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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

#51

Post by swiley »

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…

"Recycling" lithium batteries is already one of the preferred methods for acquiring lithium by armature chemists.

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

#52

Post by ajross »

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…

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!)

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

#53

Post by ajross »

Reason077 wrote: post #8
kragen wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

"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.

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

#54

Post by jillesvangurp »

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?

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.

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

#55

Post by 908B64B197 »

ajross wrote: post #53
Reason077 wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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.

That's even cooler.

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

#56

Post by MaxBarraclough »

jillesvangurp wrote: post #54
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?

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.

> a process that is trivially reversed.

If it's trivial, shouldn't lithium recycling have been profitable from the moment we started making lithium batteries?

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

#57

Post by loufe »

kingsuper20 wrote: post #28
dkarp wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

>People don’t realise this when they think of landfill. I expect you'll see increasing mining of tailings piles as things like gold extraction technology improves.

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.

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

#58

Post by loufe »

ajross wrote: post #53
Reason077 wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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.

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

#59

Post by saltcured »

MaxBarraclough wrote: post #56
jillesvangurp wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> a process that is trivially reversed. If it's trivial, shouldn't lithium recycling have been profitable from the moment we started making lithium batteries?

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.

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

#60

Post by niblettc »

ajross wrote: post #52
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…

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 transmissi…

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.
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