Optimizing Battery Manufacturing Decision-Making Using Lifecycle Assessment

Abstract

The global demand for batteries is projected to increase by 25% annually, reaching ~2,600 GWh in 2030. As the world shifts to electric mobility, particularly EVs, to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and mitigate the effects of climate change, research efforts on recycling and recovery of critical elements from lithium-ion batteries (LIB) have increased, leading to the development and advancement of technologies that utilize conventional and state-of-the-art recycling processes. Hydrometallurgical processing continues to be the most widely used method for recycling metals from LIB, but over the last few years, direct recycling has gained attention as a more sustainable and efficient process. While direct-recycling technologies are promising, most direct-recycling processes remain small in scale and are costly in terms of the equipment needed to recover metals from spent LIB. As such, materials selection in battery manufacturing and overall battery chemistry and design have become increasingly important. The development of new battery chemistries that are less reliant on critical metals, such as cobalt, has become a prominent area of interest, and material criticality has become a major driver for battery recycling and reuse.Battery manufacturing is at a crossroads of decision-making with growing demands that overshadow available resources, reliance on imports, challenges in developing sustainable recycling processes that achieve increasingly stringent materials specifications, changing environmental regulations, and the need to identify and reduce potential environmental impacts for this growing waste stream. The best solutions will engage stakeholders from a variety of specialties who consider the battery lifecycle and the impact of each decision on the entire battery lifecycle. This presentation highlights one set of challenges - tradeoffs in materials selection with environmental regulatory compliance burdens and risks.