Electric car batteries – from battery degradation to cobalt mining. We ask an expert!

Electric car batteries – from battery degradation to cobalt mining. We ask an expert!

So you and thank you for taking the time because there is so much to unpack when it comes to batteries when it comes to EV and batteries and there’s a whole world of myth and Legend attached to batteries so I’m really grateful for you taking the time to give us some of the

Facts actually and where we’re at with batteries and what we know about them and how they’re actually playing out in the real world firstly then I know there are lots of different types of batteries we all do from our remote control to our mobile phone to our

EVS um can you run me through the science of how they actually work so the champion of the electric vehicle traction battery the one that actually Powers your car rather than the windscreen wipers in it is the lithium ion cell and that’s actually quite a broad Church of chemistries but

Fundament what they all have in common is the anode which is the negative electrode you’ll have lots of lithium ions in it at the beginning when it’s fully charged and then as you’re discharging it those lithium ions move across the well out of the anod across the cell through the separator which is

Just a kind of polymer film that allows the ions through it but doesn’t allow electrons through it they have to take the external circuit in other words leave the cell leave the battery pack power the electric motor and go in the other side where they recombine with the

Lithium ions to become lithium atoms within some sort of heavy metal oxide structure however recently we’ve seen quite a lot of electric vehicles launched that have lithium iron phosphate cathodes which are a very different structure there’s no nickel there’s no Cobalt they’re safer they’re longer lasting and they’re much cheaper

Too so those are the Main Stays of electric vehicle batteries at the moment although of course there’s lots of exciting chemistries on the horizon but in terms of a car that you would buy today it’s likely going to be nmc or lfp lithium cells in it we all did learn how

Batteries work at school it’s the science of that is playing out just the same way it’s just that we’re using a different recipe of chemicals and that recipe of chemicals that we’re using is what’s critical to I’m guessing performance absolutely yeah yeah uh performance safety lifespan the works so

There were some earlier batteries that didn’t last as much as we’d like them to but we learned since then how to tweak chemistries so that they do last longer how to tweak chemistries and and Battery design um so that they last longer as well uh so we we’ve added in liquid

Based thermal Management Systems to Wick away heat before it can cause any long-term degradation issues and that’s why pretty much any other electric car from the early 2010s is still running around in its original battery with minimum loss of range and that’s the key we outlasting expectations things are

Isn’t it amazing to we have to say for once in a day things are better than we thought would that is that fair it is true yeah because when we were testing lithium cells in the lab um in the the kind of earlier days and coming up with

Predictions of you know oh they they’ll maybe do five years maybe eight years in an electric car that’s because if you test them in a lab that’s not necessarily representative of a real world environment because if you’re doing accelerated charging discharging charging discharging constantly hammering these things in a way that

They will not be used in most applications that’s not going to be representative of how they’re going to be treated in the vehicle it’s not going to be necessarily represented of the ambient temperatures and the kind of driving conditions that they’re going to be faced with it was only once we

Actually got those batteries out there into the real world that we realized hey these are actually really resilient so it is genuinely better than early lab tests indicated that the problem with battery recycling at the moment isn’t that we can’t recycle them is that there’s not enough dead EV batteries to

Rec cycle so everyone’s sitting there twiddling their thumbs waiting on this feet stock coming in wow and so really you know we thought that we’d have them turning over by now we haven’t and that would explain some of the longer warranties that we’re seeing the eight-year back we War as as

Manufacturers they getting a bit more confident obviously eight-year warranty that is with manufacturers being really skittish and conservative because they don’t want to have to pay out on that what we’re seeing though is some manufacturer switching to 10year battery warranty we’re we’re getting to the stage where are outlasting expectations

So much that even the kind of skittish warranty conditions are getting more generous so there’s even more confidence to buy an EV these days and degradation which was the big fear seems to not be something that we need to worry about um it’s a totally different Beast to the

