The U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) has begun a $335 million program to support battery recycling.
The Department has issued a Request for Information (RFI) seeking help directing the program, which aims to develop and support battery recycling capabilities within the United States.
Its rise is due to the importance of batteries in grid storage and transport. Earlier this month, the U.S. Department of Research and Development (R&D) issued a similar "Critical Materials" guide, which includes materials for batteries.
Battery recycling is already taking off in the US through North American companies like Li-Cycle, Ascend Elements and Redwood Materials. In April of this year, Redwood said it was already processing up to 6 gigawatt hours of used lithium battery recycling per year.
As more EVs roll off the assembly line by the end of the century, this is likely to be only a small fraction, although BESS will likely account for a much smaller share of total battery waste, it will be in a similar situation as from 2010 Lithium-ion batteries installed in the middle of the year begin to be retired 15 to 20 years after deployment.
Also, most critical materials are not sourced from the ground or processed in the U.S., so one way to localize the supply of materials is through secondary markets or recycling supply chains, which also benefits sustainability. Recycled material, once ready for use in batteries, can actually be a higher quality resource. Materials mined from the ground may require more refining and processing to achieve battery-grade quality.
For Li-Cycle, what's interesting about BESS from a commercial perspective is that some utility-scale projects will be several megawatt-hours and larger. This means that at the end of the project, each project will have 200 or 300 tons of batteries.
