Designing better batteries before predicting giant growth
Also, I'm interested in your thoughts
Climate technologies require enormous amounts of metal. I’m Ian Morse, and this is Green Rocks, a newsletter that doesn’t want dirty mining to ruin clean energy.
I’m off this week and next, road-tripping across the US, perhaps visiting some mines…
In the meantime, I’d like to share some things I learned while reporting my piece on recycling EV batteries — and share a great graphic from it (below).
This is a mining newsletter, but any critical look at mining also grapples with the alternatives to extraction. Communities around the world have been exploring those alternatives for as long as there have been large-scale mines. They include how to shrink the need for mining, how to mine more efficiently, and how to distribute the benefits of mining. With a climate crisis impacting the world’s most vulnerable, solutions have generally come from the world’s least vulnerable.
A field that isn’t often put under the microscope is design. How can the design of an important climate technology, the EV battery, enable recycling? How can battery design reduce demand for the ‘necessary evil’ of mining?
Scientists in countries that plan to buy hundreds of millions of EVs are growing concerned that those battery materials may live out their lives then return to the ground, only for newly mined materials to take their place. This happens with a lot of products, but there’s a growing sense that “world-saving” tech shouldn’t be the same.
Three points that surprised me as I spoke to scientists:
Recycling currently treats batteries as if they were ore mined from the ground: most of it goes to waste, and expensive, GHG-emitting processes are required to get metals out.
The first step to efficient recycling is taking apart the battery, but these batteries aren’t designed to come apart once they’re made. Tesla battery packs are among the most difficult to dismantle.
There is a lot of potential for carmakers to design batteries with recycling in mind. China has had some success in encouraging those designs through regulation.
So, in all the models that predict skyrocketing demand for battery metals, why is battery design a constant? Better design can smooth the transition and ease material bottlenecks, as well as satisfy national security hawks who want domestic supply chains.
Also in the meantime, check out other features in Green Rocks:
And the map of all Green Rocks stories:
Thirdly in the meantime, send me your ideas for more reporting.
What interests you? What questions do you have about resource use and climate technologies?