EV Battery recycling still being defined

SAE International Team

fromSAE International

23 Nov, 2023

EV Battery recycling still being defined

Battery recycling experts at the 2023 Battery Show North America indicate a sustainable recycling business model is coming into focus.

batteries

- Battery

- Energy Storage System

- recycling

- sustainability

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Battery Recycling Inevitable

The efficient and economical recycling of EV batteries is not just possible, but inevitable, said a panel of battery-recycling experts at the 2023 Battery Show North America in Novi, Mich.

Panelists indicated that although the business model is evolving – and is likely to remain comparatively fluid for the near term – the sector’s broad directionals are firming and at least a few aspects of the business have become certain – one being that EV batteries ending up in landfills “absolutely will not happen,” asserted Renata Arsenault, Technical Expert for Advanced Battery Recycling at Ford.

Equally important, established recycling companies and startups understand that the EV battery recycling environment will be diverse and require a variety of players at various points and places in the recycling process, said Mike O’Kronley, CEO of Ascend Elements, a startup with a proprietary process focused on recycling material specifically for lithium-ion battery cathodes. He said there will be numerous companies with various specialties needed at different points – geographically and within the recycling process. Localization of both materials supply and operations will be vital as recycling matures, added Ford’s Arsenault.

Initiating EV battery recycling will take time to reach the scale and efficiency of recycling entire vehicles, for example, because batteries are more complicated, said Ryan Melsert, CEO at American Battery Technology Company (ABTC), which has a system to recover the individual minerals in lithium-ion batteries. Melsert said the comparative newness of automotive lithium-ion batteries also means recycling processes have yet to reach the efficiencies and scale of established recycling, such as that for lead-acid batteries.

Moreover, Melsert said, EV battery recycling must be much more “holistic” in its approach because it will be a requirement to recover more than the “token elements” sought by some systems. “As batteries get higher-performance and more complex, so will the recycling process,” he said.

Progression of an end-of-life EV battery through various current recycling processes.

Open- and closed-loop approaches

How automakers and recyclers eventually collaborate remains a question as recycling progresses through early stages of startup, but most panelists agreed that that eventual result is likely to be a “closed loop” process in which automakers form close partnerships with recyclers in what becomes a model in which the automaker “controls materials almost indefinitely, said ABTC’s Melsert. He added that closed-loop arrangements also will help to provide “security of supply” to automakers and their closely-aligned battery-manufacturing partners.

A closed-loop system also will be essential, panelists believed, because of eligibility requirements connected to incentives from the federal government’s Inflation Reduction Act. Retaining control of domestically produced materials, from mining through recycling and reuse, will ease the burden of complying with IRA dictates and also allow manufacturers to retain a steady flow of materials not necessarily subject to the economics of the commodities market.

“If you’re an OEM, you don’t want to sell that [recycled] material to the highest bidder,” confirmed Ascend’s O’Kronley, saying the material is too important to release to an open market. He said that although the industry will see elements of both open- and closed-loop systems for some time, EV battery recycling is almost certain to evolve to a mostly closed-loop environment.

Ford’s Arsenault agreed, saying, “In the early years, we’re going to be somewhat more transactional.” But “the Holy Grail for all of us is to have the fully-closed loop. It seems it would be much more efficient for our customers, too.”

Not much life for second-life

Meanwhile, the panelists had a dim view of the potential for so-called “second-life” use of entire EV batteries once those batteries become too depleted for effective use in a vehicles. Second-life applications – often cited as a viable competitor for recycling – just won’t be the best use of the valuable battery materials, most panelists asserted.

Second-life usage “has a lot of barriers,” said Gerardo Ramos-Vivas, Battery Lifecycle senior manager, Toyota Motor North America. “Right now, we’re thinking that’s way out there [in the future].”

Ascend’s O’Kronley agreed, adding, “I think the second-life market is going to be a lot smaller than we think about. I truly believe that batteries will be for the life of the vehicle,” and that once a battery has reached the end of its useful life, it will be more efficient and economical to recycle its elements rather than keep the entire battery for a secondary purpose.

Second-life usage is “going to be a smaller market than a lot of people are thinking,” said ABTC’s Melsert. He said there’s been an overestimation, as one example, of the stationary-source market’s potential use of second-life automotive batteries. He said it is becoming clearer that stationary sources likely will converge on the desire to use premium-performance batteries rather than make use of repurposed batteries.

