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The Biggest EV Battery Recycling Plant In the US Is Open For Business (canarymedia.com) 62

Posted by BeauHD from the avoiding-the-landfill dept.
Ascend Elements opened a recycling plant in Covington, Georgia in late March that it says is the largest electric-vehicle battery recycling facility in North America. "It can process 30,000 metric tons of input each year, breaking down old batteries and prepping the most valuable materials inside to be processed and turned into new batteries," reports Canary Media. "That capacity equates to breaking down the battery packs from 70,000 electric vehicles annually, said Ascend CEO Mike O'Kronley." From the report: Recycling can deliver new battery materials without the expense and environmental impact of new mining. It is extremely hard to develop new mines in the U.S., but the federal government is lavishing funds on new battery recycling plants. The revamped EV tax credits also call for increasing shares of domestically sourced batteries and battery materials. Those market and policy shifts made recycling sufficiently desirable that Ascend is paying other companies for their old batteries. At the moment, those deals are mostly with EV or battery makers that have high volumes to get rid of.

"Paying for these spent batteries keeps them from going into the landfill," O'Kronley told Canary Media. "It's better to get paid for it rather than throw them away." Ascend also accepts used consumer electronics from battery-collection programs, such as Call2Recycle. That's not to say there are enough old batteries coming in to fill the factory. Currently, 80 to 90 percent of what's going into Ascend's Covington facility is scrap materials from battery factories, including SK Battery America's plant in Commerce, Georgia.

That relationship influenced Ascend's choice of location: Covington sits in the emerging "Battery Belt," a swath of new battery factories and electric-vehicle plants opening up across the Midwest and the Carolinas, Georgia, Tennessee and Kentucky (look for all the blue icons in this White House map of new industrial investments). Fellow battery-recycling startup Redwood Materials also chose South Carolina for a forthcoming $3.5 billion recycling facility. "There will need to be a recycling plant within about an hour's drive of every single one of those [new battery gigafactories]," O'Kronley said. "You don't want to be [long-distance] shipping these very large, heavy EV batteries that are classified as Class 9 hazardous materials." The report notes that the company's second commercial-scale facility in Hopkinsville, Kentucky will "introduce a brand-new technique for efficiently extracting cathode materials from black mass, which Ascend has dubbed 'hydro to cathode.'"
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The Biggest EV Battery Recycling Plant In the US Is Open For Business More

The Biggest EV Battery Recycling Plant In the US Is Open For Business

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  • Less valuable material? (Score:3)

    by fermion ( 181285 ) on Monday April 10, 2023 @09:28PM (#63440080) Homepage Journal
    This is really good. We need to recycle batteries and recover the hard to get material. Of course, this being Georgia I do wonder where the less valuable material is going. Maybe to be landfill at the local quarry?

    • Paying China to take it away.

      • No, China isn't taking it anymore. They're probably just burning it, but that's what China was doing with it anyway, so it's 0-sum for the planet.

        • Actually if we burn it, it's better in the 'less bad' sense.

          If China burns it, we have to release CO2 to get it TO China in the first place.

          And we'll have nominally better controls on the emissions of that burn than China.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by clovis ( 4684 )

      This is really good. We need to recycle batteries and recover the hard to get material. Of course, this being Georgia I do wonder where the less valuable material is going. Maybe to be landfill at the local quarry?

      According to the linked article, the leftovers go to another processing plant in Kentucky, if that's a real place.
      I always assumed Kentucky was a made-up Hollywood thing like 555 phone numbers or gay people.

      • Re: (Score:1, Offtopic)

        by ShanghaiBill ( 739463 )

        I always assumed Kentucky was a made-up Hollywood thing.

        I lived in Kentucky when I was growing up. It is a real place.

        Most of the stereotypes are accurate. A lot of uneducated and judgmental people.

        The moonshine can mess you up (it often contains methanol), but the watermelon wine is good.

        Kentucky is the land of northern charm and southern efficiency.

        • KY state motto: 15 million people, 5 last names.

        • "Kentucky is the land of northern charm and southern efficiency."

          I'm reading along at normal speed and came across this.
          It's like I was driving on cruise-control and the transmission started slipping.
          Thanks.

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by Luckyo ( 1726890 )

      This is actually really bad, because the devil is in the details. This is a pyrolysis plant. They get nothing but cathode out of their recycling process. Because what they do is burn the battery in a specific way, which burns away everything but cathode precursors. Lithium is all lost in this recycling process for example.

      Their next much smaller plant will be hydrolysis test run as is said in the story. That is the new technology that in the lab showed promise in being able to actually extract some of the l

      • given the issues with Cobalt sourcing, any recycling of that is a positive.

        the recycling process will evolve and move forward. Starts with initial steps.
  • I thought moving to a solid state battery was the short term goal, yes yes they aren't ready yet - but will they be any different to recycle?

