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What about from an environmental standpoint if we think about that these Lithium--Ion batteries will have to be replaced and recycled every (as the article says

What about from an environmental standpoint if we think about that these Lithium--Ion batteries will have to be replaced and recycled every (as the article says, not sure if true) <12 years. We have a history of not pricing in negative externalities, did we do that this time?

ysofunny 1y ago
> We have a history of not pricing in negative externalities, did we do that this time? I worry the answering that question requires answering this question: whose negative externalities?
- fragmede 1y ago
  Humanity's. We've only got one Earth, and if my factory can just dump toxic waste down the drain which flows right to the bay and kills all the fish, for free, why would I pay for it when I could be spending that money on a yacht?
  - deleted 1y ago
    [deleted]
brandonagr2 1y ago
What is the negative externality of recycling batteries? That is way better than having to mine minerals out of the ground, eventually there won't need to be any significant mining and all the battery minerals will be in a constant cycle of being used then recycled
- deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
- barbazoo 1y ago
  I know very little of chemistry and how batteries are produced, so from that level I'm imagining that once a battery is deemed to have reached end-of-life, it will have to get shipped somewhere, be recycled/refurbished for which presumably we will need some new material which needs to be mined, shipped, etc. All that requires water, produces waste that may or may not be toxic, the metals may come from places lacking human rights, and takes energy which may or may not be clean [1]. So all this could in the end have a considerable amount of negative externality somewhere. What I like that I'm hearing about this CO2 battery, whether true will have to be seen, is that it might rely on off the shelf components, that's great, means the supply chain can be simple, and has longer life in the first place. And that while potentially even cheaper? [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GSzh8D8Of0k https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GSzh8D8Of0k
  - tehjoker 1y ago
    This is cool, but one thing to consider is that you're not going to be getting that CO2 from the atmosphere, but from captured emissions. When that plant is decomissioned, the path of least resistance is to just vent it.
    - SoftTalker 1y ago
      If you've already got pure CO2 in a tank, sequestering it is a much easier problem. The hard part is capturing it out of smokestack emissions or (especially) directly from the atmosphere as it's much more diffuse.
- slow_typist 1y ago
  You will not get back 100 % of the raw material in any economically feasible process though. If your process gets 90% of the lithium out of the battery, after 7 cycles more than half of the lithium is gone. Therefore Mining can’t stop even when the market doesn’t grow anymore.
  - matthewdgreen 1y ago
    Current BESS are rated to last 10-15 years. Battery makers are already moving to lithium-free sodium chemistries. It's hard to imagine what we'll be using at the end of seven full cycles (70-105 years from now.) Sodium? Tiny fusion reactors? Firewood and charcoal? Yes, we should care about this and try to leave our descendants with good solutions. No, we should not think about it so much that we leave our descendants with a devastatingly acidified ocean and uninhabitable equatorial regions in the process of worrying about it.
    - slow_typist 1y ago
      I hope we get rid of the lithium chemistry much sooner.
  - epistasis 1y ago
    The process of battery manufacturing is always improving, getting more storage with less lithium. So when a battery is recycled, it will actually produce more battery than the original battery, even with lithium losses. We don't know how long that process will go on, but in any case the amount of lithium needed will be a steady state, assuming constant need for batteries. But much more likely we will see ever increasing demand for batteries, just as we do for steel or copper or whatever minerals power our current economy.
    - slow_typist 1y ago
      There is a chemical limit though to the storage/lithium ratio.
      - 1y ago
- throwaway3b03 1y ago
  Except that the recycling ... cycle is not perfect. Far from it. I'd reckon maybe half of all lithium ends up in recycling. Other half probably ends up in the landfill. For instance, I picked up a broken ebike from the trash not long ago (Amsterdam). Battery still in it. Same goes for lots of smaller electronics.
  - cogman10 1y ago
    That changes rapidly as EVs and grid storage take off. 99+% of those will be recycled and those will make up the bulk of lithium battery consumption.
  - nicoburns 1y ago
    That's true, but seems unlikely to be an issue for EV batteries. Cars are large and valuable enough that there are established businesses that deal with scrapping them.
ziga 1y ago
I think 12 years is an underestimate. Lithium-ion batteries will degrade, but they still have usable capacity. There are Tesla Roadsters still going strong, 15 years in. And the battery cell chemistry has since shifted to LFP, which has longer cycle life.
- 0cf8612b2e1e 1y ago
  Furthermore, I would expect that an industrial battery is treated better than an EV. Optimal cooling/charging/discharge rates likely have a large impact on longevity.
jillesvangurp 1y ago
