I don't really get the impression that current recycling techniques are lacking... typically the battery packs are immersion-shred and separated into the metal, plastic and the cathode "paste" which is a mix of lithium, mangagnese, nickel and cobalt. The recovery from there is pretty high - up to 95%.
The percentage of cobalt in modern lithium ion batteries (ie: tesla/panasonic's nmc-811 cells) is only 8% of the battery material. It's almost entirely Nickel now (72%) with traces of manganese (8%) and cobalt (9%). Even the lithium percentage is down to ~11%.
I was under the impression that the biggest issue right now was scaling up recycling facilities and recycling pathways back to those facilities so that they can handle the huge influx of batteries anticipated in the next 3-4 years. I don't think recovering 97% vs 95% of 8% of the material is going to change the economics of battery recyling.
The more interesting breakthroughs seem to be low-temperature, safe-chemical extraction. Let's not forget the advancements in cell composition that will lead to longer lifespans (2-3x higher cycle counts) - which not only reduces the waste from battery packs but also that from devices that use them.
> The percentage of cobalt in modern lithium ion batteries (ie: tesla/panasonic's nmc-811 cells) is only 8% of the battery material
Worth pointing out that with LFP batteries, it's actually zero percent. There are a few more cobalt free battery chemistries. But this is so far the most popular one with a rapidly growing market share that is closing in on 40% of the market. Lots of Teslas and other vehicles use them. There are a few more cobalt free battery chemistries of course. Sodium ion is getting some usage in China lately and does not involve cobalt, for example. And some of the solid state batteries don't use it either.
Cobalt isn't actually controversial because it's rare but because the way some of it is mined in Congo (i.e. with children). Most of it is actually fine and mined in a more humane way. Using children is not a hard requirement. And as the article points out recycling it is pretty doable too. And it's not all that rare either. It's by no means a rare earth.
And never mind about the other things children mine. Like copper, coal, diamonds, gold, etc. Or the fact that a lot of cobalt is also used in other industries. Like the oil refining industry, for example. Cobalt is somehow only controversial in the context of batteries. Any other form of cobalt usage is apparently not worth reporting on, scrutinizing, etc.
A lot of crocodile tears get shed over the poor children in the Congo. But only when it concerns batteries for EVs. I wonder why that is (rhetorical question with some obvious answers, I know) and whether those people actually really care. Because they sure are being awfully selective with their outrage.
The people who care about cobalt being used for EVs don’t seem to mind when you point out it’s also used to refine petroleum. It was never about the cobalt.
You’ve posted this like it’s some kind of “gotcha” but I’m failing to see why. (Most) People who complain about EV cobalt use don’t actually care about it, or they would have complained about other uses before EVs were a thing.
Some people did genuinely care before, but we are really talking about the current anti-EV movement and their list of “Bingo” talking points.
When you point out alternative battery chemistries that don’t use cobalt as a viable alternative to both NMC EVs and ICE vehicles, they move on to some other anti-EV talking point they’ve been taught. My point still stands. It was never about the cobalt.
I didn't read it as a gotcha, but more of a reinforcing the point you made. Maybe the low 4% is being taken as "yeah but not really"? I know nothing about petroleum refining, so hearing cobalt was used was interesting to me, and then someone else provided more info.
Yeah, it was my impression the last time I looked into this that cobalt was a rather worthless element. Part of the reason for the terrible mining conditions isn't that cobalt is all that rare, but rather that it's not all that useful so you don't see a lot of need for industrial cobalt mining operations.
Because of it's relative uselessness and worthlessness, cobalt mines were shutdown. It's only semi-recently that there's been talks of turning the lights back on. Like in this mine [1]
>A lot of crocodile tears get shed over the poor children in the Congo. But only when it concerns batteries for EVs. I wonder why that is (rhetorical question with some obvious answers, I know) and whether those people actually really care. Because they sure are being awfully selective with their outrage.
Seems a bit complex for an issue as simple as you can extract cobalt from spent batteries literally with human pee and white vinegar as a solvent.
