Used Batteries - what will happen?
10-18-2018, 10:09 AM
#1
Racer
Thread Starter
Used Batteries - what will happen?
As EV and Hybrid numbers increase and they accumulate mileage & years on them eventually they will need new batteries.
What will happen to all these used Li batteries?
What will happen to all these used Li batteries?
10-18-2018, 12:18 PM
#2
Race Car
The first batches of batteries from electric and hybrid vehicles are hitting retirement age, yet they aren't bound for landfills. Instead, they'll spend their golden years chilling beer at 7-Elevens in Japan, powering car-charging stations in California and storing energy for homes and grids in Europe.
10-18-2018, 12:33 PM
#3
Three Wheelin'
I think about this often. History is full of humans picking up the pieces of unintended consequences of "progress". When cars were first becoming popular in the early 20th century, they were hailed as the solution to the biggest urban pollution issue of the time - horse manure. No one ever thought about the pollution impact of the ICE. So if electric really does replace the ICE, I fear we could be trying to solve a different pollution problem at the beginning of the 22nd century.
10-18-2018, 07:34 PM
#5
^^^^this is not true, it is in fact very difficult to recycle most non Pb - acid batteries in a cost effective and energy efficient manner.
I'll explain, a battery consists of an anode, a cathode, a separator and an electrolyte. There are six principal types of Li batteries generally available. Mostly these have carbon based anodes.
The lithium is contained in the electrolyte and in the cathode, in the former as a salt and in the latter as an oxide or phosphate usually combined with cobalt, aluminium and manganese (individually or in varying proportions).
To seperate the components requires mechanical breakdown of the battery - then the constituent parts have to be separated. The metals are then recovered through electrowinning e.g. the cathode and electrolyte can be dissolved in acid (after the removal of the fairly nasty organics from the electrolyte) with the metals recovered in a series of electrolytic cells.
Neither cheap, efficient or environmentally friendly.
I'll explain, a battery consists of an anode, a cathode, a separator and an electrolyte. There are six principal types of Li batteries generally available. Mostly these have carbon based anodes.
The lithium is contained in the electrolyte and in the cathode, in the former as a salt and in the latter as an oxide or phosphate usually combined with cobalt, aluminium and manganese (individually or in varying proportions).
To seperate the components requires mechanical breakdown of the battery - then the constituent parts have to be separated. The metals are then recovered through electrowinning e.g. the cathode and electrolyte can be dissolved in acid (after the removal of the fairly nasty organics from the electrolyte) with the metals recovered in a series of electrolytic cells.
Neither cheap, efficient or environmentally friendly.
Last edited by groundhog; 10-18-2018 at 07:59 PM.
10-18-2018, 09:47 PM
#6
Rennlist Member
"needing" new batteries is a vague statement…I bought a used leaf that get's 65 of it's original 85 mile range - do I "need" a new battery for it?The answer is now, I bought it knowing it's range and it sufficient for my local neighborhood kid's car commuter needs on a daily basis. So the decision to replace a degraded LiON battery depends on what your daily demand profile looks like, and it's not at all clear you need to replace the battery just because it can only go 270 miles on a. full charge when it was originally a 310 mile battery at point of sale…especially for the 200 mile+ EV's when it's a fact that 98% of daily driving usage is less than 60 miles range total.
LiON batteries degrade in that they can no longer hold as many kWh as they original did when first sold, but they don't tend to actually "fail". They definitely degrade, but if the battery continues to work and it's daily charge range is sufficient for your driving needs it's not clear you need to replace the battery. Nissan is successfully refurbishing Leaf batteries in Japan and selling them at retail costs that are 1/2 the cost of the original battery new - and there is a robust market for degraded batteries to be used as alternative stationary storage for energy storage solutions to smooth out peak/load/production/demand issues…over time these systems will be dealt with like all complex systems and existing techniques will be refined/improved and new methods will be developed. The materials in the battery are valuable and the batteries themselves are valuable. It is not at all clear they will simply end up in landfills and the actual useful life should be longer than people think.
