Tesla expects global shortage of electric vehicle battery minerals

[james_s]

A nice thing about metals is that they are generally easily recycled, so copper tied up in a vehicle or anything else can be returned to circulation when the equipment reaches end of life.

[nctnico]

A nice thing about metals is that they are generally easily recycled, so copper tied up in a vehicle or anything else can be returned to circulation when the equipment reaches end of life.

Copper yes, but Lithium and Cobalt in a battery not so much because they are chemically bound to other substances.

[maginnovision]

so the "copper alliance" says a shortage is aproaching - implying price rises.
why is my internal "fraud warning" going off??
the oil company's have pulled this stunt before - sell less product, but take more earnings!!

There is some question of this type of thing going on in California right now with petrol. Very high prices they claim is supply/demand but for some reason no other state is selling it to us. Now they're opening an investigation as to why we have limited supply and nobody else seems to want to make EXTRA money selling to California.

As a protectionist measure, California requires a different formulation of gasoline preventing competition from out-of-state refineries.  Then when California has production problems, they complain about the situation that they caused in the first place.  When things get desperate enough, they waive the regulations.  There are stories describing the machinations of this particular problem with California gasoline going back decades.

They do the same thing with milk to prevent out of state competition.

Yea, it's always been a problem. I was just commenting on the copper situation possibly being the same. Creating a self fulfilling prophecy of shortages potentially allowing them to hike the price either way.

[nctnico]

The shortage of materials could also be a reason manufacturers are moving away from electric vehicles. Audi has announced they are going to move towards hydrogen (https://www.autocar.co.uk/car-news/industry/audi-renews-hydrogen-powertrain-development-scheme
The reasons behind the move include concerns over the sourcing of natural resources for battery production and doubts over electric cars being able to deliver on ever-more-demanding customer expectations.

[apis]

Are they able to recycle lithium batteries yet?

[Tony_G]

Not sure if this has been posted before but it is an interesting look as the US REE mining situation:

http://www.mining.com/web/us-lost-plot-rare-earths/

TonyG

[Nauris]

A nice thing about metals is that they are generally easily recycled, so copper tied up in a vehicle or anything else can be returned to circulation when the equipment reaches end of life.

Copper yes, but Lithium and Cobalt in a battery not so much because they are chemically bound to other substances.

But then those chemical bonds are just matter of some pyro- and hydrochemistry, not really any problem.
Umicore has pilot-scale li-ion recycling plant with 7000 tonnes annual capacity in Belgium. (Hoboken UHT furnace)

[nctnico]

A nice thing about metals is that they are generally easily recycled, so copper tied up in a vehicle or anything else can be returned to circulation when the equipment reaches end of life.

Copper yes, but Lithium and Cobalt in a battery not so much because they are chemically bound to other substances.

But then those chemical bonds are just matter of some pyro- and hydrochemistry, not really any problem.
Umicore has pilot-scale li-ion recycling plant with 7000 tonnes annual capacity in Belgium. (Hoboken UHT furnace)

This process needs at least as much energy as processing the original Lithium ore so recycling Lithium batteries is going to be expensive and may not be worthwhile compared to mining Lithium. This means that recycling Li-ion batteries isn't going to help to push the price of EVs down.

Copper OTOH is mostly used in it's pure form so recycling it is much less energy demanding.

[Neilm]

A nice thing about metals is that they are generally easily recycled, so copper tied up in a vehicle or anything else can be returned to circulation when the equipment reaches end of life.

Copper yes, but Lithium and Cobalt in a battery not so much because they are chemically bound to other substances.

But then those chemical bonds are just matter of some pyro- and hydrochemistry, not really any problem.
Umicore has pilot-scale li-ion recycling plant with 7000 tonnes annual capacity in Belgium. (Hoboken UHT furnace)

This process needs at least as much energy as processing the original Lithium ore so recycling Lithium batteries is going to be expensive and may not be worthwhile compared to mining Lithium. This means that recycling Li-ion batteries isn't going to help to push the price of EVs down.

Why assume that EV battery recycling means recover the constituent parts? There are several companies that are taking batteries that are now not good enough for electric cars and have repurposed them for other things - generally home storage solutions. Still recycles the batteries.

[NiHaoMike]

Why assume that EV battery recycling means recover the constituent parts? There are several companies that are taking batteries that are now not good enough for electric cars and have repurposed them for other things - generally home storage solutions. Still recycles the batteries.

Quite a few individuals have managed to reuse EV battery packs or cells from EV battery packs in other applications. The Tesla packs are particularly thought after because they contain basically the best 18650s in existence.

[james_s]

Any way you look at it the cells have a finite lifespan, eventually they deteriorate to where they are not suitable for any purpose, at which point they need to be recycled or disposed of. I'm pretty confident that if raw materials get expensive enough for the economics to be favorable, recycling them will become widespread.

[nctnico]

A nice thing about metals is that they are generally easily recycled, so copper tied up in a vehicle or anything else can be returned to circulation when the equipment reaches end of life.

Copper yes, but Lithium and Cobalt in a battery not so much because they are chemically bound to other substances.

But then those chemical bonds are just matter of some pyro- and hydrochemistry, not really any problem.
Umicore has pilot-scale li-ion recycling plant with 7000 tonnes annual capacity in Belgium. (Hoboken UHT furnace)

This process needs at least as much energy as processing the original Lithium ore so recycling Lithium batteries is going to be expensive and may not be worthwhile compared to mining Lithium. This means that recycling Li-ion batteries isn't going to help to push the price of EVs down.

Why assume that EV battery recycling means recover the constituent parts? There are several companies that are taking batteries that are now not good enough for electric cars and have repurposed them for other things - generally home storage solutions. Still recycles the batteries.

That may seem like a nice application but if you look at how Li-ion batteries degrade with the number of charge/discharge cycles you'll see that the degradation drops exponentially beyond the specified lifetime of a cell. The high replacement cost of a battery pack of an EV makes me assume the owner of an EV will only replace it when it is complete and utterly worn. Also to make a decent battery pack you'll need to use cells with an equal quality otherwise a few lesser cells will determine the life of the battery pack. All in all battery packs made from repurposed cells will have a very short life after which you still end up with a pile of cells that need to be recycled or processed as waste.

Edit: another problem with repurposing old cells is that cells are optimised for a certain purpose. Cells used in an EV may suck for home storage.