Canadian-Vietnamese partnership aims to recycle 95% of EV battery material

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Canada’s Li-Cycle is looking to further its quest to become the world’s pre-eminent recycler of automotive lithium-ion, this time by joining forces with VinES Energy Solutions, another cog in Vietnam’s wide-ranging Vingroup, which also owns upstart automaker VinFast — you might remember that company for jumping into the growing North American EV segment by opening up its first North American assembly plant in North Carolina.

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The end result of this new partnership, though, say the companies, is a closed-loop chain of production that sees up to 95 per cent of EV battery materials that go into producing automotive batteries  — lithium, nickel, cobalt, graphite, etc. — returned into use.

It’s a process that can’t come too soon. The International Energy Agency estimates that we’ll need up to 40 times as much lithium and nearly 25 times as much graphite, nickel, and cobalt to fulfill the expected demand for EV batteries. With automakers scrambling to nail down supply chains for those hard-to-find materials, sourcing adequate supplies of essential minerals is becoming more problematic.

Lithium mining requires immense amounts of water. Three-quarters of the world’s cobalt emanates from the Congo, which has an extremely spotty record in child labour and working conditions. China controls the lion’s share of rare-earth metals. Meanwhile, America, while it has enjoyed a huge influx of battery makers since the introduction of President Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act, has precious little of the raw materials that will power the 400 gigawatt-hours of battery production predicted by 2030. In other words, recycling might not just be friendly to the environment, it may be absolutely necessary as raw materials become increasingly more scarce.

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Li-Cycle already has four recycling facilities in North America — including one in Kingston, Ontario — capable of processing 30,000 tonnes of used batteries per year (the equivalent of roughly 60,000 EVs) and expects to have a total of 65,000 tonnes per year of lithium-ion battery material processing capacity in North America and Europe in the near future. The company is also developing a commercial “hub” facility in Rochester, New York — which will recycle all the scrap materials from General Motors’ Lordstown, Ohio Ultium battery plant — that it claims will process quantities of raw materials equivalent to as many as 225,000 EVs.

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The “spoke” portion of Li-cycle’s recycling process will see an Ohio facility built near the GM plant transform the waste — as much as 3.5 gigawatt-hours of unused raw materials, says the automaker — into a powder-like “black mass” that is then transported to the “hub” in Rochester. There it undergoes Li-cycle’s patented hydrometallurgical process to separate the individual metals, ready once again for the production of new batteries. The combination, says the company, will be the first hydrometallurgical recovery facility, and the first source of recycled battery-grade lithium carbonate production in North America.

As for the recycling of the future VinFast battery-making plant’s waste material, industry magazine electrive says the closest Li-cycle facility is in Tuscaloosa, Alabama. Like battery plants, the sheer volume and weight of recycled materials requires that recycling facilities be quite close to an automaker’s home base, which means that, if Li-cycle’s ambitious plans bear fruit, we could see Canadian technology sprouting up all over the American eastern auto production corridor.