These cells, produced on site by Panasonic, are destined to be bundled together by the thousands in the battery packs of new Teslas. But not all the batteries are cut out for a life on the road. This is the home of Redwood Materials, a small company founded in with an ambition to become the anti-Gigafactory, a place where batteries are cooked down into raw materials that will serve as the grist for new cells.
Now vehicles from that first production wave are just beginning to reach the end of their lifespan. This marks the beginning of a tsunami of spent batteries, which will only get worse as more electric cars hit the road. The International Energy Agency predicts an percent increase in the number of EVs over the next decade, each car packed with thousands of cells.
The dirty secret of the EV revolution is that it created an e-waste timebomb—and cracking lithium-ion recycling is the only way to defuse it. Straubel understands the problem better than most. After all, he played a significant role in creating it. Straubel is cofounder and, until last year, was the CTO at Tesla, a company he joined when it was possible to count all of its employees on one hand. During his time there, the company grew from a scrappy startup peddling sports cars to the most valuable auto manufacturer on the planet.
There are two main ways to deactivate lithium-ion batteries. The most common technique, called pyrometallurgy, involves burning them to remove unwanted organic materials and plastics. This method leaves the recycler with just a fraction of the original material—typically just the copper from current collectors and nickel or cobalt from the cathode.
But it is simple, and smelting factories that currently exist to process ore from the mining industry are already able to handle batteries. Of the small fraction of lithium-ion batteries that are recycled in the US—just 5 percent of all spent cells—most of them end up in a smelting furnace.
The other approach is called hydrometallurgy. These batteries are now found everywhere and are a vital component of today's electric cars. But lithium is also quite rare, and is usually present only in small concentrations where it is found in the Earth's crust. Yet recycling has been only minimally profitable. In fact, EV owners have had to pay to recycle their car batteries.
Now a research group at NTNU wants to collaborate with Norwegian industry to do something about that. The goal is to recover lithium from EV batteries using hydrometallurgy. This means that a raw material is first dissolved in water and that the substance you want to extract is then precipitated. Norwegian companies have longstanding experience with this method.
The process is used to extract nickel and zinc, for example. But lithium from electric car batteries isn't recycled. For a long time, these batteries—in the name of the environment—were sent halfway around the globe for recycling in China. Now the Chinese have enough of their own trash and no longer accept the West's garbage. Instead, Norwegian EV batteries are stored in Sandefjord municipality, where they are taken apart and sent for further sorting and recycling in Europe, North America and Asia.
In Europe, the batteries often end up at a recycling plant in Belgium, Germany or Canada. The raw material is incinerated, and copper and nickel from the batteries are recycled. But in this combustion process, the lithium is lost. That means we need a new method that can also preserve the lithium for recycling. Hydrometallurgical methods are promising and are already used to some extent, but without extracting the lithium.
Bandyopadhyay's group is working to develop a process that recovers lithium, nickel and cobalt from what is called a black mass. Black mass is a black powder that consists of the materials in the battery that are active, meaning the material that is found on the electrodes. The composition of the material varies depending on what kind of chemistry is used to make the battery cells, but typically contains nickel, cobalt, manganese, lithium and carbon.
They are investigating two different types of electric car batteries, the Leaf variant and prismatic cells. In addition, they are cooperating with the Finnish mining company Keliber, a partially Norwegian-owned company that wants to produce lithium hydroxide for the international battery market.
Swedish researchers and companies are also active in the field, and a full-scale facility for the Scandinavian market must consider this connection as well. But the technology and research are economically interesting, regardless of the outcome in Sweden. We want this project to lay the foundation for a new, exciting industry related to the recycling of used electric car batteries in Norway.
Norway's unique position with the availability of these batteries gives us an excellent starting point," said Christian Rosenkilde, chief engineer at Norsk Hydro ASA.
The main reason for the current low profitability is that the volumes are still so small. EV batteries normally have a lifetime of around 10 years, which means that the vast majority of these batteries still work.
But in a few years there will be enough electric cars that the number of used batteries in Norway will rise sharply. Then there will also be more money in recycling. It's important to get the technology and equipment in place before that time. Adjigble, M.
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We acknowledge the contribution to the creation of the ReLiB project of N. We also thank Q. Dai at Argonne National Laboratories for providing additional data for Fig.
You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar. Somerville and E. Stolkin and A. Figures 1 and 2 were created by G. Figure 3 was created by L. Correspondence to Gavin Harper or Paul Anderson. Peer review information Nature thanks Anand Bhatt and Matthew Lacey and the other, anonymous, reviewer s for their contribution to the peer review of this work.
Reprints and Permissions. Harper, G. Recycling lithium-ion batteries from electric vehicles. Nature , 75—86 Download citation. Received : 14 January Accepted : 23 July Published : 06 November Issue Date : 07 November Anyone you share the following link with will be able to read this content:. Sorry, a shareable link is not currently available for this article.
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Download PDF. Subjects Batteries Carbon and energy Energy and society. This article has been updated. Abstract Rapid growth in the market for electric vehicles is imperative, to meet global targets for reducing greenhouse gas emissions, to improve air quality in urban centres and to meet the needs of consumers, with whom electric vehicles are increasingly popular.
You have full access to this article via your institution. Main The electric-vehicle revolution, driven by the imperatives to decarbonize personal transportation in order to meet global targets for reductions in greenhouse gas emissions and improve air quality in urban centres, is set to change the automotive industry radically.
Full size image. Social and environmental impacts of LIBs If we consider the two main modes of primary production, it takes tons of the mineral ore spodumene 7 , 8 when mined, or tons of mineral-rich brine 7 , 8 to produce one ton of lithium. Battery assessment and disassembly The waste-management hierarchy considers re-use to be preferable to recycling Fig.
Challenges of pack and module disassembly Different vehicle manufacturers have adopted different approaches for powering their vehicles, and electric vehicles on the market possess a wide variety of different physical configurations, cell types and cell chemistries. Recycling methods Pyrometallurgical recovery Pyrometallurgical metals reclamation uses a high-temperature furnace to reduce the component metal oxides to an alloy of Co, Cu, Fe and Ni. Physical materials separation For reclamation after comminution, recovered materials can be subjected to a range of physical separation processes that exploit variations in properties such as particle size, density, ferromagnetism and hydrophobicity.
Summary and opportunities The electric-vehicle revolution is set to change the automotive industry radically, and some of the most profound changes will inevitably relate to the management and decommissioning of vehicles at end-of-life. Change history 21 January An amendment to this paper has been published and can be accessed via a link at the top of the paper. References 1. CAS Google Scholar 3. CAS Google Scholar 4. Google Scholar 5. CAS Google Scholar 8. CAS Google Scholar Google Scholar ADS Google Scholar View author publications.
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