“Battery recycling is one of the most important secondary sources of energy transition critical minerals in the future, particularly lithium, nickel and cobalt,” says the report.
The IEA’s Recycling of Critical Minerals Strategies to scale up recycling and urban mining: A World Energy Outlook Special Report says that production of recycled battery metals, such as nickel, cobalt and lithium, has recently seen rapid growth, albeit from a low base.
“When assessing recovered metal volumes relative to available feedstock for recycling, rates surged to over 40% for nickel and cobalt and to 20% for lithium in 2023.”
The IEA report notes that market value of recycled battery metals also experienced nearly 11-fold growth between 2015 and 2023, with more than half of this growth occurring in the last three years.
“Although electric vehicle (EV) batteries are not yet available for recycling at scale, these developments indicate vast potential for expanding recycling, if the right policy incentives are in place,” the report says.
Lithium-ion (Li-ion) batteries are one of the most critical clean energy technologies for the energy transition, enabling decarbonisation of the road transport sector as well as the power sector.
However, Li-ion batteries require substantial amounts of critical minerals, in particular lithium, nickel, cobalt, copper and graphite.
Therefore, scaling up EV and storage deployment to achieve global climate goals necessitates a dramatic growth in the supply of these key battery materials, raising concerns around their security of supply.
“However, the rapid growth in battery deployment means that there will also be a significant growth in batteries reaching end of life and battery manufacturing scrap generated from the production processes,” the report says.
Battery recycling can therefore play a major role to recover the key critical minerals from these sources of battery waste and thus alleviate the pressure on their primary supply, reducing the mining requirement.
Moreover, given that the supply of battery critical minerals is highly concentrated in a few producer countries, recycling can provide consumer countries their own source.
“The major volumes of batteries that will reach end of life in the future also poses a significant challenge from a waste perspective.
“With some toxic compounds contained, improper disposal can pose environmental risks. Battery recycling can also minimise environmental impacts through a circular approach, preventing battery landfilling and reducing emissions from mining and refining operations.”
The report says that there are a variety of Li-ion battery recycling feedstocks and recycling pathways that may be used to recover a range of battery metals.
The Li-ion battery recycling process typically involves two major stages known as “pretreatment” and “material recovery”.
Prior to this the end-of-life batteries must be prepared for recycling, first through discharge to minimise thermoelectrical hazards and ensure the battery is safe for further handling.
Pretreatment typically involves both thermal and mechanical processes. The mechanical processes physically break down the battery packs, modules or cells through shredding and sorting stages.
This is the step where the battery metals are recycled and recovered, typically from black mass. This is the more technical and complex recycling stage. There are two primary battery recycling methods of material recovery: pyrometallurgy and hydrometallurgy.
This is an established technique for metal extraction and purification, which involves smelting the battery or material in a high-temperature oven, recovering a fraction of the metals as a metal alloy and the remainder of the metals as oxides (slag).
The primary recoverable metals are in the form of an alloy (for a lithium nickel manganese cobalt oxide [NMC] chemistry including cobalt, nickel and copper) while others are contained in a slag (such as aluminium, lithium and silicon).
Hydrometallurgy involves chemical leaching and purification processes to precipitate out individual metal products.
Hydrometallurgy can be used to produce battery-grade materials, for instance battery-grade lithium carbonate or nickel sulphates, or it can be used to produce intermediate products depending on the reagents used and the level of processing implemented.
This is an emerging recycling process with very high recovery rates as it does not break down the cathode material into its constituent metals, but instead retains the material crystal structure and regenerates the cathode material through re-lithiation.
The report notes that based on the current recycling project pipeline, with 90% of global capacity in 2030, hydrometallurgy is set to maintain its dominant position over other recycling processes for material recovery, again due to its high yields, competitive economics and flexibility to handle different chemistries.
“The combination of pyrometallurgy and hydrometallurgy is also set to grow its share modestly with novel processes being implemented with high yields, and simpler hydrometallurgical processes.”
The report says that one of the most critical questions for battery recyclers is when there will be the surge in available end-of-life EV batteries.
“There is considerable uncertainty regarding EV lifetimes, whether there will be EV exports to other markets and how this will affect available feedstock. Until 2035 the available material feedstocks to recycle are dominated by manufacturing scrap as EVs are anticipated to reach end-of-life at major scale only around then.”
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