What Will Happen to All the Dead Electric Car Batteries?

https://www.bbc.com/news/business-56574779

by disqard • 5 years ago

65 69 5 years ago

jude-• 5 years ago

They're recycling them. Saved you a click.

danans• 5 years ago

I'm surprised that the article didn't mention the intermediate use case of stationary storage, which can extend the life of batteries many more years before they need to be recycled for raw materials.

foepys• 5 years ago

This will only push the problem by a few years. After that recycling is still necessary.

Robotbeat• 5 years ago

Doubling the useful life of the battery is more than marginally useful. Reuse is much better than recycling when you can do it.

theshrike795• 5 years ago

Batteries will last a good decade in vehicle use, then another decade for grid storage.

VW is already attempting to recycle 95% of their batteries: https://www.volkswagenag.com/en/news/stories/2019/02/lithium...

We've got 20 years to improve our recycling process from that. I'm not majorly worried.

flgb• 5 years ago

E.g. https://www.relectrify.com

stubish• 5 years ago

Yes, there is a huge market for used batteries. Trick is to ensure they get put up for sale, because I'm sure the manufacturers are fearful a second hand market will devalue their product. ie. they will offer trade ins and free disposal rather than risk the battery equivalent of retread tires ending up on the market.

adgjlsfhk12• 5 years ago

This article seems to be making a few pretty big mistakes. First of all is the 5% of batteries are recycled figure. The first problem with this is that it's unclear if that is accounting for capacity or not. Recycling a 100kWh battery in a car matters a lot more than a 2500mAh battery from a phone. Also, it doesn't account for the amount of batteries that are re-used. Batteries that have lost 25% of their maximum capacity is probably no longer useful in a car, but still fine for grid storage, where price matters a lot more than volume or weight. Recycling a battery is really stupid if it can be reused, so I'm really disappointed that this article didn't mention battery reuse at all.

DoingIsLearning• 5 years ago

It's not a pretty big mistake, it is very intentionally trying to create drama as if this was somehow an unsolved problem threatening Humanity only to then conclude that EV batteries are both heavily regulated and economically valuable.

It's just a fluff tech piece like most mainstream tech reporting.

azinman23• 5 years ago

Seems like valid concerns to me. Who is taking the batteries and putting them into grids? Do we reach a limit and then what if there’s no market to buy them? If the world is going to change over to EVs, that’s a big scale of a problem that needs to be thought through or bad things will happen.

lloeki2• 5 years ago

create drama as if this was somehow an unsolved problem threatening Humanity

The number one issue people around me have when talking about EVs isn't even range or cold these days, it's that they read somewhere batteries aren't recycled, together with some total cost back of the envelope calculation that showed an EV pollutes at least as much as a fossil fuel vehicle. Some of them are convinced hydrogen and fuel cells are the only way forward.

Now, I try to formulate rebuttals based on my engineering knowledge, but I tried to do my homework and could not find reliable information.

My hunch is EV is a young, rapidly scaling product class/industry/market (compared to entrenched fossil fuel engines) so the process has to scale up to be cost efficient and even work at all, it just can't happen overnight, but that no, they're not going to throw batteries in landfills.

My second hunch is that those otherwise green-biased, reasonable people get strangely irate about the thing to the point of persisting with buying ICEs so I'm thinking there's some agenda carried through memetic manipulative propaganda somewhere around it.

teruakohatu2• 5 years ago

Batteries that have lost 25% of their maximum capacity is probably no longer useful in a car

Here in NZ people are importing "cheap" used Nissan Leafs from Japan with 75% battery remaining.

Here a 5 year old, 60,000km Leaf, with 76% battery remaining sells for around US$13,000.

headmelted• 5 years ago

This. Also, if the capacity drops enough that the range really isn’t useful to you (and you can’t sell it on to anyone else who has lower range needs), just park it up in your garage or driveway and wire it back in to your mains electricity.

No blackouts ever again and half-rate electricity on nighttime tarriffs. Bargain.

cameldrv2• 5 years ago

If it's a Leaf, losing 25% of the range may make the battery no longer useful, because the Leaf's range is just barely adequate for many people.

