 Welcome to this lecture in which I give an overview of some of the most important issues regarding the production and recycling of batteries. My name is Auke Hoekstra and I'm an expert on electric mobility at the Eindhoven University of Technology. People often say that battery production is polluting the environment, and that it's true. It's where much of this video is about. But it's good to stress that batteries are less bad than fuel. Let's take a car that drives 300,000 kilometers over its lifetime and uses one liter of gasoline for every 10 kilometers. Over its lifetime it would require over 25,000 kilograms, not liters, kilograms of oil, and emit over 75,000 kilograms of CO2. That's a lot. An electric vehicle with an average of, let's say, 60 kW battery would need 250 kilograms of battery material. That can be recycled. And there's no emissions during the use phase, and we can recycle the battery. So very, very big difference there. What we see is the cobalt process of producing batteries. I've taken an illustration of Volkswagen. It starts with mining raw materials. For the cathode of a so-called AMC or nickel manganese cobalt lithium battery. This is also graphite for the anode, but let's forget that for the moment. These are the materials you need to mine. Then you must refine these materials. You have to produce the cathode, produce the cell, assemble the entire pack, and then integrate it into the vehicle. I've taken this illustration because it clearly shows that getting the raw materials is the focus of many car manufacturers right now. Here you see that Volkswagen basically promises its investors to move its focus to the start of the supply chain, including mining, refining, and cathode production. Something else. We know how to find enough material to make billions of large car batteries. The problem is scaling up production, and doing so in the most sustainable way possible. The most talk is about cobalt on lithium, and I just want to talk briefly about cobalt. There it's actually mostly about avoiding child labor, and that's good. That mainly occurs when the pores to the pore in the filled state of Congo mine cobalt, often legally. So, of course, we have to do better. But it's not accurate to say this is a problem of car batteries. First of all, because cobalt is also used for many other purposes, such as refining oil, by the way. And second, because this is mostly related to political situation in Congo. And by the way, cobalt and nickel cobalt, mainly in these batteries, is being phased out. And that can even be replaced with the slightly heavier but longer lasting iron phosphate batteries. For the energy transition as a whole, the EAR singles out copper, rare earth, and lithium. But copper can almost universally be replaced by abundant elements like aluminium. And rare earths, they are cold like that, but they're actually not that rare. And they could also be replaced by, in motors for example, or the dynamos in windmills, to motors without magnets. So that leaves lithium as the biggest problem, child. We usually have enough lithium to last us a thousand years. That's been true for over a hundred years. Currently, we have already found enough for about 10 billion electric cars. The United States has enough deposits supply its own demand for over a century. And in Europe, there's a lot of lithium, among others in Ukraine by the way. But the biggest known deposits in the world are in South America, mainly Bolivia, Argentina and Chile, and Australia. Recently, Australia really stepped up because South America had problems scaling up, and Australia now produces over 15% of worldwide lithium. But what if production cannot scale up fast enough of, if there are questions about sustainability of lithium from, for example, South America? The first alternative could be to get lithium from a geothermal brine, and the first experiments are going on with that and looking very good. Another possibility is lithium from the ocean. There is 5,000 times more lithium in the ocean than we know how to find on land, enough for about 50 trillion cars. And some researchers think it can become economically viable in the short term. When that fails, we could temporarily, for example, switch to sodium batteries, where there's really no shortage. Refining is our biggest problem in terms of availability and CO2 emissions, so I spent some time to pass the video on that. Refining is basically the next and relatively simple and low tech step that can be quickly scaled up. You often hear that we get half of our battery materials from China, but that's mostly because they do a lot of the refining. And that's because they can do it very cheaply and don't care about sustainability that much. Easily scaled up elsewhere. It used to be that 90% of CO2 emissions from batteries were caused by just a step of cell manufacturing. But with new so-called gigafactories, that balance has shifted dramatically because in large factories you can produce cells much more efficiently. This picture from the 2021 Tesla impact report shows that only 23% of CO2 is now caused by the factory. This in turn enables batteries to be produced with less than 75 kg of CO2 per kilowatt hour. And we expect cell production to become much more efficient still, so pretty soon running mines and refineries on low carbon electricity needs to be the priority because by that time that's where over 90% of the battery emissions are, the factory will become less important. With that in mind, I, for example, find extraction of lithium from seawater using floating wind farms, a very enticing proposition, but I haven't seen any plans on that, so it's just a tip. My tripled applies of lithium, but it will still mean very little for the overall battery price. Then, before we get to recycling, I would like to point out that the biggest win we could possibly get is to buy less and smaller cars. It sounds kind of simple, but it's not really contemplated that much. We recently did three articles based on a literature survey, an agent-based simulation women ourselves on shared autonomous electric vehicles. You in this case would not own your own vehicle, but you could travel just as quickly and comfortably and would be at a fraction of the cost without having to worry about to park your car. We found this would probably lead to much more car travel because it was so cheap and easy, but still at much lower costs and would require only 6% of resources. And it would take less road space, 100 times less parking space, make cities healthier and safer. I think this is the future we should create, not one in which every household owns a Ford 150 Lightning. And if you think an SUV is such a nice car to drive in, just think for a moment what it means for others in the city. Here a mother demonstrates a number of kids that can hide in her blind spot. Smaller cars and smaller vehicles are definitely safer for pedestrians and cyclists. So that about production and how to reduce demand by sharing stuff. Now let's talk about sharing with future generations through the use of recycling. What we should understand first is that right now recycling batteries is relatively unimportant. A lot of people talk about it, but it's relatively unimportant. In this picture you see a conservative estimate for the growth of electric vehicles. Now I will add the amount of scrap vehicles. Because cars are used 16 years on average and with electric vehicles it might even be longer because of the lack of maintenance and makes them be used longer I think. It will take many years before the number of batteries available for reuse will be a significant percentage. And we're not even talking about second life then. That would of course be much much better because it makes the battery last even longer. And a good example of that is a project in the Amsterdam arena I visited recently where they do peak shaving of the whole stadium with old Nissan Leaf batteries. Perfect example of second use. Regarding recycling I cannot go into details because there's simply too many chemistries and it's all in the nascent stages basically. But I'll link to a recent overview in nature and I'll assure you there are really many recycling let's say pilot projects already. HV Stroudel, the former CTO of Tesla famously went from Tesla to starting his battery recycling company and many also see a business case there. So it's not pie in the sky thinking. And by the way, lead asset batteries are recycled for over 98% in Western European countries. And Emeril in the US has a goal of 90% recycling in the US. And the EU even has a goal of 95% recycling for most better materials. So I think that we will certainly see recycling of the vast majority of batteries once they become available in large quantities. So to wrap up, we've seen that in a low carbon future, electric vehicles replace 75 tons of carbon dioxide with 250 kilograms of batteries. We've seen that mining for resources is the biggest bottleneck by now. There was ample material but scaling up production is challenging. And mining is also where the most CO2 emissions occur. We saw that there are many plans to build battery manufacturing plants. And that these plants are quickly becoming so efficient that the greenhouse gas emissions are less of a concern. I've cautioned that giving everybody a large car might not be the future to aspire to. And sharing would reduce resource by 6% and recycling could cut that number even further. That would make it possible to heal the earth. Is that a future I envision likely to come true? I don't know. But you know what they say. The best way to predict the future is to invent it. And it's also clear that this future would be comfortable and technologically possible. So I say, let's make it come true. And that's all. Thank you very much.