Comment by conradev
5 months ago
Lithium-ion batteries are falling in cost so rapidly that any new process being ramped up is risky business. Form is way further along than this landing page and yet has a long way to go:
https://www.latitudemedia.com/news/form-energy-brings-in-mor...
The scale of investment required makes it quite hard for new companies to compete on cost:
https://www.theinformation.com/articles/battery-industry-sca...
What about from an environmental standpoint if we think about that these Lithium--Ion batteries will have to be replaced and recycled every (as the article says, not sure if true) <12 years. We have a history of not pricing in negative externalities, did we do that this time?
> environmental standpoint if we think about that these Lithium--Ion batteries will have to be replaced and recycled every
I am very interested in this question, but those who raise it never have answers about the negative impacts of mining lithium.
For example, the amount of lithium needed for an EV is an order of magnitude less than the amount of steel needed. What is so bad about lithium mining that it's 10x worse than iron mining, pound for pound?
Nobody has ever answered my request for environmental concerns with a concrete environmental lithium mining concern, such as acidification that can sometimes happen with iron mining.
I've researched and researched, found nothing, which leaves me thinking that the worst case scenario for lithium is no worse than the worst case for iron.
Meanwhile, we have such immense documented harms from fossil fuel extraction that nobody ever questions again, or with the same intensity that's reserved for supposedly toxic lithium batteries.
The apparent benefit is massive, so any delay seems to cause massive harm to the environment.
I think we need to flip the question: where is the proof that coal/oil/iron is better for the environment than mining and recycling batteries? (BTW, it's at least 20 years now for grid batteries, with lifetime going up all the time...)
Any analysis of EVs vs ICE cars I've seen put EVs at 1.5-2x the carbon footprint to produce, but win out in the long run. My default assumption has always been it comes from the battery pack - I'm not sure what else could cause such a difference.
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My understanding (bowing to ChatGPT) is that you can get 1 pound of iron from <2 pounds of iron ore. But to get 1 pound of lithium, you need around 500 pounds of lithium ore.
So if an electric car requires 2000 pounds of iron and 50 pounds of lithium, that works out to 4000 pounds of iron ore that needs to be mined and refined, vs 25,000 pounds of lithium ore.
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That's why hybrids are great, hedges your bets between iron and lithium
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I think 12 years is an underestimate. Lithium-ion batteries will degrade, but they still have usable capacity. There are Tesla Roadsters still going strong, 15 years in. And the battery cell chemistry has since shifted to LFP, which has longer cycle life.
Furthermore, I would expect that an industrial battery is treated better than an EV. Optimal cooling/charging/discharge rates likely have a large impact on longevity.
What do you think the negative externalities actually are? Off of the top of my head: mining, landfill. Same as other metals.
If the processes to extract Lithium from recycling become cheap enough to compete with the prices of mined Lithium, then that happens.
Processes still need to be invented/scaled for that to happen: the only real way to deal with damaged or charged cells that I know of is to deep freeze them, shred them, and then defrost them slowly.
But in either case: Lithium is going to end up as waste. Making it cheaper to make cars affordable and the grid more stable means that disposable batteries will be even cheaper.
I don’t know how modern batteries fare in landfills: Most modern solar panels, for example, are relatively clean (mostly aluminum, silicon, copper, wee bits of lead). But not a waste management expert.
That's very interesting about the freezing. I wonder if Redwood Materials does that?
https://www.redwoodmaterials.com/news/responding-recovering-...
They've been working hard at recycling, and the biggest challenge at the moment is actually getting old batteries for the process. There's not many in-service batteries reaching end of life yet, so they mostly deal with production scrap.
Some LFP batteries now get rated for 5000 or more cycles or more. Even if you cycle them fully every day, that's 14 years. And that's unlikely to be needed or happening. These might last decades. At which point, battery tech might be massively better. Also, even better batteries might be on the way. E.g. Sodium Ion would be a bit less energy dense and have a similarly long life. It doesn't contain any lithium and could be cheap to manufacture in a few years. The biggest driver here would be cost and other properties (like how quickly can it deliver the power and at what capacity).
It's irrelevant how long they last unless is starts to substantially exceed human lifespans though. 10 years or 20, eventually every product you put out there is replaced and you enter the steadystate waste phase of X tons per year.
