Lithium News

Researchers in Sweden recycling electric vehicle (EV) batteries are claiming recovery rates of 98% for lithium and 100% by reversing the conventional hydrometallurgical process for separating the valuable material.

In hydrometallurgy, battery metals are usually dissolved in inorganic acids and less valuable metals such as aluminium and copper are removed before lithium, cobalt, manganese and nickel are extracted. This can require several purification steps resulting in lithium loss.

However, the team at Chalmers University of Technology, Sweden is using oxalyic acid – an organic acid found in the plant kingdom. The researchers say the new latter stage, in which the black mass is filtered, is reminiscent of brewing coffee. While aluminium and lithium end up in the liquid, the other metals are left in the ‘solids’. The next step in the process is to separate the aluminium and lithium.

‘So far, no one has managed to find exactly the right conditions for separating this much lithium using oxalic acid, whilst also removing all the aluminium,’ says PhD student Léa Rouquette. ‘Since all batteries contain aluminium, we need to be able to remove it without losing the other metals.’

‘We need alternatives to inorganic chemicals,’ says Martina Petranikova, team at the Department of Chemistry and Chemical Engineering ‘One of the biggest bottlenecks in today’s processes is removing residual materials like aluminium. This is an innovative method that can offer the recycling industry new alternatives and help solve problems that hinder development.’

Petranikova’s research group is involved in various collaborations with companies to develop electric car battery recycling and is a partner in major research and development projects, such as Volvo Cars’ and Northvolt’s Nybat project.

President Joe Biden announced Monday a $1.3 billion federal investment to build three new interstate power lines in an effort to upgrade the United States’ outdated electric grid and transition it to clean energy.

The electric transmission lines will cross through six states: Arizona, Nevada, New Hampshire, New Mexico, Utah and Vermont.

The Southline Project will bring wind power generated in New Mexico to Arizona cities. The Twin States Clean Energy Link Project will connect Canada’s clean energy to New England and vice versa. The Cross-Tie project will deliver renewable energy from the West to the Midwest.

Together, the three transmission lines will aim to supply 3.5 additional gigawatts of energy to the U.S. grid, which equates to powering 3 million homes, according to the Department of Energy. The department said the construction of the power lines would create roughly 13,000 new jobs.

The investment is a part of the Biden administration’s larger effort to transition the U.S. to a carbon-free power sector by 2035.

That means the country’s electricity grid needs to be updated to get electricity from places where solar and wind power are abundant to locations where demand is high. (With fossil fuels, they can be transported first, then used to make electricity near where it’s needed.)

In addition, the drive toward electrifying more of the economy — such as transportation — means that the U.S. needs to “more than double our grid capacity” overall, Secretary of Energy Jennifer Granholm said in a Monday statement.

U.S. energy infrastructure was already in need of an upgrade. Built in the 1960s and 1970s, the grid is aging. Electricity customers experienced an average of over seven hours of power outages in 2021, compared to just over three hours in 2013, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration.

That degradation is exacerbated by increasingly regular extreme weather.

“America’s existing energy infrastructure will not endure the continuing impacts of extreme weather events spurred by climate change,” the Department of Energy said in January 2022.

The $1.3 billion investment is a step in the right direction, but it does not mean three new power lines will magically appear. Electric transmission lines are notoriously difficult to build and often run into delays and roadblocks in the planning and construction phases.

For example, even with the new federal funding, the Twin States project cannot begin construction until it receives all necessary approvals. The project’s estimated timeline is to finish siting and permitting by 2026, complete construction in 2030 and be in service by 2031, according to Mary-Leah Messenger, a spokesperson at National Grid, the New England firm developing the Twin States line.

Still, Messenger said, “Today’s decision from the DOE is a major step forward.”

Federal agencies, along with the Biden administration, have previously said they would work to expedite federal permitting processes to make grid infrastructure development more efficient.

Layered lithium cobalt oxide, a key component of lithium-ion batteries, has been synthesized at temperatures as low as 300°C and durations as short as 30 minutes.

Saudi Arabia’s flagship mining company Ma’aden is working to extract lithium from seawater, its chief executive Robert Wilt said on Wednesday, as competition for the rare metal rages between the U.S. and China.

Wilt said Ma’aden, the Gulf’s largest miner, is trying to stay above the fray and was “doing what’s best for the kingdom”.

