Recycling is an obvious solution to the limited supply of many nonrenewable resources, but the economics can be difficult. Recycled materials often struggle to compete with lower-cost virgin resources. Rapid technological change adds another challenge for the electric vehicle (EV) industry: By the time a vehicle reaches the end of its life, battery manufacturers may have shifted to a different chemistry, reducing the value of recovering those materials for new batteries.
However, a study led by Xin Xiong of Nanjing University suggests that EV battery and motor recycling in China could become a major, and eventually dominant, source of critical materials for electric vehicle manufacturing in the coming decades.
Modeling China’s future EV material demand
The researchers modeled the relationship between recycled material supplies and manufacturing demand in China from 2010 through 2050. Their analysis includes materials used in batteries for hybrid, battery-electric, and fuel-cell vehicles, including lithium, cobalt, nickel, manganese, phosphorus, sodium, sulfur, and graphite. It also examines critical materials used in electric motors, such as copper, neodymium, dysprosium, samarium, and cerium.
The study evaluated four possible technology-development scenarios. In some projections, battery and motor chemistries gradually shift toward technologies such as solid-state lithium batteries, sodium-ion batteries, and electric motors that use fewer rare-earth elements. Other scenarios assume a faster transition to these alternatives. The model then estimates each material’s “circularity potential”—the percentage of annual manufacturing demand that could be met by recycled material recovered during the same year.
The analysis also accounts for China’s latest recycling policies. These measures seek to raise recovery rates for certain battery materials from approximately 40 percent today to at least 98 percent. At the same time, China aims to increase EVs’ share of new vehicle sales from 45 percent to 60 percent by 2030.
Although hybrid and plug-in hybrid vehicles eventually decline in the researchers’ projections, sales of battery-electric vehicles continue rising through 2050. As a result, the number of vehicles reaching recycling facilities initially trails new vehicle production but grows steadily over time. The model also assumes that battery replacements will become common because EV batteries can lose significant capacity before the vehicle itself reaches the end of its useful life, particularly in heavily used commercial fleets. Battery-swapping infrastructure in China could further increase the number of batteries entering the manufacturing and recycling cycle.
Source: arstechnica.com