Recycling will at some stage help however end of life EV batteries are currently a tiny fraction of the material needed for current EV demand. This situation will continue to be the case while EV demand is growing strongly. It won't be until 10-15 years after EV's stop taking market share that recycling will have a chance to catch up and become the dominant source of supply. Perhaps around 2050 you might see the bulk of lithium coming from recycling.
Even then there's several major issues:
Not all batteries are recycled and for some types (eg AAA, AA, power tools) I think the rates are pretty low
Not all the lithium is recovered in recycling
End of life for a vehicle may not mean end of life for the battery - it may be repurposed as stationary storage for a few years
Some uses like stationary storage have intended design life's longer than 10 years
The Chinese typically have smaller vehicles as were the 10-yr ago EV's (eg Leaf). You might need to recycle 10 leaf's to get the lithium for 1 Hummer.
Other issues include: Typically the number of car's produced has increased annually (look at statista). If this continues into the future, end of life volumes will always be lower than new volumes.
If larger vehicles/transportation options like trucks, trains & ships convert, this will add incremental demand beyond EV's
What happens when the densities get high enough to make the maths work for planes? There are already a few prototypes for shorter-range.
What happens if the Climate problems get worse and governments get serious about phasing out ICE's putting a rocket under total new EV demand because the plan becomes to replace the billion ICE cars out there? Governments are going to love adding ICE taxes - petrol, parking, congestion because it does two things - brings in tax revenue and improves their "green" image. They just can't do this until there is a robust supply of EV's.
To get grid stability as you reduce Coal/oil and add renewables you need increased levels of backup to supply backup during periods of low generation. This issue is going to add a lot of stationary storage demand (although not all of this will be met with lithium batteries). Any batteries used in stationary storage aren't going to come back for recycling for a long long time.
A11 Price at posting:
44.5¢ Sentiment: Buy Disclosure: Held
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