If it's a Tesla with a 300+ mile range, assuming the owner has a home charger, the difference in range really only matters on long road trips, and 225 miles is still adequate to drive long distances, albeit more slowly. The owner is not likely to replace the pack at this level of degradation.

fhe• 5 years ago

does anyone have knowledge of whether, once a battery starts losing capacity, does it do so in accelerating speed? My experiences with laptop and phone batteries suggest that they do. It took a couple of years for batteries to be reduced to 85% capacity, but from there it took only half a year for them to diminish to 60% or 50%.

theshrike795• 5 years ago

Yep: https://electrek.co/2020/06/06/tesla-battery-degradation-rep...

"Real-world data showed that Tesla battery degradation was less than 10% after over 160,000 miles (257,500 km)"

According to the graph there's a slight dip during the first 50k and then it levels out to a steady decline. There is no data for batteries around 60% capacity, since there are none yet :)

Eric_WVGG• 5 years ago

My numbers almost exactly match yours. I’ve been using “Coconut Battery” for about fifteen years to track this on various MacBooks.

The death spiral starts at 80%. Newer Macs and iPhones now get pretty aggressive about pushing users to seek service.

Also worth noting that, as of Big Sur, MacBooks that are mostly used plugged-in will not too off past 80% until asked. I expect that this will pay off bigly for consumers.

h0nd• 5 years ago

Same here. Even just looking at the title, I wondered when would a battery be considered 'dead'. There is no description of this in the whole article.

type_enthusiast• 5 years ago

What will happen to all the used gasoline?

Ygg2• 5 years ago

Use it for global warming.

11235813213455• 5 years ago

We recycle it, with our lungs

theshrike795• 5 years ago

This is the weird disconnect we're having.

People are SO VERY WORRIED about the emissions from EV battery use and their recycling.

But at the same time digging up fossil fuels and literally burning them up in smoke is perfectly fine somehow?

kvgr• 5 years ago

Well digging heavy metals and trashing them concentrated to landfills is also no joke so worries are in place. But the reporting on these issues is trash. The same applies to solar panels. Some countries have good rules to recycle. Some dont. And in the long term we will see some bad results.

lloeki2• 5 years ago

Nasty psychological perception trick: smoke is hardly visible compared to quarries and landfills, and there is visibly more atmosphere volume than ground surface.

kregasaurusrex• 5 years ago

Hopefully Google doesn't tell us to collectively throw them into the ocean and recharge the electric eels. [0] While cylindrical 18650's can be opened and unrolled carefully without being shorted, it's difficulty to quickly and reliably do at scale. Many other designs like flat-packs used in phones are too difficult to extract the lithium from, where the rarer metals like cobalt are the target components instead. [1] Extracting lithium isn't cost-effective due to its abundance in the earth.

[0] https://www.thedrive.com/tech/39540/google-tells-search-user...

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battery_recycling#Lithium_ion_...

peterburkimsher3• 5 years ago

I'm still hanging on to the swollen battery I took out of my MacBook, even though I know it's a fire risk.

Buying a real battery for a 2014 MacBook Pro 15" A1398 isn't possible, because Apple says they're obsolete. (long live laptops with USB-A and HDMI!).

I bought a third-party battery, labelled Simplo but apparently made by someone else. It idles at 12V. The original Apple battery idles at 2V, and "wakes up". The third-party battery killed my logic board about a month after I fitted it, when lifted the lid to wake from sleep while outside.

I tried moving the Compeq PCB from the official battery to the new cells, but in the process, got an undervoltage on the TI controller chip BQ20Z45, which set the PF flag (permanent failure). To clear the PF flag, I need an "unseal" password, which isn't the same as the one that Charlie Miller discovered. I wrote a fuzzer, but it'll take 340 days to run. Be2Works haven't answered their email.

So in conclusion: even when your batteries are swollen, they're still better than the fakes. Trying to fix them can make it worse. Don't throw out your Smart Battery control boards.

Stratoscope2• 5 years ago

Buying a real battery for a 2014 MacBook Pro 15" A1398 isn't possible, because Apple says they're obsolete.

Are you f------ kidding me? You have just ruined my night.

Figuratively speaking, of course. I won't shoot the messenger!

But I have an A1398 sitting here that's been idle for a few years, ever since the battery started puffing up every time it warmed up and pushed out the center of the bottom case so far that the rubber feet at the four corners were lifted off the table and it would start to twirl as you type.

The machine is in perfect shape otherwise, and even if I'm not using it any more, I'd hoped I could have a new battery put in and give it to someone who would get many more years use out of it.