LiON batteries degrade in that they can no longer hold as many kWh as they original did when first sold, but they don't tend to actually "fail". They definitely degrade, but if the battery continues to work and it's daily charge range is sufficient for your driving needs it's not clear you need to replace the battery. Nissan is successfully refurbishing Leaf batteries in Japan and selling them at retail costs that are 1/2 the cost of the original battery new - and there is a robust market for degraded batteries to be used as alternative stationary storage for energy storage solutions to smooth out peak/load/production/demand issues…over time these systems will be dealt with like all complex systems and existing techniques will be refined/improved and new methods will be developed. The materials in the battery are valuable and the batteries themselves are valuable. It is not at all clear they will simply end up in landfills and the actual useful life should be longer than people think.
10-18-2018, 09:50 PM
#7
Its a a question of economics, its technically possible to recycle certain components but its very expensive to do so.
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10-18-2018, 10:01 PM
#8
Rennlist Member
"I fear we could be trying to solve a different pollution problem at the beginning of the 22nd century."
but over life of an EV being driven for 13,500 miles/year you are accumulating quite an energy budget of "savings" vs. the ICE car - and at the end of that life from an total impact point of view you will lose some of those savings to deal with the battery - but I highly doubt recycling a LiON EV battery will wipe out the total energy savings over the life of an EV vs. the total energy consumption by simply driving the ICE....so it's very possible and likely to be a net win even with battery disposal and recovery costs....
but I"m confident when it becomes a problem we can surmount it - in the mean time it's a fact EV's are zero emission and use less energy overall during the life of their usage and that energy can come from a variety sources rather than just one source…let's not pretend the disposal of ICE vehicles is a panacea…it's not.
10-18-2018, 10:13 PM
#9
Rennlist Member
"The paper concludes that renewal of surface of EV
battery electrodes by removing SEI and reassembly of the
components will enable reuses of the battery and will be
much less expensive than manufacturing a new battery
(PDF) End-of-life (EOL) issues and options for electric vehicle batteries. Available from: https://www.researchgate.net/publica...icle_batteries[accessed Oct 18 2018]."
battery electrodes by removing SEI and reassembly of the
components will enable reuses of the battery and will be
much less expensive than manufacturing a new battery
(PDF) End-of-life (EOL) issues and options for electric vehicle batteries. Available from: https://www.researchgate.net/publica...icle_batteries[accessed Oct 18 2018]."
just one example of what can happen at the EOL of an EV battery - from he conclusion of this paper - EV batteries are too valuable to end up in a land file and reuse, refurbishment, and recycling are all possible, not free, but possible and likely once volumes are big enough to matter (cause the impact will be big enough to matter) - I'm confident that if this is the biggest problem with an EV it can be solved - once we are presented with a problem humans are pretty good at figuring out solutions - we don't have to sit on our hands and say "oh well that's a nasty problem, we should keep burning dead dinosaurs at 28 mpg and beathing the toxic fumes cause it might be hard to recycle a LiON battery" - I'd much rather have the contained LiON battery recycling problem, than the ongoing toxic airborne emissions problems from billions of idle'ing ICE engines - worse case we pile them all in once place and use them as giant paper weights, they at least don't get released into the atmosphere and get added to the overall CO2 parts-per-million count world wide.
it's a constrained problem and is technologically feasible, the ONLY comment about it is that it is current expensive for some definition of expensive without accounting for the "expense" of doing nothing and continuing status quo - if the only argument against LiON battery is they are "expensive" at EOL that's a reasonably high class problem that I'm sure we can solve, it's much hard to recapture all the pollutants output by an ICE engine over it's life, and to date isn't even really feasible…there is no perfect solution, but one clearly has a life cycle advantage if what you're optimizing for is emissions control - which is what we are in fact optimizing for.
