Secondary Battery Life

The use of Li-ion batteries is crucial in the future to deal with increased vehicle electrification and automatization. As the key to using onboard Li-ion batteries, the client has been engaged in the development of battery degradation diagnosis, especially technology to rapidly measure the capacity and internal resistance of a battery. Unfortunately, no promising solutions have yet been found. Since Li-ion batteries grow popular in various industries, and approaches to degradation diagnosis technology are widely studied, the client hence decided to seek technology proposals to accelerate research and development in-house.  To gather merely one ton of lithium requires the mining of 250 tons of the mineral ore spodumene or 750 tons of mineral-rich brine. Therefore extracting lithium from car batteries (since estimates suggest that we only need 256 used EV batteries to produce 1 ton of lithium) can avoid this water-intensive carbon-intensive method of production. In 2017, the worldwide sales of electric cars exceeded 1 million units for the first time. Market research group Deloitte reported that this figure doubled during 2018, and is close to doubling again, from 2 million to 4 million by the end of 2020. Those are big secondary resources for minerals, which could negate the need for mining many additional tons in order to power the world we love.

Recycling electric-vehicle batteries at end-of-life are essential for many reasons. At present there is little hope that profitable processes will be found for all types of current and future types of electric-vehicle LIBs without substantial successful research and development, so the imperative to recycle will derive primarily from the desire to avoid landfill and to secure the supply of strategic elements. The environmental and economic advantages of second-use and the low volume of electric-vehicle batteries currently available for recycling could stifle the development of the recycling industry in some places. In many nations, the elements and materials contained in the batteries are not available, and access to resources is crucial in ensuring a stable supply chain. Electric vehicles may prove to be a valuable secondary resource for critical materials. Careful husbandry of the resources consumed by electric-vehicle battery manufacturing—and recycling—surely hold the key to the sustainability of the future automotive industry. 

Pyrometallurgical routes, in particular, suffer from high capital costs, and if full recyclability of LIBs is to be achieved, alternative methods are urgently required, rather than seeking to recycle only the most economically valuable components.