Electric mobility accentuates the need for batteries and, by extension, the need to recycle them. Technological and industrial solutions are already being developed in Quebec.
The boom in electric vehicles, financially supported by the governments of Canada and Quebec to decarbonize road transport, will produce a considerable quantity of batteries to be recycled. The first peak should be reached in 2030: between 58,000 and 88,000 batteries will reach the end of their life that year in the province, according to projections by Propulsion Québec, the industrial cluster for electric and intelligent transport. This represents between 17,500 tonnes and 26,400 tonnes of plastic and strategic metals to be recycled, such as nickel, lithium, cobalt or graphite.
“Our current reprocessing capacity corresponds to just under 10% of sales of lithium-ion batteries, which have a lifespan of around ten years. That leaves us 10 years to multiply our recycling capacity by 10,” calculates François Larouche, researcher at the Center of Excellence in Transport Electrification and Energy Storage (CEETE) at Hydro-Québec.
Within the electric transport sector, “everyone is well aware of the challenges related to the end of life of batteries”, assures the CEO of Propulsion Québec, Sarah Houde, who finds “healthy and comforting to see a emerging industry to tackle a problem that does not yet arise”. It remains however lucid on the ecological intentions of the industrialists. “A used battery is a high-value waste that contains strategic metals that are less expensive to recycle than to extract. »
Reduce mineral requirements
The transition to electric mobility also raises the question of the availability of mineral resources. “We have margin on nickel, lithium and graphite, but it can go quite quickly depending on the other uses of these metals. For cobalt, the situation is more critical”, indicates François Larouche, who recalls that the limit to mining extraction, “is the price that we are ready, as a society, to pay for minerals and environmental cost that we are ready to accept”. He nevertheless estimates that in 2050, 20% to 30% of the materials required to manufacture new batteries will come from the recycling of used batteries.
In this perspective of reducing economic, ecological and climatic costs, research and development is moving towards new batteries using less rare metals in smaller quantities, and above all easier to recycle, such as iron. Manufacturers of electric cars and trucks are beginning to organize themselves to recover their used batteries. And in the four corners of the world, manufacturers are busy finding solutions to exploit this mine of waste with open hoods.
A leader in Quebec
For us, recycling is one of the three axes of the Quebec strategy for the development of the battery sector. The Legault government invested $22.5 million in April 2022 to build Lithion Recycling’s first commercial plant, which could process up to 7,500 tons of batteries per year by the end of 2023 — the site of the factory remains to be confirmed.
The Quebec company has developed a process – called hydrometallurgy – which allows it to recover 95% of the components of lithium-ion batteries and to regenerate materials with a level of purity of 99.98%, explains its president, Benoit Sewing. “We are closing the loop with finished products equivalent to mining products that can be used to manufacture new batteries. »
The Lithion Recycling technique is attracting a lot of international interest. “We have projects in development in Asia, Europe and North America”, indicates Benoit Couture, who intends in particular to conclude partnerships to set up supply chains for used batteries, but also to recover batteries rejected in the term of their production, “whose volumes are substantial”, emphasizes the circular entrepreneur.
For its part, the CEETE is developing a recycling process specific to LFP batteries (for lithium, iron and phosphate), a type of battery patented by Hydro-Québec in the early 2000s, which today equips the majority of electric vehicles produced in China. “We are still at the laboratory research stage, but we are able to upgrade around 30% of the cathode materials that have value,” says François Larouche.
If the question of recycling is crucial, “we must not skip the reuse stage either”, points out Thierry St-Cyr, general manager of InnovÉÉ, an innovation accelerator in the electrical energy sector. . “Batteries will outlast vehicles. Their capacity will be less, but still sufficient for stationary applications, such as the storage of electricity produced by solar panels or wind turbines, for example. »
The engineer by training agrees that it takes “a bit of brainwashing to connect different batteries that have their own management systems”, while remaining convinced that this is an avenue worth exploring. “Batteries will green our transport in the first life and then they will green renewable electricity”, he prophesies.
This special content was produced by the Special Publications team of the To have to, pertaining to marketing. The drafting of To have to did not take part.