 Hello and welcome to this translation by C3lingo for the talk about battery recycling and brown coal that is Lignite in Germany. Translating for you today will be Oscar and bread and toast. There is an old saying that says there is a source like the water and today we'll talk about what sources we want to use and which sources we want to let dry out to make our future worth living. So as an input there shall be this study that an institute did together with another company about battery recycling as a job perspective for the Lausitz area in Germany. An important aspect for that is to have many disciplines in this project and we had five or six disciplines on board for this project. There's physics, there's geography, there's traffic science, management science and the question about how can we make an energy area like the Lausitz where ever since 200 years fossil fuels are used for energy production, how can we change this into a energy production for the future? When looking at the last elections in Berlin and Germany had certain results and doesn't really focus on the environment how can we show a better future for this area? So we had three basic assumptions one of them is very simple the climate change is happening and we have to create climate neutrality in all areas of our life to limit the climate change temperatures to up to 1.5 degrees and to change our energy and traffic ways. So the parts of the traffic in Europe are rising significantly starting from 2020 in Europe especially because certain limits that have been set by the government will apply then which means that manufacturers will get fines if their sold cars have too many based on fossil fuels and if that didn't change enough about the environment and the battery lifetime of electric vehicles also means that there will be a lot of batteries use batteries to handle the third assumption is that the structure of the ecological and economical change should be sustainable. So this will be our three chapters at first we will have a look at the Lausitz why is the Lausitz as so affected by the energy and traffic change happening and the second chapter will be about propulsion technologies which is mostly lithium ion batteries and the path that we suggest for a sustainable circular economy and in the third part we will try to look at both ends about where the Lausitz is now and where it should be in the future and how the electronic electromobility and energy usage will change and how all of these problems can be brought together and how the transposition can be made for this energy region of the future. This transition is a concept that came from the as American union workers and it says that social interests can shouldn't be used against economical issues and so with this to the to the structure change in the Lausitz the interesting thing about the Lausitz is that it's a cross-border cultural region where open coal pit mining is part of the regional identity and there it's distributed over the Oberlausitz and Unterlausitz reaching from Dresden to Berlin which is in size about 12,000 square kilometers there are six Landkreise there is the city of Kottbos and the whole region is seen to be periphery and has a low perspective of the future. The whole region has a strong decline in population and so between 1995 and 2015 there has been a decline of 20 percent so every fifth person in the Lausitz has been moved away which also had a strong impact on this on the demography because people in average got older there is a high percentage of people who are unemployed but it's as low as as the lowest point in the last 30 years economy is based off lots of small and middle-sized companies but there are very high dependencies from from bigger corporations because they are strongly dependent on them and so the big corporations decide on the fate of this small local companies so for instance decisions who are done in Niedersachsen will affect very strongly the Lausitz so there is a lot of space for innovation and economic growth from this region so what are the people working in in which sectors are the people working in the Lausitz so 66 percent of employees are working and this might be surprising if we are talking about a lignite mining region this is maybe four percent of the four hundred thousand socially social insurance mandatory paying employees where of course the groundwater management is also a very difficult and long-term work and again it's surprising that the industry part is almost 20 percent here and this is in quite high and within this the metal and electro area is the biggest one every tenth you every tenth worker in the Lausitz is actually working in the metal and electronics industry so a lot of people are actually just skilled workers and quite a few more of those are actually qualified and this is very relevant for the recycling and 65 thousand people from the Lausitz are qualified to work in metal and electronics areas the income which is available to households is fairly low comparatively and has not been increased with the rest of the country and also infrastructure is missing a lot there's barely any high-speed rail there and also high-speed internet is not very widespread in the Lausitz area we think this is a base that is required for good life there and to make life there possible so I want to talk a little more about the meaning of the midnight economy in the region the mining and resource industry is historically has grown a lot and ever since the glass and textile industries failed in the area it's a very central and important for the area ever since 1989 or 90 a short view onto the numbers says that there have been 80 thousand miners and workers in the energy production sector and the the lignite power production was 90% of the energy production of the area in the DDR time and 2016 it only were 8000 people employed in the coal industry in the Lausitz and in total the the the aspect of brown coal in the power mix in the Lausitz is now 23% which is fairly similar to how it is today it has probably moved some more but if and if you know more about that you can tell us more later but to say it's even though it's just 8000 employed people in the area it's still with the company running this is still one of the biggest employers in the region and they also pay over average salaries which is more than in Bruntenburg and Saxony for example so this actually still improves the local buying force that people can provide or when they visit their hairdresser barbershop in following the commission for for the structural change in Germany in short coal coal the commission they decided that it should be by 30 30 that two-thirds of employees will be going into pensions and we it was planned that the it was planned that employees shouldn't be shouldn't be set free because of companies strategy is reasons but rather they should get another field of of employment inside the economy it is projected to 2030 that about two-thirds of employees will go to to pension so how to find perspectives to the remaining employees in the industry so maybe in the region for energy of future which could be founded in the return of of products