Some LFP batteries now get rated for 5000 or more cycles or more. Even if you cycle them fully every day, that's 14 years. And that's unlikely to be needed or happening. These might last decades. At which point, battery tech might be massively better. Also, even better batteries might be on the way. E.g. Sodium Ion would be a bit less energy dense and have a similarly long life. It doesn't contain any lithium and could be cheap to manufacture in a few years. The biggest driver here would be cost and other properties (like how quickly can it deliver the power and at what capacity).
- XorNot 1y ago
  It's irrelevant how long they last unless is starts to substantially exceed human lifespans though. 10 years or 20, eventually every product you put out there is replaced and you enter the steadystate waste phase of X tons per year. Personally of course, I don't think this matters at all: old lithium batteries degrade into salt and don't contain harmful chemicals. There's no real indication we'd ever have a problem dealing with them, even if it was just throwing them all into a big hole till the hole looks enough like a natural lithium source to mine again.
  - tonyedgecombe 1y ago
    >It's irrelevant how long they last unless is starts to substantially exceed human lifespans though If a product has twice the lifetime then you are going to have half the waste. I'm not sure how that is irrelevant.
    - XorNot 1y ago
      Or you'll have twice the product in circulation because you might be far below satisfying actual demand. For batteries this is definitely true: we're not even close to storing weeks worth of every yet, and the more you can store the more flexible and useful they become.
- leptons 1y ago
  Lithium batteries last as long as one battery out of thousands decides to thermal runaway, and then you have to replace all of them (as well as the facility they were all housed in).
epistasis 1y ago
> environmental standpoint if we think about that these Lithium--Ion batteries will have to be replaced and recycled every I am very interested in this question, but those who raise it never have answers about the negative impacts of mining lithium. For example, the amount of lithium needed for an EV is an order of magnitude less than the amount of steel needed. What is so bad about lithium mining that it's 10x worse than iron mining, pound for pound? Nobody has ever answered my request for environmental concerns with a concrete environmental lithium mining concern, such as acidification that can sometimes happen with iron mining. I've researched and researched, found nothing, which leaves me thinking that the worst case scenario for lithium is no worse than the worst case for iron. Meanwhile, we have such immense documented harms from fossil fuel extraction that nobody ever questions again, or with the same intensity that's reserved for supposedly toxic lithium batteries. The apparent benefit is massive, so any delay seems to cause massive harm to the environment. I think we need to flip the question: where is the proof that coal/oil/iron is better for the environment than mining and recycling batteries? (BTW, it's at least 20 years now for grid batteries, with lifetime going up all the time...)
- smithkl42 1y ago
  My understanding (bowing to ChatGPT) is that you can get 1 pound of iron from <2 pounds of iron ore. But to get 1 pound of lithium, you need around 500 pounds of lithium ore. So if an electric car requires 2000 pounds of iron and 50 pounds of lithium, that works out to 4000 pounds of iron ore that needs to be mined and refined, vs 25,000 pounds of lithium ore.
  - epistasis 1y ago
    Interesting, but tailings never seem to enter much into environmental analyses that I have seen, unless you count coal ash as "tailings" which would be a pretty broad interpretation of the idea. Lithium is also extracted via brine, as opposed to hard rock. Most of the environmental reporting has been on the brine approaches, which currently are in high elevations of South American mountains, and the problem appears to be mostly the use of land and taking that land out of the ecosystem for economic use as drying pools. But the same problem occurs with mining, too!
conradev 1y ago
What do you think the negative externalities actually are? Off of the top of my head: mining, landfill. Same as other metals. If the processes to extract Lithium from recycling become cheap enough to compete with the prices of mined Lithium, then that happens. Processes still need to be invented/scaled for that to happen: the only real way to deal with damaged or charged cells that I know of is to deep freeze them, shred them, and then defrost them slowly. But in either case: Lithium is going to end up as waste. Making it cheaper to make cars affordable and the grid more stable means that disposable batteries will be even cheaper. I don’t know how modern batteries fare in landfills: Most modern solar panels, for example, are relatively clean (mostly aluminum, silicon, copper, wee bits of lead). But not a waste management expert.
- epistasis 1y ago
  That's very interesting about the freezing. I wonder if Redwood Materials does that? https://www.redwoodmaterials.com/news/responding-recovering-and-recycling-lithium-ion-batteries-after-accidents-and-natural-disasters/ https://www.redwoodmaterials.com/news/responding-recovering-... They've been working hard at recycling, and the biggest challenge at the moment is actually getting old batteries for the process. There's not many in-service batteries reaching end of life yet, so they mostly deal with production scrap.
thelastgallon 1y ago
You want to price in negative externalities for lithium because we didn't price in negative externalities for fossil fuels? Am I understanding you right?

