Efficient recovery and recycling of cobalt from spent lithium-ion batteries
pubs.acs.org
pubs.acs.org
The percentage of cobalt in modern lithium ion batteries (ie: tesla/panasonic's nmc-811 cells) is only 8% of the battery material. It's almost entirely Nickel now (72%) with traces of manganese (8%) and cobalt (9%). Even the lithium percentage is down to ~11%.
I was under the impression that the biggest issue right now was scaling up recycling facilities and recycling pathways back to those facilities so that they can handle the huge influx of batteries anticipated in the next 3-4 years. I don't think recovering 97% vs 95% of 8% of the material is going to change the economics of battery recyling.
The more interesting breakthroughs seem to be low-temperature, safe-chemical extraction. Let's not forget the advancements in cell composition that will lead to longer lifespans (2-3x higher cycle counts) - which not only reduces the waste from battery packs but also that from devices that use them.
Not yet but as more and more EVs reach end of life and these rare earth metals become rarer then it starts make a difference.
A: Four. Calling a tail a leg doesn't make it one.
One sometimes sees the nonsense you are describing there in attempts to smear PV as dirty because it "uses rare earth elements", with a pointer toward dirty REE processing in China. PV does not use the actual REEs; this smear exploits the terminological slovenliness being engaged in here.
I don't believe any honest person in industry would use "rare earth element" to refer to nickel or cobalt.
The question should be whether you were genuinely confused about what the upthread commenter meant by using "these rare earth metals" to refer to battery reactants. You were not. You were just being a pedant. Now you're heaping onto the mistake by (1) calling the upthread comment "nonsense", (2) calling me "dishonest", (3) calling the discussion a "smear", and "slovenly".
Good grief. Can you really just not? There are ways to have this discussion without flinging poo...
"Slovenly" is a precise description of the problem here, up to and including the moral component of that word. "Smear" is also accurate in what I was referring to there: these were clear bad faith attempts to disseminate a falsehood about PV. Your own use was not called a smear, you may just be the kind of useful fool the smear depended on.
https://www.cobaltinstitute.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/06/P...
I’m not very familiar with the ellconomics of recycling, but I doubt that this process to recover an additional 2% will be cost effective.
Considering spot prices for cobalt are dropping quickly and are now back to pre-2019 levels... not sure it makes sense to invest heavily in this.
Do they keep a huge deposit of these tailings hoping for it to be profitable some day?
BTW referring to it as “huge deposits” is likely exaggerating. There are currently only a small number of battery packs that have failed to the point of being processed. Even with larger number of EVs, the number will climb slowly and will probably never be enough to produce huge slag deposits.
Dump it in the nearest river.
I think you're focusing on the wrong part of the headline.
> ... with common chemicals.
Seems much more important to the economics than, as you said, the slight uptick in recovery.
We could reach almost steady state of battery materials eventually with more and better battery recycling. I wonder when that might be expected? 30 years for EVs to go through the car fleet and replace all other cars, then most battery materials can come from recycling? However there will likely be different minerals in new battery tech over time, will solid state batteries be as recyclable?
In the end people will buy EVs because they are cheaper and better. Governments are just trying to set goals and promote action against climate change.
>In the end people will buy EVs because they are cheaper and better.
I'm hoping people switch from EVs to public transit. Personally, I'm more interested in how the government can expand public transit in general so that the need for EV cars is eliminated or substantially reduced in the first place.
I can see your preference for public transport, but it's already heavily subsidised and only used by a minority of people in most places. Subsidies for EVs, which aim to reduce emissions from cars, which are extremely popular, seems quite equitable.
I don't think further subsidy of public transport is going to materially increase its use, it has to improve beyond incremental availability. As I said automated vehicles are a much more promising avenue for drastically increasing public transport use.
I live in London, UK. We have lots of public transport. About half of my journeys can be done via public transport, about half of them can't.
By can't, I mean that they are significantly slower, would require taxis on one or both ends, or simply are not possible due to one end being semi rural or rural.
The half that can't represent far more mileage, emissions, etc. They also frankly are most if not all of the fun ones.
Public transport works if you live a solely metropolitan life. If you do anything else, it just doesn't scale at all.
This is of course ignoring the fact that in my own car I don't have to experience feral beings.
https://www.centreforcities.org/case-study-library/case-stud...
Why is car different? I love train and tram (not so much bus) and would love to see them doing well, but I understand why people love car, and not only in less dense countries. Do you know that car ownership in Netherlands is on the rise? [0]. One of the reasons cited being people preferring cars as they get older.
