Ten years left to redesign lithium-ion batteries? • Hacker News Board

Re: Ten years left to redesign lithium-ion batteries?

#191

Post by ajross » Fri, Jul 27, 2018, 6:01 PM UTC

justinator wrote: post #152

ajross wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unlike petroleum, batteries are almost 100% recyclable. Our "peak battery" is bounded at the product of "peak population" and per-capita battery need, both of which are fairly constrained. Not really the right analysis.

> Unlike petroleum, batteries are almost 100% recyclable. Not using current technology. You can't recycle lithium (for example) using smelting. It's also not very profitable. It's still very much an unsolved problem. I would love to be proved wrong! Edit: I don't know why this is being downvoted. Using current recycling methods, the lithium is not recyclable (the cobalt is). I then asked if I am not correct, to pleas…

> Not using current technology. You can't recycle lithium (for example) using smelting. It's also not very profitable.

Lithium is not a limiting resource for battery production, it's actually fairly common in the earth's crust. The limit is cobalt[1].

Extracting cobalt from a junked battery is orders of magnitude cheaper than mining and smelting it from the (very diffuse) ores that are available.

[1] Also, per the article, nickel, which surprises me so much that I suspect it's wrong. Per wikipedia nickel reserves are 30x yearly production, and of course new exploration and extraction techniques are always pushing the reserve number up.

Re: Ten years left to redesign lithium-ion batteries?

#192

Post by opportune » Fri, Jul 27, 2018, 6:02 PM UTC

misterprime wrote: post #185

opportune wrote: post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What does soil have to do with this? You think they’re just going to put the thorium in fertilizer or drop it all over the country from the air? Lithium ion batteries are incredibly important if we want to make a fast transition to green energy. The environmental calculus is 100% in favor of finding a thorium disposal site and making rare earths / lithium cheaper now , rather than being picky about where minerals are…

>Global warming, especially if it reaches a runaway tipping point Thought we reached that a long time ago, and yet things haven't really changed.

we have somewhat, in that a significant amount is going to happen even if we switch to 100% carbon neutral energy tomorrow. I’m thinking more about a Clathrate Gun kind of event

Also things have changed. Something like 10 of the hottest years on record have been within the last 15 years. Global warming is not simply a modeled prediction, it is very much measurable and ongoing

Re: Ten years left to redesign lithium-ion batteries?

#193

Post by hwillis » Fri, Jul 27, 2018, 6:03 PM UTC

tombert wrote: post #84

I know that the popsci media can overblow this, but wasn't there some optimistic results for super-capacitors that wouldn't rely on any of these rare-earth metals? I'm seriously asking, since looking this up tends to bring up links to crap-sites like IFLS and whatnot, so I don't know if the hype is warranted.

There are also optimistic results for batteries, because li-ion batteries do not and never have used rare earth elements. Cobalt and nickel are not rare earth elements and as other people have pointed out the global resources of both are far higher than the article suggests.

You probably have difficulty looking up alternatives to batteries with rare earth elements because the only sites that say they have rare earth elements have negative knowledge about the subject.

Re: Ten years left to redesign lithium-ion batteries?

#194

Post by ajross » Fri, Jul 27, 2018, 6:03 PM UTC

justinator wrote: post #179

xyzzyz wrote: post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you suggesting we know how to extract lithium from a random mix of many minerals, but getting it out of the used battery is beyond our capabilities? That’s not very believable. The real issue is that, just as you hint, it’s actually cheaper to get lithium from mineral rich dirt, than to set up collection, disassembly and recovery operation for existing batteries. We can do it, it’s just not most economically effi…

> That’s not very believable. Can you point me to a recycling facility that's doing this?

No, because it's far cheaper to mine it. As mentioned above, you've been fooled by the name of the technology and are looking at the wrong part of the periodic table.

Re: Ten years left to redesign lithium-ion batteries?

#195

Post by stevew20 » Fri, Jul 27, 2018, 6:05 PM UTC

l_camacho84 wrote: post #144

jeffreyrogers wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think he's saying that eventually we will run out of economically viable to extract resources and we should start planning for that now. I'm not quite so sure because there are still tons of people living in awful conditions and they need a lot of this resource extraction to raise their standard of living.

Many people need this resources, including our children. That’s why we need to slow down our crave for things and enjoy what we have. We don’t need to change cars every 4 year, we don’t need to commute as we do, we don’t need all the clothes, we don’t need to eat meat at every meal. Also we don’t need to work in useless jobs only to have money to buy useless things. We need to reconnect with nature and with each othe…

Lol

Re: Ten years left to redesign lithium-ion batteries?

