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Comment by acyou | Hacker News Reader

Pretty pathetic "recycling": 1. 80-90% of input is not even batteries, it's scrap from woefully inefficient and low yield battery cell manufacturing 2. "Recycling" consists of mechanical shredding to combine all of the copper, aluminum, steel, cathode materials, anode materials 3. A single extraction process pulls out lithium carbonate, the rest is saved for the future as "black mass" for as yet nonexistent processes to pull out the valuable cobalt, nickel, manganese, phosphorus, graphite.

The approach taken is practical, but kind of stupid. We want to physically separate these materials, so let's grind them into a well mixed aqueous slurry, then let the process chemists loose to solve it with science.

Particulate contamination of new or recycled battery materials with iron particles is a particular concern. Grinding the steel battery casings will not help.

The failure isn't with the battery recyclers, we shouldn't blame them. The issue is that consumers pay $0.05 per cell to recycle cells which at the moment are not recyclable, and we all see it as OK. I got my Tesla, ... you. So, as a result, there is zero incentive to consider the full product life cycle when designing cells.

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Input volume is low because vehicle batteries last forever. Importantly, we can ramp on QA rejects, salavaged vehicles, etc before there are tens of millions of EVs out there (not to mention stationary storage that will eventually EOL) needing waste management. Slow is smooth, smooth is fast.

https://cleantechnica.com/2022/09/21/surprise-nissan-leaf-ba...

Not super familiar with Ascend ground truth, but very familiar with Redwood Materials state of the art.

Input volume is low because vehicle batteries last forever.

I am not sure of your meaning. Because, taken literally, our 2011 Nissan Leaf would like a word with you.

> Many will be amazed to learn that Nic Thomas, Nissan’s marketing director for the UK, told Forbes recently, “Almost all of the [EV] batteries we’ve ever made are still in cars, and we’ve been selling electric cars for 12 years. We haven’t got a great big stock of batteries that we can convert into something else,” he added. “It’s the complete opposite of what people feared when we first launched EVs — that the batteries would only last a short time.”

> In fact, many EV batteries may outlast the vehicles they are installed in, then enjoy a second life in a stationary storage application before finally being recycled, according to EVANNEX. “At the end of the vehicle’s life — 15 or 20 years down the road — you take the battery out of the car and it’s still healthy with perhaps 60 or 70% of usable charge,” Thomas said.

> “It’s more sustainable to take the battery pack out of the car after 20 years, recycle the car, and reuse the battery. By far the easiest thing to do is take the complete battery out of the vehicle, put it in a shipping container in a rack, and plug that into a solar farm.”

Can’t speak to a Leaf, but I have fast DC charged my 2018 Model S almost exclusively over the last 100k miles and its pack has degraded only 6%.

The leaf is notorious for fast degradation in hot climates due to a poor cooling system. The model S, by 2018 anyway, sets the bar for both thermal and charging management. People outside of those climates mostly think about cold being a temporary range reducer, but if 40c is a normal or even cool summer day where you live, many EVs are simply off the table due to battery life concerns. The population of places with that sort of climate is growing faster than the others, so it really is worth addressing.

> many EVs are simply off the table due to battery life concerns

What EVs would be off the table? The Leaf is notably bad in this regard, as you mention, because the battery is passively cooled. However, all the other EVs I'm aware of are actively cooled and should be fine in hot temps.

It's an earnest question—I don't know anything except as a consumer who's shopped around for an EV, and as a resident of a hot climate I'd be interested in knowing what I need to look out for.

The spot checks I've done mostly show everything but nissan and gm having active cooling beyond a fan. But even within liquid cooling not all use the ac to keep the pack below ambient temp nwhen it gets too hot. I think kia and tesla are the only two I decided I was sure would be ok.

"Almost all of the [EV] batteries we’ve ever made are still in cars."

