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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

#91

Post by agumonkey »

toast0 wrote: post #72
agumonkey wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 ear…

Nope, not at all, I meant the old population of ICE that may rapidly end up in landfills if (if) people migrate to EVs en-masse.

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

#92

Post by laurencerowe »

rsj_hn wrote: post #77
laurencerowe wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

I agree with you on the lithium - it is far too abundant. It seems that most of the value in a catalytic converter is in the palladium and rhodium, though the platinum is worth something too. Catalytic converter chemistries vary a lot too, with some omitting platinum and some omitting palladium.

Globally, the catalytic converter industry uses about 112 tons or platinum, 170 tons of palladium, and 21 tons of rhodium per year. And an individual catalytic converter uses 1-2g for a small car up to 12-15g in a big truck. (Elsewhere I've seen 3-7g as an average for a US catalytic converter.)

https://www.thermofisher.com/content/dam/tfs/ATG/CAD/CAD%20D...

So from what I can tell, an average catalytic converter contains about 5g of PGM's which works out at:

1.85g of platinum at $40/g = $74

2.80g of palladium at $95/g = $361

0.35g of rhodium at $900/g = $315

The Washington post reports that catalytic converter thefts are largely driven by the rhodium they contain (the price of which has gone up enormously because it is a byproduct of platinum mining and platinum itself is not currently worth mining.)

https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/africa/catalytic-conver...

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

#93

Post by toast0 »

agumonkey wrote: post #91
toast0 wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 ear…

Nope, not at all, I meant the old population of ICE that may rapidly end up in landfills if (if) people migrate to EVs en-masse.

Oh, I don't think that's likely, even if we assume EVs are unconditionally better than ICE for all users, unless ICE use is meaningfully restricted (either because of explicit restrictions from use within important areas, or because the fuel network shrinks and it becomes onerous to refuel), ICE cars in working condition will still have utility and resale value, even if it goes down and even if new sales are all EV.

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

#94

Post by kragen »

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?

Yes, in many cases polluting is profitable because the economy doesn't internalize the negative externality of pollution (and Coase's Theorem fails to hold for various reasons). That's part of what I meant by "There are problems that capitalism makes worse."

This is not one of those cases, precisely because (refining from) new raw materials is not cheaper than recycling waste.

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

#95

Post by kragen »

greggyb wrote: post #46
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'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 i…

In my comment, I said, "At that point I looked a bit into the hydrometallurgical processes that were available, enough to convince myself that there were no showstopper problems that would make recycling battery waste uneconomical." That seems to be the "domain knowledge" you're referring to? So I didn't presume I was correct; I investigated and found out what was correct.

This article has much better domain knowledge than what I was able to dig up at the time, though.

I don't think we're arguing past one another at all. The central point of my comment was that people often made the error that crazygringo made; I explained why it was an error. Then, crazygringo responded, reiterating the error. I think my comment was rather precisely targeted at his comment, even though I made it earlier.

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

#97

Post by [deleted] »

yomly wrote: post #38
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?

Matter cannot be created nor destroyed. And elemental conversion is a big deal - usually involving nuclear fission or fusion. Batteries do become depleted but the lithium never disappears, I guess simply put a reverse potential is no longer able to reverse the battery equation back to the energy storing state. Presumably because there is some third reservoir state that a potential cannot reverse (without delving into…

[deleted]

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

#98

Post by samatman »

LeifCarrotson wrote: post #50
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?

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 becom…

The most common failure mode is actually dendrites growing off the cathode and puncturing the thin layers of the cylindrical battery. Typically these are cobalt or iron, depending on the chemistry.

Note that I'm discussing failure of a cell, not slow degradation in its ability to hold a charge, which has a variety of causes including the one you sketched out.

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

#99

Post by samatman »

eloff wrote: post #75
pfdietz wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Metals are always metals, but they are only metallic in the fully reduced state. So we say "metallic iron" and so on.

So an oxidized metal isn't "a metal" on the macro scale, because it isn't metallic.

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

#100

Post by kragen »

coryrc wrote: post #90
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.

When we extract ore from a given area, it's mixed with just a few different compounds. So you tailor various acids and processes to economically filter out just want you need. How do you plan to do this when you have every compound we've ever created with overlapping solubilities and you want pure output?

> When we extract ore from a given area, it's mixed with just a few different compounds.

This is pretty far from the truth. Rock is less chemically complex than living plants, animals, and fungi, it's true; but there's a long distance from "less than hundreds of millions" to "just a few".

The article explains how it's done in the case of lithium-ion batteries.

It is true that to the extent that you can reduce the admixture of other materials, you can reduce the costs.

> How do you plan to do this

The standard mining methods include roasting, oxidation, and reduction (pyrometallurgy); froth flotation; lixiviation; defecation; crushing and grinding (milling or comminution); screening; and agglomeration. More exotic methods, some of which are crucial to one or another method, include vacuum sublimation, electrolysis (molten-salt or aqueous), amalgamation, recrystallization, and fractional distillation. There are also processes that don't fit neatly into one of these categories, such as the Pidgeon process. There's a good outline at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Template:Extractive_metallurgy.

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