#196

Post by ataturk » Fri, Jul 27, 2018, 6:07 PM UTC

vanderZwan wrote: post #90

nickik wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah is radioactive but you can build a bed out of it and sleep on it so its not radioactive in any practical sense. And of course Toxic is not a problem because most of the metals a rare earth mine would deal with would be toxic. You can actually find heavily concentrated earth in the US that would basically count as nuclear waste because nuclear policy is so insane.

> Yeah is radioactive but you can build a bed out of it and sleep on it so its not radioactive in any practical sense. Eh, you're technically correct in the sense that you can also make a bed out of asbestos and sleep on it and be fine, as long as it doesn't become airborne. Sure, you won't get thorium in your system as quickly but it's still a material that you probably don't want in your household or in the environ…

Those scanners made Level3 Systems and other government contractors billions of dollars, so you just pipe down, citizen!

Re: Ten years left to redesign lithium-ion batteries?

#197

Post by dang » Fri, Jul 27, 2018, 6:15 PM UTC

Ok you guys, we've put a question mark above as a nod to the skepticism in this thread.

Re: Ten years left to redesign lithium-ion batteries?

#198

Post by tbabb » Fri, Jul 27, 2018, 6:18 PM UTC

ggm wrote: post #8

Oh god, another Erlich/Simons bet is needed: what's low is the level of rare earth exploration and exploitation not absolute supply. Is there a supply chain problem? Yes. Are we approaching a mad-max hell war for the last vestiges of humanities wonder mineral? Alas.. no. The ten years meme is based in a false premise. The article even says Australian known sources are only utilised at 14% and yet predicts a long term…

Thus begins the "peak s/oil/cobalt" soothsaying for the next 10 decades or so?

Re: Ten years left to redesign lithium-ion batteries?

#199

Post by hwillis » Fri, Jul 27, 2018, 6:19 PM UTC

swaggyBoatswain wrote: post #41

ptero wrote: post #16

TL;DR: Battery demand grows. Best current tech uses nickel and cobalt. Their prices grow and at the current growth trends demand outstrips supply within 20 years. We should fund research (in the author's area) to find better alternatives (e.g., using iron and silicon). This is valid but not surprising and hardly catastrophic. This is not "10 years left to find an alternative". But what turned me off is scaremongering…

I thought nickel-colbalt has a significantly lower specific energy / energy density than other lithium-polymer batteries. They might be cheaper to make (or maybe not so much anymore), but they have a large space form factor. I don't know of any laptop today that's using a nickel cobalt battery. Those ones usually allowed you to remove the battery pack from the laptop. Now there all based on lithium-polymer now. Same…

No, LiPo (which really means li-ion with gel or polymer electrolyte) has a lower specific energy (kWh/kg) but higher specific power (kW/kg).

> I don't know of any laptop today that's using a nickel cobalt battery. Those ones usually allowed you to remove the battery pack from the laptop. Now there all based on lithium-polymer now. Same with smartphones.

They all use NMC (nickel manganese cobalt) cathodes. LiPo batteries have the exact same cathodes and anodes as normal li-ion, just a different electrolyte.

> I did some research in lithium polymer batteries a few years back. I distinctly remember there being almost 10 or so variations of lithium polymer mixes being used in battery production.

There are ~10 main chemistry families, but hundreds of mixes.

Re: Ten years left to redesign lithium-ion batteries?

#200

Post by magduf » Fri, Jul 27, 2018, 6:21 PM UTC

gok wrote: post #190

magduf wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Batteries might get more expensive, but if that happens then we'll see old batteries having scrap value, just like with aluminum today. People will hold onto their old batteries instead of trashing them or recycling them for free, and will re-sell them to recyclers, and recycling rates will go way up. Just look at the recycling rates today for car batteries (lead acid): it's nearly at 100%, though of course part of t…

> ban the selling of devices with sealed-in batteries altogether in major markets [...] making batteries at least somewhat easily removed to facilitate recycling. The opposite is true; removable batteries almost entirely end up in landfills. Putting batteries non-removably inside devices makes them much more likely to be recycled, along with the rest of the recyclable components of the device.

>The opposite is true; removable batteries almost entirely end up in landfills.

Right now, that may be the case, but that's because those batteries generally have zero scrap value, so you're just hoping users will care enough about the environment to not do this, and take them to a proper recycling bin (like at the entrance to Target).

But the parent was predicting that batteries would become significantly more expensive as these materials became more scarce. In that future, a dead phone battery would still have some value, so people would generally want to take them someplace where they can get money back for them.

The other factor is that, in this possible future of expensive batteries, it'd be much more important for them to be standardized and more easily replaced. If your phone costs $500 sans battery, but the battery for it is another $500, you're going to want a standardized design that you can swap between different phones or other devices.