Profiting from electric vehicle battery recycling

Posted: November 01, 2024

Black mass. It’s neither a heavy metal band nor an astronomical object. It’s the deep black, fine powder you get when you shred and sift electric vehicle (EV) batteries into dust. This dust contains valuable metals like lithium, cobalt, nickel and manganese along with lots of other materials of varying value. 

If only you could separate these valuable materials out so you could reuse them, you’d be sitting on a gold mine—or, rather multiple mines for lithium, cobalt and other rare earth metals. That is just the challenge facing a whole slew of new ventures that are leaping into the growing EV battery recycling business. 

How are EV batteries recycled? 

In the past, black mass has been gone through a pyrometallurgical process—directly smelting it at high temperatures separates the components into a cobalt/nickel/copper alloy with lithium/aluminum/silicon slag. 

Hydrometallurgical processing can recover more of those valuable elements with less waste. Instead of burning the black mass, hydrometallurgical recyclers use acids to chemically treat it with a series of reactions that separate out individual compounds like nickel sulfate or lithium carbonate. 

A new kind of hydrometallurgical processing promises to be even more efficient. Instead of chemically extracting each individual element from black mass, the strategy is to simply remove the impurities, leaving a mix of metals behind. Recyclers can then fine-tune the levels of each element in the mix to create a powder called precursor cathode active material (pCAM). Manufacturers can use the pre-mixed pCAM to manufacture cathodes for new EV batteries. 

That’s the approach that Ascend Elements is using to recycle EV batteries. Co-founder and CTO Eric Gratz told National Public Radio that traditional hydrometallurgical processes painstakingly extract 98% of black mass just to leave behind the 2% of impurities: 

“So we flipped the problem around and we're extracting the 2% of impurities and keeping the nickel, manganese, and cobalt together. So not fighting thermodynamics but working with it” 

Ascend sent out its first commercial shipment of pCAM in June from its pilot production line in Massachussets. It’s opening a much larger, billion-dollar plant in Kentucky next year. 

What is closed loop battery recycling? 

The holy grail of EV battery recycling is a closed-loop supply chain in which battery materials are perpetually recycled without having to rely significantly on new inputs. Recyclers such as Ascend, Aquametals, Cirba Solutions and Redwood Materials look to recycle the water, chemicals and other materials that go into recycling batteries so that the whole process produces little to no waste. 

What are the incentives for EV battery recycling?

Efficient battery recycling will make EVs even more climate friendly—but it also promises big profits for companies that are building out the technology. McKinsey estimates that a battery made with recycled materials produces 28% fewer CO2e emissions than one made with virgin materials. At the same time, it projects that recyclers could realize margins of $600 per ton of battery recycling material by 2025. 

In the U.S., these profits are being helped along by over $3Bn in government incentives, which are designed in part to challenge China’s current dominance in the industry. All these incentives—along with increased demand for electric vehicles—are prompting battery recycling startups to scale up as quickly as possible. 

Cirba Solutions CEO David Klanecky told NPR: 

“We're building as fast as we humanly possibly can build. And I think we're going way too slow, to be honest with you.”