That's because replacing the battery in a 2011 Nissan Leaf will likely "total" the car (in that, the replacement cost would be more than the car is worth). It's the boat we're in now. Five, six, eight grand to replace the battery for a car that even dealers are only asking $7K for. Where are the cheap replacement batteries that we were promised when we bought the car? My guess is, "we'd rather place those batteries in $70K cars, so those are the customers you're competing with for battery supply." So that's how we're going to replace the battery: with a new Hyundai IONIQ 5.

In fact, many EV batteries may outlast the vehicles they are installed in, then enjoy a second life in a stationary storage application before finally being recycled, according to EVANNEX.

"May", or may not. We don't know, because despite the chatter, I'm not seeing this secondary car battery use. Probably because no one replaces the batteries, because...it's not worth it.

Can’t speak to a Leaf, but I have fast DC charged my 2018 Model S...

Your Tesla also has the advantage of seven years of battery advancement over our Leaf, which has degraded 25%. And the Leaf battery thermal management is non-existent. OTOH, as my wife and I push up against retirement age, with a liquid-cooled battery pack and the 12 years of learning about battery management, I'm assuming that the battery in the new Ioniq 5 coming this week will outlive us.

Yeah the Leaf ~2011 is infamous as an earlier "bad" battery design so I wouldn't extrapolate too much from it. The reality is also that as battery capacity increases, people simply won't notice 10-15% degradation of the pack because their commute is so much shorter than the vehicule's range.

And I'm not really extrapolating too much from it, as I expect our soon-to-be-in-the-driveway Ioniq 5 to perform much better (as in, outlives me). The Leaf was the first mass-market electric car in, what, 100 years? Yeah, we expected some early-adopter teething pains (including a short-lived battery), and we have no complaints with the OG Leaf, enough so that we swore off ICE vehicles years ago and await our 2nd electric car.

But at the same time, it's a counter to Nissan marketing guy trying to mansplain to me about their battery lifecycle. I own one of your batteries, Marketing Guy, and I'm detecting slight hints of marketing bullshit.

> That's because replacing the battery in a 2011 Nissan Leaf will likely "total" the car (in that, the replacement cost would be more than the car is worth).

Yeah, well, totalling shouldn't work like that. A car with a new battery should be worth several thousand more, and the totalling calculation for replacing the battery should be based on the post-work value, not the pre-work value.

Is there a consumer market yet for buying/selling old EV batteries for stationary storage? Some quick googling isn't turning anything up.

Probably not at scale due to all the different form factors. There are plenty of hobbyists doing that, however.

You can buy old Tesla modules (typically from wrecked cars) on eBay. Once in a while I see people on the RV forums use them instead of LFP, though honestly I'd much rather have LFP for RV or home energy storage than regular lithium ion.

Batteryhookup and Jag35 are hobbyist-friendly places dealing in such things. Safety or documentation are very much YOYOMF.

I can vouch for battery hookup, they even sell new/never used overstock sometimes. Pretty good way to build your own battery back up system, which has helped me a lot when we lost power here in quebec for 4 days last week.

I'm guessing the battery in your Nissan Leaf only has maybe 60% of its capacity when new? That's not so bad that a battery would be deemed unusable. If you didn't want that battery, that battery probably would not end up in a recycling site but reused in other low energy-density use cases.

My 2014 Nissan Leaf still had great battery life when we finally traded it in last year.

Often times a Leaf's entire pack can substantially recover capacity by replacing a single problematic cell.

OG leaf battery design was legitimately flawed.

I had one for a while and watched the range drop from 50-40 “miles” (half that really) over less than 10k miles of usage before I sold it.

Nissan for whatever reason never chose to do (and still doesn't do in 2023) active battery thermal management that every other EV manufacturer does - I have a Ford Focus EV (2017) and despite being a complete econobox compliance vehicle (which I still love) it actively manages battery heat.

Luckily Leafs are a minority of all EVs so the point still stands - EV batteries will likely outlive the car.

> Because, taken literally, our 2011 Nissan Leaf would like a word with you.

2011 was a particularly bad year for the Leaf. And they were not great (battery life-wise) before 2015 ('lizard pack').

