...
Your link has a graph[1] that indicates that while using 75%-25% charging states, which is what most of the electric cars use by default, you would get 10 000 cycles and still retain 80% of the original capacity. On a 500km range electric car, like that hypothetical Tesla Model 3, that would be 80% capacity left after 2 500 000km. You can Google quite easily that there are for example Tesla Model S cars with over a million kilometers driven.
[1] https://batteryuniversity.com/img/content/capacity-retention...
There are also buyers who are overwhelmed by simple maintenance (oil changes, brake maintenance, window regulator failure) that help get their cars into these states.
Luckily, evs require so much less maintenance, even these buyers are likely to be surprised.
>"in the region of 30%-50% capacity"
Why are we saying 10 years? Why are we in the region of 30% capacity?
I'm so curious why you'd invent such pessimistic numbers... I am hoping there is a beneficent reason for the choice..
But to inject a frame of reality in your imagining, my 2012 Nissan leaf has worse battery chemistry than modern EVs, has been left for up to 6 months off the charger, charged fully to 100% it's entire life, and still maintains 83% of original capacity a decade later.
In fact, out of spec motoring channel recently bought the cheapest EV in the country, a $3.5k 2012 leaf with a broken charger, and they were able to get 53 miles out of it at a constant 72mph indicated.
Most other EVs, even of that era, had a cooling system and their batteries have been lasting for many years.
The body, the steering system, suspension, wheels, passenger area, brakes and electronic stability systems etc. they can be used for another 20 years.
A 15kWh conversion kit will turn all these clunkers into perfectly usable daily drivers.
There have been pilot projects that take batteries from EVs where the range has dropped too far to be useful and put those into stationary installations. The batteries are used in buildings to store power from solar panels.
One problem cited by people working on recycling batteries is that the batteries are lasting a lot longer than initial estimates and the number of batteries that have degraded significantly or have failed outright is rather small. It’s hard to setup a reuse or recycling industry if the supplies are so small.
As more cars get to be 10, 15, or more years old, more will degrade to where they are no longer fit for vehicle service or the batteries will fail. That will feed back into the resume/recycle processes.
They are working with Panasonic.
What does this mean? Vasteras Stockholm, known for its satanic mills?
The abuse was horrific- health and safety was a joke (this was the age pushing for making it illegal for kids to work in factories (cleaning behind moving engines, losing limbs), sexual predation from capitalist owners was rampant (you think Hollywood was bad), and the usual financial exploitation.
Combine with coal soot and Dark Satanic Mills is a good term.
Although Blake was more concerned about people losing their "natural" state because he barely was aware of the abuses in detail and he was middle class and worried about the loss of innocence that educated urban middle classes always worry about - the loss of an idealised non-existent state. People left farms for good reasons.
Recycling is not a 0 or 1 operation, the rate is not as high as people think, and there are other hidden impacts (energy, resources used by factories, transports, etc)