If there is a solution that would get a safe and reliable new battery into it without futzing with chips, I would be all ears!

csense• 5 years ago

I'd hoped I could have a new battery put in

Then you should have bought a PC with a battery you can take out, instead of Apple's garbage.

Apple makes their stuff specifically non-disassemblable by third parties. If you buy Apple hardware, you get a repair if Apple wants to give you one, and you pay the price Apple wants you to pay.

I'm proud to say I've never bought a piece of Apple hardware in my life. This is one of the many reasons behind that decision.

Caveat emptor.

pronoiac• 5 years ago

I've had good experiences with iPhone batteries from iFixit, and they also have decent directions. I'd recommend them. Looking for that Macbook model, it looks like a 1 or 2 hour process.

fourstar• 5 years ago

https://americanbatterytechnology.com seems to be focused on sustainable batteries + recycling. we'll see if it actually pans out but seems promising.

pl-94• 5 years ago

What means recycling? From 1 kWh you restore 1 kWh? Or from 1 kWh you restore 1 Wh and then publish a report claiming how sustainable is your business?

CameronNemo• 5 years ago

I think it means no landfilling.

kragen3• 5 years ago

This battery waste problem has an epistemological status similar to that of dowsing and witchcraft.

Right now there are both articles about how lithium mining is terrible and expensive (https://www.wired.co.uk/article/lithium-batteries-environmen... "The spiralling environmental cost of our lithium battery addiction"†) and articles like this one about how we're producing a massive waste stream containing high concentrations of valuable metals like lithium, cobalt, and manganese. (A 2600-mAh 18650 cell contains about 800 mg of lithium, and https://lygte-info.dk/review/batteries2012/Aosibo%20IMR18650... says it weighs 45 g, so it's 1.78% lithium by weight, 35 times as concentrated as the brine. At US$13k/tonne that's about 1¢ of lithium per battery.)

People throwing out valuable metals while other people are spending a lot of money to recover those same valuable metals from highly diluted deposits? This sounds like a case for... capitalism!

(This is completely different from the old battery waste problem, where mercury was included in disposable battery electrodes in order to stabilize the battery chemistry, which is a serious toxicity hazard and a real pain in the ass to separate out. That's never been the case with lithium batteries and has even been eliminated from almost all disposable batteries now.)

As pointed out in https://xkcd.com/808/, if dowsing could tell you what was under the ground, companies would be using it to make a killing in oil prospecting. If casting hexes on your enemies worked, companies would be using it to make a killing in... killing. Military contracting. (Actually, probably military leaders would.) And, when there's a significant waste stream of lithium batteries available, companies are going to make a killing by buying up these used lithium batteries for 10¢/kg and extracting 23¢/kg of lithium from them.

Until then, it's not a problem.

Unless somehow modern capitalism is failing to be ruthlessly profit-focused enough.

______

† The Wired article says "500,000 gallons [of water] per tonne of lithium", which, in non-historical-re-enactment units, is 1.9 million liters per tonne, but probably more accurately 2 million liters. That puts the lithium content of the brine at 0.05%.

ppf4• 5 years ago

You're assuming that it takes less than 13 cents / kg to extract that lithium.

kragen3• 5 years ago

Yes, 13 cents per kg of dead batteries, working out to US$7.30 per kg of lithium.

Actually, though, I see a major error in my calculations. What cost US$13000/tonne in 02019 wasn't lithium; it was battery-grade lithium carbonate. The molar mass of Li₂CO₃ is 73.9 (amu); lithium itself is only 13.9 amu of that, or 18%. So that's US$69000/tonne for the lithium itself, 5.5¢ per battery, and US$1.23/kg for used batteries.

In 02015 the price was only US$6500 per tonne of lithium carbonate and thus US$35000 per tonne of lithium. Most of that was being extracted from deposits like the ones mentioned above: 0.05% lithium mixed in with 99.95% water and other things. I don't think lithium extraction technology has gotten worse since 02015 (maybe it's gotten better, but probably not worse) so I think that's a reasonable upper bound to the cost of refining lithium from such dilute deposits: US$35000 per tonne, US$35/kg.

But, as I said, the batteries represent a deposit that is 35 times more concentrated than the natural deposits currently being mined. That means that it will be much cheaper to refine lithium from batteries than from the natural deposits, although of course the chemistry of the process will be different.

