Most of us depend on battery power to get through the day. Smartphones and laptop computers don’t run on sunshine. Neither do electric vehicles. This growing reliance creates a problem: America lags far behind economic nemesis China in the manufacture and recycling of lithium-ion batteries.
Fortunately, someone’s thinking about this. At Argonne National Laboratory, 25 miles southwest of Chicago, researchers have begun a $15 million, three-year project to look into ways to recycle lithium batteries that yield a plentiful, reliable supply of lithium for years to come. That’s a crucial application of science that the United States cannot afford to put off. Here’s why:
The U.S. produces just a fraction of the world’s lithium, a reactive metal. Leading lithium producers include Australia, Chile, Argentina, China and Zimbabwe. Cobalt is also used in some lithium batteries, and the primary source for that metal is the Democratic Republic of Congo. Argonne officials say that to meet demand, the U.S. will have to forge new ways to tap expended lithium batteries and transfer recycled lithium and cobalt into new batteries.
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China’s a big producer of lithium batteries, but it already recycles lithium from batteries and has its share of lithium mines. Given America’s competitive relationship with China, and President Donald Trump’s trade tussles, it’s not wise to rely on Chinese supplies.
Just how big will the U.S. need for lithium be in the future? JPMorgan projects that by 2025, electric vehicle sales will make up 38 percent of all vehicle sales in the U.S. In 2017, Ford CEO Jim Hackett said that by 2030, the carmaker expects two-thirds of all vehicles sold to be either electric or hybrid. Demand from battery makers for lithium is expected to increase 650 percent by 2027, according to lithium industry market reports.
And yet right now in the U.S., less than 5 percent of lithium batteries are collected and recycled, Argonne officials say. Their goal: find a way to ratchet up that recycling rate to 90 percent.
“We’ve done a lot of analysis … and if we don’t recycle, we will run out of materials,” Jeff Spangenberger, director of the Argonne project, told The Associated Press. Collaborating with Argonne will be Oak Ridge National Laboratory, the National Renewable Energy Laboratory and several universities. “If we had a steady supply from recycled materials, we’d reduce the risk.”
It’s a laptop world, a smartphone world, a tablet world, and it’s a safe bet that sometime soon, it’s likely to be an electric car world. Argonne is trying to ready America for that world. More power to them.
Source: chicagotribune
