You know what the richest ore for finding metals for new batteries is? Old batteries. Same applies to solar panels. This is great to see.
big oil’s about to start yet another denialism campaigh
I just want the fucking oil mafia to burn at sun’s temperature. They are such a fucking obstacle and disgrace to humanity’s development. Same goes for the big pharma. All the suffering just because of greed for a piece of paper with £/₹/$/€ on it.
Ok angry rant over.
is it a rant if you’re just stating facts?
both haha
Jerry Rigs Everything Video about lithium recycling to black mass.
Recycled lithium uses 70% less energy than virgin freshly mined lithium, and lithium, like aluminum, in infinitely recyclable.
Assholes like Jeremy Clarkson don’t get this.
For a second here, I thought Jerry’s channel had taken on a new format. I realize, now, this is referring to a materials part of the recycling process.
Oh well, anyway… HAIL SATAN
Jeremy Clarkson rims goats. Fuckin tail-lifter.
“The process starts with old batteries being separated and burned to strip away non-metal components. What’s left gets crushed into something called black mass. This is essentially a powder packed with recoverable metals. From there, a water-based chemical treatment called hydrometallurgy pulls the lithium out. One clever distinction in this new process is that the recovered lithium hydroxide actually replaces a chemical traditionally used during refining. This cuts the carbon footprint by about 40% compared to older methods.”
Article also said that previous methods got about 45% of the lithium from recycling.
black mass
Pretty metal
HAIL SATAN
Ok it needs to be said. The smart play is to have governments to subsidize this process and build up the raw inventory for lithium. That way, ie (US) could have tons and tons of raw lithium without having to mine it.
We recover 99% of lead from car batteries. The same lead is used over and over.
Lead is much easier to purify than lithium.
Wouldn’t it be smarter to use old EV batteries for grid storage?
Why not both? Downcycle the old EV batteries for grid storage, then when they reach the end of useful life, recycle them. We need to resurrect the first 2 R’s (Reduce, Reuse) to be able to survive on this planet.
They are listed in order of importance… reduce first, if you can’t, then reuse. If you can’t reuse, then recycle.
Problem is, we saw “recycle” and thougt “infinite resources” and ditched the other two… turns out that most things cant really be recycled, so now it’s just landfill all the way
I wish I could remember where I read it, but the focus on just Recycle was encouraged as the main narrative by corporations which didn’t want to give up the myth of endless growth.
The batteries don’t last forever, eventually, they need to be dealt with somehow.
Also grid storage doesn’t have the sort of deep, rapid discharge/charge cycles that EVs go through. Once an EV battery is no good in the car, it still has about 80% of it’s useable capacity left. Meaning, there will always be a need for “new” EV batteries, but grid storage would saturate and leave surplus batteries. Not to mention, as the grid storage batteries fall out of their useful life for that purpose, they can be recycled into new EV batteries and begin the cycle anew.
Not if they are not holding energy any more.
tl;dr:
Rub them on a big piece of carpet.
Lithium recycling has never been the problem. The problem is most EVs are new, and people aren’t buying enough of them, so there isn’t enough capacity of old batteries in the system yet for business to profit from building the plants to do the recycling. And now some stupid orange asshole has been sabotaging production, so we’re not going to hit that tipping point for decades.
I remember reading another article that said that their incinerated sewage waste had more gold per ton than their highest yielding mines.
Can these not be used for grid storage?
Not forever
Terrific. But, I suppose it won’t happen at scale until it’s cheaper than mining.
Because money is everything, and our environment is replaceable. /s
“But but but! What about landfills? What lame excuse will I make up now that my delusions about batteries filling up landfills has been exposed?” 😭 🫏
This is still good and should be looked at seriously to recover the lithium already in circulation, but I can’t help but feel like this is coming at the end of lithium as a battery material. Sodium batteries seem posed to supplant it in the near future.
Sodium batteries aren’t seriously expected by anyone to supplant Lithium ones. The two things Sodium can theoretically do better than Lithium are being cheaper as a raw material, and working well at low temperatures, but it’s always going to be heavier and larger for a given capacity. Most applications for batteries care about their size and weight, and so the extra cost of Lithium will be worth paying.
it’s always going to be heavier and larger for a given capacity.
That assumes research has stopped on sodium battery chemistry.
Chemically, Sodium and Lithium are very similar, so any improvement that applies to one should be pretty applicable to the other. That’s actually one of the main strengths of Sodium batteries - most of the research that’s already gone into making Lithium batteries can be reapplied with minor tweaks. However, Sodium is inherently larger and heavier than Lithium, with fewer atoms fitting into the same space and those atoms weighing more. If research for Sodium batteries catches up with Lithium ones, they’ll still be worse just because of that, and at that point, research would get easier gains from improving Lithium batteries than Sodium ones.