ysofunny 1y ago

> We have a history of not pricing in negative externalities, did we do that this time? I worry the answering that question requires answering this question: whose negative externalities?

fragmede 1y ago
Humanity's. We've only got one Earth, and if my factory can just dump toxic waste down the drain which flows right to the bay and kills all the fish, for free, why would I pay for it when I could be spending that money on a yacht?
- deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]

brandonagr2 1y ago

What is the negative externality of recycling batteries? That is way better than having to mine minerals out of the ground, eventually there won't need to be any significant mining and all the battery minerals will be in a constant cycle of being used then recycled

deleted 1y ago
[deleted]
barbazoo 1y ago
I know very little of chemistry and how batteries are produced, so from that level I'm imagining that once a battery is deemed to have reached end-of-life, it will have to get shipped somewhere, be recycled/refurbished for which presumably we will need some new material which needs to be mined, shipped, etc. All that requires water, produces waste that may or may not be toxic, the metals may come from places lacking human rights, and takes energy which may or may not be clean [1]. So all this could in the end have a considerable amount of negative externality somewhere. What I like that I'm hearing about this CO2 battery, whether true will have to be seen, is that it might rely on off the shelf components, that's great, means the supply chain can be simple, and has longer life in the first place. And that while potentially even cheaper? [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GSzh8D8Of0k https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GSzh8D8Of0k
- tehjoker 1y ago
  This is cool, but one thing to consider is that you're not going to be getting that CO2 from the atmosphere, but from captured emissions. When that plant is decomissioned, the path of least resistance is to just vent it.
  - SoftTalker 1y ago
    If you've already got pure CO2 in a tank, sequestering it is a much easier problem. The hard part is capturing it out of smokestack emissions or (especially) directly from the atmosphere as it's much more diffuse.
slow_typist 1y ago
You will not get back 100 % of the raw material in any economically feasible process though. If your process gets 90% of the lithium out of the battery, after 7 cycles more than half of the lithium is gone. Therefore Mining can’t stop even when the market doesn’t grow anymore.
- matthewdgreen 1y ago
  Current BESS are rated to last 10-15 years. Battery makers are already moving to lithium-free sodium chemistries. It's hard to imagine what we'll be using at the end of seven full cycles (70-105 years from now.) Sodium? Tiny fusion reactors? Firewood and charcoal? Yes, we should care about this and try to leave our descendants with good solutions. No, we should not think about it so much that we leave our descendants with a devastatingly acidified ocean and uninhabitable equatorial regions in the process of worrying about it.
  - slow_typist 1y ago
    I hope we get rid of the lithium chemistry much sooner.
- epistasis 1y ago
  The process of battery manufacturing is always improving, getting more storage with less lithium. So when a battery is recycled, it will actually produce more battery than the original battery, even with lithium losses. We don't know how long that process will go on, but in any case the amount of lithium needed will be a steady state, assuming constant need for batteries. But much more likely we will see ever increasing demand for batteries, just as we do for steel or copper or whatever minerals power our current economy.
  - slow_typist 1y ago
    There is a chemical limit though to the storage/lithium ratio.
    - 1y ago
throwaway3b03 1y ago
Except that the recycling ... cycle is not perfect. Far from it. I'd reckon maybe half of all lithium ends up in recycling. Other half probably ends up in the landfill. For instance, I picked up a broken ebike from the trash not long ago (Amsterdam). Battery still in it. Same goes for lots of smaller electronics.
- cogman10 1y ago
  That changes rapidly as EVs and grid storage take off. 99+% of those will be recycled and those will make up the bulk of lithium battery consumption.
- nicoburns 1y ago
  That's true, but seems unlikely to be an issue for EV batteries. Cars are large and valuable enough that there are established businesses that deal with scrapping them.

ziga 1y ago

I think 12 years is an underestimate. Lithium-ion batteries will degrade, but they still have usable capacity. There are Tesla Roadsters still going strong, 15 years in. And the battery cell chemistry has since shifted to LFP, which has longer cycle life.

0cf8612b2e1e 1y ago
Furthermore, I would expect that an industrial battery is treated better than an EV. Optimal cooling/charging/discharge rates likely have a large impact on longevity.

jillesvangurp 1y ago

Some LFP batteries now get rated for 5000 or more cycles or more. Even if you cycle them fully every day, that's 14 years. And that's unlikely to be needed or happening. These might last decades. At which point, battery tech might be massively better. Also, even better batteries might be on the way. E.g. Sodium Ion would be a bit less energy dense and have a similarly long life. It doesn't contain any lithium and could be cheap to manufacture in a few years. The biggest driver here would be cost and other properties (like how quickly can it deliver the power and at what capacity).