“We are working on an initiative to extract lithium from seawater as well as some other things; I would say nothing is of scale, we are still at pilot phase currently,” Wilt told Reuters in an interview.

Lithium is a key mineral used for electric car batteries, laptops and smartphones.

Ma’aden is 67% owned by the Public Investment Fund (PIF), the kingdom’s sovereign wealth fund, and recently launched Manara Minerals, a joint venture with the PIF, to invest in mining assets abroad.

“We have de-risked our portfolio in terms of broadening exploration and working external to the kingdom to make sure we are resilient no matter what happens geopolitically,” Wilt said.

He noted the kingdom is developing an automotive industry which will require electric vehicle battery materials and “we will probably not find that in time as the plants are being built, so we have to go outside and source it.”

However the priority for Saudi Arabia has also been securing steel and iron ore from abroad as the kingdom rushes to construct ambitious mega projects. “Look outside the window, see the cranes, the giga projects that are going on here, there is immense appetite for steel,” Wilt said.

The company was also planning to almost double production from its phosphate and gold mines, he said.

“We are in the final stages of commissioning Mansourah-Massarah, the largest gold mine in the kingdom, which will almost double our production of gold,” he said.

Mansourah-Massarah is expected to contribute 250,000 ounces of gold per year.

Ma’aden has struggled as global prices for metals dipped, with its second quarter profit tumbling by more than 90%.

Wilt said prices have been recovering.

“Prices seem to be steadying out in a place that’s higher than they were going into at the beginning of the cycle.”

In its last earning’s call, Ma’aden said it was considering raising debt on international markets.

“We recently required an investment rate credit rating … So all of this is in preparation for significant growth over the next 15 years or so,” Wilt said.

University of Maryland researchers studying how lithium batteries fail have developed a new technology that could enable next-generation electric vehicles (EVs) and other devices that are less prone to battery fires while increasing energy storage.

The innovative method, presented in a paper published Wednesday in the journal Nature, suppresses the growth of lithium dendrites—damaging branch-like structures that develop inside so-called all-solid-state lithium batteries, preventing firms from broadly commercializing the promising technology. But this new design for a battery “interlayer,” led by Department of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering Professor Chunsheng Wang, stops dendrite formation and could open the door for production of viable all-solid-state batteries for EVs.

At least 750,000 registered EVs in the U.S. run on lithium-ion batteries—popular because of their high energy storage but containing a flammable liquid electrolyte component that burns when overheated. While no government agency tracks vehicle fires by type of car, and electric car battery fires appear to be relatively rare, they pose particular risks; the National Transportation Safety Board reports that first responders are vulnerable to safety risks, including electric shock and the exposure to toxic gases emanating from damaged or burning batteries.

All-solid-state batteries could lead to cars that are safer than current electric or internal combustion models, but creating a strategy to bypass the drawbacks was laborious, Wang said. When these batteries are operated at the high capacities and charging-discharging rates that electric vehicles demand, lithium dendrites grow toward the cathode side, causing short circuits and a decay in capacity.

He and Postdoctoral Associate Hongli Wan began to develop a theory for the formation of lithium dendrite growth in 2021; it remains a matter of scientific debate, the researchers said.

“After we figured out that part, we proposed the idea to redesign the interlayers that would effectively suppress the lithium dendrite growth,” he said.

Their solution is unique because of the stabilizing of the battery’s interfaces between the solid electrolyte and the anode (where electrons from a circuit enter the battery) and the electrolyte and the cathode (where energy flows out of the battery). The new battery structure adds a fluorine-rich interlayer that stabilizes the cathode side, as well as a modification of the anode’s interlayer with magnesium and bismuth—suppressing the lithium dendrite.

“Solid-state batteries are next-generation because they can achieve high energy and safety. In current batteries, if you achieve high energy, you’ll sacrifice safety,” said Wang.

Researchers have other challenges to solve before the product enters the market. To commercialize all-solid-state batteries, experts will have to scale down the solid electrolyte layer to achieve a similar thickness to the lithium-ion batteries’ electrolyte, which will improve energy density—or how much power the battery can store. High costs of basic materials are another challenge, the team said.

Aiming to release the new batteries to the market by 2026, advanced battery manufacturer Solid Power plans to begin trials of the new technology to assess its potential for commercialization. Continuing research aims to further boost energy density, the researchers said.