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The Race to Crack Lithium Ion Recycling

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Re: The Race to Crack Lithium Ion Recycling

#91

Post by sitharus »

avianlyric wrote: post #11
artvark11 wrote: post #4

The lie that electric vehicles are better for the environment than internal combustion needs to stop. Lithium batteries will pollute the world. We will exploit impoverished counties and extract their lithium reserves while destroying their environments. We will not clean up when we finish. Lithium batteries will pollute our water supplies here at home when they aren't properly disposed. This is a giant environmental…

> We need widespread renewable electricity generation first anyway. Otherwise our electric cars will be running on coal. Even this is preferable to internal combustion engines. ICEs really aren’t very efficient, and electric car is easily 3x more energy efficient than an ICE. Which means that’s even if you include transmission losses and heat losses at a coal power station, you’re still ahead. Because of coal power s…

Another big advantage is removing pollutants from densely populated areas, especially unburnt hydrocarbons, nitrous oxides and microparticles emitted by diesel engines.

Re: The Race to Crack Lithium Ion Recycling

#92

Post by h0l0cube »

hedora wrote: post #48
h0l0cube wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Lithium is a mine once, use forever resource. It's an element. It will cost energy to recycle it ... and human labor, and other chemicals. I'm not sure if you read the article, but it claims that recycling is still a somewhat tenuous economic proposition vs digging more out of the ground. This is especially true given the glut of lithium, while cobalt and other rare minerals are slowly being phased out of battery d…

The second company described in the article claims to recycle using nothing but catalysts, and simply grinds up the used batteries in a giant vat before transportation (rendering them inert, and easier to safely move). It sounds like their main problem at this point is continuing to scale the business to meet supply (they are already the largest lithium recycler in the US), and that the challenges there are logical,…

Some amount of human labor will be required for operations, say maintenance of the in-situ automated systems, or intervention when things go wrong. These costs can't be eliminated with renewable energy, and won't be fixed with robots for some time yet (decades, minimum).

And if a mine can be automated to yield orders of magnitude more material than recycling for the same labor costs, you would need some other financial incentive (government subsidies, backroll by Tesla for marketing purposes) to make it viable.

Re: The Race to Crack Lithium Ion Recycling

#93

Post by imtringued »

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #63
toomuchtodo wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Tesla's previous CTO and Co-founder, JB Straubel (who spent 15 years at Tesla), left to found Redwood Materials [1] (which intends to scale up battery recycling processes). Fortum, a Finnish clean energy firm (correction provided by @Sharlin), has reached an 80% recycling rate as of 2019 [2]. It's always going to be cheaper to pour end of life cells into a remanufacturing process than to extract raw lithium from brin…

> It's always going to be cheaper to pour end of life cells into a remanufacturing process than to extract raw lithium from brine ponds, so it makes economic sense to do the R&D to do so. This is a major point to assume away.

Lithium does not suffer from undesired pigmentation and overabundance of too many completely different types of lithium the way plastics do. Plastics are composites so if you were to extract the elements out of them then you would end up with carbon and hydrogen which unfortunately aren't plastic. With lithium all you have to do is extract the lithium elements.

Aluminum and iron recycling is viable because they are elements in their own right.

Re: The Race to Crack Lithium Ion Recycling

#94

Post by rsfern »

LockAndLol wrote: post #64
d33lio wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is precisely the literary slight of hand I was talking about! Similar to Musk's hilarious dismissal of hydrogen technology. Hydrogen will obviously in time become the ideal source of energy for electric aircraft and electric long haul trucks.

Has hydrogen storage been solved? How big would a hydrogen tank have to be to power a plane for more than an hour? And what is the conversion rate of hydrogen to electricity?

Hydrogen storage is definitely not a solved problem. It was a hot funding topic for the US DOE a few years ago, but sufficient energy density and operating pressures are super challenging targets to hit.

Efficiency depends on fuel cell type and operating conditions and such, but I think it’s generally pretty high for the useful life of the catalyst material. (The catalyst is another materials challenge itself, since I think most of the good materials are super expensive like Pt/Pd alloys, and they’re vulnerable to carbon monoxide poisoning)

Edit: this DOE program page has some good detailed discussion of the current status, including on compressed liquid/gas storage systems, which I’m not as familiar with: https://www.energy.gov/eere/fuelcells/hydrogen-storage-curre...

Re: The Race to Crack Lithium Ion Recycling

#95

Post by vlovich123 »

Chris2048 wrote: post #26
vlovich123 wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not sure that's an accurate assessment. 1. Reduced dependency on oil = less money in oil = less money for a lot of countries that historically act quite poorly on the world stage. 2. 100% better for global warming than combustion cars. 3. Is mining lithium & disposing on lithium batteries incorrectly worse for the environment than oil manufacturing, production & transport? I don't know 100% but the massive oil sp…

Are lithium batteries ever used at grid-scale? I though the point was that the high energy-density was convenient for mobility, but poor on most other metrics, including manufacturing complexity, stability, and safety. Grid-scale wouldn't need to care so much about energy density versus stability and maintenance, in which case lead-acid, or compressed-gas storage should shine.