Energy Storage Materials: Lithium from Hot Deep Water

Researchers from KIT and EnBW show lithium-ion sieve for geothermal brines - Lithium recovery can supplement power generation and heat supply

Martin Heidelberger

fromKarlsruhe Institute of Technology

19 Apr, 2023

batteries

- Battery

- Energy Storage System

Geothermal energy not only enables a sustainable supply of electricity and heat, but also regional lithium production. Researchers from the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT) and EnBW have produced a lithium-ion sieve from a lithium-manganese oxide and used it to adsorb lithium from geothermal brines. In the future, the use of domestic lithium sources can help to meet the increasing demand for the light metal, which is indispensable as an energy storage material. The researchers reported in the journal Energy Advances , which now recognizes the work as one of the "Outstanding Papers 2022". (DOI: 10.1039/d2ya00099g )

A sustainable energy supply requires efficient energy storage. Lithium has become indispensable - the light metal is in the batteries of many technical devices and vehicles, from smartphones and notebooks to electric cars. In recent years, demand has risen sharply worldwide. Up until now, Europe has been dependent on imports. However, there are also European deposits for lithium, namely thermal waters at a depth of a few kilometers. They contain high concentrations of lithium ions. In this way, geothermal systems, which pump hot water from the depths, can not only be used for the sustainable supply of electricity and heat, but also for environmentally friendly regional lithium production.

High lithium concentrations in the North German Basin and in the Upper Rhine Graben

"Depending on the geological origin, geothermal brines contain between 0.1 and 500 milligrams of lithium per liter," explains Professor Helmut Ehrenberg, head of the Institute for Applied Materials - Energy Storage Systems (IAM-ESS) at KIT. Lithium concentrations of up to 240 milligrams per liter were measured in the North German Basin, and up to 200 milligrams per liter in the Upper Rhine Graben. "However, the extraction of lithium from geothermal brines represents a major challenge because the lithiu

Image: Ceramic solid electrolyte cells (vertical rectangular shapes) with dendrites (the lightning-like dark structures inside the rectangles) growing inside them from the bottom to the top. These solid electrolytes are floating on a liquid (blue puddle) which represents a liquid electrolyte. The reflections of the solid electrolytes in the blue liquid, particularly the dark dendrites, show the similarity in the dendrite initiation process in both the liquid and solid. (Credit: Rajeev Gopal, Bai lab)

New study shows similarity between solid state and liquid state electrolytes used in batteries

New research at the McKelvey School of Engineering at Washington University in St. Louis is the first to show that a solid-state electrolyte has a high level of similarity to liquid electrolytes, which is good news for designing safer and more efficient solid-state batteries based on reliable mechanistic knowledge.

Team WashU

10 May, 2023

energy storage system

- batteries

- Battery

New research at the McKelvey School of Engineering at Washington University in St. Louis is the first to show that a solid-state electrolyte has a high level of similarity to liquid electrolytes, which is good news for designing safer and more efficient solid-state batteries based on reliable mechanistic knowledge.

“Our results reveal surprising similarities between the liquid and the solid electrolytes, and that allows us to borrow some ideas from the successful liquid electrolytes to help our design of the solid electrolytes,” said Peng Bai, assistant professor of energy, environmental & chemical engineering. “Before our work, solid electrolytes, at least the ceramic ones we studied here, are considered distinctly different from their liquid counterparts.”

Batteries power so much of our lives, so finding new improvements will have a drastic societal impact, Bai said. A promising route is the development of a full solid-state battery. A key component is the electrolyte in the center of the battery which allows ion movement between the electrodes. Here, the traditionally used liquid electrolyte is replaced with a solid and coupled to a metal electrode. This not only boosts the amount of energy stored but also leads to a potentially safer battery. However, an increasing number of reports about solid-state batteries tell a story of a key barrier, known as the critical current density (CCD), beyond which small tree-like structures called dendrites grow, resulting in battery failure. These reported CCDs are relatively low, which hinders fast charging and compromises further development of solid-state batteries.

“The CCD of solid-state electrolytes is a mystery. We are working to reveal why it exists, what its true physics are, and how it changes under different operating conditions,” said Bai, the principal investigator of this project and corresponding author of the paper published in ACS Energy Letters on April 12, 2023.

“Our discov