Half Used Battery Can Be Used Again

From scooters to motorcycles, sportscars, school buses, trucks, trains, and fifty-fifty planes, it seems nosotros are entering the era of electrified mobility.  This has been due in big part to the rapidly falling costs and improving performance of lithium-ion batteries. Amend batteries are enabling an increasingly wide assortment of electric personal, calorie-free, and heavy-duty vehicle technologies. The growth in deployments of lithium batteries will inevitably create a large flow of retired or used batteries.  By 2030, analysts predict that retirements could exceed one-half a million vehicles annually or over 2 million metric tonnes of batteries per year.

Electric vehicles (EVs) are nevertheless a small part of the vehicle market and the few retired EV batteries coming out of vehicles are being tested in a range of pilot-scale applications or simply stored while engineering science or infrastructure for recycling improves.  While the majority of consumer electronic wastes accept historically been destined for the landfill, lithium batteries contain valuable metals and other materials that can be recovered, processed, and reused to make more than batteries.

There are many promising strategies for recycling lithium-ion batteries (LIB) , but there are also technical, economical, logistic, and regulatory barriers to resolve. Equally the Hitz Climate Fellow for the Union of Concerned Scientists, I'll be taking a wait at some of the challenges and opportunities for battery reuse and recycling over the next year. This is a quick overview of the current state of battery recycling which highlights opportunities to shut the loop on battery materials and create a sustainable value concatenation for lithium batteries.

The finish of life?

When an electric vehicle comes off the road, either from accident or age, bombardment systems will need to be processed. After primary use in a vehicle, potential end of life pathways for used electric vehicle batteries include reuse, or repurposing ("2nd life"), materials recovery (recycling), and disposal. Regardless of whether batteries are reused, they will eventually need to be recycled or disposed. Understanding the opportunities and barriers to recycling is critical to reduce environmental impacts from improper disposal, and to account for benefits from recovered materials and avoided mining of virgin resources.

A handful of big-scale facilities recycle lithium batteries today using pyrometallurgical, or smelting, processes. These plants employ high temperatures (~1500^oC) to burn off impurities and recover cobalt, nickel, and copper.  Lithium and aluminum are generally lost in this processes, jump in waste referred to as slag. Some lithium can be recovered from slag using secondary processes.  Today's smelting facilities are expensive and energy intensive, in role due to the demand to treat toxic fluorine emissions, and accept relatively low rates of material recovery.

According to the The states Avant-garde Battery Consortium standards, an EV bombardment reaches the end of its usable life when its electric current prison cell chapters is less than fourscore% of the rated capacity. Merely there are still a lot of unknowns as to when EV batteries volition be retired.  For case, the average vehicle is on the road in the United states for more than 12 years; mod EVs with large lithium-ion bombardment packs have been on the marketplace for less than viii years, with over fifty% of sales occurring in the last two years.

A second-life for batteries

A second-life awarding for used batteries is an appealing opportunity for battery and vehicle manufacturers to make EVs more than affordable and potentially generate more than profit. Reuse as well extends the lifetime of batteries, and potentially displaces some new batteries from stationary applications, all of which reduces the overall impacts of battery product.

In some cases, batteries could be refurbished for use directly in another vehicle, potentially extending the useful life of many vehicle systems. And then when a battery pack dies prematurely, functioning modules and cells can often exist recombined to create refurbished bombardment packs for other vehicles.

300 kWh 2nd-life EV battery storage projection at University of California Davis

Given the big size and high operation of modern vehicle batteries, retired batteries could still offer significant capacity after being retired from employ in a vehicle. As batteries are charged and discharged, their performance degrades. Deposition results in is less stored free energy existence accessible for powering the vehicle; in other words, the vehicle won't drive equally far on a single charge. But in less demanding applications, EV batteries might go a second-life.  While the high-power demands of a vehicle render stored energy inaccessible, batteries might be able to serve an additional six to ten years in a lower-ability, stationary application storing energy from solar panels to exist used in off-grid or tiptop demand-shaving applications.

One key bulwark for reuse has been the continually improving economic science and functioning of new batteries.  The price of new batteries cruel over an order of magnitude while performance has improved, effectively pricing out used batteries from some applications.  The integrated construction and blueprint of current battery packs and proprietary direction software also limit component replacement and increase the costs of testing and repurposing.

Closing the loop

Regardless of whether batteries are reused, recycling and material recovery will eventually be required.  Recovering the materials in LIBs decreases the need for new raw materials, lowers the battery's life-cycle bear on and improves energy security by reducing imports.  The majority of recycling research and interest focuses on the bombardment cathode, which contains the highest value constituent minerals.

At that place are three general stages to battery recycling. The first stage is pretreatment, which primarily consists of mechanical shredding and sorting out plastic fluff and not-ferrous materials.  Secondary treatment tin follow, which involves separating the cathode from the aluminum collector foil with a chemical solvent.  The last step is dissolving the cathode materials through either leaching chemicals (referred to equally hydrometallurgy) or heat and electrolytic reactions (referred to equally pyrometallurgy).