The point being made is that talking about the use of cobalt in batteries is actually beside the point. Unless we do something about child labor _in general_ then reducing cobalt use will just see those children being exploited in some other way. The focus on child labor for mining cobalt is 100% just an attack on BEVs, it was never about the children who were just being used in yet another way to achieve someone elses ends.
Yup. You see this ALL THE TIME with anti-BEV articles. The arguments being made are in bad faith. It's not that the individual cares but rather they are looking to give BEVs a black eye.
Another fun one is how whenever you talk about BEVs, there's all the sudden someone that lives in the arctic circle that has a 12 hour commute (Not hyperbole, I actually saw someone make this claim in an argument). It isn't good enough to say "Well then perhaps BEVs aren't for you" instead "The technology isn't there and nobody can use them".
It's just astroturfing or people trying to win a culture war.
Hey now. The governments of the world are trying to mandate those so even bad faith arguments have to be addressed. You can't just say 'those are not for you then' anymore. Amusingly, EV folks seem to be telling ICE folks what to do.
FWIW, waiting on sidelines for some of this stuff to mature ( oddly, I am not talking about range, but about the incessant subscription push.. that trend has to die ).
> Unless we do something about child labor _in general_ then reducing cobalt use will just see those children being exploited in some other way.
Oh well this eases all my concerns—let's continue to look the other way, consume blindly, and pretend like this isn't a new low for the barbarism of the west.
> Cobalt isn't actually controversial because it's rare but because the way some of it is mined in Congo (i.e. with children). Most of it is actually fine and mined in a more humane way.
74% of the world's cobalt is extracted from the Democratic Republic of the Congo (not to be confused with the Republic of the Congo)[0]. Not to diminish the horrors of using children to mine, but that's hardly the only problem—this neglects the absolutely inhumane working conditions and violent conflict between dozens of armed groups vying for control of the mines, chief among them the state's military itself. The mad rush for cobalt has certainly exacerbated this conflict[1] and led to one of the world's worst humanitarian crises in modern times. Even if you were to somehow magically vanish the children from the mines it would still be one of the worst situations on earth to be born into. I don't appreciate this attempt to trivialize the cost of the west's voracious demand for the mineral and it's extremely difficult to imagine the above comment being made in good faith.
All of this progress is also good information to counter the endless claims that electric vehicles are destroying the world. There is an impact from all mining exercises and there are terrible conditions in some cobalt mines. Tesla apparently buys from only certified cobalt suppliers, for example. But every article that talks about improvements in efficiency in recycling and the continuing improvements help to set the record straight.
We could reach almost steady state of battery materials eventually with more and better battery recycling. I wonder when that might be expected? 30 years for EVs to go through the car fleet and replace all other cars, then most battery materials can come from recycling? However there will likely be different minerals in new battery tech over time, will solid state batteries be as recyclable?
Improving public transportation is a far superior solution than forcing people to buy EV cars by outlawing gas engines. For the median income in the US, or person working minimum wage - all of this is pie-in-the-sky elite talk. EVs are essentially for rick folks to feel better about themselves.
Class warfare aside, public transport will transition to EVs as well and there is a lot of promise in self driving vehicles smaller than a bus making public transport cheaper, more flexible, and more attractive.
In the end people will buy EVs because they are cheaper and better. Governments are just trying to set goals and promote action against climate change.
There is no benefit to public transport when EV companies gets our tax money to build their charger network, or offering thousands of dollars of tax credit to rich folks to buy EVs.
>In the end people will buy EVs because they are cheaper and better.
I'm hoping people switch from EVs to public transit. Personally, I'm more interested in how the government can expand public transit in general so that the need for EV cars is eliminated or substantially reduced in the first place.
The easiest way to get people to switch to public transport is to make it suck less. Short of forcing people to use it that's kind of the only way. It also contributes to CO2 emissions so it has to go electric and improvements in EVs also helps there.
