Jan 29, 2024 06:27 PM
https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2400520121
EXCERPTS: The upswing in EV sales means a flood of used batteries in the coming years. What's the best way to minimize their environmental impact and reuse precious minerals?
[...] it’s quite possible that neither conventional hydrometallurgy nor pyrometallurgy will solve the recycling conundrum. “When you look only at those two processes, you only get an incremental improvement—no game-changers,” says chemical engineer Jeffrey Spangenberger at Argonne National Laboratory, in Chicago. What’s needed, says Guo, is an environmentally friendly, closed-loop system—a series of steps that can reuse materials and mine nearly all the metal, of all types, from old batteries without producing new troublesome waste streams. The potential benefits of closed-loop recycling include zero emissions of carbon dioxide and nitrogen oxides, benefiting both the climate and air quality.
Materials scientist Eric Gratz, who helped start Ascend Elements in Westborough, Massachusetts, says his company’s approach achieves those objectives. It’s called direct precursor synthesis, and he describes it as a modified hydrometallurgical process...
[...] A third method, often called direct recycling, involves rejuvenating spent electrodes by replenishing the lithium ions from used batteries, without resorting to caustic acids at all...
[...] But it’s too early to know whether it will catch on, Belharouak says. There are issues to resolve, including guaranteeing the quality of the recovered materials, to convince battery makers to use them. “At the end of the day, it’s all about performance”, he says, "and if a manufacturer finds that my recycled material doesn’t give the same performance, they may not go with it.”
To help overcome these challenges, the US Department of Energy launched the ReCell Center, based at Argonne National Laboratory, in February 2019. It focuses on research and development that could lead to the kind of closed-loop system that Spangenberger and others envision. Direct recycling is its main focus...
[...] Researchers point to three things that need to happen to make EV battery recycling efficient and appealing to manufacturers. First, a successful process has to entice EV companies, both by producing batteries that they will actually use and by giving them an incentive to recycle old ones, Spangenberger says. “Working with manufacturers to build batteries that are easier to recycle is a great opportunity to improve recyclability in the future,” he says.
Second, Belharouak says, the technology needs to scale up. In March 2023, Ascend Elements opened a large recycling facility in Covington, Georgia, that, once at full capacity, the company claims will be able to handle batteries from 70,000 EVs every year. But, to meet demand, every state would need its own comparable factory, he says. Four million EVs were sold in 2021 alone.
Finally, experts agree that recycling considerations must drive the design of future batteries. As an example, consider the LIB found in the 2017 Toyota Prius Prime, which has a battery pack consisting of five modules, each with 19 connected cells. The cells are the smallest individual component. Right now, if one cell in a heavy Prius battery pack goes bad, the repair usually involves replacing the whole battery. A more recycling-friendly design would allow the removal of the defective cell, or at least the module, without losing the entire pack.
As warranties expire on EVs, batteries will begin to pile up—slowly at first, then likely in a rush, not unlike the rollout of EVs in the last decade or so. Gratz, at Ascend Elements, thinks that the long lifetimes of today’s EV batteries will give chemists and companies plenty of time—even decades—to come up with ways to scale up the technology... (MORE - missing details)
EXCERPTS: The upswing in EV sales means a flood of used batteries in the coming years. What's the best way to minimize their environmental impact and reuse precious minerals?
[...] it’s quite possible that neither conventional hydrometallurgy nor pyrometallurgy will solve the recycling conundrum. “When you look only at those two processes, you only get an incremental improvement—no game-changers,” says chemical engineer Jeffrey Spangenberger at Argonne National Laboratory, in Chicago. What’s needed, says Guo, is an environmentally friendly, closed-loop system—a series of steps that can reuse materials and mine nearly all the metal, of all types, from old batteries without producing new troublesome waste streams. The potential benefits of closed-loop recycling include zero emissions of carbon dioxide and nitrogen oxides, benefiting both the climate and air quality.
Materials scientist Eric Gratz, who helped start Ascend Elements in Westborough, Massachusetts, says his company’s approach achieves those objectives. It’s called direct precursor synthesis, and he describes it as a modified hydrometallurgical process...
[...] A third method, often called direct recycling, involves rejuvenating spent electrodes by replenishing the lithium ions from used batteries, without resorting to caustic acids at all...
[...] But it’s too early to know whether it will catch on, Belharouak says. There are issues to resolve, including guaranteeing the quality of the recovered materials, to convince battery makers to use them. “At the end of the day, it’s all about performance”, he says, "and if a manufacturer finds that my recycled material doesn’t give the same performance, they may not go with it.”
To help overcome these challenges, the US Department of Energy launched the ReCell Center, based at Argonne National Laboratory, in February 2019. It focuses on research and development that could lead to the kind of closed-loop system that Spangenberger and others envision. Direct recycling is its main focus...
[...] Researchers point to three things that need to happen to make EV battery recycling efficient and appealing to manufacturers. First, a successful process has to entice EV companies, both by producing batteries that they will actually use and by giving them an incentive to recycle old ones, Spangenberger says. “Working with manufacturers to build batteries that are easier to recycle is a great opportunity to improve recyclability in the future,” he says.
Second, Belharouak says, the technology needs to scale up. In March 2023, Ascend Elements opened a large recycling facility in Covington, Georgia, that, once at full capacity, the company claims will be able to handle batteries from 70,000 EVs every year. But, to meet demand, every state would need its own comparable factory, he says. Four million EVs were sold in 2021 alone.
Finally, experts agree that recycling considerations must drive the design of future batteries. As an example, consider the LIB found in the 2017 Toyota Prius Prime, which has a battery pack consisting of five modules, each with 19 connected cells. The cells are the smallest individual component. Right now, if one cell in a heavy Prius battery pack goes bad, the repair usually involves replacing the whole battery. A more recycling-friendly design would allow the removal of the defective cell, or at least the module, without losing the entire pack.
As warranties expire on EVs, batteries will begin to pile up—slowly at first, then likely in a rush, not unlike the rollout of EVs in the last decade or so. Gratz, at Ascend Elements, thinks that the long lifetimes of today’s EV batteries will give chemists and companies plenty of time—even decades—to come up with ways to scale up the technology... (MORE - missing details)
