The metals recycle well and very cheaply, with no need for human sorting like with plastics. Those make up the bulk of the material cost.

Graphite and lithium are the only things that aren't currently recycled. Lithium is too cheap right now- it makes up on the order of 1% the cost of a cell. It's more common than lead. We're very unlikely to have lithium supply problems. Compare the 7 billion tonnes of coal production, or 5 million tonnes of lead, to the 80 million cars sold annually. Mining in general can be scaled to far larger than anything car batteries would need.

Graphite is more of an issue. Battery graphite is very high quality spheroidal grains, roughly 55% synthetic and 45% "natural"- even the natural stuff goes through a huge amount of processing. Synthetic graphite can be made from anything, but natural graphite has slightly higher specific energy. Both types take a great deal of energy to manufacture, and natural spheroidal graphite would be a lot more expensive if not for Chinese and American coal.

Batteries are burnt as part of the recycling process, and even if they weren't there's no really good way to recover the graphite. So that probably puts a bit of a floor on li ion recycling savings. The elemental metals recovered are also not appropriate to directly turn into batteries, so they will probably get sold on the open market for lower profit.

The bottom line is that the only constraint on manufacturing batteries is the cost of energy.

Thanks, just to paraphrase back to make sure I understood:

The lithium is not recycled, due to economies of scale.

Same for the graphite.

There is no foreseeable shortage of either graphite or lithium, with the scale that we use it, and the scale that it can be found in the wild.

The majority of the materials in a battery, however, are recycled quite easily.

That right?

Are there any concerns to the mining of either element? I've seen some scare posts, but don't know enough about them to know if they were worth taking seriously.

> The lithium is not recycled, due to economies of scale.

That's part of it, but even if we had very large battery recycling operations it probably still isn't really worth it. It's not hard to get 90%+ recovery but the amount of lithium in a battery is ~3% by weight. Spodumene, one of the important lithium ores, is up to 8% lithium.

> Same for the graphite.

Graphite is more of a technical thing, it's pretty difficult to extract it and it's pretty worn down. The physical structure is very important to performance and manufacturing is virtually all of the cost of creating graphite- so having the actual raw material isn't worth all that much.

More than graphite, I'd actually prefer to see the organic materials in a li ion battery dissolved off and then distilled. That isn't economical though.

> There is no foreseeable shortage of either graphite or lithium, with the scale that we use it, and the scale that it can be found in the wild.

With any scale we could use it, there's no way we would run out. If we mined as much lithium as we do lead, we would have enough to make every car electric with ~200 kWh batteries and no recycling. And as I said, lithium is more common than lead.

> Are there any concerns to the mining of either element? I've seen some scare posts, but don't know enough about them to know if they were worth taking seriously.

Graphite is mined in the same places coal is, but very roughly 5 orders of magnitude less. It can also be created completely synthetically from any organic matter, same way they make charcoal or carbon fiber.

Lithium as it is currently mined is one of the least environmentally impactful extractions. It uses up a lot of groundwater which is a problem in some places, but it's more about it not being replenished properly. There's no runoff like there is with heavy metals in Africa. There's pretty insignificant land use. The chemicals used in purification are super benign- things like lime or acid, in millionths or billionths of global use. Brine mining means you don't need to dump any rock anywhere, there's no hole, there's no significant dust or blasting- it's just a very large water well.

Better hook that up to some solar panels then...

What a great reply.

Other sources of lithium being exploited, lithium is the new oil.

https://www.technologyreview.com/s/538036/quest-to-mine-seaw...

This sounds alarming, but one difference I think is that a lithium batteries are not fuel in the sense that they are consumed immediately like gas/diesel. Of course they have a limited lifespan, but I read elsewhere that lithium batteries can be partially recycled for raw materials.

Lithium is an element. What happens to lithium batteries over time that makes the lithium no longer lithiumish enough?

I'm also curious on this. My understanding is that common computer li-ion batteries basically expire after a few years. Whether you use them or not. Sorta sucks, as I used to buy spare batteries for laptops. Turned out, the spares would be as bad as the worn out one in the computer.

The anodes and cathodes of the cells tend to acquire a film of lithium and electrolyte oxides which reduce the coulombic efficiency of the cells, i.e. it makes it harder for the electrons to interface between the anodes and cathodes. I don't see a reason why we cannot extract the lithium from old cells for reuse, other than economic efficiencies of fresh lithium supply versus the cost of sorting, unpacking, and extracting from old batteries.

> lithium batteries are not fuel

I really hope that this is not exactly what the desperate end of the disposal chain will look like once it is fully formed.

Yes, a big plus for lithium. However, demand and usage will only increase need for lithium out in the field and that could prove a bumpy curve and with all resources of a finite amount, we hit a plateau. Question is, will demand outstrip supply or will supply manage to maintain a pace that stays at least equal to that demand. It is with this in mind, that I call it the new oil.

You can evaporate sea water to get it. For now, seems functionally infinite.

Except we don't have any way to do it economically.

What’s expensive about it?

Yes, I have similar thoughts, though I guess worst case it's roughly the same as mining coal but without the CO2 (and other unhealthy) emissions of burning it.

Downvoted? I was intending to express that even with mining the raw materials, etc. it is probably a net positive environmentally.

It's probably possible to commercialize sodium-ion batteries with carbon anodes.

Not necessarily price competitive with highly developed lithium ion batteries using the cheapest to access minerals, but cheap enough to make the world go round.

And an intermediate step to ultimate recycling is that car batteries still have usefulness after they lose half their capacity (but not as a car battery). They can be used in say a storage system for home power. And this kind of recyling is already happening. Tesla has discussed this, and I believe other ev car companies are doing it already too.