Here is the transcript and summary of Emma Nehrenheim’s talk titled “The Powerful Possibilities of Recycling the World’s Batteries” at TED conference.
In this TED talk, Emma underscores the critical role of batteries in the global shift towards electrification and the importance of sustainable practices in their production and recycling.
Listen to the audio version here:
TRANSCRIPT:
So the world is going electric. And batteries will do for electrification what the refrigerator did for food, because batteries will allow us to move clean energy through time and through space. And we don’t have a problem with the availability of energy on this planet. We have a problem with getting this energy to where we need it, and when we need it.
But if we approach battery manufacturing the wrong way, we will end up repeating mistakes from the past, mistakes that are at the heart of the climate environmental crisis that we see today. And that’s what I’m here to explain.
It’s all about the way we are using the Earth’s resources. So historically, and today, we have been mining oil from the Earth’s crust with little concern for the long-term effect.
And this example of how we’ve been approaching the fossil fuel industry and how we’ve been dependent on it, how we have been extracting oil where it’s economically possible, refined it, burned it, and it ends up in the atmosphere — that’s the perfect illustration of the fundamental, simple and linear model that we are working with: extract, use and discard.
When I was a professor in environmental engineering, I used to teach my students that mistakes are OK, as long as you learn from your mistakes, and as long as you take action. So now, when we are evolving, when we are changing, when we are building things from scratch, we should think twice, and we should do it right this time.
And what does this mean for batteries? There are two things we need to know about batteries. One is they require enormous amounts of energy to produce, and the second is that they are made from minerals, minerals that require global mining, refining and processing, and long and complex supply chains.
So if we start with energy, a battery factory is a very large and complex operation. It requires large amounts of heat and electricity to produce. It starts with a chemical plant; then follow long coating machines. After that, we have cell assembly, which is fine electronics equipment that require clean and dry rooms.
Now at the end of this process, each and every battery cell needs to be charged and discharged in certain patterns to gain its properties. And if we put this kind of factory under a fossil fuel grid, we will end up with a carbon footprint, which is the benchmark today, which is around 100 kilograms of carbon dioxide per kilowatt-hour of produced battery.
And how much is that? If we take it at scale, 20, 30 years of battery manufacturing will give the total footprint of about half the size of Germany’s.
Battery minerals
Now that would be a big mistake. Luckily, you can slash that footprint by some 67 percent — that’s two-thirds — if you put the same operation on the renewable energy grid, which we do, in northern Sweden. That, on the other hand, leaves us with the remaining footprint, the last third, coming entirely from everything that is outside the factory, and the lion’s part from the supply chain. And that leads us to the second topic we have to talk about, which is the minerals.
So batteries are made from minerals — for example, nickel, cobalt and lithium — and the way we approach this is going to determine how much we can further slash that carbon footprint.
Luckily, if we put it under this renewable grid, if we approach it the right way, with sustainable mining and a lot of recycling, we can significantly reduce the footprint. One tonne of battery-grade lithium requires 750 tonnes of brine or 250 tonnes of lithium ore.
Same with cobalt — if you need one tonne of battery-grade cobalt, you have to mine 300 tonnes of cobalt ore. So does this give us a similar situation to the oil history we have? No, because the difference is that when we mine metals, they are elements. And if you can get elements back to their elemental form, they are just as good as new. And this is the fundamental difference between the combustion-engine history that we’re living now and the new electric vehicle industry.
Because at the end of the life cycle, you can bring the metals back from the market, and you can use them again and again. So what we have developed at Northvolt is a recycling process, where we take the batteries back from the market, we discharge them fully, we take away the aluminum casing, we take away all the cabling. And then, we take out the cells and the modules. We take those cells and modules, together with some waste material we have from the production, and we throw it into a big shredder.
Black powder
We chop it up. We take out the copper foil, aluminum foil, some plastics. And then, we are left with something that we call the black mass. And this black mass is a fine black powder. This fine black powder consists of everything that we had coated on the electrodes in the factory. It’s the graphite from the anode, and it’s the nickel, cobalt, manganese and lithium from the cathode.
We take this fine powder, the black mass, we pass it on into the hydrometallurgical process. Hydrometallurgy means treating metal in liquid. And what we do is that we use different pressure changes, temperature changes and pH to separate them from one another. We refine them, so we get them into the form that we need for the production — economy salts for nickel, cobalt and manganese, or hydroxides for lithium.
And then, we do like this.