XorNot 1y ago
It's irrelevant how long they last unless is starts to substantially exceed human lifespans though. 10 years or 20, eventually every product you put out there is replaced and you enter the steadystate waste phase of X tons per year. Personally of course, I don't think this matters at all: old lithium batteries degrade into salt and don't contain harmful chemicals. There's no real indication we'd ever have a problem dealing with them, even if it was just throwing them all into a big hole till the hole looks enough like a natural lithium source to mine again.
- tonyedgecombe 1y ago
  >It's irrelevant how long they last unless is starts to substantially exceed human lifespans though If a product has twice the lifetime then you are going to have half the waste. I'm not sure how that is irrelevant.
  - XorNot 1y ago
    Or you'll have twice the product in circulation because you might be far below satisfying actual demand. For batteries this is definitely true: we're not even close to storing weeks worth of every yet, and the more you can store the more flexible and useful they become.
leptons 1y ago
Lithium batteries last as long as one battery out of thousands decides to thermal runaway, and then you have to replace all of them (as well as the facility they were all housed in).

epistasis 1y ago

> environmental standpoint if we think about that these Lithium--Ion batteries will have to be replaced and recycled every I am very interested in this question, but those who raise it never have answers about the negative impacts of mining lithium. For example, the amount of lithium needed for an EV is an order of magnitude less than the amount of steel needed. What is so bad about lithium mining that it's 10x worse than iron mining, pound for pound? Nobody has ever answered my request for environmental concerns with a concrete environmental lithium mining concern, such as acidification that can sometimes happen with iron mining. I've researched and researched, found nothing, which leaves me thinking that the worst case scenario for lithium is no worse than the worst case for iron. Meanwhile, we have such immense documented harms from fossil fuel extraction that nobody ever questions again, or with the same intensity that's reserved for supposedly toxic lithium batteries. The apparent benefit is massive, so any delay seems to cause massive harm to the environment. I think we need to flip the question: where is the proof that coal/oil/iron is better for the environment than mining and recycling batteries? (BTW, it's at least 20 years now for grid batteries, with lifetime going up all the time...)

smithkl42 1y ago
My understanding (bowing to ChatGPT) is that you can get 1 pound of iron from <2 pounds of iron ore. But to get 1 pound of lithium, you need around 500 pounds of lithium ore. So if an electric car requires 2000 pounds of iron and 50 pounds of lithium, that works out to 4000 pounds of iron ore that needs to be mined and refined, vs 25,000 pounds of lithium ore.
- epistasis 1y ago
  Interesting, but tailings never seem to enter much into environmental analyses that I have seen, unless you count coal ash as "tailings" which would be a pretty broad interpretation of the idea. Lithium is also extracted via brine, as opposed to hard rock. Most of the environmental reporting has been on the brine approaches, which currently are in high elevations of South American mountains, and the problem appears to be mostly the use of land and taking that land out of the ecosystem for economic use as drying pools. But the same problem occurs with mining, too!

conradev 1y ago

What do you think the negative externalities actually are? Off of the top of my head: mining, landfill. Same as other metals. If the processes to extract Lithium from recycling become cheap enough to compete with the prices of mined Lithium, then that happens. Processes still need to be invented/scaled for that to happen: the only real way to deal with damaged or charged cells that I know of is to deep freeze them, shred them, and then defrost them slowly. But in either case: Lithium is going to end up as waste. Making it cheaper to make cars affordable and the grid more stable means that disposable batteries will be even cheaper. I don’t know how modern batteries fare in landfills: Most modern solar panels, for example, are relatively clean (mostly aluminum, silicon, copper, wee bits of lead). But not a waste management expert.

epistasis 1y ago
That's very interesting about the freezing. I wonder if Redwood Materials does that? https://www.redwoodmaterials.com/news/responding-recovering-and-recycling-lithium-ion-batteries-after-accidents-and-natural-disasters/ https://www.redwoodmaterials.com/news/responding-recovering-... They've been working hard at recycling, and the biggest challenge at the moment is actually getting old batteries for the process. There's not many in-service batteries reaching end of life yet, so they mostly deal with production scrap.

thelastgallon 1y ago

You want to price in negative externalities for lithium because we didn't price in negative externalities for fossil fuels? Am I understanding you right?