Whence the Heat for This Lithium Battery Recycling Process?

[NNadir]

We have bet the planet's atmosphere on so called "renewable energy" and, um, energy storage, generally involving fantasies about big, big, big, big piles of batteries, batteries galore, batteries everywhere.

From my perspective, and only my perspective, it's not going well:

May 15: 421.84 ppm
May 14: 422.04 ppm
May 13: 421.95 ppm
May 12: 421.87 ppm
May 11: 421.71 ppm
Last Updated: May 16, 2022

Recent Daily Average Mauna Loa CO2

Don't worry, be happy. If we chant about batteries - and of course hydrogen - the "renewable energy" god will surely save us.

Here's a recent paper on how we can all "recycle" our billions of tons of batteries:

Alkaline Roasting Approach to Reclaiming Lithium and Graphite from Spent Lithium-Ion Batteries Dongxu Liu, Xin Qu, Beilei Zhang, Jingjing Zhao, Hongwei Xie, and Huayi Yin ACS Sustainable Chemistry & Engineering 2022 10 (18), 5739-5747.

From the introduction:

Graphite is still unbeaten in most of the commercial lithium-ion batteries (LIBs) as an anode material due to its low cost and superior performance including long-term cycling stability, relatively high practical specific capacity (∼360 mA h g–1 vs theoretical capacity of 372 mA h g–1), non-memory-effect feature, low operation potential (∼0.1 V vs Li+/Li), and so forth. (1,2) It is reported that more than 10 million electric cars were on the world’s roads in 2020, and more than 20 countries have electrification targets or internal combustion engine bans for cars by no later than 2050, (3) which results in increasing the demand for graphite anode. However, graphite mines only produce flake graphite of 90–98% purity, and further energy-intensive purification is required to upgrade the flake graphite to 99.5% purity. (4) Meanwhile, the average lifespan of LIBs is 1–3 years for consumer electronics and 8–10 years for energy storage systems and electric vehicles, thereafter bringing about 0.2 million tons of spent consumer LIBs and 0.88 million tons of spent power LIBs by 2023. (5,6) Considering the environmental pollution of hazardous wastes and the scarcity of resources, the recycling of LIBs gains increasing attention. In-depth and extensive research of cathodes, such as LiNixMnyCo1–x–yO2, (7,8) LiCoO2, (9,10) and LiFePO4, (11,12) have been reported in recent years. Unfortunately, the graphite anodes are usually abandoned or incinerated in these studies. However, it has been confirmed that the recovered graphite can be reused in LIBs (Table S1) and Na/K/Al-ion batteries (13,14) and employed as the raw material for composite (15,16) and graphene (17,18) fabrication. Therefore, the spent LIB anode that contains about 12–21 wt % of battery-grade graphite (19,20) is a rich resource that should be recovered, which will help in not only closing the resource cycle but also reducing the environmental footprint.
Because the Li content in the spent graphite anode is much higher than its abundance in the Earth’s crust (3.007 wt % vs 0.0017 wt %), (21) Li should also be recovered in addition to graphite...

Don't worry. Be happy. Chant the word "recycle" and everything will be OK.

The process:

Spent LIBs were obtained from waste cell phones and EVs at a local electronic market (Shenyang, Liaoning province, P. R. China). First, spent LIBs were fully discharged by immersing them in a saturated NaCl (AR, Sinopharm Group Co., Ltd.) solution for 12 h to avoid the short circuit caused by the remaining capacity. Second, the fully discharged spent LIBs were dried and dismantled manually in a fuming hood to separate packaging materials, cathode, anode, and separator...

... The schematic illustration of reclaiming spent graphite anodes is described in Figure 1. First, the spent anode was vacuum-calcinated at 400 °C for 2 h to remove the organic solvent and binder, and then, the anode materials were scraped off from Cu foils. The derived graphites from different anodes were named LCO-VG, NCM-VG, and LFP-VG, respectively. Second, NaOH (AR, Sinopharm Group Co., Ltd.) and VG were mixed at different mass ratios (1:2, 1:1, 2:1, and 4:1). Third, the mixture was roasted under an argon (Ar) atmosphere in a tube furnace. The roasting temperature was maintained at 100–400 °C for 0.5–3 h, and the heating rate was 5 °C min–1. After the roasting process, lithium and graphite were separated by leaching with deionized water and filtrating. Finally, the obtained graphite residue was dried at 80 °C in a vacuum oven for 12 h, and the recovered graphites from different anodes were named as LCO-RG, NCM-RG, and LFP-RG, respectively...

The caption:

Figure 1. Schematic illustration of reclaiming lithium and graphite from spent LIBs by alkaline roasting.

400 °C for 2 hours?

Where are we going to get the heat for this process in our solar and wind nirvana?

I know...

Let's cover all of Southern California's deserts with big mirrors and focus them on little recycling ovens with molten salts that we can use to dry the graphite residue at 80 °C for 12 hours using vacuum pumps with energy provided by battery power.

Jobs! Jobs! Jobs!

Good idea?

My favorite part of this process is the part where:

...the anode materials were scraped off from Cu foils...

No problem. We have large deposits of desperately poor people who can spend 12 to 14 hours a day to do this for us so we can all be "green" and go cruising on Saturday nights down Hollywood Blvd. in our cool electric souped up Teslas.

History will not forgive us, nor should it.

[Throck]

1. The problem is not in using substitute energy but using less energy.

With modern green energy I see people using more energy not less energy. My kids know we weaned our house of incandescent lights, they think they can leave all the LED lights on for twice as long now in a double lit room. I never had AC as a kid or in the college dorms. I see more AC now than ever before in what I ask, why is it necessary there? We opened our windows and got fresh air.

[NNadir]

2. The laws of thermodynamics require if one stores energy, one must use more of it.

As I noted elsewhere, the rise in wet bulb temperatures to fatal levels, because our fantasies didn't play out quite so well, will result in people lacking access to air conditioning dying.

The big problem with the "conservation will save us" rhetoric is, of course, that desperately poor people lack reliable energy almost entirely, not just for air conditioning, but for many other things we ought to regard as basic human rights.

So called "renewable energy" was never, at least in the early days of the rhetoric, about a sustainable environment. In those times it was always about anti-nuclear fear and ignorance, precluding our last best hope from doing what nuclear energy might have done in a better, wiser world.

We are paying for that rhetoric, big time.

[hunter]

3. What a nightmare.

We need to be restructuring our cities so that car ownership becomes unnecessary for the vast majority of us.

So far, batteries for electric vehicles are being designed to reduce costs and increase performance. A third factor, maybe the most important one, ought to be ease of recycling in automated factories.

It seems very likely that plug-in hybrid vehicles powered by synthetic fuels may be the better option. Maybe that Post Office van should be a hybrid vehicle with a little ten kilowatt DME fueled engine humming away under the hood

Over-the-road truck transportation ought to be reduced substantially in favor of electric or hybrid electric rail.

The absurdity of utility scale battery storage ought to be apparent to everyone but sadly it's not.

"More batteries!" cannot be a solution to ordinary gaps in wind and solar production lasting hours, days, or weeks, especially if we are building power grids to serve the needs of 8 billion people.

The materials for a conventional electric grid -- aluminum, iron, and concrete -- are readily available and abundant. Aluminum and iron are long lasting and easily recycled. That's not true of most of the materials used in "renewable" energy systems, which also require backup power from a conventional grid to be economically feasible.