The newer ones are faring much better. Sure, this is of no consolation for your Leaf, but I'd keep an eye for a battery pack from a Leaf that's totaled for other reasons (minor accident causing airbag deployment, for example). You can even add a larger battery than the one your model came with.

I figure that over 10 years later, the fact that the only example that consistently comes up is the Nissan Leaf means we've made excellent progress on EV batteries. It's the exception proving the rule.

Chevy Volt batteries are holding up great even in 2012 models. There are definitely people experiencing failures of a cell leading to bricking the car, or even a temp sensor failure in the pack leading to the vehicle bricking itself, but for 95%+ of people it seems like a decade old battery is doing great. I've got 170k miles on my decade old Volt and everything seems good as new for now.

> stationary storage that will eventually EOL

I suspect stationary storage will never EOL. Even after tens of thousands of recharge cycles, the battery can still store some energy, perhaps just 10% of the design capacity, but thats still worth something so it's still worth running.

The only time it is worth throwing out is if the land is valuable and you need it for another project.

This does depend on there not being much 'parasitic load' - ie. fans and pumps which run 24x7 which cost money to run even when they aren't really needed when the battery capacity and charge/discharge speed is really low.

Eh not sure about this one.

With SoH decreasing the internal resistance increases and the battery inherently becomes a fire hazard. At some point the energy required for cooling will not be justifiable and the battery will have to be decommissioned.

As internal resistance rises, you just need to charge slower...

A battery that normally takes an hour to charge can charge 10x slower and take 10 hours to charge, and still be providing some useful value. (nearly everywhere will have a day/night power price discrepancy, as well as a weekday vs weekend discrepancy, and a hot/cold weather discrepancy - so there are lots of timescales over which money can be made)

Yes, vehicle batteries and stationary storage are used in much more "forgiving" environments than laptops and power tools, when it comes to cell life. Lower power draw, better battery management systems, less temperature fluctuation, less physical impact.

Battery production is still massively wasteful in terms of partially finished or finished products that need to be scrapped. The reason is that battery quality is critical at every level. One tiny piece of iron embedded in one battery out of a million can mean a catastrophic fire and tens of millions in damages. If there is a systemic defect that manifests during cell testing and is caught, the whole production batch should be scrapped. Most of this scrap happens before the batteries are shipped, and you never see it, except in this too-honest article. You see how this plays out in car fires, resulting from battery defects, resulting in large recalls.

Run into defects in semiconductor manufacturing, and scrap cost is lower, and you don't have an obvious and direct link between the defects and catastrophic failure modes.

Keeping iron particles and manufacturing defects out of batteries isn't a "solvable" problem. You try to minimize it and catch it. Without technical breakthroughs and using existing technologies, the higher the batteries' performance, the less the margin for error.

We don't have a good baseline cultural understanding for what lithium-ion batteries are. In general, household batteries, AAs, AAAs, car batteries use a water-based electrolyte. They do not catch fire. Lithium-ion batteries use an organic solvent as electrolyte and when punctured, dropped, or just cycling in everyday use if defective, turn into red-hot self-propelled blowtorches.

I think the 'grind it up and use chemistry to extract the valuable bits' is the future of recycling.

The reality is that lifespans of products is so long (eg. 30+ years) that no recycling process wants to be built to fit standard mechanical designs from 30 years ago... and 20 years ago... and 10 years ago... Multiply by the number of different designs from different companies and different countries (even with regulation, it is unlikely we would get one global mechanically recyclable design).

If process chemists can't extract everything, then you plasma-ionize what's left and now you just have plain old elements to deal with.

steel recycling has the same concern.

Sure, you can rip apart a building and say "ooh, thats a nice steel beam - we could reuse that for another building, or cut it into sheets to roll flat into something else"... But it is cheaper and easier just to chuck it into a furnace and melt it down and start from scratch.

