What happens to EV batteries when they're worn out?

Wednesday, 20 March 2019

Electric Vehicles are carrying a potentially dirty secret: what happens to all those batteries when they wear out?

It's an important question because it's clear the car industry is going EV in a big way. Announcements at the recent Geneva Motor Show embraced a plethora of product promises from Toyota, Audi, Seat, Skoda, BAIC, Skoda and Nissan.

There are major industry investment signals: $99 billion into EVs from Germany's car industry over the next three years; Chinese and South Korean battery suppliers announcing replication of European plants that haven't been finished; a report reminding that it took five years to sell the first million EVs whereas, in 2018, it took six months. So, yeah, ready or not, they're coming.

Electric vehicles are here now, but the offered by manufacturers is going to increase drastically over the next few years.

Our national EV fleet stands at just under 12,000 units, and though that's just 0.25 percent of the total and there's doubt about reaching the goal of 64,000 by 2021, we're down to see an increasing count of new and used product and are very likely to be ultimately swept up by a world swing delivering 140 million EVs by 2030.

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The Nissan Leaf has a 40kWh battery made up of 192 cells, across 24 modules.

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Lead acid batteries are easy to recycle. The ones used in EVs are a bit more complex.

Clean and green running has a dirty side. Resourcing and making batteries is costly, resource and energy-intensive. And what happens when this tech is trashed; will we end up with piles of dead batteries being dumped?

New Zealand has yet to enact specific legislation addressing this, but industry expectation is that we will follow emergent international guidelines and promote environmentally-friendly disposal outcomes.

Countries where EVs are produced have identified need to keep expired batteries out of landfills. China, where about half the world's EVs are sold, and the European Union have regulations. The United States is expected to soon follow.

Re-purposing batteries that are no longer suitable for use in cars is something that a number of manufacturers are looking at.

Are batteries already being dumped domestically? Let's hope not. Nickel-metal hydride (mainly the preserve of Toyota and Lexus) and lithium ion (BMW, Audi, Toyota, Lexus, Mitsubishi, Nissan, Tesla, Holden – with Volt - and other emergents) batteries are dangerous items.

Toyota NZ alone publicly reveals, in annual sustainability reports, its own effort to ensure safe disposal of expired batteries: 383 collected last year.

Those were described as being at 'end of life', yet that term's a potential misnomer. An emergent buzzword, 'repurposing', reminds the dead have continued life through remanufacturing – a good idea when total recycling is still challenging.

Mitsubishi has launched a dealership in Japan that uses old EV batteries to store electricity for charging cars, as well as for emergency outages.

EV batteries are not at all like a standard lead-acid battery, which can be smashed up and have the plastics and lead recycled easily. Designs are not standardised. Some were not designed with dismantling in mind. Even the first step of sending them overseas for a new future is not as easy as it sounds. Shipping spent batteries demands compliance with strict conventions. And reclaiming lithium is a challenge.

China has tightened up its battery handing, so a favoured destination is Umicore in Belgium; it can process 35,000 EV batteries per year. The priority is extracting the valuable metals; cobalt and nickel are infinitely recyclable.

The lithium ends up in a mixed byproduct that can only be disposed of. A chemical process is under development, but has yet to prove itself. Investment bank Morgan Stanley last year forecast no recycling of lithium at all over the decade ahead. It also suggested the global recycling infrastructure would be overwhelmed when the current wave of batteries die.

Repurposing at least buys time needed to sort that issue. Second-life batteries have great potential. Even when too exhausted for vehicle use, EV batteries are far from spent. They can have up to 70 per cent of their capacity remaining, so potentially can collect and discharge electricity for another seven to 10 years beyond point of being stripped from a chassis. That's perfect for home energy storage.

Repurposed batteries are also running supermarket chillers, forklifts and street lighting in Japan and powering car-charging stations in California.

This might well occur in NZ. One day. Our journey has only just begun, predictably with a working group, formed late last year.

Vector Energy's Battery Leaders Group aims to find 'circular economy solutions', with specific commitment to research the market for spent EV batteries and home energy storage. Audi, BMW and Toyota represent automotive involvers; also contributing are the scrap metal recycling and waste management industries.

Repurposing excites Nissan NZ's boss, John Manly. A second life for the batteries in the Nissan Leaf is a good end of the road for the country's most popular EV, given those units are 98 percent renewable.

'We have been approached by people who would prefer to buy batteries for second-life storage rather than seeing them broken down for scrap or recycling.'

Just one catch: some 5200 Leafs are here yet 'to the best of my knowledge, there has not yet been a single battery released from a car.'

Nickel-metal hydride (NiMh) batteries (here more than two decades and in large numbers) are less favoured for second-life potentials due to performance limitations. Unfortunately, Toyota NZ did not respond to emailed questions.

In any event, the motoring world is increasingly favouring Li-ion over NiMh, to the extent that EVs are expected to account for 90 per cent of the Li-ion battery market by 2025. Which means, experts predict, the world will have to cope with 11 million tonnes of spent Li-ion batteries between now and 2030.

We've been using Li-ion batteries for years, but the majority have been small, designed for consumer electronics – your phone, toothbrush, tablet and so on. The count of those batteries is unfathomable, but commonly they just as likely end up neglected in a drawer as being chucked away.

In respect to battery size, what's commonly referred to as a single unit in a vehicle is actual a misnomer. It's actually a pack of many; stacked as 'cells', grouped in modules. The new Leaf, which Nissan NZ will have soon, has a 40kWh battery comprising 192 cells, across 24 modules. A Tesla Model S with an 85kWh battery pack has 7104, in 16 modules. The 90kWh Jaguar I-Pace has 36 modules, each with 12 cells.

Mark Gilbert, chairman of Drive Electric, a leading electric mobility proponent, sees no evidence of end-of-life concerns flavouring EV acceptance here, but agrees that might change.

'More companies are thinking more from a sustainability perspective and it may well become more important in the future.'