from the mobility sector the the mobility sector is one of the highest emittance of carbon emissions and from that personal cars are about 60 percent as I said there is a European Union regulation that by 2020 there is the CO2 emission should be reduced by 95 percent and one decides with electric cars one differs between the cars for its range and it's so there are now small so all are new and mobile vehicles will need batteries and many of them actually need very big batteries hybrids only need about 25 kilograms but in bigger cars it can get to a way more like 250 kilograms for example which is quite a lot and will be quite relevant when we look into other areas hydrogen operated vehicles are more difficult I would refer to some of the people having held talks here before tomorrow and the day after that that's mostly just a relevant in heavy load trucking but we can look into the the far future of course and see that maybe there will be developments happening there for passenger vehicles but probably not as relevant so we developed three scenarios for how the battery lithium-ion market will develop given various manufacturer strategies and government policies and such things and their development status so we are focusing on the first scenario on the left side which is battery electric vehicles and we can see that about 20 to 25 we expect around 3 million cars and 2010 to and in 2050 we expect over 30 million vehicles so that from that we derived that the battery demand will and how big it will be on the left side the first two columns you can see in 2030 we expect an old battery market of about 18 weight 18 to 17 and then very relevant becomes from 2030 actually so with with a deeper view on battery technologies the lithium-ion battery technology is dominant right now on the market and we think that will be true for the for the coming years but it is just a bridging technology but a bridging technology for the next decades why is that why is the film iron batteries the thing it showed that this technology has optimal power and energy density for personal cars this is this is due to the lithium which is the lightest metallic element which by the way has to come from somewhere the availability of the lithium of lithium resources and soon graphite which is also built in the cells is from our perspective given also in the amounts that we projected for the market but there might be shortages and it's pretty pretty certain that there will be shortages because the the mining and the research sources aren't available and from good for good reasons the strategic important resources which are just found in some specific countries they are usually political instable and tend to form monopolies so it's a very tactile market and for instance this spring and in summer it was becoming obvious that these resources are produced under very bad conditions for instance for children and usual fundamental standards are not met in this in this industries and that it came therefore to incidents also the ecological the ecological impact is very strong and it leaves big a big footprint on the environment from that and from the amounts of resources we need it is essential that we implement a circular economy to to get to a better efficiency from materials and resources and thereby contributing to smaller environmental destructions and exploitation so it is important that we increase the recycling and decrease the resource dependency another idea for increasing the efficiency is the second life loop this means that battery cells today battery cells can't be separated from each other that's not economically feasible but you can by now use them in a different way for instance as a buffer for high-peak energy demands or you can use them for home heating and for because the the and this means that the lifetime of lithium-ion batteries in electric vehicles is currently at around 10 years so the battery should probably be exchanged or will be exchanged before the car itself will be replaced the car lifetime is currently expected to be about 15 years and at the same time we have currently no real regulation about how to handle and collect these old batteries how the recollection is organized how high the recycling quotes are supposed to be and for example if there is a mandatory return policy for manufacturers so but what exists already is recycling processes for these batteries ever since 2009 to 2016 there were three big research projects mostly financed by the German environmental agency and the return quotas for the individual materials cobalt has 94% return lithium has 86% and nickel even gets us 97% back of course still there is demand for more research here but what we can say already and that's fairly interesting is when looking at how usable and feasible the economic circle for lithium is and the energy demand for that the conclusion there was that the economic game the zero sum of that is that it's definitely possible so there's here's a chain of resource extraction for battery recycling according to the current state of research this will probably change in the next couple years of research and of course there's a lot of demand for continuous development of many of these processes and standardization of that for example standardization of modules and automatic deconstruction of battery modules but what is fairly interesting is that the job profiles that result here is that the demand for workers here and skill matches actually the available skills in the now's its area so for example deconstruction of modules and are the charging of cells the pyrotechnical hydro technical and such processing and the indirect employment in terms of energy production for the recycling factory and of course the collection of the old cells and distribution and reusing of them ideally with a entirely new battery cell manufacturing in another local worth creating system from this knowledge we put we took another view on the lawsuits and the girl with the common work of state country and cities is to make an attractive and future-oriented economy here in the region of allows it as it was proposed by the coal coal commission so there seems to be a consents on the current current discussions the way to the so the way to this goal is still under argument and we want to empathize that the change of structures is is a transitional is a transitional phenomenon and one needs to see all the social and economical challenges and need to analyze them before there are decisions on the on the region which so it's very interesting which potentials has the lawsuits which is also not that much known then that it's a let's let's is mining region for instance there is a very interesting landscape of companies there are the biggest wind farms in Germany I don't exactly know how much of them are operational right now and there is research in the area of hydrogen production there are plants for big storage plants for energy and the basically the infrastructure in the region is is just tailor-made for the energy production and the energy sector so also the coal mines offer very big potentials for after use there is for instance the BTU Kottbos