The Circle of EV Life

This week, during the Financial Times "Future of the Car" Summit, JB Straubel, of Tesla fame, and now the leader of Redwood Materials, (whom I seem to quote a lot recently) made the comment that unlike internal combustion vehicles, battery electric vehicles (BEV's) do not consume a substance (such as liquid gasoline) and expel it (burned gasoline carbon emissions). Yes, electrons will move to fill the battery, and deplete as it is used to power the vehicle, but his point was that battery powered automobiles are really built just once, and all of their materials stay in use, perhaps permanently. He went on to say that his company, Redwood Materials, has found that 95-99% of the materials in a battery can be re-used, recycled, and remanufactured. This means that BEV's can feasibly be operated in a "closed loop" environment, where little new material will need to be added to continue new production. He was getting at the fundamental differences between how we have been doing things within automotive (internal combustion, gasoline stations on every corner) to how we should be doing things (electric vehicles, home and work chargers) so that we can make faster progress to deliver zero emission vehicles, reducing the carbon in the atmosphere, and reducing the need to dig rare earth metals out of the ground.

But exactly what is in a battery anyway? Should we be concerned at all? Doesn't more and more evidence also point to the idea that batteries will last a lot longer than we thought? Maybe we may not need to recycle them so often.

The excellent graphic below shows what elements typically make up an EV battery, and you can see that the rare materials are a smaller fraction. Unfortunately, these are also hard to get, and controlled by only a few countries. Hence the global race to secure supplies of these materials to support the growing EV demand. Just this past month, for example, EV sales in the US market were up 60%. A massive jump.

Manufacturers like GM, Ford, and Tesla recently announced deals to secure their battery material futures. One FT Live reporter reminded us during the event this week that the auto industry has historically been vertically integrated, and that this is simply continuing.

As a former Ford employee, I have been to the "River Rouge" plant and it really does look like Charles Scheeler's "American Landscape" painting from 1930. The Rouge was the archetype of a vertically integrated factory with iron ore from Michigan's Upper Peninsula coming in, and cars going out. The scale of it was immense. In fact, if you look closely, you can see the single human figure just left-of-center in Scheeler's painting shown here.

In the new battery-powered future we see automakers lining up to again secure rights to mines and materials. Elon Musk even hinted this week that Tesla may buy its own mine sometime soon. And car companies are creating their own technology companies (VW's CARIAD for example) in order to also secure the "code" they need to run these new electric machines. This is in addition to the aluminum stamping plants, assembly plants, and component factories they already have. It all sounds pretty vertically integrated.

And there is "horizontal" integration as well, with automakers collaborating with each other on electric vehicles as they try to catch up and meet the market. The most recent example is Honda teaming up with GM. It makes sense to collaborate and scale your purchasing power when you are trying to secure future supplies of critical materials. We'll see many more of these types of technology partnerships, even beyond batteries, in the race to meet growing EV demands.

But back to recycle, re-use, and remanufacture. Ford and Volvo recently announced partnerships with Redwood Materials to recycle batteries, helping those two auto companies get started on the path to truly closed loop production. And Cox Automotive Mobility recently purchased a battery recycling company, Spiers New Technology (SNT), and is folding it into its electric vehicle operations. It seems like those that are taking the longer view of electrification can now also see that reclaiming and re-using all those battery materials that started life in the ground may be even more cost-effective and sustainable than continuing to mine new materials. And if JB Straubel is right, that 95% or more of the material is recoverable, there should be much less need for new mines, and all the public regulatory and environmental issues that come with new mines, in the future.

For example, one place known for regulation and where battery recycling is becoming a big deal is California. Since 50% of the EV's sold today in the US market are sold in California, what to do with all the EV Lithium-Ion Batteries (LIB) that will be present in the state is a growing concern among local state legislators. Two years ago they formed a study group to look into battery recycling called the California Li-Ion Battery Recycling group. Here's a quote from the executive summary of the group's report released just this week, and about what the California Legislature needs to do in the future. The group concluded that:

"To ensure that the maximum amount of EOL batteries are reused, repurposed or recycled, the Advisory Group’s recommended policies focus on two main areas of need: 1) Clearly defining responsibility for the coordination and payment of recycling in cases where the cost presents a burden for the owner of the vehicle and the LIB is unwanted and, 2) Mitigating barriers that may currently inhibit the reuse, repurposing, and recycling of EV LIB's."

You can see then, that this legislative study group is mostly concerned about "who" owns the batteries (and therefore has the responsibility) to take care of their re-use, recycling, or repurposing, while also being concerned with removing the barriers that prevent more recycling. Some have even proposed new labeling requirements on the vehicle's "Monroney," the regulated window-sticker consumers are used to seeing on cars for sale. Long ago this label was revised to update it with "percentage of locally-made content" for example, as well as safety and fuel economy information. So it seems natural that regulators would look to this as as way to inform consumers and "disclose" to them where the materials come from that make up an EV's battery before they decide to purchase it.

Trygve Burchardt, from Eco Stor, a Norwegian company focused on delivering Energy Storage Systems (ESS) using 1st and 2nd life batteries, and controlling them with sophisticated battery and data management systems, said during the FT Live event this week that one of the main challenges with battery recycling is that any given country will have a "mix" of batteries, from many OEM's and suppliers, and that each of these batteries may have differences requiring somewhat different processes for recycling and re-use. Since Norway is one of the highest penetration EV markets today, it's a country we need to watch as a leading indicator for how recycling will happen, since it will have many more EV vehicle Units-in-Operation (UIO) on its roadways and in its parking garages.

Linda Gaines, from Argonne National Laboratory, during the FT Live event suggested that better design for end-of-life needs to occur within the initial engineering for EV's as well, since battery pack modules need to be able to be recycled efficiently, but also many other parts of the system can be used again, recycled, or repurposed as well. I think she is right, in that the industry can do better in this way, much like designing for "serviceability" occurred many years ago.

Accelerating the way batteries are reclaimed, re-used, recycled, and re-purposed now can help not only supply the growing EV demand, but help us as a society better utilize the natural resources we are expending on making the mobility future happen. After all, digging things out of the ground is not that different than pumping things out of the ground. It makes sense for us to apply our learning and technology to create a new system, and a new process, instead of trying to do things the same way. Perhaps this is the definition of "progress." And finally, Caroline Godkin of the California EPA reminded us during the FT Live event that we also should not "offshore" battery recycling like we have done with the tech device industry, where people in underdeveloped countries "reclaim" hazardous materials from computers and phones in order to make a living, and potentially harm themselves in the process.

So let's do it right this time from the beginning, and realize that whatever we make, will be around for a long time. In fact, I can't wait for the "Vintage EV" market to develop. It even gets me kind of "amped up." A recycled pun you might say.