Criticality and recycling of lithium-ion batteries

Beschreibung

The first few months of 2022 have dramatically demonstrated our dependence on imported raw materials. Russia's war against Ukraine has prompted many countries to consider banning imports of Russian coal, oil and gas as soon as possible. At the same time, voices are being raised, particularly in the business community, warning of the potentially serious negative consequences of a comprehensive energy embargo for the domestic economy. Energy raw materials, it turned out, are critical raw materials: raw materials that are existentially important for national economies and whose security of supply is threatened at the same time. The concept of criticality has thus entered the mainstream political and public debate. Yet it concerns more than just fossil fuels. Indeed, energy transition technologies also depend on raw materials whose supply is subject to certain risks. Electric motors, for example, which are essential components in electric vehicles, need rare earth metals (also known as ‘rare earths’) such as neodymium and dysprosium for their permanent magnets. The same applies to wind turbine generators (Erdmann 2021). And batteries, with their numerous fields of application for the energy transition, also rely on critical raw materials. When it comes to batteries the debate has traditionally focused on the metal cobalt, which is essential as a cathode material in battery chemistries with high energy density, such as traction batteries for electric vehicles. But other battery raw materials, such as nickel, lithium, and the anode material graphite, could also prove to be critical (Weil et al. 2018). Besides raw material substitution and sufficiency, recycling is seen as a promising way to mitigate criticality in the longer term. Indeed, if we succeed in recovering raw materials from used batteries, we will need fewer new (i.e. primary) raw materials to manufacture new batteries. This could explain why a lot of attention is currently being focused on development of battery recycling processes and the establishment of a corresponding recycling (or circular) economy. But recycling is important for other reasons as well: in particular, it is to prevent the battery boom from generating huge amounts of waste that could end up in landfill. Recycling also has the potential to decrease energy demand and greenhouse gas emissions—but only if the recycling processes have lower energy and carbon footprints with respect to the primary industry processes. Indeed, it has been demonstrated that the considerable environmental impacts caused by the provision of battery raw materials (Helms et al. 2019) can be reduced by the use of secondary materials from recycling (Crenna et al. 2021; Bothe and Steinfort 2020; Xu et al. 2020). While the importance of criticality and recycling is appreciated from a high level, many questions remain to be answered. For example: Which battery chemistries are actually most susceptible to criticality, and according to what criteria? What are the current barriers to comprehensive recycling of lithium-ion batteries, and how could these barriers be mitigated? What role could second-life battery products play, and can they mitigate critical raw material supply issues for the energy transition? The following chapters aim to shed light on these and other questions—and also to provide impulses for the debate on criticality and recycling.
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Marc Dusseldorp

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Ladeinfrastruktur Elektromobilität Akku virtuelle Kraftwerke Energiewirtschaft Erneuerbare Energien Ökobilanz Nachhaltigkeit Recycling Umweltfolgen Lithium Ionen Batteriealterung Schlüsseltechnologie Umweltwirkungen Feststoffakku

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