Sun, Dec 03, 2017 page15

• Battery ‘mining’ a new cobalt source for electric cars

  • By Anna Hirtenstein / Bloomberg
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  Almost 14,500km from the dusty Congo savanna, miners have hit on an entirely new source of cobalt — the rare mineral at the heart of the electric-car boom — and not only can they take coffee breaks, when they take a break, they can grab a donut at Tim Hortons.

  Scientists working for American Manganese Inc, located in the suburbs of Vancouver, have developed a way to produce enough of the bluish-gray metal to power all the electric cars on the road today without drilling into the ground: by recycling faulty batteries.

  It is one of many technologies that entrepreneurs are patenting to prepare for a time when electric cars outnumber combustion engines, turning the entire automotive supply chain upside down in the process.

  Instead of radiators, spark plugs and fuel injectors, the industry will need cheap sources of cobalt, copper and lithium.

  “Mining batteries is much more profitable than mining the ground,” said Larry Reaugh, the president of American Manganese, which is patenting a method to draw out all of the metals in rechargeable batteries. “Rather than mining ore that’s 2 percent cobalt, you’re mining a battery that has 100 percent cobalt in it.”

  Innovators like him have made so much progress that the likes of Tesla Motors Inc and Toyota Motor Corp could count on recycling for 10 percent of their battery material needs through 2025 if companies roll out large schemes, according to Bloomberg New Energy Finance.

  That will ease pressure on lithium and cobalt, whose prices have more than doubled over the past year.

  Finding new sources of cobalt, in particular, could be a game-changer, because more than half of the relatively rare metal is sourced in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Not only is it one of the world’s poorest countries, doing business there is tough after decades of violence and corruption. Some artisanal mines still use child labor.

  American Manganese wants to recycle the one in 10 lithium-ion batteries — used in everything from home electronics to smartphones — that fail quality-control tests and end up in hazardous-waste dumps.

  Doing this could yield as much as 4,000 tonnes of cobalt, Reaugh said.

  If true, that is equal to the material used in all electric vehicles on the road this year.

  Add in the 311,000 tonnes of electric car batteries that Bloomberg New Energy Finance anticipates will stop working by 2025, and the potential trove of metals grows exponentially.

  Recycling could have a “stabilizing effect” on battery metal prices, said George Heppel, a consultant at London-based commodity analysis company CRU Ltd.

  After surging from US$10 to US$30 a pound in less than two years, cobalt’s price gains are poised to slow to US$32 by 2021 and US$41 by 2022, according to forecasts of Macquarie Group Ltd, one of the largest banks in commodities.

  Pressure on lithium, sourced mainly from Chilean brine lakes, will also abate as new supply starts getting produced in Argentina and Australia.

  “Recycling will help to ease supply constraints that we see coming in the next couple of years,” Bloomberg New Energy Finance energy storage analyst James Frith said. “It will be a big deal mainly because you wouldn’t get all the wastage going into the ground.”

  That does not mean miners like Glencore PLC, the world’s top producer, will need to scale back production. As the number of electric cars on roads from Shanghai to Paris surges from 2 million now to 118 million vehicles by 2030, demand for cobalt will soar to 156,000 tonnes.

  By then, cars that emit less greenhouse gas than combustion engines will be everywhere. The UK and France plan to outlaw the sale of gasoline and diesel-powered cars by 2040. China, which is tackling one of the world’s worst air pollution problems, aims for electric cars to make up 10 percent of new sales in two years.

  “We expect recycling will take off in 10 to 12 years, when the first wave of electrified vehicles will near end of life,” said Marc Grynberg, the chief executive officer of Brussels-based Umicore N.V., one of the few companies capable of recycling electric-car batteries at an industrial scale at a plant in Belgium.

  Umicore has agreements with Tesla and Toyota to recycle their expired batteries in Europe. It uses smelting to recover minerals to make cathode materials — the part of the battery that houses the chemical reaction and produces the electron.

  At American Manganese, Reaugh says he can extract metals at a cost of about US$0.30 a pound and resell them to battery manufacturers for up to US$20 a pound.

  Reaugh, who spent 40 years working for miners of precious and base metals in the Americas and China, is patenting a technique that removes the battery casing with robotics and soaks the cell in a chemical solution for 30 minutes to bring out the pure metals.

  He plans to raise US$6 million next year to build a pilot plant near Vancouver.

  “This is an immediate market,” he said.

  With assistance from Mark Burton

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