Fortune Minerals : COBALT NEWS

The Economist - May 10, 2021

But they need to be designed to make recycling them easier | Science & technology

vehicles being made rises, lithium prices will triple by the end of the decade. Cobalt, meanwhile, comes mainly from Congo, a country that

EVs, by contrast, contain a far greater variety of materials (see chart). Separating and sorting these is tricky, especially as many of them are locked up inside complex electrical components…For those who can manage to do so, though, there is good business to be had here. EVs contain lots of valuable stuff. The magnets in their motors are full of rare-earth metals (see box), and their batteries of lithium and cobalt. Rystad Energy, a Norwegian research company, forecasts that as the number of electric vehicles being made rises, lithium prices will triple by the end of the decade. Cobalt, meanwhile, comes mainly from Congo, a country that is often war-torn and has a dreadful human-rights record…There are two ways of doing so. The more common at the moment is pyrometallurgy. This treats black mass as an ore, by smelting it in a furnace to liberate a metallic mixture from which pure metals, particularly the cobalt, can be separated. That, though, requires a lot of energy. It also destroys valuable non-metallic components such as the graphite in batteries' anodes. And it fails to liberate the lithium, which ends up in compounds in the slag that is generated alongside the liquid metal, and must then be extracted separately…The other approach, hydrometallurgy, works more subtly. It leaches metals, lithium included, out of the shredded material by dissolving them in acids or other solvents. That requires less energy and also permits the recovery of non-metallic materials such as graphite. Hydrometallurgy is more complex than pyrometallurgy, and comes with the added expense of treating the waste water it generates, to prevent pollution. But its overall advantages suggest it is the wave of the future…Li-Cycle, a Canadian company founded in 2016 that is already the biggest recycler of lithium-ion batteries in North America, is one outfit betting on hydrometallurgy…Li-Cycle is not alone, though, in its hydrometallurgical ambitions. One rival is Redwood Materials of Carson City, Nevada, which was founded in 2017 by Jeffrey Straubel, formerly chief technology officer of Tesla, a big maker of EVs. Redwood uses a combination of pyro- and hydrometallurgy in its process, with some of the recovered materials providing energy to drive the pyro side of the equation…Northvolt, another firm started by ex-Tesla-ites (Peter Carlsson, its chief executive, and Paolo Cerruti, its chief operating officer), makes lithium-ion batteries for European carmakers. It is adding a recycling plant to its factory in Sweden, to process the batteries it produces there when they reach the ends of their lives. Their steel and plastic casings, and copper wiring, are removed manually before they are crushed in an inert environment. Nickel, manganese, cobalt and lithium are then removed by hydrometallurgy…The biggest battery-recycling operations of all, though, are not Western, but Chinese-not surprising, perhaps, given that China is the world's largest market for EVs, and the country's government has been promoting the recycling of lithium-ion batteries for some time. Brunp Reycling, a subsidiary of CATL, the world's biggest EV-battery-maker, has half-a-dozen hydrometallurgical recycling operations around the country. Brunp says it can recycle 120,000 tonnes of old batteries a year, which it claims represents about half of China's current annual battery-recycling capacity…Designing recyclability in from the beginning will, in the long run, be crucial to the effective recycling of electric vehicles-and especially their batteries.