While lithium extraction technologies generally focus on ways to get the essential metal out of the ground, there’s another source to mine: existing batteries that no longer work. A new technique could now make that process economically viable.
While lithium extraction technologies generally focus on ways to get the essential metal out of the ground, there’s another source to mine: existing batteries that no longer work. A new technique could now make that process economically viable.
Question is does that $12.70/kg figure include sourcing the spent batteries?
Great news, but would be curious to know if the figures are apples to apples, or if one of them excludes cost of the raw material.
If they’re hiding something and aren’t comparing apples to apples, it wouldn’t be a scientific comparison and they wouldn’t be scientists. Let us know what you find.
Note when the article made the comparison, it seemingly sourced the comparative figure independently, not the scientists. So the scientists may be in good faith describing ‘incremental cost to take presumed existing battery material and recover lithium from it’ and article trying it’s best but not thinking things through presents "number that would implicitly include processing, but also cost of acquiring the raw material as well’. So no one may be trying to ‘hide’ something, but still the comparison is somewhat flawed.
Just seeing how even if everything is being honestly presented, we may still be in a position where mined lithium is still cheaper than recycled even as all the figures suggest that shouldn’t be the case at face value.
As long as the cost is lower than mining it from the ground, I think other gaps can be overcome, especially where batteries already have their own logistic waste path. Though I guess it also depends on scale required to get that cost. If it’s something that can be set up at any waste facility, sourcing might be close to “free”, as in it might just require a redirection of what’s currently done. I don’t think it even needs to be cheaper than mined lithium, since there’s other costs associated with that, like environmental.
Right, a lot of questions that are frankly outside the scope of their specific work, since it depends on what the general ‘market’ is for used batteries today and if there’s any opportunity cost associated with the process (e.g. you can get the lithium, but you somehow make retrieving other materials tough.
But yeah, if the $13.17 figure is, say, $3.17 raw lithium and extraction and $10 of ‘processing’, then the cost of spent batteries would have to be less than $0.77/kg by lithium content to be break-even.
I’m hopeful that even nearly break even is enough to move the needle, but companies love taking advantage of cheaping out by inflicting externalized costs on the environment…