If you want to advocate for public transportation, make sure you understand why people love cars, and strive to make public transportation suck less, primarily with flexible schedule, quicker, and more readily available.
[0] - https://www.researchgate.net/publication/358798695_The_wides...
This is just false. T shirts and shoes do not cause the same level of harm to the environment as manufacturing a car. It seems to me you don't understand what goes into mining, refining, processing all of the parts that go into making a car. You also don't seem to understand how progress happens - incrementally - by tackling the big-ticket items first. Good luck with your anti-public transport argument, you haven't convinced me.
You chose to shame people who don't share your opinions instead. Pity.
Do you know what else is idle during most of the day? All the vehicles used for public transport or worse, they drive around empty. I'm a big fan of good public transport and were I live it is fairly good and I use it a lot, but it is not even near as good as would be using my own car - I have to normally double or even triple my commute time when I use public transport. I can afford it (for common good) as I'm working normally from home but if I had to do it daily then it would become unbearable.
>If you make all the fancy CEOs to use public transport then I'm in.
Why would anyone (CEO or otherwise) not prefer a comfortable, safe and clean public transit option? Also, If I was a CEO I'd be supporting expansion of public transit to include my business locations. Making commuting easier/cheaper to work is a great way to attract talent. I don't have a public transit option where I live, and I would love to get on a comfy bus or light-rail each morning and bang out some emails on my way to work. It seems to me that you don't seem to fundamentally believe public transit can be improved, or maybe you're not sure how it can be. It most certainly can be improved, and cities have shown how it can be done in their own microcosm.
And this is probably where the 'should' meets reality as it were primarily, because public transit in most metros is 2 out of 3 at best. I am being generous and I use Chicago's Metra every so often.
Most leaching processes produce toxic waste, often very large quantities of toxic waste. It's usually soluble in water, so plants have big leachate ponds, where the water evaporates, leaving behind some kind of sludge. The question here is, can this new leachate really be recycled effectively, or is there a sludge-disposal problem?
This is probably a solveable problem, because recycling batteries starts with a very rich resource. It's processes which extract from low-grade ores that yield giant dumps of leftover crud. Gold and rare earth extraction are notorious for this.
Then they get a mixture of the annode and cathode + any electrolyte solution.
My understanding is that the anode and cathode are separated into separate containers....and who knows what the electrolyte solution is doing....its probably stuck in both piles or burnt off
Worth pointing out that with LFP batteries, it's actually zero percent. There are a few more cobalt free battery chemistries. But this is so far the most popular one with a rapidly growing market share that is closing in on 40% of the market. Lots of Teslas and other vehicles use them. There are a few more cobalt free battery chemistries of course. Sodium ion is getting some usage in China lately and does not involve cobalt, for example. And some of the solid state batteries don't use it either.
Cobalt isn't actually controversial because it's rare but because the way some of it is mined in Congo (i.e. with children). Most of it is actually fine and mined in a more humane way. Using children is not a hard requirement. And as the article points out recycling it is pretty doable too. And it's not all that rare either. It's by no means a rare earth.
And never mind about the other things children mine. Like copper, coal, diamonds, gold, etc. Or the fact that a lot of cobalt is also used in other industries. Like the oil refining industry, for example. Cobalt is somehow only controversial in the context of batteries. Any other form of cobalt usage is apparently not worth reporting on, scrutinizing, etc.
A lot of crocodile tears get shed over the poor children in the Congo. But only when it concerns batteries for EVs. I wonder why that is (rhetorical question with some obvious answers, I know) and whether those people actually really care. Because they sure are being awfully selective with their outrage.
4% of global cobalt use is used by refineries. 62% of global cobalt use is for EVs, and growing.
[1] https://www.perplexity.ai/search/How-much-cobalt-5scBTFEHRym...
[2] https://www.perplexity.ai/search/How-much-cobalt-5scBTFEHRym...
Note that the links you provided are not primary sources. They rely on this one tweet as the primary source. https://twitter.com/siddharthkara/status/1612587425087524864
Because of it's relative uselessness and worthlessness, cobalt mines were shutdown. It's only semi-recently that there's been talks of turning the lights back on. Like in this mine [1]
Some people did genuinely care before, but we are really talking about the current anti-EV movement and their list of “Bingo” talking points.
When you point out alternative battery chemistries that don’t use cobalt as a viable alternative to both NMC EVs and ICE vehicles, they move on to some other anti-EV talking point they’ve been taught. My point still stands. It was never about the cobalt.
Seems a bit complex for an issue as simple as you can extract cobalt from spent batteries literally with human pee and white vinegar as a solvent.