10-18-2018, 10:34 PM
#10
Rennlist Member
Nissan is successfully refurbishing batteries in Japan for the Leaf - after 100,000-200,000 miles you can spend $3,000 and get a brand new fresh refurbished LiON battery and they take your old battery and refurbish it also…
https://insideevs.com/nissan-introdu...-new-4r-plant/
$3,000 for a new refurbished battery installed works out to $0.015/mile driven for a new battery which will completely restore your car's original range, and the battery doesn't end up in a landfill - that's chump change and much cheaper than any common 100,000-200,000 mile ICE refurbishment. And I doubt Nissan's losing money on this affair - so I question the comment that this is "expensive".
including the battery refurbishment cost that change the equation for driving an electric car from about $0.05/mile to $0.06/mile driven - still way way cheaper than a ICE car.
https://insideevs.com/nissan-introdu...-new-4r-plant/
$3,000 for a new refurbished battery installed works out to $0.015/mile driven for a new battery which will completely restore your car's original range, and the battery doesn't end up in a landfill - that's chump change and much cheaper than any common 100,000-200,000 mile ICE refurbishment. And I doubt Nissan's losing money on this affair - so I question the comment that this is "expensive".
including the battery refurbishment cost that change the equation for driving an electric car from about $0.05/mile to $0.06/mile driven - still way way cheaper than a ICE car.
10-18-2018, 10:35 PM
#11
Again, its a question of economics - this is well understood. Expensive as in uneconomic. Thats why its not routinely done and thats why everyone avoids the question
Its plenty hard to capture the pollutants due to EVs too. Mostly they are made of aluminium and are large and heavy and thus consume large amounts of raw material - the aluminium is usually sourced from mined bauxite put through electric arc furnaces - a very high energy process per unit of production.
I explained how recycling of a battery is done, I also explained why its expensive and currently largely uneconomic to do so.
The thread is about used batteries.
Its plenty hard to capture the pollutants due to EVs too. Mostly they are made of aluminium and are large and heavy and thus consume large amounts of raw material - the aluminium is usually sourced from mined bauxite put through electric arc furnaces - a very high energy process per unit of production.
I explained how recycling of a battery is done, I also explained why its expensive and currently largely uneconomic to do so.
The thread is about used batteries.
10-18-2018, 10:48 PM
#12
^^^^this is not true, it is in fact very difficult to recycle most non Pb - acid batteries in a cost effective and energy efficient manner.
I'll explain, a battery consists of an anode, a cathode, a separator and an electrolyte. There are six principal types of Li batteries generally available. Mostly these have carbon based anodes.
The lithium is contained in the electrolyte and in the cathode, in the former as a salt and in the latter as an oxide or phosphate usually combined with cobalt, aluminium and manganese (individually or in varying proportions).
To seperate the components requires mechanical breakdown of the battery - then the constituent parts have to be separated. The metals are then recovered through electrowinning e.g. the cathode and electrolyte can be dissolved in acid (after the removal of the fairly nasty organics from the electrolyte) with the metals recovered in a series of electrolytic cells.
Neither cheap, efficient or environmentally friendly.
I'll explain, a battery consists of an anode, a cathode, a separator and an electrolyte. There are six principal types of Li batteries generally available. Mostly these have carbon based anodes.
The lithium is contained in the electrolyte and in the cathode, in the former as a salt and in the latter as an oxide or phosphate usually combined with cobalt, aluminium and manganese (individually or in varying proportions).
To seperate the components requires mechanical breakdown of the battery - then the constituent parts have to be separated. The metals are then recovered through electrowinning e.g. the cathode and electrolyte can be dissolved in acid (after the removal of the fairly nasty organics from the electrolyte) with the metals recovered in a series of electrolytic cells.
Neither cheap, efficient or environmentally friendly.
Look at the metal industries, they already find recycling to be cheaper than raw materials in most cases.
Earl Colby Pottinger (Tesla and Bollinger fan)
Last edited by earl pottinger; 10-18-2018 at 11:21 PM. Reason: spelling error
10-18-2018, 11:03 PM
#13
Rennlist Member
as far as aluminum all cars are moving that direction so we'll call that a wash for EV vs. ICE…
10-18-2018, 11:32 PM
#14
They will all pile up in special containment areas in salvage yards across the world while all the EV loyalists stand around saying " the technology is getting better every day and soon they will find a viable solution to recycle these things "
10-18-2018, 11:37 PM
#15
Well
Those are the real world facts TODAY.
Earl Colby Pottinger (Tesla and Bollinger fan)