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Old electric cars are a raw material of the future

economist.com

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Re: Old electric cars are a raw material of the future

#41

Post by eloff »

GordonS wrote: post #35
jillesvangurp wrote: post #34

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…

I had always assumed that when a lithium battery didn't work any more, the lithium was somehow "depleted", or had been charged chemically somehow?

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.)

Re: Old electric cars are a raw material of the future

#42

Post by jeffbee »

jillesvangurp wrote: post #34

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…

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.

Re: Old electric cars are a raw material of the future

#43

Post by crazygringo »

gilbetron wrote: post #36
crazygringo wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> only pose a significant pollution problem if capitalism is somehow prevented from profiting from it. This is fundamentally false. The entire issue of environmental pollution exists because , or when, reuse isn't profitable. If new raw materials are cheaper than reusing, then capitalism will absolutely result in dumping old materials and increasing pollution. Why would you think otherwise?

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.

No, I'm disagreeing, you know.

What "dumb regulations" are you referring to specifically?

Tons of things aren't profitable even with zero regulations. That's my entire point -- not profitable even before any regulations.

Though regulations also exist for some pretty important reasons -- like prohibiting cheap child labor, requiring worker safety protections, etc.

Re: Old electric cars are a raw material of the future

#44

Post by jeffbee »

ecpottinger wrote: post #40
GordonS wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I had always assumed that when a lithium battery didn't work any more, the lithium was somehow "depleted", or had been charged chemically somehow?

Lithium is an element how can it be deleted? If Lithium is chemically changed what prevents it being chemically changed back? Batteries are sealed, if material does not leave than all the components used to make it are still inside the battery.

> If Lithium is chemically changed what prevents it being chemically changed back?

Thermodynamics. It is also tremendously difficult to get your gasoline back after you burned it, or to un-cook an egg.

It is not difficult to recover lithium from a battery, but in general do not assume that physical processes are easily reversed.

Re: Old electric cars are a raw material of the future

#45

Post by GordonS »

ecpottinger wrote: post #40
GordonS wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I had always assumed that when a lithium battery didn't work any more, the lithium was somehow "depleted", or had been charged chemically somehow?

Lithium is an element how can it be deleted? If Lithium is chemically changed what prevents it being chemically changed back? Batteries are sealed, if material does not leave than all the components used to make it are still inside the battery.

It's not something I ever gave conscious thought before now, but yes, the depletion assumption sounds a bit silly in retrospect.

If the lithium has changed chemically, presumably the feasibility of changing it back depends on the nature of the change.

Re: Old electric cars are a raw material of the future

#46

Post by greggyb »

crazygringo wrote: post #33
kragen wrote: post #3

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 mak…

> only pose a significant pollution problem if capitalism is somehow prevented from profiting from it. This is fundamentally false. The entire issue of environmental pollution exists because , or when, reuse isn't profitable. If new raw materials are cheaper than reusing, then capitalism will absolutely result in dumping old materials and increasing pollution. Why would you think otherwise?

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.

Re: Old electric cars are a raw material of the future

#47

Post by JudasGoat »

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

Re: Old electric cars are a raw material of the future

#48

Post by tomcam »

kragen wrote: post #7
plebianRube wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That sandwich you're eating? Made from old recycled half eaten sandwiches.

Actually your sandwich is made from poop. 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 fertilize…

I save time and just eat the poop directly

Re: Old electric cars are a raw material of the future

#50

Post by LeifCarrotson »

GordonS wrote: post #35
jillesvangurp wrote: post #34

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…

I had always assumed that when a lithium battery didn't work any more, the lithium was somehow "depleted", or had been charged chemically somehow?

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.
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