I can see your preference for public transport, but it's already heavily subsidised and only used by a minority of people in most places. Subsidies for EVs, which aim to reduce emissions from cars, which are extremely popular, seems quite equitable.
I don't think further subsidy of public transport is going to materially increase its use, it has to improve beyond incremental availability. As I said automated vehicles are a much more promising avenue for drastically increasing public transport use.
I live in London, UK. We have lots of public transport. About half of my journeys can be done via public transport, about half of them can't.
By can't, I mean that they are significantly slower, would require taxis on one or both ends, or simply are not possible due to one end being semi rural or rural.
The half that can't represent far more mileage, emissions, etc. They also frankly are most if not all of the fun ones.
Public transport works if you live a solely metropolitan life. If you do anything else, it just doesn't scale at all.
This is of course ignoring the fact that in my own car I don't have to experience feral beings.
Personal cars (EV or otherwise) incur a huge carbon tax to manufacture, are difficult to recycle, and are idle during most of the day. You're welcome to your opinion.
You can say that pretty much about any personal items -- laptop, phone, clothes, shoes, even your house. Manufacturing them cause harm to the environment and they're idle most of the time. Some of your clothes may stay unused for years, or forever. Yet nobody advocates for sharing them. That's because they are personal, reflect the owner's personality, and they're there when you need them.
Why is car different? I love train and tram (not so much bus) and would love to see them doing well, but I understand why people love car, and not only in less dense countries. Do you know that car ownership in Netherlands is on the rise? [0]. One of the reasons cited being people preferring cars as they get older.
If you want to advocate for public transportation, make sure you understand why people love cars, and strive to make public transportation suck less, primarily with flexible schedule, quicker, and more readily available.
>You can say that pretty much about any personal items -- laptop, phone, clothes, shoes, even your house. Manufacturing them cause harm to the environment and they're idle most of the time. Some of your clothes may stay unused for years, or forever. Yet nobody advocates for sharing them. That's because they are personal, reflect the owner's personality, and they're there when you need them.
This is just false. T shirts and shoes do not cause the same level of harm to the environment as manufacturing a car. It seems to me you don't understand what goes into mining, refining, processing all of the parts that go into making a car. You also don't seem to understand how progress happens - incrementally - by tackling the big-ticket items first. Good luck with your anti-public transport argument, you haven't convinced me.
I wasn't trying to convince you. I was telling you that your arguments didn't make sense, and that people love car for valid reasons. Address their need and they will use public transportation.
You chose to shame people who don't share your opinions instead. Pity.
War against car usage is war against middle class. Upper and upper-middle class will not suffer - they can afford what ever it costs and will keep their fancy parking places and if it leads to less traffic, they win even more. If you make all the fancy CEOs to use public transport then I'm in. Otherwise it is another form of disguised oppression.
Do you know what else is idle during most of the day? All the vehicles used for public transport or worse, they drive around empty. I'm a big fan of good public transport and were I live it is fairly good and I use it a lot, but it is not even near as good as would be using my own car - I have to normally double or even triple my commute time when I use public transport. I can afford it (for common good) as I'm working normally from home but if I had to do it daily then it would become unbearable.
One full bus offsets about ten empty busses if you just look at carbon per passenger mile compared to cars. If you also consider space use the numbers are even better. Not to mention trains.
Middle-class?! The only people purchasing personal EVs are rich people; giving them tax subsidies doesn't seem like the best use of my taxes. You think people making minimum wage are driving around in fancy EVs?
>If you make all the fancy CEOs to use public transport then I'm in.
Why would anyone (CEO or otherwise) not prefer a comfortable, safe and clean public transit option? Also, If I was a CEO I'd be supporting expansion of public transit to include my business locations. Making commuting easier/cheaper to work is a great way to attract talent. I don't have a public transit option where I live, and I would love to get on a comfy bus or light-rail each morning and bang out some emails on my way to work. It seems to me that you don't seem to fundamentally believe public transit can be improved, or maybe you're not sure how it can be. It most certainly can be improved, and cities have shown how it can be done in their own microcosm.
