Lithium is a valuable resource. EV batteries have lots of it. Therefore EV batteries are valuable even after they stop working.
Lithium is valuable because extracting it from naturally occurring salt deposits is a lot of work. These salt deposits are mostly not Lithium. We are talking trace amounts here. To extract it, you have to process vast amounts of brine. Boil of the water, separate it from other materials, etc. That's a lot of work and energy. Recycling a battery with high concentrations of Lithium is probably a lot less work. For that reason, lithium is a lot more expensive than other materials.
Melting old ice cars to recover the steel is already a thing. The steel has a value. All you need to do is melt it and reuse it. So, we already have existing practices for recycling old vehicles and companies specializing in that. The only thing that changes is that those companies will be dealing with very valuable batteries as well. Lithium is of course quite a bit more lucrative than steel. If it works for steel, it's going to work a lot better for lithium. Because it has a lot more value.
> Lithium is a valuable resource. EV batteries have lots of it. Therefore EV batteries are valuable even after they stop working.
A Tesla battery weighs about 500 kg and has about 10kg of Lithium (2%). The Lithium is worth about $130, whereas the battery costs more than $10,000. It's difficult to extract the trace elements of lithium from the thousands of individual cells honeycombed together in the battery, so there is no known way of getting at that Lithium via processes that are even comparable to the value of the lithium recovered. That's why no one does it.
A car, on the other hand, is 55% steel by weight, and there are relatively straightforward ways of getting that steel (no, the car is not "melted down". The steel components are melted after they are removed from the car). That's why steel in cars is recycled but Lithium in batteries is not.
The issue with recycling is the cost of extraction -- yes, catalytic convertors and old computers contain trace elements like platinum (maybe $2 per catalytic convertor) but extracting it is far too expensive. So merely the presence of an expensive element in a manufactured good does not mean it is economic to extract the element. In the vast majority of situations, it's not.
> yes, catalytic convertors and old computers contain trace elements like platinum (maybe $2 per catalytic convertor) but extracting it is far too expensive.
Catalytic converters can be worth $100s as scrap. They’re regularly stolen from parked cars.
Right, but not for the platinum, which is worth only about $2. Similarly, I'm not saying no that no one will find a way to get scrap value out of a used $10,000 battery, but it's not going to be for the $130 of lithium inside it.
I agree with you on the lithium - it is far too abundant. It seems that most of the value in a catalytic converter is in the palladium and rhodium, though the platinum is worth something too. Catalytic converter chemistries vary a lot too, with some omitting platinum and some omitting palladium.
Globally, the catalytic converter industry uses about 112 tons or platinum, 170 tons of palladium, and 21 tons of rhodium per year. And an individual catalytic converter uses 1-2g for a small car up to 12-15g in a big truck. (Elsewhere I've seen 3-7g as an average for a US catalytic converter.)
So from what I can tell, an average catalytic converter contains about 5g of PGM's which works out at:
1.85g of platinum at $40/g = $74
2.80g of palladium at $95/g = $361
0.35g of rhodium at $900/g = $315
The Washington post reports that catalytic converter thefts are largely driven by the rhodium they contain (the price of which has gone up enormously because it is a byproduct of platinum mining and platinum itself is not currently worth mining.)
FWIW: the metal components of lithium batteries (especially cobalt) tend to be the economically limiting resources, not the lithium itself. But the point is valid: batteries are indeed harder to recycle than bulk steel, but relative to the cost of extracting new materials recycling is far more effective economically.
Also: it's not like EVs don't have steel chassis. It's (very roughly) the engine block and transmission mass that gets replaced by a battery. Once you remove that battery, the vehicles recycle identically. The only question is about how effective battery recycling is or can be (and it's pretty good already!)
It actually is that many vehicles don't have a steel chassis. The Model Y for instance has an aluminum chassis to save weight. There even other materials such as Carbon Fiber used in some high end vehicle.
The rear underbody of the Y is aluminum but it still has a steel chassis. Aluminum can never fully replace steel because it lacks the strength and rigidity.
