Engineers says reducing the size of batteries could lead to significant savings in critical minerals and that new battery chemistries that do without them need to be explored
USING smaller electric car batteries and stripping materials out of old wind turbines for use in the car industry could reduce the UK’s reliance on critical minerals and bolster its push for net zero, engineers have advised.
The recommendations are included in a new report from the Royal Academy of Engineering’s policy unit on how the UK government should intervene to reduce demand for critical minerals. These include lithium for batteries, neodymium for wind turbines, and chromium for nuclear technologies whose supply are likely to fall short of growing global demand. Until now, the government has focused on how to get more of these materials, often from unreliable and unsustainable sources, rather than reduce demand for them.
Joan Cordiner, IChemE fellow and chair of the National Engineering Policy Centre Working Group on Materials and Net Zero that prepared the study, said: “We are not the only country that will be competing for these finite minerals and we are calling on the new government to develop a materials strategy that addresses demand and reuse of critical materials.”
Producing virgin supplies of minerals is a significant environmental burden. The production of 1 kg of cobalt requires 860 kg of mined ore. For lithium the burden is much higher, with 1,600 t of mineral removed from the earth for every kilogramme produced.
Cordiner added: “If we reduced the size of the UK’s larger electric vehicle batteries by 30%, we could cut our lithium demand by 17% and save 75m tonnes of rock mined for lithium by 2040 – that’s the equivalent of 19 Wembley Stadiums full of rock.”
If the UK were to meet electric vehicle sales projections, the RAEng warns that 250,000 t of lithium will be required between 2018 and 2040. This cumulative demand for the UK alone is more than 3.5 times the global lithium demand in 2020.
Yet calls to reduce the size of car batteries will likely enflame the “range anxiety” that deters people from switching to electric cars. The NEPC argues that the government must implement system-wide transportation planning to ease these fears. This should include investment in widespread fast-charging technology and public transport, better links between ports and rail networks to reduce road transport for freight, all joined up with planning for houses, hospitals, and business centres.
System-wide planning…and understanding
There are tonnes of critical minerals in wind turbines but how much exactly, and when can they be reused in other technologies?
This infrastructure planning is the most important tool at the UK’s disposal to control the volume of critical materials it will demand. Ultimately, the government must implement a systemic materials strategy and set a target to halve the UK’s materials footprint, the report says. Underpinning this, the government will need to fund a centralised National Materials Data Hub to monitor and forecast supply chains, material flows, and material requirements for net zero infrastructure.
The report uses the UK’s large fleet of wind turbines to demonstrate the lack of planning that currently exists. A large offshore wind turbine can contain as much as 5,800 kg of neodymium magnets. Yet there is a lack of information on exactly how much of this critical material is locked up in all the wind turbines across the UK, and then what date these valuable magnets will become available for reuse in the car industry. To maximise the opportunity, the UK needs to better understand the cost and yields of recovering these materials so it can invest in recycling facilities and overcome the domestic shortfall in skills and facilities needed to decommission wind turbines.
Design for life
This recycling of existing turbines is hampered by the fact that turbines haven’t been designed with their end of life in mind.
“Increasingly valuable and strategically important volumes of critical materials are being built into the infrastructure and technologies around us. Too often this is done without planning for their recovery or due attention to material sustainability,” the authors write.
They note the UK has limited manufacturing capabilities or influence over the design of imported goods so it should instead focus on shaping international standards for technologies and processes through the likes of the British Standards Institution (BSI).
It also calls for a change to how engineers and designers are educated to emphasises resource efficiency and the ability to maintain, replace, and recover critical materials into future technologies and products. It says accreditation processes such as the Engineering Council’s Accreditation of Higher Education Programmes (AHEP) could enable these changes.
The UK should also use its research-funding agencies – UKRI and the moonshot agency ARIA – to develop alternatives to critical materials. It calls for development of sodium-ion batteries which it says could help avoid the use of critical materials including lithium and cobalt and reducing demand for nickel. With government support, the UK could develop a domestic sector for the production and recycling of this emerging technology.
To raise public awareness of materials conservation and influence consumer habits, it recommends eco-labelling standards be updated to include more comprehensive sustainability indicators including the material efficiency, repairability, and ease of disassembly and recyclability of a product.
Ban vapes and deep-sea mining
Other notable recommendations include the new government continuing its predecessor’s support for a moratorium on deep-sea mining and seeking evidence into the impact mining the seabed for minerals has on life and the environment.
It also calls for the UK government to ban single-use vapes and keep an eye out for other products that need prohibiting because they contain disposable batteries and no end-of-life planning. A ban on single-use vapes was proposed in January by the previous government but has not been implemented.
Mark Enzer, member of the working group that put together the report for RAEng’s National Engineering Policy Centre, said: “Globally, 62 million tonnes of e-waste are generated every year, and the UK produces the second highest amount of e-waste per capita. International e-Waste Day [on 14 October] provides a sobering opportunity for us to reflect on the urgent need to engineer a greener future. Otherwise, the state of our environment and the supply of items like lithium-ion batteries looks bleak without more recycling and moving away from how we dispose of our old electronic devices.”