Another fun one is how whenever you talk about BEVs, there's all the sudden someone that lives in the arctic circle that has a 12 hour commute (Not hyperbole, I actually saw someone make this claim in an argument). It isn't good enough to say "Well then perhaps BEVs aren't for you" instead "The technology isn't there and nobody can use them".
It's just astroturfing or people trying to win a culture war.
FWIW, waiting on sidelines for some of this stuff to mature ( oddly, I am not talking about range, but about the incessant subscription push.. that trend has to die ).
Norway is the only country with a 100% new car mandate before 2030, and they are already 87% EV’s so it’s hardly a major change for them.
Citation needed.
Oh well this eases all my concerns—let's continue to look the other way, consume blindly, and pretend like this isn't a new low for the barbarism of the west.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tantalum#Status_as_a_conflict_...
I.e. the thing that's been going into most electronics manufactured in the last two decades.
74% of the world's cobalt is extracted from the Democratic Republic of the Congo (not to be confused with the Republic of the Congo)[0]. Not to diminish the horrors of using children to mine, but that's hardly the only problem—this neglects the absolutely inhumane working conditions and violent conflict between dozens of armed groups vying for control of the mines, chief among them the state's military itself. The mad rush for cobalt has certainly exacerbated this conflict[1] and led to one of the world's worst humanitarian crises in modern times. Even if you were to somehow magically vanish the children from the mines it would still be one of the worst situations on earth to be born into. I don't appreciate this attempt to trivialize the cost of the west's voracious demand for the mineral and it's extremely difficult to imagine the above comment being made in good faith.
[0]: https://www.npr.org/sections/goatsandsoda/2023/02/01/1152893...
[1]: https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2024/2/21/a-guide-to-the-deca...
Big money is trying as hard as possible to convince people not to buy EVs, and "The batteries are not recyclable" is just another wonky arrow in their bent quiver of fear, uncertainty and doubt.
In fact, there are huge EV battery recycling plants in the US, operating right now:
https://www.canarymedia.com/articles/recycling-renewables/th...
Tesla uses Panasonic's NCA-9 mostly for North America; LG's NCM811 for Europe/China. Recycling nickel-based batteries are already profitable[1].
[1] Financial viability of electric vehicle lithium-ion battery recyclingVolume 24, Issue 7, 23 July 2021, 102787, Journal home page for iScience
Despite being a specific domain, wouldn’t reasoning about reactions (and their efficiency in an industrial, large-scale setting) be something that "models" should be able to do quite "easily" (given the fact that bonding forces, energy requirements and catalytic effects are sort of well-known, i.e. just some more dimensions to deal with)?
The vast majority of chemical reactions involve changes in electronic configuration that are only described by quantum mechanics. The most accurate algorithmic approximations of electron quantum mechanics have terrible scaling properties - O(N^7) or worse. Due to that terrible scaling, the largest high-accuracy calculations that are tractable now are not that much larger than those that could be completed in the 1990s, despite much greater processing power.
There are other ways of approximating quantum effects in chemistry that scale better, but they all have tradeoffs and weaknesses of their own. They can used in limited domains or used to guide experimental design, but they're not accurate enough to discover useful reactions via pure calculation. They need to work in tandem with experimental validation and it requires domain experts in both the experimental and theoretical work. The methods are not simple enough for a bench chemist to use them as a black box for reaction discovery.
Screening through reactions in the real world is particularly hard, since you not only need to worry about the inaccuracy of your simulation method, but you also need to take solvent/environment effects into account. You need to trade off even more accuracy for speed if you want to do so. As computing power advances, there will be less pressure to make these tradeoffs, but a lot of work in comp chem at the moment is focused on either exploring or expanding the speed-accuracy frontier.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transition_path_sampling
[1] https://people.chem.ucsb.edu/kahn/kalju/chem126/public/qm_ts...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ab_initio_quantum_chemistry_me...
Thanks for the angle!
Does it mean it can work on intermittent electricity? (Cheapest renewable is intermittent)
BTW, the N-methylurea used in this is extremely mutagenic in humans.
https://www.solarpaces.org/solar-pyrolysis-to-recycle-lithiu...
https://www.thecooldown.com/green-tech/ev-battery-recycling-...
It would have been more accurate to say "using ingredients commonly found in urine", but that is more words that can be used in an HN title even though that is the entire point of the post.
Plastic is trivial to recycle but it’s cheaper to buy new plastic than to buy recycled plastic.
https://www.npr.org/2023/12/14/1219246964/cobalt-is-importan...