COBALT IN EV BATTERIES? The Story of Cobalt & its importance to Batteries & Electric Cars

[Music] cobalt is just one of the many elements that we find on earth and humans have been paying attention to it from the start so three or four thousand years ago this beautiful blue color in ceramics and glassware was why humans valued cobalt today it's more about these batteries that are powering an electrified world but what is cobalt why do we care about it why are we making such a fuss about it and how much a part of humanity's future is it going to be today we're going to be telling the story of cobalt welcome to fully charged [Music] all of the cobalt on earth was created in a supernova miles out in space and billions of years ago and it all ended up on our small rocky planet but it hasn't all been locked up in the rocks for all of that time each one of us actually carries cobalt with us so vitamin b12 is an essential element and that's got cobalt at its core that's how our bodies get our necessary supply of cobalt so it's actually all around us in tiny quantities and we're starting to hear a lot about it but we don't often go back to ask the basic questions of of what cobalt is really getting to the heart of why why we hear so much about it so let's begin at the beginning what is cobalt [Music] so cobalt's an element in the periodic table of course but which sits right in the center amongst the transition metals in fact it sits next to iron and in some ways it shares a lot of characteristics with it one of the things about cobalt is that you can add electrons to it and you can take them away and of course when you think about electricity you know electricity is all from a sort of user's point of view about moving electrons around and so inside a battery one of the key things that you need to do is to as chemists say oxidize or reduce in other words remove an electron or put one back on and cobalt really works for that cobalt funnily enough has been with us for thousands of years without people actually realizing what it was the fact that it's it's an element that it's a metal and so on is something which really dates only from the 18th century and and since then you know we have explored its detailed chemistry its electronic structure all that sort of stuff but cobalt sort of salts cobalt compounds really have been used for a very long time why is that it's because if you incorporate them into ceramics into glazes into those kinds of things you can really get beautiful colors and you know the classic example is is this sort of thing where you can actually incorporate the cobalt into a glaze and when you fire it you just get that spectacular blue thing i feel about cobalt is that everyone talks about it but no one's seen it what's it look like when you just have a lump of cobalt so let me just show you a little lump of cobalt it's not the purest cobalt in the world because it's tarnished and you can see here these beautiful little cubes right they've actually got little cracks in them and so on but if you polished it up this would be a shiny metal a little bit like a you know piece of iron a piece of steel something like that now cobalt is interesting because in fact it is i've got a magnet with it and you can see that it sticks quite nicely so it's one of the four uh ferromagnetic elements in the periodic table and so cobalt is also used in a number of alloys that are magnetic right and so you know that's another characteristic of this part of the periodic table is that when in fact the electronic structure is right and particularly if you have electrons which are not paired up then what you get are these interesting magnetic properties and we certainly see it here so so that's the basic chemistry and i remember cobalt chloride from the chemistry set i had as a kid because it was bright pink and i love that color more than anything although not enough to turn me into a chemist in later life but of course we hear about cobalt in connection with batteries so why is cobalt so important in the battery world if you think all the way back to when batteries were first developed 1979 when john goodenough and his team discovered lithium cobalt oxide as the first cathode material that goes into lithium-ion batteries and really ever since then cobalt's been a key part of the lithium-ion battery that we all use from day-to-day in our mobile phones and our electric vehicles in almost every battery lithium-ion battery that we've used so far almost certainly there would have been some cobalt in there and what's what's the job the cobalt does why is it in there well so again if you come back to this positive electrode or cathode material the lithium cobalt oxide that has the chemical formula lico2 is a stable way of keeping hold of the lithium so within a battery the lithium cobaxide is the source of the lithium and the cobalt on the oxygen is just there to try and make that compound as stable as possible lithium as a metal on its own it's very highly reactive very sensitive to moisture and to oxygen but by combining the lithium with the cobalt and the oxygen it makes quite a nice stable compound and that's the one that we have predominantly used in batteries ever since and in our lab we research all different types of battery chemistry so not just lithium ion batteries we're also looking at post lithium chemistries like lithium sulfur and sodium iron and we apply a sort of common engineering research framework to all those different chemistries so what we're really interested in doing in the chemical engineering department is taking all these wonderful new materials that are synthesized by our colleagues in chemistry and material science and translating those into electrodes and those electrodes into devices and we want to make batteries for a lot of different things so electric vehicles grid scale energy storage storage consumer electronics and so there are a lot of different batteries that we can match make with those different applications so that's the research that we're doing trying to make batteries cheaper trying to make them last longer trying to make them safer and we apply that sort of methodology to a broad range of different battery chemistries we often talk about chemical elements as though we can just go to some big supermarket and buy them but they're part of our