US eager to recycle lithium batteries so it doesn’t have to buy them from China
- Officials in Washington are portraying the drive to develop recycling technology as a ‘national security’ issue
The US government will lead an ambitious effort to develop technologies to recycle lithium-ion batteries from electric vehicles, mobile phones and other sources to ensure a reliable and affordable supply of metals crucial to battery production in anticipation of soaring global demand and potential shortages, Department of Energy officials said on Friday.
Calling the effort a national security issue, the agency announced a US$15-billion, three-year research and development project at Argonne National Laboratory outside Chicago. The collaboration between government labs and universities is also an attempt to catch up with China and other countries that manufacture and recycle lithium-ion batteries, including those shipped back from the US, officials said.
US dependence on other countries for metals such as lithium, cobalt, nickel and graphite, as well as finished batteries, “undermines our national security” because the source countries are not always close allies, said Daniel Simmons, assistant secretary of the Energy Department’s Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy.
Lithium salts primarily are extracted in South America and African countries and Australia, and cobalt largely mined in the Democratic Republic of Congo, experts said. The US has a strained trading relationship with China, which produces a large share of the batteries and has been aggressively recycling them to recover metals it otherwise would have to import.
But the demand for lithium-ion batteries is also driving the effort. With US carmakers set to expand production of electric vehicles over the next 10 years and batteries from existing electric vehicles nearing the end of their useful lives, it’s time to figure out how to recycle them in the US, said Jeff Spangenberger, director of the new recycling centre, called the ReCell Centre.