Battery that’s in your smartphone or your laptop yes they’re lithium ion but the chemistries are subtly different the way they’re made is different the quality is arguably not as good and also they’re deliberately pushing the voltages and the temperatures of of cells in laptops and and smartphones and

So on to the extreme all in the sake of a few minutes extra run time and also the fact they don’t have any kind of thermal management you know liquid thermal management system to Wick away that heat compar it to the very easy life that they have in an electric

Vehicle and then those eventually deemed dead electric vehicle batteries which still have about 70% of their original capacity so that’s actually more than enough for for most electric car drivers to keep driving that dead battery you can then put those into life applications like energy storage that

Are even easier on that battery and then you’ll get decades out of them before you eventually do recycle them talk to me about that first of all I can’t you’re making me laugh because you I’ve never seen anyone quite so passionate about B and I love that so much because

It really helps us you know like you your passion shines through and it’s really exciting then stop it stop it it makes sense thank talk to us about that because that’s also genuinely exciting the life of a battery after it come well it’s in the EV for longer than we

Thought after it comes out of the EV there are then options for it right not just recycling absolutely oh no no there’s already companies worldwide who are making Second Life electric vehicle energy storage systems and one for example is connected energy in the UK um so what they do is they take old

Electric vehicle batteries from the likes of the the Renault kangu electric van from the early 2010s not too disimilar to early Nissans in terms of quality and so on um but they’ll then stick those into shipping containers um and then they will basically literally stack the packs on top of one another

Hook them up to some control Electronics probably get an air conditioning unit in there to keep everything nice and and optimized temperature- wise and when you look at the um the kind of charge discharge patterns the duty cycles of an electric vehicle where you’ve got harsh acceleration regenerative braking you

Kind of stop start driving um the novelty of the instant torque of an electric vehicle means that inevitably one that’s fairly new will be you know kind of um raced off the line quite a bit against taxi drivers and white fans and all that um so know genuinely you do

See like it’s a very kind of spiky graph I mean we I like we’ve been banging on about all of the great things you know because it’s really nice to have some good news um but there is a dark side to battery production in particular the stories surrounding that and what to

Believe and what not to believe and obviously the huge human cost um of mining is one of those factors but where are we headed with all of that the two minerals that are making the headlines are lithium and Cobalt and in both cases they’re accused of having kids working

Down mindes um first of all the people if you see anyone who says oh there’s children working in lithium mines they’ve not been reading the correct sources because that’s not the case um lithi generally comes from either Hard Rock in the likes of Australia or brins from the

Likes of South America but the UK actually has its own lithium reserves too down old Cornish mines both hard rock and geothermal brins Cobalt that’s where the the serious contention is because it’s um about 70% of cobalt comes from Democratic Republic of Congo um most of it is from opencast mines

From Big mining giants like Glen core and so on and they have to play by the rule book and have to make sure that you know there’s this proper ESG you environmental and social governance in place but because the wages in DRC are so low like a teacher earns something

Like2 us doar a day if you can do artisanal mining in other words dig your own hole and and extract your own Cobalt Ore then you can earn $3 a day and when you’ve got a nation which doesn’t have a welfare state doesn’t have free education doesn’t have free healthare

Funnily enough there’s quite a few people who do that artisanal mining is not restricted to Cobalt there’s loads of artisanal mining worldwide for loads of different resources but um yeah unfortunately sometimes uh the working conditions are not very safe for these artisanal Minds because it’s DIY efforts and sometimes such as the financial

Desperation of the household you’ll find children working there too the good news however um there’s there’s the technological good news and then there’s the sort of societal good news so we’ll start with the social the fair Cobalt Alliance has been established to um to basically make sure that AR mining is

Safe that wages are fair that children are in schools not in mines and the likes of LG CM big battery manufacturer and Tesla needs no introduction are members of that conspicuous in their absence are the oil and gas companies who use Cobalt to refine petrol and Diesel there are basically the

