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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

#71

Post by pfdietz »

gilbetron wrote: post #37
WJW wrote: post #5

Pretty much everything is a raw material of the future. Even household waste has much higher concentrations of metals than most ore deposits.

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…

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).

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

#72

Post by toast0 »

agumonkey wrote: post #20
WJW wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NQHKUpwMboY

yes but the rate of recycling may explode due to EVs (potentially)

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.

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

#73

Post by jeffbee »

alisonkisk wrote: post #67
jeffbee wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

The energy you get from burning gasoline is about as much as the energy cost of creating it. It's not a complex organism like an egg. https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/turning-carbon-di... The only reason it's not done is because already made gasoline is cheaper.

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.

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

#74

Post by laurencerowe »

rsj_hn wrote: post #61
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…

> 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…

> 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.

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

#75

Post by eloff »

pfdietz wrote: post #66
eloff wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.)

Lithium ion batteries don't contain lithium metal. The lithium is always in the +1 oxidation state.

To me oxidized metal is a metal, but then that's why I'm not an expert in that field by any stretch of the imagination.

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

#76

Post by adammunich »

JudasGoat wrote: post #47

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

I’d love to learn more about what you dug up on this

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

#77

Post by rsj_hn »

laurencerowe wrote: post #74
rsj_hn wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

> 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.

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

#79

Post by generalizations »

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?

That would only be the case if the batteries were nuclear.
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