EV battery industry runs circles around the rest

For the past few weeks, I’ve been focusing on electric vehicles (EVs), examining fallacies being embraced by those who don’t believe we can build a cleaner future. This is a key battleground for fossil fuel interests and people who dismiss the seriousness of the climate emergency. Earlier this month, I focused on false claims that EV weight is going to destroy our roads and highways. This week, I address concerns about the environmental impact of mining for battery minerals.

When battery packs replace gas tanks in your vehicle, the automotive industry and its battery suppliers will have taken a major step towards improving the circularity of their business models.

The gas tank and internal combustion engine (ICE) platform is the epitome of waste. Every week or two, we fill our tanks with single-use fuel and burn it to get around. It’s a process that wastes 80 per cent of the energy contained in the fuel while pumping exhaust fumes into our environment.

Everyone understands the efficiency improvements offered by powering an electric motor from a battery, but many people worry that the mining of lithium, cobalt and other minerals used in EV batteries will also damage the environment.

The allure of money, jobs and tax revenues has consistently tempted our society to make poor choices around profit-focused resource extraction. If we simply start building roads into environmentally sensitive ecosystems and excavating massive open pits for lithium supply, then we’ve learned nothing from our past mistakes.

But there is evidence that the rapidly growing battery industry can be much better than the gasoline economy it’s replacing. EV battery minerals are used for the lifetime of the vehicle. Instead of filling our cars with a liquid fuel that must be found and extracted continuously, we can harvest energy from renewable sources and fill our cars with electricity.

As we transition to an electricity-based energy system, the demand for batteries will grow exponentially, but we will also reach a point where recycled battery minerals are the preferred choice of battery manufacturers.

Energy expert Michael Liebreich explains the potential for recycling battery materials: “Suppose your battery has a lifespan of 15 years, and together collection and recovery rates exceed 90 per cent. Then as long as battery energy density improves by 10 per cent every 15 years — and remember, it doubled in the past decade — your initial battery minerals will continue providing the same storage services forever.”

The International Energy Agency (IEA) forecasts battery mineral demand will grow to nearly 12,000 kilotonnes per year by 2040. That will require new mining operations, but it will also reduce the amount of oil we need to extract from the Earth.

According to the IEA, the transport sector accounts for 60 per cent of global oil demand, which was around 100 million barrels of oil per day in 2023. This translates to a transport sector consumption of around 13,000 kilotonnes of non-recyclable fuel per day.

Examining the potential

Engineer and podcaster Rosemary Barnes points out that the minerals in an EV battery are 99 per cent less than the amount of gasoline consumed over the typical lifetime of a vehicle. But rather than argue about which extractive resource industry will do a better job of destroying the planet, let’s have a look at the potential for these industries to clean up their operations.

Australia supplies just over half the world’s lithium using a hard-rock mining process similar to open-pit coal or bitumen mining. It’s energy-intensive.

Chile produces about 30 per cent of world lithium supply using a process that extracts the mineral from underground brine deposits. Brine extraction is more time-consuming, but has about one-third of the CO2 emissions in comparison to open-pit lithium mining.

Direct lithium extraction (DLE) is a third process being developed that promises to reduce water and land use while massively cutting back CO2 emissions. Numerous companies are developing this technology to replace traditional brine extraction methods.

The battery industry is driving innovation to reduce CO2 emissions from lithium mining at the beginning of exponential growth in lithium demand. This is in stark contrast to the fossil fuel industry that is only now striving for net-zero production by 2050, a hollow promise when 70 to 80 per cent of CO2 emissions still occur when the fuel is burned.

Reducing CO2 emissions from the extraction of minerals for lithium-ion batteries is important, but it’s the recycling of those minerals that represents a groundbreaking move towards a circular economic process.

The recycling industry is still in its infancy, but it’s growing quickly. Nevada’s Redwood Materials plans to be producing anodes and cathodes for one million EV batteries annually by 2025. It has established partnerships with major automobile manufacturers Tesla and Toyota.

Although its recycling facility in Rochester, N.Y., has been put on hold due to cost overruns, Toronto-based Li-Cycle has five recycling plants already in operation and is leading the charge for more battery recycling capacity around the world.

In 2022, Hydrovolt launched Europe’s largest EV battery recycling plant and the operation is powered by 100 per cent renewable energy. Hydrovolt is a partnership between Swedish battery manufacturer Northvolt and Hydro, a Norwegian company that produces green aluminum.

In addition to the new ventures trying to capitalize on the growing market for EV battery recycling, all major EV manufacturers (including Tesla, Toyota, Volvo and Volkswagen) have plans for recycling their vehicle batteries. In 2022, Renault Group launched The Future is Neutral, a company that aims to “become the leader in industrial and European scale of the closed-loop automotive circular economy.”

The EV battery industry is an interesting example of a circular economy because there are several stages in its reuse and recycle value chain. For example, companies like B2U Storage Solutions are repurposing end-of-life EV batteries for use in the energy storage industry.

In the very near future, EV battery giga-factories will be surrounded by an ecosystem of suppliers, including companies specializing in different phases of the recycling process. For example, logistics companies will dominate the business of collecting and transporting recovered EV batteries.

First-stage recyclers like Li-Cycle will specialize in the mechanical recovery phase that produces a black mass containing the various minerals in an EV battery. Other companies like Ascend Elements will specialize in separating out lithium, nickel, copper and other minerals from the black mass.

The transition to electric vehicles is creating new businesses and careers that can exist in any country in the world, unlike the fossil fuel industry where a few resource-rich regions enjoy all the benefits. Battery manufacturing is already a more distributed industry and recycling will reduce dependency on countries with rich lithium deposits.

The electrification of the transport sector is a long overdue reboot of an industry that emerged in 1908 with the Model T Ford. This time, there is more thought going into reducing the impacts of resource extraction and efforts are being made to build a circular economy, which eliminates waste and reduces the amount of mining required. It’s a game-changing revolution.

Rob Miller is a retired systems engineer, formerly with General Dynamics Canada, who now volunteers with the Calgary Climate Hub and writes on behalf of Eco-Elders for Climate Action, but any opinions expressed in his work are his own.