planet they were hanging around long before we got to them but if we want some cobalt where are we going to get it from [Music] so the vast majority 75 percent of the world's cobalt comes from the drc that's the demo democratic republic of congo that's right in the south the katanga region which is down here okay um the rest of it comes it's fairly well spread out um some big producers are canada australia russia but um yeah 75 from the drc and about no more than five or ten percent from any other country so it's very dominant very much dominated by the dna why is that in the drc we have some very large copper cobalt deposits so you tend to find cobalt in two different ways globally one the drc way which is copper and cobalt together so it's two different minerals and then outside of the drc you tend to find it with nickel and that's the mineralogy we have here this is a example it can look different depending on where it is in the world but ultimately you find about you know in minerals like this you have about 10x of nickel to one of uh cobalt so for every one tonne of cobalt you get 10 tons of nickel cobalt is not a rare element right there's there's plenty of it around and in fact deposits of it of it have been found you know in all kinds of places across the world but certainly the most famous the ones which have really become both famous and notorious are the ones in the congo basin in the upper congo basin that's where huge amounts of of cobalt are found and that in fact is a big problem for the area because you know what happens is that if that cobalt is easily available then artisanal mining that kind of thing becomes an attractive proposition in order to make money and that has all kinds of social and other consequences in many ways you know it is it is really our our thirst for elements which is in a way fueling a lot of the conflict in the eastern congo and that's something we need to take quite seriously the main sourcing problem for cable is because it comes from the drc you have this very large artisanal mining workforce in this so what does that mean artisanal in this so all that means is mining by hand essentially which isn't a problem there's no problem with that we can mine by hand as long as you're doing it safely and legally and there are some examples although limited in the cobalt supply chain i think it's been misrepresented in the media that it's a very commonplace practice but there are some examples of illegal mining unsafe mining including child labour so of course even a small percentage of that material getting into your supply chain is a huge problem so that's the reputational issue that the cobalt supply chain has primarily in terms of sourcing um although as i say it's it's actually quite a small problem out of the overall deal sort of the whole thing is it i mean five percent 10 less than that it's probably somewhere between five and ten percent at the moment so in in five years time do you think that will still be a problem so are those ethical concerns are they really being sorted out yes yeah they are i think what drew attention to the supply chain and the problem was in 2016 there was a big report by amnesty international which kind of you know shown a spotlight on this issue since then um the industry has kind of moved into various different programs which are essentially trying to make artisanal mining a safe source of material secure source of material you know ultimately the goal is that this is a very poor region um these artisanal workers can mine by hand it's not a problem as long as it's safe and you know you know meets oecd guidelines and so you know and it gives the region an opportunity to lift itself out of poverty by you know capitalizing on essentially the boom associated with the energy transition so um a number of different organizations and there's there's numerous um essentially are trying to provide what are called model mines so these are operations where um obviously make sure there's no child labor there's a legal right to mine fair price is paid for labor or for the material depending on how the price structure works and also traces that material to ensure there's no contamination from other illegal material from other sources all the way through the supply chain through to an end product so there we are the story of cobalt but maybe it isn't because cobalt was on this planet right from the beginning and it's not going to go away just because we put some of it in a battery so what happens next well actually cobalt is the most valuable metal in lithium ion batteries and currently it's cobalt recovery that drives the economics of the recycling of lithium ion batteries there are it's one of very few materials and components that is actually worth recycling in economic terms and the current push for uh reducing the amount of cobalt will provide challenges i think for recycling of lithium-ion batteries as we do that if i gave you a lithium-ion battery how hard is it to recycle the cobalt from that battery well there are two stages in this obviously lithium-ion batteries range from the very small coin cells that you might have in a hearing aid or whatever right up to a full uh you know electric vehicle battery pack so um there are challenges with both types with the large electric vehicle battery pack it's a very complex device that's assembled through many car compiling together many cells many individual batteries putting them into modules then building them up into packs and actually it's very costly and time consuming to dismantle all that back to the cell level so you have to take it apart before you can get to the individual cells absolutely you have a lot of work to do with an electric vehicle lithium-ion battery before you even get anywhere near the cells or or more so the materials so the challenge with breaking the cells is there are hazards associated uh both in terms of fire risk and toxicity in breaking a cell and so therefore it has to be done under very controlled conditions so actually an awful lot of work and a lot of cost is taken up in getting to the materials before you even start to do uh purification or recovery processes uh using chemistry or anything like that is it easier to recycle a battery the cobalt in the battery that's got more cobalt or in the battery that's got less cobalt i mean if