As Tesla has demonstrated Lithium-ion is pretty critical for balancing out a grid that has renewables in the mix. It drastically cuts costs and improves efficiencies because it can detect instability in the grid more quickly and arbitrage different power sources more efficiently (+ coal plants take a while to start up so it’s an important stop gap).

Re: The Race to Crack Lithium Ion Recycling

#96

Post by CaptArmchair »

Accujack wrote: post #85
CaptArmchair wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You just referred to a HTML page ... having a counter on the bottom which says: > The number of hits on this page since 1996 Feb 12 ... a HTTP Response Header > Last-Modified Sat, 27 Jan 2007 02:38:36 GMT Stating that these aren't "the latest insights" would be putting it mildly. My comment referred to commercial viability. It at this point in time, Uranium has only been extracted from seawater in a laboratory settin…

Uranium isn't necessary. A breeder reactor could manufacture plutonium, or a thorium fueled design could be used. Nuclear power isn't constrained by fuel scarcity at all. If anything, we have too much fissionable material.

Absolutely. I understand that there are alternatives and options. My concern isn't scarcity. It's that the confidence in those options is rooted in tenuous predictions about commercial viability in the far future.

That is, how a transition to these alternatives would conceivably integrate in and have an impact on larger market dynamics, and they way they might be either furthered or impeded by local, regional or geo-political dynamics.

Re: The Race to Crack Lithium Ion Recycling

#97

Post by bryanlarsen »

0xffff2 wrote: post #82
tuatoru wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's right, it's better. The old mantra "reduce, re-use, recycle" is in that order because that's the order of "greenness". Recycling should be the last resort.

Re-use of a battery is fine, but it's a stop-gap. The battery will eventually reach a state of health where it isn't useful in any application anymore, so recycling is still necessary. The "re-use" step just delays that a bit.

Exactly, so stop worrying about recycling. It'll happen when it's viable, and not before.

Batteries are a way too important source of valuable materials to not be recycled.

Re: The Race to Crack Lithium Ion Recycling

#98

Post by 08-15 »

CaptArmchair wrote: post #76
08-15 wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Uranium supplies are also finite So is the sun, and they will both last for roughly the same time, i.e. 5 billion years.[1] [1] http://www-formal.stanford.edu/jmc/progress/cohen.html

You just referred to a HTML page ... having a counter on the bottom which says: > The number of hits on this page since 1996 Feb 12 ... a HTTP Response Header > Last-Modified Sat, 27 Jan 2007 02:38:36 GMT Stating that these aren't "the latest insights" would be putting it mildly. My comment referred to commercial viability. It at this point in time, Uranium has only been extracted from seawater in a laboratory settin…

>> Last-Modified Sat, 27 Jan 2007 02:38:36 GMT

Yes, John McCarthy hasn't updated his web page in a while, because he's been dead for nine years. Have some respect for the man who invented Garbage Collection!

But more importantly, do you think a lot of uranium has disappeared in the last 13 years? Has the use of uranium increased by an order of magnitude in the last 13 years? Have we forgotten how to extract uranium from low grade ore in the last 13 years? No?! Then how the hell is the age of this web site (13 years) or Bernard Cohen's book (35 years) even relevant?

> My comment referred to commercial viability.

Don't move the goal posts! You specifically wrote "Uranium is finite", and the counter point is that it is practically infinite. As McCarthy points out, this doesn't even depend on seawater extraction, because low grade uranium ores (phosphate ores, later Conway granites) are plentiful.

Re: The Race to Crack Lithium Ion Recycling

#99

Post by CaptArmchair »

08-15 wrote: post #98
CaptArmchair wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You just referred to a HTML page ... having a counter on the bottom which says: > The number of hits on this page since 1996 Feb 12 ... a HTTP Response Header > Last-Modified Sat, 27 Jan 2007 02:38:36 GMT Stating that these aren't "the latest insights" would be putting it mildly. My comment referred to commercial viability. It at this point in time, Uranium has only been extracted from seawater in a laboratory settin…

>> Last-Modified Sat, 27 Jan 2007 02:38:36 GMT Yes, John McCarthy hasn't updated his web page in a while, because he's been dead for nine years. Have some respect for the man who invented Garbage Collection! But more importantly, do you think a lot of uranium has disappeared in the last 13 years? Has the use of uranium increased by an order of magnitude in the last 13 years? Have we forgotten how to extract uranium f…

Frankly, I'm not willing to engage with you because of the tone of your comment and how you address me.
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