Zenftenberg where is an institute for battery research and recycling there is a small small part of economy and this offers the advantage that small companies offer high agility and so they can develop new technologies fast if they are supported in a sufficient way and can produce educated people who are needed in future which can be then employed from that we see the potential to implement a circular economy for battery recycling with extremely so with this to build up an worth gaining chain in the region that is sufficient which means that we had an regional economical circle our study was published shortly before Tesla announced to build electric cars near Berlin and there is next next to Zwickau near Dresden factory from Volkswagen which are working on a very high pace to produce electric cars which is just one of two in Germany from 2021 here about 300,000 electric vehicles should be manufactured here and with this perspective the Lausitz won't be so periphery anymore it is we see that it's between Berlin Dresden and Poland so basically it's zoomed more outside of this between Poland Germany and Czech Republic so this is great great position to to bring all the agents together and so 2030 to 2050 the creation of old batteries for lithium-ion batteries is correlating quite well with the exit from fossil energy creation and for the way in within the region of the future where the battery recycling is maybe just one of the puzzle pieces we created some approaches and ideas and recommendations a whole catalog of them from which a integrated regional development concept can be can be derived which will both create jobs and economy but also will improve the social and ecological situation and for with this I will come to the end I would like to tell you about these six points that I just took from our action recommendations so the first thing is that we should work on the improvement and of the EU battery guidelines which means more mandatory return policies for manufacturers better organization and systems for battery recycling and returning the recycling quotas what quotas we need for which resources exactly and so currently the battery law doesn't even know the lithium-ion battery currently then we need and this is not just for the Lausitz but is probably relevant in for all of the processes in this area of improving and recreating the energy economy is that to coordinate the different institutions that are in there both mayors for individual towns but also the entire European Union their ideas ideas and interests and those have to be coordinated and interchanged so they don't run to into nothing so the infrastructure help that are supposed to be given to the Lausitz area are supposed to be used effectively then next to also knowledge transfers should happen and be ensured for both the knowledge institution in and around the Lausitz in in cod post for example and also with Dresden and Billion and especially and that's we notice that a lot and also in between the disciplines we as social scientists as natural scientists as many of these differences we have to get into contact and the structural processes and the questions about the society we have to structure them in such a way that we don't get into singular individual results the society in that don't really take the society in general into account what we also need is transparency and transparency in these processes and more bottom-up participation which means that the citizens just like the employees are supposed to get the possibilities to get into contact with each other to talk to the people making the decisions to get into dialogue with them and not just tell people their opinion but also get the room to develop this process along with the professionals this is for us mostly important because only this way we can create this information base that is important and so there's this process this timeline about to be developed and created for many years and will be deployed in the area in Lausitz by an agency there and judging by this transparency thing this process was opened up and citizens have been invited to participate but then it can just stay with one day participation events but the the citizens have to be taken along all the way and the citizens have to carry this plan and the ideas as well in order for the entire project to work we think it's very important to finally again invest more in education and qualification sectors because the demands the demand for lifelong learning is supposed to reflect in the possibilities that citizens have for educating and re and further educating themselves to learn new things about all of these new things very simple step for example would be that in the state of Saxony the further education policy would be implemented which other provinces in Germany already have and participate in there for this this one special policy where every employee every two years has ten years of of a right to be educated further which they can use in order to get into the the jobs of the future better and to be ready for for those so the second to last point is is that this which is one that will only work in our eyes with which has to has to work is that good work has to be created which means that next to the further education possibilities for people it should also be possible to work together with the professional and the personal work that one does there shouldn't be bad worker policies like workers that are only temporary and full on there should be more participation options and chances for employees and many of the employees actually don't want to just turn up and press buttons all day but they want to maybe bring new ideas to the table and work on the processes as well because they are the ones that actually know the most about them being as close to them as they are and so everybody who's interested in the topics and should be able to participate so for the last point to stress this again the creation of equal life chances people of certain areas shouldn't be declared declared and become losers of the progression of society and the policies that exist and this this idea should not be just deployed and invested in Germany at that area but also in all of the European Union so this is it thanks for your attention okay so we don't have a lot of time so they will probably just be one question from the internet so you showed a lot of possibilities for what can happen there was also a discussion the ISE channel about the the actual feasibility of this project is are there already policies and maybe subventions and investing investing in the area for this area and its industrial potential or is this mostly just a plan so there are plans and no there's a recommendation of the commission from the federal government and there are 70 million euros in a structural fund which are provided by the participants of the coal commission with the perspective to build here this industrial region but the results are still open and there's need for participation unfortunately for further questions we don't have any time if you have any questions come forth to the stage maybe one more time's applause for the wonderful Catherine