Farid Ahmed, VP of global strategy and business development at Ace Green Recycling, argues there is so much wrong with almost everything surrounding EVs, even if the vehicles are improving.
The future for road transport is electric, that’s for sure. Certainly for cars and light commercial, probably for most buses, but possibly not so much for heavy trucks. It’s definitely coming – but not in the way and at the speed that most people imagine.
The problem is that there is so much wrong with… well, almost everything to do with EVs. The cars themselves are getting better and better, but they do not exist in isolation. They exist within the infrastructure that’s provided for them, the legislation that governs them, the raw materials that make them and the perception of people who might own them.
Let’s start with EVs themselves. A 300km range is adequate for most people most of the time as they go about their daily business. Yet many still suffer from range anxiety as they see the range plummet if they use the air conditioning, heating, wipers, lights or any number of other electrical systems. That apparent range can easily become something of a fiction under real world conditions.
Which leads to the next issue: recharging. The speed of replenishing the energy in an EV’s battery pack still falls way short of filling up with fuel at a service station. This would be much less of a concern if: a) the range was sufficient to do the whole trip; and b) there was a working charging point at the end of the journey.
Not enough charging points
On that first point, typical trips are well within range for a battery with reasonable charge, except for long distance journeys when a number of recharges will be necessary – and that could add hours to the total time travelled. That brings us to the second point. Walking through your daily life, how many charging points do you notice at service stations, public car parks, workplaces or on-street parking in residential areas? I’m guessing not many, and certainly not enough for the number of EVs that will be on our streets very soon. The rate of additional charging infrastructure is just too slow.
In the UK where I live, one-third of households do not have off-street parking, so are very unlikely to be able to recharge EVs at home. But who wants to spend 40 minutes topping up their battery on the way to work because there are no charging points in your company’s car park?
These factors have, in the past year or so, created something of a public backlash against the adoption of EVs, made worse by the enduringly high prices for both new and used electric vehicles.
And the batteries – oh dear
Let’s focus now on batteries. Oh dear, we find plenty wrong here too. There’s a common misconception, including from some within the broader industry, that EV batteries can’t be recycled. This is simply not true. But, as this industry is so new, there is a huge range in the effectiveness in the recovery of lithium-ion battery materials from the various competing processes.
My own company, Ace Green Recycling, is at the vanguard of sustainable hydrometallurgical EV battery recycling that produces no Scope 1 emissions and recovers value from all the metals used in the various lithium-ion chemistries, including lithium, nickel, cobalt, plus iron phosphate from LFP batteries and copper and aluminium from electrodes.
Traditional pyrometallurgical methods cannot extract lithium. It sits badly with so many of us in the metals industry that such a valuable resource could be dug out of the ground, used once and then put back in the ground as waste furnace slag. These metals are infinitely recyclable, so we really should endeavour to do this wherever feasible.
The European Union took action intended to compel higher levels of battery recycling in last year’s new Batteries Regulation. From 2031, batteries must have a certain level of recycled content to be manufactured or imported into the EU. These thresholds increase again in 2036.
For lead, 85% of that metal must come from secondary sources – which the industry can achieve without breaking into too much of a sweat as around 75% of global production (ex-China) already comes from scrap feed.
For lithium-ion batteries, the targets are altogether more ambitious. From 2031, 6% of lithium, 6% of nickel and 16% of cobalt must be from recycled sources, increasing to 12%, 15% and 26%, respectively, from 2036.
Regulation aims questionable
The aims of these regulations should certainly be applauded, but the reality of whether these can be achieved are questionable. Indications are that EV batteries are longer-lived than expected. Go back just a few years, and we considered battery life to be 8–10 years. Now we believe this to be more like 10–12 years.
That’s great – EV batteries will last longer. But therein lies a problem: if these batteries aren’t coming back so quickly for recycling, then where are we going to get the recycled content required for making new batteries in Europe?
And there’s another problem: what if those end-of-life batteries instead go to second-life applications, rather than being recycled? That would mean their metals would not become available for recycling for years. I feel this is, perhaps, less of a problem than it might appear. I believe repurposing of scrapped EV batteries will be somewhat restricted.
Yes, they are fine to use for energy storage systems if they’re in a steel box in the middle of a field. But who’s going to accept one in a residential home or workplace if the battery management system has been knocking around for 200,000km on bumpy roads for the past 12 years? I’m sure insurance companies aren’t too keen on that kind of fire hazard being under the roof of any property they underwrite.
The scrapping of end-of-life EV batteries provides another logic gap in the whole EV philosophy too. In North America and Europe, the average age of a car is 12 years. That’s average age, not total service life. At the point when the EV battery needs to be changed, the cost of a replacement pack will doubtless exceed the value of the 12-year old car.
The result will inevitably be that the whole vehicle is scrapped, prematurely, because it just isn’t worth putting a new battery into an old EV. So, a brand new EV will need to be built to replace it, with manufacturing being the most intense part of the emissions produced over the lifetime of a car. How does this make good environmental sense?
No ready answers
There aren’t any ready answers to all these questions, and many of them will require substantial investment for which, in the current global economic climate, there simply isn’t sufficient money. But there are some solutions which are available now and still getting better, especially concerning battery recycling. The leading technologies, such as those pioneered by Ace Green, are pushing down the cost and driving up the efficiencies in recovery of all battery materials. This is a clearcut way to maximise the recycled content, and minimise the cost, for new lithium-ion batteries. If we are to harness the potential for EVs to reduce total global carbon emissions, then we need to grasp these opportunities in recycling.