Regardless, aluminum is expensive to extract and refine, requiring a tremendous amount of energy. In terms of cost, on average aluminum is more expensive than steel.
None of what you said contradicts what you quoted. Steel is a stronger material than aluminum, the trade offs are that it's harder to form and weights more.
The vast majority of current lithium supply comes from hard rock mining, not brines. Brines were about half of lithium supply ten years ago but as the industry took off the amount of hard rock mining in Australia has radically expanded (by 500%).
An EV battery pack does not contain a spectacularly high concentration of lithium. A state-of-the-art battery pack might by 2% lithium. That's higher than subsurface brines, but not miraculously high. Brine mining also throws off lots of valuable products other than lithium. You can get potash, boron, magnesium, and other valuable ores from the same brine, so it can be hard for recycling to compete economically.
Ten year ago brines were about all of lithium supply, but now they're about half. The byproducts of lithium extraction from brine are profitable, but not enough to make a big difference to the bottom line of the mining operation.
2% is "miraculously high" if subsurface brines are your reference point, because they're usually around 0.05% and almost never as high as 0.2%. It's an orders-of-magnitude difference.
Lithium costs on the order of US$10k per tonne. Potash is about US$800, boron around US$400, and magnesium around US$2000. All of these are mostly extracted from brines.
Matter cannot be created nor destroyed. And elemental conversion is a big deal - usually involving nuclear fission or fusion.
Batteries do become depleted but the lithium never disappears, I guess simply put a reverse potential is no longer able to reverse the battery equation back to the energy storing state. Presumably because there is some third reservoir state that a potential cannot reverse (without delving into the chemistry).
Don't be mistaken into thinking that because a charger cannot reverse the battery reaction that the lithium itself is gone, or that there does not exist some completely unrelated process that can recover the lithium - separate from the immediate battery ecosystem
E=mc^2 doesn't really say that matter can be converted to energy, just that energy has mass.
For example, a fission/fusion reaction doesn't make matter go away, but the amount of energy released is large enough to be measured as a loss of mass. When you discharge a battery, it also loses mass, but the amount is too small to notice.
Close, the typical problem is that the cation of the lithium compound used in the cathode (LiFePO4, LiCoO2, etc) becomes oxidized or otherwise degraded in a way that the electrochemical reaction can't reverse. In an LiFePO4 battery, you might get some iron oxide. In a traditional lead and sulfuric acid battery, you get lead sulfate crystals. There's typically the exact same amount of lithium present (it doesn't become gaseous and float away) but its constituent elements are unavailable for electrochem.
The most common failure mode is actually dendrites growing off the cathode and puncturing the thin layers of the cylindrical battery. Typically these are cobalt or iron, depending on the chemistry.
Note that I'm discussing failure of a cell, not slow degradation in its ability to hold a charge, which has a variety of causes including the one you sketched out.
Outside of nuclear reactions, elements are not created or destroyed.
What happens in old batteries is the physical structure of the lithium metal is damaged so it does not function as well as a battery, but you can separate out the lithium from the old battery, melt it down and reform it into a new battery (or whatever else you want to do with lithium.)
You said, "the physical structure of the lithium metal". There is no such physical structure of a bunch of ions floating around in an electrolyte and intercalating themselves into electrodes.
The atoms never leave the battery. There is no exhaust. It just works less well because it crystalizes in the wrong form. Which is a process that is trivially reversed.
I think they mean trivial compared to processing raw ore. The general assumption is that you are seeing the normal delay effects or inertia of the economy. Capital is already invested in mining and ore processing. Recycling needs to appear economically worthwhile for a long enough period for investors to grow interested and take the plunge in this new direction.
Note, I am neither a battery nor recycling expert here, but am somewhat interested in dragging unstated arguments to the surface!
I think proponents of this economic view of recycling often argue that you could mechanically shred/grind such post-consumer products into a big mess and think of it as a new type of high-density ore. It might take different refining stages, but they seem to have faith that industrial processing can be invented for these materials and that it ought to be less energy intensive than processing the very low density ores found in nature.