    • Re:Solid State Batteries? (Score:4, Informative)

      by ShanghaiBill ( 739463 ) on Tuesday April 11, 2023 @12:50AM (#63440334)

      Solid-state batteries are shredded, and then the components are separated by density. Then the lithium is leached out with acid while the other metals are melted down and separated.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by eepok ( 545733 )

      "Short-term" is marketing speak for investors.

      The operational reality is that solid state batteries are the current dominant "next-gen" energy storage and will be so for the foreseeable future. The industry has accepted the financial risks of investing in solid state batteries at scale to mitigate the already-scaled reliance on fossil fuels. Effectively, it's the equivalent of using your own t-shirt to stop another person's bleeding. The shirt's not sterile and its use may result in an infection, but it's m

  • Would be fascinating to see their modelling (Score:5, Interesting)

    by shilly ( 142940 ) on Tuesday April 11, 2023 @01:35AM (#63440400)

    I'm sure they built a robust set of models of their likely future business, so I'd love to see the assumptions they've made about:
    - Future EV uptake
    - EV pack lifespan
    - % of packs going to second use eg home storage
    etc

    On lifespan: from what I understand, EV battery recycling plants in the EU have struggled because they've overestimated the MTBF (well, mean time before range drops below what a driver will put up with), and so the supply has been extremely limited. I wonder if that changes as we move from early adopters to mass market? Will the next set of drivers have lower tolerance for drops in range? Or will it continue to be the case that drivers will only do something once the pack is at c75% of it's original range, in which case it may well be another decade till there's scale in recycling.

    Would love to see that model, to understand what they are assuming on all this.

    • I think they are following the Field of Dreams assumption: "If you build it, they will come."

    • Re:Would be fascinating to see their modelling (Score:5, Interesting)

      by AmiMoJo ( 196126 ) on Tuesday April 11, 2023 @05:19AM (#63440638) Homepage Journal

      The issue in the EU has been that the batteries are so valuable it becomes uneconomical to recycle them. Typically a pack that isn't performing well enough in a car actually only has a small number of bad cells. People know that and are willing to break the pack down into modules and test them individually, replacing the bad ones. Other people are then willing to break down the failed modules and test the cells individually. That maintains relatively high prices, since often the people doing that are not factoring in their time as a cost, i.e. they are fixing their own car or building their own home battery.

      The other issue is that packs are so big now that a reduction from 500km to 400km range isn't the deal breaker that dropping to sub 100km in cars with small batteries can be. Even if the original owner isn't happy with it, someone else will want to buy it at a discount.

      Given that the EU has set a cut off date for fossil fuel car sales, and EV sales are increasing rapidly, it seems like a fairly safe bet that recycling will be a major business. Manufacturers will be keen to recover value from "failed" batteries, as will insurance companies scrapping cars that are written off.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by shilly ( 142940 )

        There's another benefit of larger packs in terms of longevity too -- it means fewer discharge cycles per 1000 km.

        My first gen Zoe: 140km per cycle, so 7 cycles per 1000km
        My 2nd gen Zoe: 300km per cycle, so 3.3 cycles per 1000km
        My 3rd gen Zoe: 390km per cycle, so 2.5 cycles per 1000km

        So the cycles per annual mileage goes down dramatically with larger batteries, meaning they should last longer. And as scaling is only really starting to happen now, the vast majority of EVs in Europe and the US will have fewer

        • Well, not really. Yes, you will get more kms before the batteries need replacing, but you will wind up having to recycle the same kwh of battery capacity in the end.

          Your 1st gen had a 22kwh battery.

          Your 3rd gen has a 52 kwh battery.

          Assuming 1000 cycles to failure (just as an example), and Renaults official range numbers, you can travel 385,000 km in you 3rd gen. Your 1st gen will need about 2.5 battery packs to go that same distance (150,000km per pack). So you will have used 52kwh of battery in the 3

          • Re: (Score:2)

            by shilly ( 142940 )

            Sure -- but I was talking about the consumer benefit, rather than the sustainability benefit. Obviously, moving from 1 to 2.5x as mean time between replacements is a pretty big benefit for a consumer

            In practice, I expect there will also be some sustainability benefit too, as larger batteries will spend more of the working life further away from fully discharged than smaller batteries.

  • "There will need to be a recycling plant within about an hour's drive of every single one of those [new battery gigafactories]," O'Kronley said.

    So, does this mean O'Kronley thinks the EV's range is an hour's drive before the battery dies and needs recycled?

  • I'm sure it isn't cheap to lug a bunch of these batteries to the plant for recycling. Who pays for that? I doubt it will be the manufacturers or the car owners.
  • ...Unfortunately, the U.S. isn't making electric vehicles very feasible or practical just yet. Design either. What happens if you're running on empty driving down a lonely highway at night? AAA couldn't help you if you run out and bring you a "gallon of electricity". You'd have to get towed... You'll also have to pay for extra miles of towing passed Gas stations after Gas stations, just to find the rare Charge station. Then be prepared to sit there for a very looooong time!

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