Ecologically and economically viable production and recycling of lithium-ion batteries
After the successful project Sintbat, this project aims to continue the effort with the modified objectives of LC-BAT-2-2019. This new call moves the focus to a new KPI, the cycle related costs per energy: €/kWh/cycle. It very well reflects the real need of the customers if a minimum volumetric energy density is added. An extended LCA, cradle-to-grave will be setup to judge the environmental impact of the different options and to choose the best. To show the both ECO-aspects (ECOlogical and ECOnomical) of our project the acronym ECO²LIB was created.
Especially for the deployment of advanced battery systems, time to market is an important factor. This criterion is helpful to select between the different electrochemical systems:
- Lithium-Sulphur: is heavily investigated, but up to now doesn’t show a break-through to reach acceptable cycle life
- Lithium-Air: For this system, many major problems are known to be solved, like Li metal protection, dendrite growth, cleaned air inlet, oxygen-stability of the catholyte
- Zinc-Air: is better, but this system, as all Metal-Air systems, will never lead to a maintenance-free battery
- All-Solid-State: has a chance in the polymer version, but rather not in oxidic or sulfidic version
- Sodium-Ion: can be potentially interesting for large-scale storage due to cost advantages (replacing Cu with Al), but is still held back due to the lack of a useful and stable anode material and a complex surface chemistry
- Organic-based systems: can be potentially interesting for large-scale storage due to potential sustainability impacts, but have problems regarding energy density (especially volumetric), cycling stability, and materials degradation
Consequently, the consortium decided to continue the improvement of the well-established Lithium-Ion system with advanced materials, methods and corresponding recycling-concept. So it will be possible to directly exploit the results of ECO²LIB in an IPCEI project, which is under preparation.