That whole article is about how even with zero-cost energy it would still be double the expense of fossil fuels. Nobody doubts that you can make liquid fuels from solar energy and atmospheric CO2 … that is a plant’s life. The problem is it’s hilariously inefficient.
As I understand it, lithium crystals form inside the battery and eventually short the battery out.
The lithium moves between the anode and cathode to release/store energy. I think when it's locked up in a crystal it isn't free to move and reduces the battery capacity as well.
Lithium is lithium. Idk anything about lithium batteries, but presuming they use some kind if lithium salt compound or something, it's going to be a hell of a lot easier to re-saltify it or otherwise rebuild the useful compound, than it is to try and recreate big bang conditions to make more lithium.
18 days ago, I posted https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26952544, "This battery waste problem has an epistemological status similar to that of dowsing and witchcraft." This article seems to vindicate the viewpoint I expressed in the comments there: electric vehicle waste can only pose a significant pollution problem if capitalism is somehow prevented from profiting from it. (There are problems that capitalism makes worse, but this is the kind of problem that capitalism is good at solving.)
However, the reporters have acquired considerably more knowledge of the issues than I had.
At that point I looked a bit into the hydrometallurgical processes that were available, enough to convince myself that there were no showstopper problems that would make recycling battery waste uneconomical. But I didn't know about the pyrometallurgical processes at all, and I found that aspect of the article very interesting. Nor did I know about the current business situation.
You're arguing past one another. The parent's working assumption is that concentrated lithium is much cheaper to harvest than trace lithium in natural deposits.
You seem to be assuming that it is cheaper to mine trace minerals than harvest from existing batteries.
Absent any domain knowledge regarding the cost of these two sources of lithium, neither of you can presume to be correct.
The only fundamental thing here is that, absent any external pressure, in a capitalistic system, we will see suppliers of lithium prefer the source that is cheaper for them to utilize.
In my comment, I said, "At that point I looked a bit into the hydrometallurgical processes that were available, enough to convince myself that there were no showstopper problems that would make recycling battery waste uneconomical." That seems to be the "domain knowledge" you're referring to? So I didn't presume I was correct; I investigated and found out what was correct.
This article has much better domain knowledge than what I was able to dig up at the time, though.
I don't think we're arguing past one another at all. The central point of my comment was that people often made the error that crazygringo made; I explained why it was an error. Then, crazygringo responded, reiterating the error. I think my comment was rather precisely targeted at his comment, even though I made it earlier.
Yes, in many cases polluting is profitable because the economy doesn't internalize the negative externality of pollution (and Coase's Theorem fails to hold for various reasons). That's part of what I meant by "There are problems that capitalism makes worse."
This is not one of those cases, precisely because (refining from) new raw materials is not cheaper than recycling waste.
You are agreeing with the OP, you know. "somehow prevented" = we put dumb regulations in the way or the entire process of lithium extraction can't be made profitable.
On the contrary. There is a lack of regulations that properly price externalities and make the people profiting from them pay for the shit they pollute.
While this is true in general, in this case recycling the waste is more profitable than discarding it, even without regulations. Of course, you could still produce more pollution during the recycling process, a point touched on in the article.
I would very much like to see where they got their breakdown.
The "electrical vehicles by weight" looks pretty much like Tesla Model S breakdown.
Tesla is alone in choosing aluminium, while the rest of the industry goes with steel.
The engine block is the heaviest part in an ICE vehicle, but it's usually made of grey iron, and not really steel, with German cars some times using silicon-aluminium, or much rarely magnesium alloy.
I don't know how you come to this conclusion, but the engine block in a modern passenger car is definitely not the heaviest part. The engine block itself is often incredibly light, even a V8 made from cast iron would only be a few hundred pounds.
The body (or unibody) of any modern car is far heavier, given that it has so many functions and safety features as part of its design.
Buckminster Fuller Said it quite a few years ago. If Society did not socialize the expense of cleaning up the environment for industry we would be much farther down the road to closed loop manufacturing.
People don’t realise this when they think of landfill.