<< Why would anyone (CEO or otherwise) not prefer a comfortable, safe and clean public transit option?
And this is probably where the 'should' meets reality as it were primarily, because public transit in most metros is 2 out of 3 at best. I am being generous and I use Chicago's Metra every so often.
The really important point: "Furthermore, the ni-DESs are highly soluble in water and can be recovered and recycled."
Most leaching processes produce toxic waste, often very large quantities of toxic waste.
It's usually soluble in water, so plants have big leachate ponds, where the water evaporates, leaving behind some kind of sludge. The question here is, can this new leachate really be recycled effectively, or is there a sludge-disposal problem?
This is probably a solveable problem, because recycling batteries starts with a very rich resource. It's processes which extract from low-grade ores that yield giant dumps of leftover crud. Gold and rare earth extraction are notorious for this.
The original mining process almost certainly involved some kind of leachate processing process too. And it’s pretty unlikely to be worse doing it on battery components where all the original components were highly refined.
> I don't really get the impression that current recycling techniques are lacking
Big money is trying as hard as possible to convince people not to buy EVs, and "The batteries are not recyclable" is just another wonky arrow in their bent quiver of fear, uncertainty and doubt.
In fact, there are huge EV battery recycling plants in the US, operating right now:
I guess if you're a massive recycling facility and working on 30,000+MT of raw batteries as input, the 2% extra could equate to a fair amount, certainly when the spot price is $28,000/MT.
Considering spot prices for cobalt are dropping quickly and are now back to pre-2019 levels... not sure it makes sense to invest heavily in this.
What happens with the slag from these operations? I assume it is easy enough to separate out the metals from plastics, all of the metal is still potentially available for reprocessing.
Do they keep a huge deposit of these tailings hoping for it to be profitable some day?
Possibly. What happens to mine tailings and slag from other smelting operations?
BTW referring to it as “huge deposits” is likely exaggerating. There are currently only a small number of battery packs that have failed to the point of being processed. Even with larger number of EVs, the number will climb slowly and will probably never be enough to produce huge slag deposits.
This is what my understanding of EV battery recycling is at. It all gets shredded and then the separate the enclosure from the actual battery.
Then they get a mixture of the annode and cathode + any electrolyte solution.
My understanding is that the anode and cathode are separated into separate containers....and who knows what the electrolyte solution is doing....its probably stuck in both piles or burnt off
at $28,000/MT it's rare enough to worry about - for context it looks like a model 3 has about 4.5KG of cobalt in it's entire pack, or around ~$130 at current spot rate.
This is like arguing with an astronomer about what a "metal" is. The colloquial definition of "rare earth element" when talking about industry and not chemistry generally means anything you mine that isn't an already-concentrated ore.
Q: How many legs does a dog have, if we call a tail a leg?
A: Four. Calling a tail a leg doesn't make it one.
One sometimes sees the nonsense you are describing there in attempts to smear PV as dirty because it "uses rare earth elements", with a pointer toward dirty REE processing in China. PV does not use the actual REEs; this smear exploits the terminological slovenliness being engaged in here.
I don't believe any honest person in industry would use "rare earth element" to refer to nickel or cobalt.
The question should be whether you were genuinely confused about what the upthread commenter meant by using "these rare earth metals" to refer to battery reactants. You were not. You were just being a pedant. Now you're heaping onto the mistake by (1) calling the upthread comment "nonsense", (2) calling me "dishonest", (3) calling the discussion a "smear", and "slovenly".
Good grief. Can you really just not? There are ways to have this discussion without flinging poo...
I'm being pedantic because the confusion has been exploited by bad actors in the way I described. Now, I correct it, to prevent the exploit.
"Slovenly" is a precise description of the problem here, up to and including the moral component of that word. "Smear" is also accurate in what I was referring to there: these were clear bad faith attempts to disseminate a falsehood about PV. Your own use was not called a smear, you may just be the kind of useful fool the smear depended on.