The revised numbers, then, are that old batteries contain US$1.23/kg of lithium (US$1230/tonne); so, if you spend 50¢/kg (US$500/tonne) to buy the old batteries, you can spend 73¢ per kg of batteries to refine the lithium, yielding 18 g of lithium. In 02015 miners were getting paid 63¢ to refine 18 g of lithium from natural deposits, so I don't know if it'll actually cost 50¢ or 5¢ or 0.5¢ to do that same refining from batteries, but it won't be 73¢.

Except at first, because it'll be chemistry Ph.D.s refining lithium a gram at a time at a lab bench, and it will cost US$1000 per gram. But then you gradually scale up the process.

jeroenhd• 5 years ago

My guess is that these recycling efforts will go the same way plastic recycling has gone: industry lying about the amount of recycling while secretly burning and dumping the waste somewhere the general public doesn't see.

Yes, we all want a battery to be recycled, but recycling batteries is an arduous task that cannot be automated efficiently in any way. No company will spend the man hours on recycling batteries if they're not forced by law, because it's a terrible cost sink. Even with recycling the material gains from taking apart batteries are terrible.

Extracting lithium from a cell is damn near impossible, but the other metal parts can be metled down, so my guess would be that when a large amount of batteries reach their end of life, they'll just be burned and molten, possibly with some filter attached to the smoke stack that'll do the absolute legal minimum to protect the people and environment from the toxic fumes.

Or, what might happen is what has happened to plastic "recycling", we export the stuff to third world countries who offer to "recycle" the stuff for cheap, where they'll just end up in a landfill, waiting for the occasional fire.

Sure, these companies tout that they're going to recycle all of these used batteries right now, but in the end I have very little faith that they'll actually give a damn about recycling. They're not even recycling used cars for more than their metallic elements, so why would we ever believe that they're going to recycle something as complicated as a battery pack?

ppf4• 5 years ago

You speak the truth. "Recycling" is mostly a sham, that we allow to soothe our consciences for living such an unsustainable lifesytle.

A close friend of mine gained a Masters's degree in the subject, intending to work towards our new utopian recycling society, and even he doesn't complain any more when I tell him that the best thing we can do with our "Recycling" is highly controlled incineration and heat extraction.

carpedimebagjoe• 5 years ago

Seems like another bait article intentionally-espousing an unpopular/wrong/un-held position to elicit "engagement" IYAM, basically trolling the readers.

If not and the journalist were authentically dim, then leave it to the pessimism of British MSM to smear FUD like Nutella on specific, immediate, essential solutions to an existential emergency so we can delay, bikeshed, and hand-wring about how ICEs, burning FFs, and net positive GHGEs are so much better than all this EV claptrap. In the larger picture, it seems like there's always a social opportunist who will automatically espouse the opposite of a prevailing-but-sensible view to garner some sort of following.. like flat earthers but without meetings or conventions.

scotty79• 5 years ago

I think we shoud force manufacturers of the stuff to take back in the garbage it becomes.

To be allowed to sell n batteries you need to buy k*n from the garbage collectors. Then just fine tune k, but it can't be 0.

That would provide money flow from people that make vast amounts of money from making things that will ultimately become the garbage, to the people that are dealing with that garbage.

I don't think the batteries are the problem yet, but we might start doing this with manufacturers of plastic packaging.

jxidjhdhdhdhfhf• 5 years ago

People are starting to think about this problem (and by problem I don't mean a problem on the same scale as global warming). Notably, former Tesla CTO JB Straubel started a company doing battery recycling called Redwood Materials. We already have a metals recycling industry today (scrap yards and aluminum recycling) so I don't see why we can't have the same for batteries. Yes, they have to be handled using special processes to avoid fires but that is just an engineering hurdle that will be overcome.

Car batteries easier to recycle than consumer electronics, because cars are already scrapped when they get too old because the raw materials in them have value. Consumer electronics are more difficult because the metals in them are in smaller quantities and so people won't want to drive to the recycling center to earn themselves 50¢ but a car may have several hundred dollars in raw materials.

Also note that because the global EV industry is currently scaling and because it may take decades for a car battery to wear out, companies in this space will take time to grow because there just aren't enough dead car batteries out there to make mass scale recycling commercially viable yet.

What Will Happen to All the Dead Electric Car Batteries?

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