Materials handling
products, materials and components in use at their highest value for as long as possible, restoring natural systems and eliminating waste, according to Neil Glover. Recycling is one part of this, but other approaches, such as increasing longevity and enabling reuse, repurposing or repair, are also important.
“Electric car batteries may well have a useful lifespan of a couple of decades – including second- life applications such as stationary energy storage,” says Glover. “So, while recycling them will not provide us with enough lithium for all the new ones we need, within five to ten years, it could be a notable contributor to the supply chain. It is predicted that, by 2040, the UK might be able to source somewhere between 25% and 35% of lithium from secondary sources.”
Scaling up research
As global supplies become increasingly contested, from sources such as this lithium salt flat in Argentina, the UK lithium industry is looking to develop supply chains closer to home.
2022 at its pilot plant – sufficient to demonstrate that plant’s commercial value to potential customers – will likely take up some of the slack. It aims to build a full-scale plant that could eventually produce 21,000t of battery-grade lithium carbonate annually by 2030 from its quarrying and refining site.
Magnets are critical The ATF, meanwhile, has been busy elsewhere, backing Pensana’s £145m Saltend development in the East Riding of Yorkshire. That facility will be developed to process the critical minerals used in magnets, a key component for manufacturing BEVs, as well as wind turbines, with expectations that operations will commence at the end of 2023.
“Electric car batteries may well have a useful lifespan of a couple of decades – including second-life applications such as stationary energy storage.”
Neil Glover $3.48bn
The expected value of the worldwide lithium-ion battery recycling market by 2027.
Emergen Research 30
Pensana eventually aims to produce 12,500t of separated rare earths, including 4,500–5,000t of neodymium and praseodymium (NdPr) oxide, representing about 5% of projected world demand in 2025, making it the second-largest magnet materials refiner outside of China.
Against this backdrop – and offering significant scope for bolstering supply chains – is the so- called ‘circular model’ of recycling, reusing, and repurposing; the worldwide lithium-ion battery recycling market, for example, expected to reach $3.48bn by 2027, according to from Emergen Research. While definitions of the circular economy vary in detail, at the core is keeping
Much work is being done in this field by WMG – an academic department within the University of Warwick. Unveiling its new EV battery recycling scale-up facility – the first of its kind in the UK – earlier this year, the department noted that today’s processes recover as little as 50% of the mass of the battery. The new facility, which will host a scaled-up version of its lithium recovery process – with claims that it will be able to recover over 90% of the lithium in a battery at very high purities – aims to rectify this. The Faraday Institution with its ReLib project – ‘Recycling and Reuse of Li-ion Batteries’ – is similarly actively engaged by examining the next generation of battery recycling technologies, as well as the underpinning scientific processes that could provide the UK with a competitive advantage.
“One of the work streams of the Faraday ReLiB project is specifically looking at the automation process including testing, disassembly and sorting using advanced robotics, machine vision and AI techniques,” Neil Glover explains.
“Material recovery would be significantly improved through designing batteries for the whole life cycle, standardising processes and providing more accurate data relating to the material streams.”
And therein lies the rub. Geopolitical ‘black swan’ events, such as Covid-19 and the Russian invasion of Ukraine, will likely continue crimping global supply chains over the short to medium term. Yet, despite the world having to adjust to higher inflation and higher interest rates in the short-term as a result, the longer-term prognosis is better due to technological advances that will likely have a major say in terms of how commercial costs can be driven down. To draw the silver lining out a little further, it should also provide additional economic security for the industry – even if there’s some rough to travel before we get there. ●
World Mining Frontiers /
www.nsenergybusiness.com
Ksenia Ragozina/
Shutterstock.com
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