Disclaimer: didn’t read the paper and only have a very basic understanding of chemistry (and sorry for simplifying a complex topic), but started wondering whether we should be able to discover useful reactions via pure calculation by now (ignoring quantum effects)?
Despite being a specific domain, wouldn’t reasoning about reactions (and their efficiency in an industrial, large-scale setting) be something that "models" should be able to do quite "easily" (given the fact that bonding forces, energy requirements and catalytic effects are sort of well-known, i.e. just some more dimensions to deal with)?
The only kind of bonds we can model reasonably well while ignoring quantum effects are hydrogen bonds. Hydrogen bonds can be modeled as parameterized effects in Newtonian mechanics, and molecular dynamics simulations using Newtonian mechanics can reproduce some interesting properties of molecules in solution.
The vast majority of chemical reactions involve changes in electronic configuration that are only described by quantum mechanics. The most accurate algorithmic approximations of electron quantum mechanics have terrible scaling properties - O(N^7) or worse. Due to that terrible scaling, the largest high-accuracy calculations that are tractable now are not that much larger than those that could be completed in the 1990s, despite much greater processing power.
There are other ways of approximating quantum effects in chemistry that scale better, but they all have tradeoffs and weaknesses of their own. They can used in limited domains or used to guide experimental design, but they're not accurate enough to discover useful reactions via pure calculation. They need to work in tandem with experimental validation and it requires domain experts in both the experimental and theoretical work. The methods are not simple enough for a bench chemist to use them as a black box for reaction discovery.
Yes, there are many research groups working on this at the moment. We can (roughly) screen through chemical reactions performed in vaccuum. Even this is difficult since you either need to simulate atoms bouncing around until you observe a reaction (extremely slow to perform) [0], or you need to numerically search for a viable reaction pathway (still quite slow to perform) [1]. The main problem is that the best methods scale badly with the number of atoms you're simulating, so you need to trade off accuracy for speed by using less-accurate methods.
Screening through reactions in the real world is particularly hard, since you not only need to worry about the inaccuracy of your simulation method, but you also need to take solvent/environment effects into account. You need to trade off even more accuracy for speed if you want to do so. As computing power advances, there will be less pressure to make these tradeoffs, but a lot of work in comp chem at the moment is focused on either exploring or expanding the speed-accuracy frontier.
Broadly speaking, "computational materials science" has been a thing for quite a while, and has been responsible for the majority of academic supercomputer time allocations for decades.
Not a chemist, but I think trying to do chemistry without modeling quantum effects is like trying to do physics without math. The latter is necessary to express the former.
Yeah, reading the sibling comments made me aware that my mental model when it comes to chemistry (and the role QM plays even in "simple" scenarios) needs an update.
The energy use is the issue because fossil fuels supply the heat for the thermochemistry (like with most industrial processes). But direct solar heat could be used instead - this heat is supplied by concentrated solar thermal in a novel process
It would have been more accurate to say "using ingredients commonly found in urine", but that is more words that can be used in an HN title even though that is the entire point of the post.
You don't think there is a market for recovered cobalt? I see your point regarding recyling, but plastic just isn't as valuable as cobalt, given the relative difficulty of extraction.
There are LFP batteries that don’t use cobalt if you want to use less of it. It’s used for refining crude oil so you can’t get away from it completely.
The percentage of cobalt in modern lithium ion batteries (ie: tesla/panasonic's nmc-811 cells) is only 8% of the battery material. It's almost entirely Nickel now (72%) with traces of manganese (8%) and cobalt (9%). Even the lithium percentage is down to ~11%.
I was under the impression that the biggest issue right now was scaling up recycling facilities and recycling pathways back to those facilities so that they can handle the huge influx of batteries anticipated in the next 3-4 years. I don't think recovering 97% vs 95% of 8% of the material is going to change the economics of battery recyling.
The more interesting breakthroughs seem to be low-temperature, safe-chemical extraction. Let's not forget the advancements in cell composition that will lead to longer lifespans (2-3x higher cycle counts) - which not only reduces the waste from battery packs but also that from devices that use them.