Automation could play an important part in making pretreatment more than efficient and economic by enabling rapid disassembly of the battery into constituent components.  Separation of battery components can yield recovered materials with higher purity and value. Researchers in the United Kingdom are developing robotic procedures for sorting, disassembling, and recovering valuable materials from Li-ion batteries which could eliminate man workers' risk of electrical and chemical injury.

Pyrometallurgical processes for recovering cathode materials generally have larger negative environmental and climate impacts than some hydrometallurgical processes. This is in function due to the energy requirements and need to remove toxic pollutants from exhaust gases.  Subsequently recovery through pyro (heat) or hydro (chemic) metallurgical processes, minerals often demand to be re-refined earlier being resynthesized into a cathode compound and used to brand battery electrodes.

In direct recycling, the cathode compound is kept intact and refunctionalized, yielding a cathode cloth with like if not identical properties to the original chemical compound.  Ane of the highest value components of the battery is the synthesized cathode compound; straight recycling seeks to separate the compound intact, and recombine it with additional lithium (relithiation). Direct recycling offers the opportunity to avoid energy intensive refining and resynthesis of the cathode chemical compound, farther reducing the ecology impacts of battery product.

Recovery of critical minerals

A lithium battery is primarily composed of a short-list of important minerals which could exist recovered and used to make new batteries, thereby lowering manufacturing costs.  The cost of minerals in the bombardment represent nearly one-half the cost of today's lithium batteries. The costs of the three most expensive ingredients in the bombardment cathode (i.e. cobalt, nickel, and lithium) have been highly volatile, fluctuating by as much every bit 300% in a single twelvemonth, despite a >90% reduction in the overall price of EV batteries in the last x years.  Recycling and recovery of the valuable materials besides reduces the potential quantity of material going to landfill from material scrap.

The recipe of transition metals in the battery cathode influence characteristics such as the energy density, ability density, cycle life, safety and cost of batteries.  The choice of cathode chemical compound besides influences the economics of recycling, as the value of the recovered materials may not be sufficient to cover the costs of expensive recycling processes.  Cobalt is the well-nigh valuable component of the cathode alloy; reducing the cobalt content, as is the tendency in battery technology, reduces the cost of production, just besides reduces the incentive for recycling.

Recycling could decrease reliance on new mining, slow depletion of virgin materials, and reduce impacts on vulnerable populations along the value chain for batteries.  For example, more than than lx% of the world's cobalt supply comes from Autonomous Republic of Congo and is tied to armed disharmonize, illegal mining, human rights abuses, and harmful ecology practices. Recycling batteries and reformulating cathodes with a reduced concentration of cobalt could help lower dependence on foreign sources and raise the security of the supply chain.

Materials recovered from recycled batteries could exist an important and environmentally preferable source of material supply for hereafter batteries.  Research has shown that optimal cathode recycling has the potential to be assisting, given a sufficient ratio of material content to material value. Peradventure more importantly, recycling could provide cost competitive and potentially environmentally preferable alternatives to production of cathode compounds from virgin materials.

Policy for sustainable batteries

There are clear reasons to pursue policies to promote safe and equitable disposal practices. The impacts of global flows of consumer electronics wastes offer 1 cautionary tale. Collection, logistics, data sharing, standardization, and investment in infrastructure are all probable to be barriers for creating a sustainable and circular organization of bombardment production and recycling

Endmost the loop on battery materials by recycling EV batteries is a critical step towards edifice better batteries.  California is currently working to develop policies to ensure that 100% of electric vehicle batteries sold in the state are recycled or reused at their end of life.  Policy mechanisms like standards for labelling and data interface, extended producer responsibleness, responsible sourcing, and deposit or core charge could help to alleviate some of the cardinal barriers listed above.

Development of a domestic supply chain for electric vehicle batteries, including secondary product of battery materials, could have important economic, ecology, and social impacts. Demand for battery manufacturing is growing speedily, and recycling is likely to play a key role in the nearly trillion dollar market for lithium batteries and battery materials. Policy is going to play a central role in ensuring environmental sustainability and equity guide and inform the citing, blueprint, and evolution of manufacturing and recycling facilities.

Incertitude on the fate of used electric vehicle batteries is often cited as a claiming to future vehicle electrification efforts, but some concerns are non ever supported by the facts. Batteries tin be recycled economically with technologies available today. Futurity systems could farther reduce pollution, climate emissions, and finite resources depletion associated with the battery life bicycle.

In this fellowship, I am investigating the opportunities and challenges for recycling and reuse of electric vehicle batteries.  I am hoping to amend understand and quantify the impacts of battery deployments and retirements on need for critical minerals, the potential for second-life storage, and the infrastructure required to recycle batteries.  As office of the fellowship, I will also exist posting a series of blogs on batteries which digs deeper into many of these issues. Stay tuned.

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Source: https://blog.ucsusa.org/hanjiro-ambrose/a-quick-guide-to-battery-reuse-and-recycling/

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