The Promise and Pitfalls of Electric Cars – Battery Recycling
[May 14, 2020]
If you’re reading this, there’s a good chance you have at least a passing interest in electric cars. With a lot of individuals and outlets that advocate for certain policies, there tends to be an optimistic hyping of the benefits, and a downplaying of the drawbacks. At The Watt Car, we strive to provide a balanced view of the trend of transportation electrification. Electrified transportation certainly has its benefits, but it would be naïve and misleading to claim that there are no downsides or drawbacks to EVs.
One of the biggest, which up to this point hasn’t become a large-scale issue, is reuse and recycling of the high-voltage traction battery packs once they reach the end of their useful first life. Relative to the tens of millions of new ICE vehicles sold every year, and the cumulative hundreds of millions of conventional cars and trucks currently on the world’s roads, EVs only account for a tiny fraction of vehicles. However, by mid-century, electrified vehicles, whether hybrids, PHEVs, or full BEVs, are expected to account for close to, if not more than half of new vehicle sales.
Assuming a service life of 15-20 years, there will be a gradual, but unavoidable accumulation of used battery packs that will begin to stack up. A popular suggestion for second-life use of these automotive battery packs is for utility-scale energy storage for renewables such as solar and wind, where a battery’s maximum charge capacity of less than 70 percent isn’t as critical of an issue as it is in a car. It is a rational and sensible proposition. However, at the volumes being projected for electrified vehicles in the decades ahead, there may be an issue as to how much of the second-life use of the batteries can be absorbed by utilities. The inescapable issue of responsible disposal and resource recovery soon arises.
Energy storage products like the Tesla Powerwall offer an excellent second-life for EV batteries. But as EVs saturate the market, battery recycling will become an urgent necessity. (Image courtesy Tesla)
Unlike cardboard or PET plastics, which can be chopped, emulsified, and re-formed relatively easily into new products, breaking down EV traction batteries is complex, intricate, and expensive. Similar to the plastics and paper recycling industries, the issue of economics is at play here as well. End-consumer recycling has been criticized recently as essentially a decades-long, elaborate greenwashing campaign by the petroleum and forestry industries to claim environmental stewardship while most plastic and paper products were sourced from virgin feedstocks.
While there are various theories about the decline of recycling, at the end of the day, it was likely driven by the economics and availability of source materials. Simply put, it was cheaper to make plastic from crude oil and paper from virgin tree pulp than it was to use recycled materials. This was not always the case, and may not always be. Oil prices are notoriously volatile, and can rise and fall with economic cycles, supply and demand, and geopolitical externalities such as trade wars, tariffs, embargos, and supply constraints, either deliberate or unforeseen.
Similarly, apart from governmental mandates, battery recycling could be a tricky business economically. For it to succeed over the long term, a sustainably economical method to extract and reuse the metals and materials in the batteries needs to be in place that will undercut the cost of mining and processing raw materials. Up to now, the process of practically breaking down and reusing high-voltage traction batteries has largely been the province of academic research papers. However, there are some indications that the process may be transitioning from the realm of research to the real world.
The name J.B. Straubel should be familiar to anyone that has closely followed the EV industry over the last decade. Straubel was co-founder and chief technology officer at Tesla until February 2019. He is credited with championing the Supercharger network at a time when Tesla boss Elon Musk was toying with battery swap stations, as well as being instrumental in the planning and construction of the first Gigafactory in Sparks, Nev. Even before the Supercharger network existed, Straubel advocated for engineering in high-speed DC charging capability in the Model S to be able to take advantage of the future charging network. Musk is attributed with saying Tesla wouldn’t exist in its current form without Straubel. Clearly, this is a smart guy with an intimate knowledge of EVs and how they work.
Somewhat under the radar, Straubel formed and incorporated a company in Nevada called Redwood Materials in 2017. The company’s activities and longer-term strategy is somewhat mysterious. Redwood’s official website simply states, “Advancing sustainability through research and development, engineering and operational excellence for next generation recycling processes and programs.”
The Argonne National Laboratory in Illinois also recently formed its ReCell Center dedicated to the research and development of battery recycling techniques and second-life uses.
So in terms of the issue of battery recycling for EVs, it’s not being swept under the rug or ignored. However, neither is it at the crisis stage where the packs are becoming an environmental and societal menace. Better that solutions are being researched and developed now in the early stages than when they’re stacked stories high in the dystopian junkyards of the future.
(Main image courtesy General Motors)
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