WEBVTT

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This little pile of dirt was once an electric car battery.

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Before it went through all this...

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...and now you have all the good stuff -

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cobalt, nickel, manganese and lithium - in here.

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And the idea is to turn these raw materials

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into new a new battery again.

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Companies promise they can make this work:

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recovering more than 90% of materials

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from old lithium-ion batteries

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and recycling them into new ones.

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And that's great news

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because we have more and more electric cars

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hitting the streets.

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So, we need more and more batteries -

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and for those we need more and more resources.

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And recycling is better than mining new materials

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and throwing them away.

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But how does it work exactly

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and does it work at scale?

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To find out, we initially hoped to film

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with a battery recycling company in Europe.

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But apart from releasing promo footage like this,

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the industry seems pretty secretive.

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Thankfully, universities are much more open,

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which is why we came to TU Clausthal.

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Here, the focus is metal recovery -

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just a perfect fit for us.

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But before we go in,

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I'll give you a quick rundown of how a car battery

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turns into a small piece of dirt.

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There are several ways,

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but this is one of them.

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First, the battery arrives at a recycling facility

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and gets discharged.

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After, it's taken apart.

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This is done BY HAND

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which means it's expensive.

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But we'll get to that later.

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The battery then get shredded,

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the liquid parts get extracted

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and different methods of grinding and sifting

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leave you with these base materials:

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Metals from the battery housing,

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plastic and a bit of aluminum and copper.

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But the stuff that everybody is after is this...

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...black mass.

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This contains all the valuable materials

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like lithium, cobalt, nickel and manganese.

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But also graphite. That's why it's black.

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And today we're going to get all of them out of there.

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That's not my job - but theirs.

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This is Luka Mettke, a doctoral researcher at TU Clausthal,

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and his chemical lab technician Maike Gamenik.

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The university is part of a larger research group

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that is trying to figure out

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how to do this on a larger scale.

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And by the way...

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this is what the end goal of this process

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is supposed to look like.

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Thin metal foil. Ready to go into a battery again.

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"What are we doing now with the black mass?"

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"So now we're going into the leaching operation

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with the black mass.

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So we are bringing all the valuable metals

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we have in the black mass into a solution.

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The metal we're after today is cobalt.

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To bring that out,

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Maike is using sulfuric acid as a solvent.

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Pretty nasty stuff.

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If it would touch our skin,

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it would instantly cause severe burns.

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We're using a process called hydrometallurgical recycling.

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It's a low temperature process

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that only uses small amounts of energy

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compared to other battery recycling methods.

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Sulfuric acid's fumes are toxic.

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Hence the ventilator,

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but this entire process is perfect

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for getting rid of impurities

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that are still in the black mass

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after all the shredding and sifting:

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Mainly aluminum and copper.

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As a second step the black mass

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also gets filtered.

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Luka says

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throughout the entire recycling process

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they are able to remove 95% of impurities.

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On a scale a little bigger,

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the whole process looks like this:

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massive pots of solvent

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in which the black mass is processed.

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"So, from what we are seeing here,

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the exhaust gasses seem to be a bit of an issue.

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What are we dealing with there?"

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"Yeah, we're having a small issue with this.

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Depending on the acid you are leaching with,

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for example in our case, sulfuric acid,

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you might have some evolution of H2S

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and also some HF formations.

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So, this is kind of problematic

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and definitely something you need to look into

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when you're going into upscaling."

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"And we also have the acids, the solvents,

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the leaches and stuff like that

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which is also not that great for the environment.

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Is there a way to approach that differently?"

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"Actually, there are at the moment

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upcoming researches for organic acids

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or more greener acids

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which are also very biocompatible with the environment.

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So normally they are quite harmless.

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But the research is in a way

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not at an advanced stadium as it is now."

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And if you don't work cautiously,

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you get headlines like this:

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SungEel HiTech's factory in Hungary recorded

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high levels of cancer-causing heavy metals in the air

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and had difficulties filtering its exhaust gasses.

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Bye bye environmental benefits of recycling.

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So many things to consider

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and we're not even halfway done.

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Our black mass is now added to another solvent

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that will help bring out the cobalt

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in this chemical cocktail.

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And it's pretty colorful: from greenish to dark blue.

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"It's so blue that it almost looks like ink.

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You could write with that."

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And it's this dark blue part, actually,

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that the cobalt sticks to.

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To get a higher concentration of cobalt

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we need to do another round of this.

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This time, we're going from blue to red.

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"Now, that's a color change!"