In future, we could have an effective way of mining landfill for resources. Some forms of recycling now are highly inefficient and it’s conceivable that we’d be better off utilizing landfill and recycling with better techniques later.
Reprocessing gold tailings for old mines with more effective and robust methods has been tried recently. I remember looking into it but IIRC the few examples I found had all folded. I really do hope we do get to the point where we can reprocess almost any solid mass into useable compounds, though.
I think the trick will be if you can extract funding from the public for remediation and make your profit off of the materials recovered from said tailings.
The thing is now you’re rewarding an industry for making a mess in the first place, which is a bad pattern.
When we extract ore from a given area, it's mixed with just a few different compounds. So you tailor various acids and processes to economically filter out just want you need. How do you plan to do this when you have every compound we've ever created with overlapping solubilities and you want pure output?
> When we extract ore from a given area, it's mixed with just a few different compounds.
This is pretty far from the truth. Rock is less chemically complex than living plants, animals, and fungi, it's true; but there's a long distance from "less than hundreds of millions" to "just a few".
The article explains how it's done in the case of lithium-ion batteries.
It is true that to the extent that you can reduce the admixture of other materials, you can reduce the costs.
> How do you plan to do this
The standard mining methods include roasting, oxidation, and reduction (pyrometallurgy); froth flotation; lixiviation; defecation; crushing and grinding (milling or comminution); screening; and agglomeration. More exotic methods, some of which are crucial to one or another method, include vacuum sublimation, electrolysis (molten-salt or aqueous), amalgamation, recrystallization, and fractional distillation. There are also processes that don't fit neatly into one of these categories, such as the Pidgeon process. There's a good outline at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Template:Extractive_metallurgy.
Batteries obviously have a small (-ish) set of possible compounds and it should be economically feasible to recycle used batteries once there is sufficient volume that needs to be recycled. (I guess we're still at least a decade away but that remains to be seen... if it's sufficiently efficient, it could be cheaper to recycle than reuse older batteries).
Yeah, I was saying you can use the same processes for mining trash dumps that you use for mining natural rock. Maybe there are more economically productive techniques specific to mining trash dumps (computer vision with conveyor belts, desoldering electronic components, deshredding correspondence to blackmail politicians with) but the usual rock-processing techniques form a minimal baseline. If you heat anything up enough it becomes rock again. (And gaseous oxides like those of carbon and sulfur.)
The poop fertilized plants, the plants were harvested, some of them were turned into bread, others fed a pig, and that's what you're eating. Some of the poop decayed and was released as gases into the air, which were then recaptured by the plants, by bacteria in the roots of soybeans, and by Haber-Bosch factories (confusingly also called plants) which made synthetic fertilizer to fertilize the plants further.
You are recycling your sandwich, made from poop, into more poop.
This is the reflection on the disgusting nature of food and its link to the interdependent arising of all things. Your existence is inextricably linked to the existence of the pig and the poop. They are not separate processes; they are different focuses in the same process.
"The nitrogen in our DNA, the calcium in our teeth, the iron in our blood, the carbon in our apple pies were made in the interiors of collapsing stars. We are made of star stuff."
—Carl Sagan
FWIW: Sagan was poetic but the intuition turns out to have been wrong. Models are still not super convincing, but supernovae alone aren't enough to explain the abundance of heavy elements. A big chunk of the rare earth nuclei we apply in industry today seem likely to be tiny remnants of neutron stars that were thrown off in a merger event with another neutron star or black hole.
Thanks for bringing this up! I was always curious and decided to research it. The graphic at the top of this Phys article describes the origins of all elements on the periodic table. It claims that only a small number of elements were remnants of neutron stars, however. https://phys.org/news/2020-09-elements-neutron-stars-contrib...
>Half of all the elements that are heavier than iron—such as thorium and uranium—were thought to be made when neutron stars, the superdense remains of burnt-out suns, crashed into one another. Long theorized, neutron star collisions were not confirmed until 2017. Now, however, fresh analysis by Karakas and fellow astronomers Chiaki Kobayashi and Maria Lugaro reveals that the role of neutron stars may have been considerably overestimated—and that another stellar process altogether is responsible for making most of the heavy elements.