Bestselling cars on worldwide roads coming from Tesla Chinese manufacturers Fords doing it with the Mustang macki in the US Volkswagen Mercedes are going to follow suit basically they’re switching to these Cobalt free lfp batteries so anyone who gets out of their V8 Range Rover and points a Tesla Model 3

Standard range driver or a model y standard range driver or a byd driver and says oh you know there’s kids that mind the Cobalt in that battery as they’re filling up their V8 Range Rover actually there’s no Cobalt anywhere near that electric car and by default the V8

Range Rover is using more Cobalt because that uses Cobalt to refine the petrol and Diesel that goes into it every time it gets filled up Miss busted thank you very much that’s really really useful and my other question is obviously Cobalt is now going to the demand is

Going to decrease but for the other minerals demand is not going to decrease in fact it’s only going to increase as we make that shift to EV how sustainable is that how sustainable is the mining of that from an environmental point of view and do we have enough so there’s definitely areas where

Nations need to be far stronger on their their ESG that I mentioned earlier they need to be making sure that there’s very strict practices in place for mines there are clean ways of doing things and there are dirty ways of doing things and if you see the the color of the likes of

Water runoff from Indonesia and uh nickel mines and things like that these are things that are not insurmountable but at the moment they’re not being tackled due to insufficient sort of governmental um input you know to to tackle this these are as I say they’re not insurmountable um we’re already

Seeing ways of of dealing with mining waste and far more efficient manner of being able to extract more resources from the the same deposits Etc so again it’s because of this powerful Spotlight of scrutiny that’s been put on electric vehicles that’s not been put on petrol

And diesel cars it’s not been put on consumer electronics Etc that has actually helped the sector to um you know to to vastly improve its environmental credentials but there’s still obviously some work to be done that said I mentioned nickel lithium iron phosphate does not contain nickel

And lfp looks as if it’s going to be become a Mainstay of a wide range of Manufacturers electric vehicle batteries for ranges of upwards of 200 mil per charge nmc gets you more range but how much range do you actually need and lithium iron phosphat energy density is

Improving in other words how much range you can you know physically squeeze into a particular space and then on top of that we can move away from lithium as well sodium ion is tantalizingly close to commercialization that removes not just your Cobalt and your nickel you’re looking at sodium you’re looking at bi

Derived negative electrod materials you’re looking at incredibly wait wait wait sodium ion so sodium ion is very similar to lithium ion but you’re replacing lithium which by the way is a lot more abundant than people think it is so it’s not scarce it’s just that the

Supply chain needs to ramp up for it and that’s where the bottleneck is but sodium obviously salt you know we’ve we’ve been using that for quite some time and it’s even more abundant and the supply chain is already there so sodium has some clever Trix up its sleeve uh it

May be a bigger atom which means that in terms of the structure that would be used for the anode the negative electrode of a a lithium ion cell um if it tried to kind of pigeon hole itself in between those layers of graphine that make up the graphite it’s just carbon

But it basically smashes it apart and ruins it so you need a less organized structure hard carbon hard carbon can be easily made from waste biomass so basically you know um any kind of wood chippings or what have you that would naturally have come from the forestry industry

You can effectively Char I mean I’m simplifying it but you can Char it and turn it into this hard carbon which works really well so you we are literally talking about EVS powered by salt pretty much yeah yes that’s basically it it’s it’s one half a table salt with really really cheap uh

Positive Electro materials as well um yeah it’s a very exciting Avenue to to go down it’s really exciting look what happens when you speak to a Battery Specialist don’t you thank you so much for sharing a Your Enthusiasm and B your knowledge today because it’s such a mindfield of rumor and speculation and

Misunderstanding and even down to the basics of how it actually works to power your car the battery um really appreciate your help today thank you no Problem

There’s a lot of controversy and mis information surrounding batteries for electric vehicles, so we thought it was about time we asked an expert – time to separate fact from fiction.

Dr Euan McTurk is a consultant battery electrochemist, so knows a thing or two about batteries and clearly the best person to ask about all areas of EV batteries, including degradation and the mining of the compounds needed, including cobalt.

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