But that's not the same, the above process would be like melting the steel and glass and concrete from the building and hope future chemistry allows us to separate them

Current chemistry allows us to do that just fine. Glass melts at a much lower temperature and is much less dense than steel. Concrete is not as dense as steel, but melts at a much higher temperature. So, if you heat up the whole mixture to steel melting temperatures, the glass and steel will melt and can be poured off, while the concrete will stay solid. Then the molten mixture of steel and glass will naturally separate because the steel part is so much heavier than the glass part and they don't naturally mix all that well.

(Fun fact, glass pane manufacturing is often done by floating the molten glass on a bath of molten metal so that the surface tension will make it flat. AFAIK they don't usually use molten steel as the metal though.)

But if you can pull out the steel beams without all the concrete, melting it will be a lot cheaper.

Imagine grinding up a bridge or tunnel and trying melt all the steel out of the concrete.

That sounds expensive.

It does "sound" expensive, but so does separating out all the steel beams from the concrete of a tunnel. That kind of thing is pretty labor intensive and people cost a lot of money. If you have a big enough grinding machine, it may well be cheaper overall if it only needs a single operator.

I'm not a chemist, but this is something we're already very good at, and have been for quite some time. Silicon oxides occur very commonly in iron ores, and are a major component of slag.

This is the correct way of thinking, and is widely applicable to many commonly recycled materials. Wood, aluminum, steel, and some plastics can be efficiently processed in this way.

Battery materials and applications are different. They cannot be cheaply and easily melted down and re-used. The main constituents are all very similar and difficult to separate, and need to be separated extremely well in order to be used in battery applications.

The lithium carbonate extraction is very telling. Lithium is #3 in the periodic table. The remaining elements that we would want to extract occupy every number from #24 through #30. The reason that they are extracting cheap lithium and none of the heavy, expensive elements, is that more process development needs to be done.

In light of the above, creating a facility to grind up batteries does not represent much progress towards the core problem, and is not a particularly large step in the right direction. It would be like making a facility to grind up plastic, without having a process in place to recycle the plastic. It's great, but you need more, much more.

> I think the 'grind it up and use chemistry to extract the valuable bits' is the future of recycling. […] If process chemists can't extract everything, then you plasma-ionize what's left and now you just have plain old elements to deal with.

So high temperature applications which remove strong bonds and create programmable ions can lead to atomic elements?

Chromium, manganese, iron, cobalt, nickel, copper and zinc are elements # 24, 25, 26, 27, 28, 29, 30. The processes to separate them are currently resource-intensive and expensive. They need to be separated by conventional smelting and refining processes or hydro metallurgical processes, or some combination. These processes need to do a great job of purification for the materials to be battery grade.

Plasma ionization, can it be cheap and scalable?

> Plasma ionization, can it be cheap and scalable?

It doesn't need to be awfully cheap - those elements (except iron) are pretty valuable per kg, so they can pay for a pretty expensive process while still being cheaper than getting new stuff out of the ground.

Reduce, Reuse, Recycle

You seem upset that "reuse" is a different word than "recycle".

Recycling causes harm for the environment. It’s not a viable solution in the middle terms.

We may or may not develop processes to efficiently recycle the "black mass". For now, these processes do not exist.

Battery recycling may go in a different direction than it's currently heading. We may decide to focus on separating out the most valuable of these elements, or only elements from certain battery chemistries. We may even decide that it's not feasible to chemically separate ground battery materials containing iron, chromium, or other contaminants.

In the short term, re-using lithium-ion cells is not particularly feasible due to issues with cell safety and handling. In my mind, re-use doesn't enter into the conversation. If cells are being decommissioned, they would ideally be at or near the end of their useful lives anyways. For instance, if a vehicle was in a car accident, you would never re-use the cells, due to concerns about acceleration damage.

Re-use is happening all over. Used Nissan Leaf cells sell for almost new prices. I wish it wasn't true because I'd like a few packs myself.

You seem to be adding some details not in the article. Are you familiar with them?

> Currently, Ascend sells most of these substances to the market;

I took that line to mean they sell the recycled materials. You seem to think they are storing them as a combined goop.