Personally of course, I don't think this matters at all: old lithium batteries degrade into salt and don't contain harmful chemicals. There's no real indication we'd ever have a problem dealing with them, even if it was just throwing them all into a big hole till the hole looks enough like a natural lithium source to mine again.
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Lithium batteries last as long as one battery out of thousands decides to thermal runaway, and then you have to replace all of them (as well as the facility they were all housed in).
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> We have a history of not pricing in negative externalities, did we do that this time?
I worry the answering that question requires answering this question: whose negative externalities?
Humanity's. We've only got one Earth, and if my factory can just dump toxic waste down the drain which flows right to the bay and kills all the fish, for free, why would I pay for it when I could be spending that money on a yacht?
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What is the negative externality of recycling batteries? That is way better than having to mine minerals out of the ground, eventually there won't need to be any significant mining and all the battery minerals will be in a constant cycle of being used then recycled
I know very little of chemistry and how batteries are produced, so from that level I'm imagining that once a battery is deemed to have reached end-of-life, it will have to get shipped somewhere, be recycled/refurbished for which presumably we will need some new material which needs to be mined, shipped, etc. All that requires water, produces waste that may or may not be toxic, the metals may come from places lacking human rights, and takes energy which may or may not be clean [1]. So all this could in the end have a considerable amount of negative externality somewhere.
What I like that I'm hearing about this CO2 battery, whether true will have to be seen, is that it might rely on off the shelf components, that's great, means the supply chain can be simple, and has longer life in the first place. And that while potentially even cheaper?
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GSzh8D8Of0k
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Except that the recycling ... cycle is not perfect. Far from it. I'd reckon maybe half of all lithium ends up in recycling. Other half probably ends up in the landfill. For instance, I picked up a broken ebike from the trash not long ago (Amsterdam). Battery still in it. Same goes for lots of smaller electronics.
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You will not get back 100 % of the raw material in any economically feasible process though.
If your process gets 90% of the lithium out of the battery, after 7 cycles more than half of the lithium is gone. Therefore Mining can’t stop even when the market doesn’t grow anymore.
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You want to price in negative externalities for lithium because we didn't price in negative externalities for fossil fuels? Am I understanding you right?
The one exception I'd make to this is Sodium-ion which does seem to have some chance of reaching manufacturing scale: https://www.batterytechonline.com/materials/5-key-takeaways-...
I consider sodium-ion as an extension of lithium-ion because they’re made by the same folks with similar processes. They are still early, but very much in the process of being ramped and will be incredibly useful for stationary storage: lower density, but better durability. Another real technology that Form will have to compete with.
Compressed gas storage scales better than any battery chemistry. Energy Dome claims >75% round-trip efficiency [0], and just inked a deal with Google [1].
[0]https://www.pv-magazine-australia.com/2025/03/12/energy-dome... [1]https://energydome.com/energy-dome-inks-a-strategic-commerci...
Once R&D costs are covered, capacity scales with the size of the gas bag. Without competition from EVs or the volatility of resource extraction markets there's a clear path to profit here for 10hr+ grid-scale energy storage.
Though they are also poised to get iron ore refining to work. That alone could be worth a bunch (numbers assuming 20y amortization and 30% average duty cycle (using only summer surplus) suggest around 10ct/kg iron metal capex plus 3 kWh/kg iron metal electricity).
How do these numbers compare with traditional methods?
Blast furnace based raw metallic (no longer ore/now-reduced) iron costs currently around 30~40 ct/kg in international trade. Iron ore of nominal 62% purity runs at a surprisingly even 10 ct/kg[ore], thus contributing about 16 ct/kg[metal] to the metal output price.
I have not seen much data on these designs, but conceptually they should be cheap. Require holding tanks and iron. No high pressures or other exotic requirements.
Round trip efficiency is way worse than lithium, but that might not be meaningful for grid batteries. You just want something that cheaply scales.
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Lithium is a geopolitical metal and catches fire. Obviously what you are saying is true but there are always risks.
AFAIK lithium isn’t used for long duration storage
Right now that's true, but it's a price limitation, not a technical limitation.
I’m not too sure about it. Dendrites form when you charge to 100% and leave it for days and weeks. In some sense it wouldn’t matter if cells costs 100x less than now.
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