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So, now the cobalt is in the darker reddish parts.

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But to be able to use the metal in new batteries,

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you of course need to get it out of the solvent.

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You can do that by heating it up,

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as you would at industry-scale.

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Or - a little quicker - in a small lab like this

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with yet another solvent.

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"You can really see the crystals a lot here

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they have accumulated at the bottom.

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How much cobalt of the black mass is in here?"

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"Well actually with this technique we are able

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to recover more than 99% of the cobalt."

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"What are the biggest challenges

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in upscaling these processes?

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What makes it so hard?"

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"Yeah of course here we also run into the problem

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that on the lab scale we are only doing this

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in batch experiments.

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So step by step, very calm and steady.

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But in industry you want to earn money.

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So you're having a continuous process

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and handling a continuous process

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with all the impurities and all the process steps

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and small things you need to consider -

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it's kind of challenging, yes."

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That's what other researchers say as well:

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recovering more than 90% of materials is possible,

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but this requires optimal conditions,

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which you don't always find in the real world.

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If recovery rates drop,

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the business case becomes even more difficult.

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And that's what it comes down to with recycling.

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One thing is to make it work technologically.

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A completely different thing is to make money from it.

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And that's where the industry faces its biggest challenges.

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Remember how I said that batteries

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have to be taken apart by hand?

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That's because every manufacturer

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builds them a little bit differently...

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This means machines can't currently

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do all of the job.

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And that drives up costs.

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So does the most expensive part of the process:

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the hydrometallurgical recycling.

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And there's another factor

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that makes it hard to turn a profit.

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"The more difficult part comes in

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from volatility in the market

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because in the metals market

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you have a lot of speculation.

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And if you see, for instance, lithium prices,

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one year back,

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I don't know the exact number by heart,

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but one year back, I think it was eight times higher,

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ten times higher than today.

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Crazy prices."

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This is Julian Prölß from BASF.

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They just opened up

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their prototype black mass refining plant

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in Germany this year,

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and plan to scale up the technology further.

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"The volatility in the market is a stress

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to everybody who mines or who recycles.

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Right now, the prices are quite low,

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which is a challenge for everybody who seeks investment."

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Basically if prices are high, recyclers make more money.

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But the question is: How much?

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Consulting firm McKinsey expects recyclers

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to make around $800 to $1,600 per ton of battery.

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"It's really about how much do you pay

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when you acquire the material."

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This is Hans Eric Melin.

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He has been analyzing

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the end of life battery market for years.

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"So if you get material for free

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and then you process it and sell it to market price,

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you will usually make a lot of money.

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You will most probably make more

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than many mining operations."

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But if recyclers would need to pay for the batteries,

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the economics get shaky.

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This could mean recycling is more expensive

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than just mining new materials.

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And this isn't the only issue

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for a commercial size plant.

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Another challenge are the materials

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used in the battery itself.

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It could be a whole bunch of combinations:

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lithium iron phosphate (LFP),

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or lithium manganese oxide (LMO),

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or lithium nickel cobalt aluminum (NCA),

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or lithium nickel manganese cobalt (NMC).

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And the last one comes even in different compositions:

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1:1:1,

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6:2:2

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or 8:1:1.

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It's the Wild West out there

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when it comes to battery manufacturing,

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which makes it more difficult to build

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tailored commercial plants.

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"You have to build them for the largest possible amount

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of the individual material,

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like nickel, high nickel,

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8:1:1, for instance.

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The ratio to the other components,

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you have to have a really huge nickel separator.

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Whereas if you're having a 1:1:1,

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you have to be able to precipitate a lot of cobalt.

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Then you have to have a huge separator for cobalt.

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You have to be pretty robust.

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And that's of course driving the costs,

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which means that some analysis

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from some universities

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predicting cost of the flow sheets is completely wrong,

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because they might go to an optimum case."

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The bottom line is:

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in the real world,

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recycling is much, much harder than on paper.

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Another problem for the recycling batteries

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doesn't have anything to do

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with the recycling process itself,

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but with the missing feedstock.

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Electric car batteries last longer

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than previously thought.

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And after that they get used

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for all kinds of other things,

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like storing renewable energy.

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Which means there aren't as many batteries

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to be recycled.

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On a lab scale,

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recycling batteries is no issue at all:

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99% cobalt recovered. Insane!

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But on a commercial scale,

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not so much info there.

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For example,

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what are we going to do

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with the harmful byproducts?

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So, there are some questions

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that still need to be answered.

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