I do have a little familiarity with lithium-ion technologies, but no direct insight into battery recycling. Please correct me if I'm mistaken.

I absolutely do think that "recycled" battery materials are being stored as combined goop or "black mass"! For the following reasons: 1. I'm not aware of a commodity spot price for battery sludge/powder 2. I'm not aware of any cell manufacturer using recycled materials in their cathode materials 3. I'm not aware of any cell manufacturer or recycler processing recycled battery sludge/powder and re-selling cathode materials made from recycled materials 4. I am well aware of the large technical and cost barrier to processing and separating this "black mass": The chemical elements occupy all of the positions from #24-#30 in the periodic table, and existing processes to separate the elements are expensive and resource-intensive.

What I don't have insight into is: who is buying recycled battery material mixtures? If they are available cheaply, we could speculate on them and hold them, assuming that refining processes will grow cheaper over time, and that the value of the recycled material mixtures will increase.

Their website seems to be claiming they have some secret sauce:

> Our advantage starts with a remarkable innovation: Other processes leach metals out of spent battery materials, but our patented Hydro-to-Cathode direct precursor synthesis process leaches out impurities, keeping the valuable metals in solution and eliminating multiple steps in the recycling flow.

I think this is the state of the art at scale currently.

I bet if you can execute better they would love to hire you! ;)

Yes, I think you're right that this is the state of the art at scale.

I wish the article went into a little more detail on the extent of technical achievement that was reached in commissioning this facility. Never mind the core process, can only imagine the scale of the fire suppression system, dust and fume management, etc. It really is impressive. They should publish a video tour.

I think that this recycling facility occupies a supply chain niche in a larger system: Dispose of old battery cells and preserve the rest of the materials as concentrated ores. The existing cells cannot be safely warehoused as cells, due to fire risk. The concentrated ores can be stored cheaply and safely and will maintain a stable or increasing indexed commodity value, proportionate to improvements in refining processes.

I just think that getting the cell cores out intact and separate from the steel casings would be a great start for the subsequent materials separation processes. Imagine if the cathode and anode foils could be further separated at the time of cell disassembly, and you would have a few material streams that would be simpler to process downstream: steel casings contaminated with powder and maybe a little aluminum and copper, cathode foils with the bulk of the cathode powders and close to zero iron, anode foils with the bulk of the anode powders and close to zero iron, and mixed powder flakes with close to zero iron.

I guess it's about where you move cost and complexity. I view the whole cell grinding as moving complexity downstream. Yes, it may end up being the right thing to do, but that will depend on future technological developments in metal refining, hydrometallurgical separation, and other techniques.

How do you think they get it out of the ground with all the other contaminants? I'm making an educated guess that a recycling business has figured out how to make it economical at scale.

For each element, I believe there is a combination of electrolysis, electrowinning, leaching and other hydrometallurgical and refining processes that is used to refine from ore into a pure state.

In the article, lithium is extracted from the recycled cell materials. Relatively cheap lithium can be extracted because it occupies position #3 in the periodic table and has very different chemical properties than most of the other elements. According to the article, the expensive elements, occupying positions #24 through #30 in the periodic table, are left together in the black mass and re-sold.

Separating elements #24 through #30 is not yet easy and economical. The central challenges are: A. The elements are all adjacent to one another in the periodic table B. The finished outputs must be extremely pure in order to be suitable for use in battery materials C. Centuries of advancement in mining, metallurgical and process research and development focuses (mostly) on how to get (mostly) pure elements from ores

That's not to say we won't get there. I just think that opening a cell grinding and breakdown facility isn't a particularly large step in the right direction. I actually think it may be a step in the wrong direction, and that cell processing facilities should perhaps be focusing on complexity at the cell disassembly level, processing individual cells to mechanically separate elements, given that cells enter recycling facilities as attached/assembled but relatively nicely separated casings, cathode and anode foils, and cathode and anode powders.

If there are large subsequent advancements in chemical refining processes for separating elements #24 through #30, my above assessments will be proven wrong.

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