By mid-decade, Ford Motor Co. plans to produce enough batteries out of three new plants it’s building in Tennessee and Kentucky to power a million vehicles like F-150 Lightning and Mustang Mach-E annually.
One of the challenges the automaker faces is finding enough of the necessary raw materials, such as lithium, nickel and cobalt for all those battery cells. But another concern is figuring out what to do with those batteries once they reach the end of their life. Simply sending them off to a landfill would create an environmental issue almost on a par with the one that battery-electric vehicles are supposed to solve in the first place.
Ford thinks it has a way to address both problems in one step. It hopes to close the loop by recycling batteries once they’ve reached the end of their life. It recently invested $50 million in a California-based startup, Redwood Materials, which will set up a battery recycling facility at the huge Blue Oval City manufacturing complex Ford is building near Memphis.
“Our partnership with Redwood Materials will be critical to our plan to build electric vehicles at scale in America, at the lowest possible cost and with a zero-waste approach,” said Ford CEO Jim Farley.
Most batteries today are scrapped
The Detroit automaker isn’t alone. BMW, General Motors, Mercedes-Benz, Toyota, Volkswagen, the list of manufacturers looking for ways to recycle lithium-ion batteries is growing rapidly. And for good reason — or reasons, if you prefer.
Today, only a fraction of the batteries used by the auto industry — or by the consumer electronics industry, for that matter — are recycled when they reach the end of their life. But demand is expected to grow at an exponential rate. In 2019, BEVs accounted for barely 1% of the total U.S. market. It’s now approaching 3% and, according to some forecasts, could top 40 to 50% by 2030. And sales are growing even faster in some markets. All-electric models now account for as much as 70% of Norway’s auto market.
So, where battery-electric vehicles are seen as a way to reduce air pollution and climate change, automakers must find ways to prevent them from creating a solid waste nightmare. The good news is that recycling their materials could eventually reduce the need for sourcing new materials, with mining linked to a range of its own environmental hazards.
“It will help us reduce the reliance on importing a lot of the materials that we use today when we build the batteries, and then it’ll reduce the mining of raw materials, which is going to be incredibly important in the future as we start to scale,” said Lisa Drake, Ford’s chief operating officer, agrees.
Recycling ramps up
General Motors already is working with a Canadian firm, Li-Cycle, to reuse waste from production of its new Ultium batteries. GM just opened a plant in Lordstown, Ohio, with three other U.S. facilities confirmed and yet another expected to follow. Company officials recently said they eventually expect to reuse at least 90% of materials like lithium and nickel contained in recycled batteries, as well.
Tesla, meanwhile, has gotten a jump on the competitors pushing into the EV space. It claims on its website that “none” of its batteries “go to landfilling, and 100% are recycled.”
The recycling process will gear up slowly, cautioned Sam Abuelsamid, principal auto analyst at Guidehouse Insights. The number of BEVs — and hybrids — now on the road is relatively small, and only a modest number will be reaching the end of their life during the next few years. At the same time, demand for batteries will grow rapidly. It’s not likely to reach something of an equilibrium, he told TheDetroitBureau.com, until well into the 2030s and beyond, as the automotive market shifts almost entirely to EVs.
And then, it will take some time for those vehicles to reach the point where it will need to be scrapped. Today, the typical vehicle stays on the road for about a dozen years. With fewer mechanical parts to break down, some analysts believe, BEVs could keep running even longer.
Old batteries could get a “second life”
Ironically, the improvement in battery technology could delay the pace at which batteries ultimately are recycled. Early on, it was widely expected that automotive batteries would reach the end of their useful life in less than 10 years or 100,000 miles. But new chemistries, as well as techniques used to reduce their wear, have proved surprisingly effective. Abuelsamid and other analysts note that some new batteries could last 350,000 miles and Tesla CEO Elon Musk has talked about next-gen technology that would go for as much as 1 million miles. Doug Parks, GM’s executive vice president, Global Vehicle Development, said the company wasn’t far behind Tesla on that target.
By then, most vehicles would be ready for recycling themselves. But for many batteries, that might just mark what French automaker Renault calls “second life.”
“While a battery’s first life lasts for between 10-15 years, it still has a capacity of at least 75%. This means it can be repurposed for up to another 10 years in applications such as stationary energy storage,” it said on its website.
Helping level the load
Several pilot programs are already underway that are using post-vehicle batteries in a variety of ways. Among other things, this could include battery “farms” to back up renewable sources — keeping power flowing from solar facilities when the sun goes down, or when wind turbines are becalmed. And, on a local scale, a handful of second-life battery packs could be stationed in neighborhoods to provide power during blackouts and brownouts.
In fact, GM and Nissan have been doing just that sort of things since 2015. A study released earlier this year by the Boston Consulting Group forecast that by 2030 as much as 30% of the high-voltage automotive batteries will find “second life” applications once the vehicle is scrapped.
“Those batteries will become sought after” for a variety of applications, said Scott Hinson, the CEO of Pecan Street, an Austin, Texas-based energy research project.
Another issue is the ‘dead cell.’ Since the batteries consist of hundreds of cells in series, one dead or weak cell affects the overall pack (kind of the old style Christmas tree lights, ne bad bulb and the entire string goes dark). If the battery packs were designed to be able to replace the bad cell (unlikely), the entire pack could be reused.
This is not new news by far. I’m sure others beside GM have a system in place. Besides there are other smaller companies do the grunt work for a decade or so now.
https://gmauthority.com/blog/2021/08/general-motors-launches-dedicated-battery-recycling-site/amp/