you if you reduce the amount of cobalt that's there does that change how easy it is to recycle the processes are quite similar but the point of course is you get more valuable stuff out at the end so the economics of that are much improved and so the reduction of cobalt actually presents a challenge because uh many of the things that we can or could recover from batteries currently uh there is no market for them and therefore it's not economic to do that it is important that we get more efficient recycling processes that can reduce costs in order to make that economical as we go forward and i guess there's two ways of counting the cost there's the economic cost which is usually the first one but actually there's also an energy cost that if you're going to be heating things up or smashing things apart how how high is that cost i mean what's the energy does it take a lot of energy to get this cobalt back um it takes energy i mean i i think the the the full uh life cycle analysis of uh batteries and processes has not been worked out in any great detail but uh we need to bear in mind that uh to have zero mission vehicles it's not just a matter of putting our electric vehicles on the road we have to decarbonize the grid we have to decarbonize manufacturing we also have to decarbonize the recovery process and at the moment most people think of recycling as an end-of-pipe process where basically it's somewhere down the line something that someone will uh somebody else's problem control and i think we need to change our thinking on that to a more circular economy type approach otherwise we do run the risk that a significant part perhaps of the environmental benefits of the electric vehicle revolution will be lost because we have inefficient energy intensive processes at the end of life there is a danger that if in the next five to ten years we push out millions of vehicles that are really very poorly designed for recycling and require very uh costly energy intensive and environmentally uh sort of challenging processes to to deal with at the end of life then uh that that could uh that would firstly be a big missed opportunity i think but it also could be potentially damaging in terms of the environmental credentials of the ev revolution i do not say that i think that it would it would completely make the whole exercise pointless but i think we have an opportunity to do this well and i think we should take that opportunity [Music] we've talked about so many things in this episode but possibly we haven't touched on the biggest one so far we know we can mine cobalt we can use it we can recycle it but do we really need cobalt for a future powered by renewable energy so as i mentioned we've already made great strides towards reducing the amount of cobalt um and i suspect that will continue so there's ever diminishing amounts of cobalt in the batteries that we buy we've gone from having pure cobalt to having this nickel manganese cobalt mixture and now if you buy a good battery you're probably buying something that's 80 nickel so almost all of the cobalt has been replaced but in terms of pathway for going completely cobalt free i think there are a couple of sort of parallel streams that can be explored within the conventional lithium-ion battery chemistry there are a range of next-generation cathodes that just have no cobalt in them they're formulated with other elements from the periodic table and there's also an entirely separate family of post-lithium-ion battery chemistries so things like lithium sulfur cells and these lithium sulfur cells are completely cobalt free and always have been so we work across a really broad range of different battery chemistries and i think it's really exciting to be able to match make the right battery chemistry with the white right application one one thing that we're particularly excited about is the lithium sulfur chemistry and one of its major benefits is that it's intrinsically very very lightweight so not only does it contain no cobalt most of the materials that go into a lithium sulfur battery are low density so it gives us a lightweight battery and of course that makes it particularly attractive for things that fly so unmanned aerial vehicles drones and maybe eventually electric aviation is a really uh exciting opportunity for lithium sulfur that we're keen to explore so we can sort of imagine going down the scale from you know the original lithium ion batteries which had quite a lot of cobalt and then you can reduce it a bit and then you go to other types of battery until you get to something like lithium sulfur which has no cobalt at all yeah i think well so i think that actually there are parallel streams for zero cobalt batteries like lithium sulfur and that type of battery has never had cobalt in it at all but i'm also optimistic that within the search for new cathode chemistries for conventional lithium-ion there will also be cobalt free options coming coming there as well [Music] cobalt has been used for such a long time but i think it's really helpful to see ourselves and our use of cobalt as the middle of the story not the beginning or the end our batteries and our cars that's just one stage cobalt passes through on its way to the next thing and you know maybe 100 years from now 200 years from now cobalt will once again mostly be something that makes pottery and ceramics really pretty maybe our batteries will be made of something else entirely so the story hasn't finished yet but we've got as far as we can with this episode so as always if you enjoy the stuff we make please support us on patreon subscribe have a look at the website all the things on fullycharge.show and if you have been thank you for [Music] watching [Music] [Music] you

Channel: Fully Charged Show

Views: 119,125

Keywords: robert llew, electric car youtube channel, why should i buy an electric car, green energy comment, grid storage technology, renewable energy youtube, new transport ideas, green technology review, renewable energy comment, renewable energy electric vehicles, electric vs ice cars, latest news on renewable energy, kryten, ev show, fully charged show, robert llewellyn, electric cars, fully charged, Cobalt, Cobalt Mining, Batteries, Battery Recycling, Clean Energy, EVs

Id: huYXIXtCsrw

Length: 20min 54sec (1254 seconds)

Published: Tue Jun 15 2021