A new life for your electric battery
Recycling electric batteries is like recycling clothes: we extract the fibers from the fabric to make a new sweater. Orano wants to do the same for batteries with its its 30 million euro investment.
The RecyVaBaT project was therefore born out of a consortium of several French and international recycling companies, with the aim of recycling and adding value to electric car batteries. The aim is to extract the lithium and other components from an electric battery, purify them and then reuse them to create new components for future batteries.
Orano's project is still in its infancy, but the recycling the project's recycling companies plan to recycle 70% of electric car batteries. electric car batteries on the European market by 2030.
Savings on all fronts
Thanks to the recycling of electric batteries, both manufacturers and consumers will benefit from major savings. When the project is completed, we can expect to see a drop in the cost of manufacturing batteries for the production of new electric cars, and thus lower the selling price of electric vehicles on the market. This has already been seen between 2010 and 2020, thanks to new techniques, from from $1100 per kWh to $137 per kWh, according to an analysis by New Energy Finance at Bloomberg.
We today, electric batteries account for a third of the price of electric cars. For example, a Tesla Model Y which costs €49,990, the battery costs €19,920. On a positive note, many French consumers are not tempted to switch to electric because of the still high prices, with a percentage of 93%, according to an annual worldwide study by Deloitte.
With recycling, electric batteries have an almost infinite life cycle, as long as the materials used to make them can always be recycled. A real ecological change for the planet, as environmental impacts will be considerably reduced and natural resources will be increasingly conserved.
A project also carried out in Quebec
Quebec is also pursuing its electric battery recycling project, with Le Devoir newspaper reporting that the Legault government has invested $22.5 million in April 2022 to build a recycling plant. In order to extract and purify the various components of electric batteries, a "hydrometallurgy" process has been set up, and it's looking promising. Indeed, the plant succeeds in recover 95% of lithium-ion battery elements, and achieve a component purity level of 99.98%..
They hope to increase their recycling capacity by a factor of 10 over the next ten years. This is a huge step in the ecological transition.