(Though the atomic nuclei didn't originate in the poop; they were just passing through. But cobalamin molecules, for example, do originate in poop pretty often.)
HAMLET
Not where he eats, but where he is eaten: a certain
convocation of politic worms are e'en at him. Your
worm is your only emperor for diet: we fat all
creatures else to fat us, and we fat ourselves for
maggots: your fat king and your lean beggar is but
variable service, two dishes, but to one table:
that's the end.
KING CLAUDIUS
Alas, alas!
HAMLET
A man may fish with the worm that hath eat of a
king, and eat of the fish that hath fed of that worm.
KING CLAUDIUS
What dost you mean by this?
HAMLET
Nothing but to show you how a king may go a
progress through the guts of a beggar.
Recycling of old cars is already pretty well developed. You drain the old fluids and strip any parts with secondary market value, then compact the whole thing and tip it whole into a steel melting furnace.
This is from battery life concerns right? If the battery pack lasts around ten years and replacement costs more than the car, it'll get junked, etc.
It seems like battery lifetime may be better than expected (except in arizona, especially if your battery doesn't have sufficient cooling). And there hasn't been a lot of reporting of this happening, I haven't seen many anecdotal reports either. Maybe, it's still too early.
This is a big (underreported) factor in CNG vehicles though, a lot of their fuel tanks are expiring now, and for at least some vehicles, it's not economical to replace the tank, and at least PG&E requires a safety report before authorizing people to use their stations, so that makes a car junk simply because you can't fuel it.
Oh, I don't think that's likely, even if we assume EVs are unconditionally better than ICE for all users, unless ICE use is meaningfully restricted (either because of explicit restrictions from use within important areas, or because the fuel network shrinks and it becomes onerous to refuel), ICE cars in working condition will still have utility and resale value, even if it goes down and even if new sales are all EV.
Given the rate at which these electric arc furnaces convert electricity into heat already, I don't think that a few hundred gigajoule extra from a random battery pack is going to matter all that much.
That makes no sense - even the best case scenarios for EVs will take a decade to get to a significant % of market share - batteries and charging infrastructure isn't there to explode anything, AFAIK all EVs have waiting lists.
As with most places, our municipal recycling system just throws away most of what it receives (but that looks like it is changing soon-ish, maybe). My wife really virtue signals by wanting to recycle everything, and gets annoyed if I throw something that is "recyclable". I just tell her that recycling deprive the future waste miners of their livelihood :)
I joke, but I do believe there will be "waste miners" at some point in the future.
In the post fossil fuel age, the waste stream will be a valuable source of reduced carbon for use in polymers and chemicals, and perhaps in specialized applications where chemical fuels are still needed (like long distance aircraft).
Another raw material source are the catalytic converters [1] of the exhaust system. Thieves are targeting them, and there are "shops" where you can "donate" your converter, get a free emulator instead, and receive money. Which, of course, is bad for environment.
Having researched Tesla battery packs, failure occurs when one cell goes into high resistance state. There is a Company that repairs battery packs by cutting the bad cell out of the circuit. They charge approx $5k to do this. I am guessing that low resistance (shorted) cells take themselves out by blowing their individual fuse. It seems as though addressable fuses could deal with this
Lithium is valuable because extracting it from naturally occurring salt deposits is a lot of work. These salt deposits are mostly not Lithium. We are talking trace amounts here. To extract it, you have to process vast amounts of brine. Boil of the water, separate it from other materials, etc. That's a lot of work and energy. Recycling a battery with high concentrations of Lithium is probably a lot less work. For that reason, lithium is a lot more expensive than other materials.
Melting old ice cars to recover the steel is already a thing. The steel has a value. All you need to do is melt it and reuse it. So, we already have existing practices for recycling old vehicles and companies specializing in that. The only thing that changes is that those companies will be dealing with very valuable batteries as well. Lithium is of course quite a bit more lucrative than steel. If it works for steel, it's going to work a lot better for lithium. Because it has a lot more value.