A nearly $2.3 million state grant — the largest of three recently awarded — went to Lawrence Technological University in Southfield to help create automated systems to disassemble, sort and process both post-consumer batteries and electric vehicle batteries at their end of life.
Goals are to reduce battery scrap in Michigan landfills and improve the purity of recycled materials, which can be reused for new batteries. Artificial intelligence will be used to help identify elements and sort materials.
“Most lithium-ion batteries have not just lithium, but nickel and cobalt, especially electric vehicle batteries. These are critical materials for battery production, and unfortunately, almost 90% of all nickel, cobalt and lithium is mined and processed in China,” said Dan Radomski, top executive officer at the Centrepolis Accelerator at Lawrence Technological University.
He argued that’s why extracting such elements from old batteries is a national supply chain priority.
“We only have one nickel mine in all the U.S., and that’s in the Upper Peninsula by Marquette. And there are estimates that we would need 72 new nickel mines alone to meet our requirements for domestic production of batteries,” Radomski said.
Statistics show that a growing number of EV batteries are expected to reach their end of life in coming years. Domestically, estimates are that 200,000 metric tons of EV batteries will be at their end of life by 2027 – but there will be four times that much globally.
Liz Browne, materials management division director for the Michigan Department of Environment, Great Lakes and Energy (EGLE), said disposable vape pens are increasingly showing up in the state’s municipal household waste stream with their lithium-ion batteries. She said the batteries are reactive enough to be prone to catching fire or even exploding.
“The main disposal options for both nicotine and cannabis vape pens and e-cigs are incineration, but the incinerators do not want the lithium batteries in their waste stream,” Browne said.
She agreed that finding a way to recycle the elements inside lithium batteries is a national imperative.
The grant to Lawrence Tech was among three recently awarded by EGLE to increase innovation in battery and critical minerals recycling. The other two grants went to research projects at the University of Michigan and Michigan State University.
A $1.49 million grant went toward a demonstration project at an electrical apprenticeship project in Flint, where U-M researchers plan to create a 500-kilowatt, grid-tied energy storage system by reusing old EV batteries.
MSU researchers got a $706,000 grant to create a way to recycle lithium-ion phosphate battery cathode materials, including ceramic parts.
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