MIT Technology Review has a story, written by moi, about the $9.5 million in DOE funding that went to Toxco Ltd., the California-based battery recycler that is pretty much the only major game in town when it comes to recycling a full range of lithium-based batteries, at least in North America. The company’s lithium-ion recycling facility is based in Trail, British Columbia, but Toxco plans to use the DOE funding to establish a lithium recycling capability at its existing Ohio plant. When complete, it will be the first facility in the United States capable of recycling plug-in hybrid and all-electric car batteries.

But here’s the tricky part: plug-in vehicles that use lithium-ion chemistries are just now beginning to enter the market, and slowly. We’re not likely to see any kind of meaningful volume until about 2012. And then there’s a 10-year wait before most of these batteries get to a point where they need to be recycled. This long delay makes it difficult for a startup to enter the recycling business, so Toxco has an edge because it can simply scale up as volume builds.

Now, there’s a big debate in the industry about whether we’ll have enough lithium carbonate to supply what’s expected to be a massive market over the next decade. If you believe we’ll run into supply problems, then recycling is a pretty good thing to have as a way to reduce dependence on foreign lithium suppliers, such as Russia, China, and Bolivia. But even if there’s plentyof lithium to supply the market for the next few decades (after all, the amount of lithium used in an electric car battery is quite small), we still need to recycle the batteries if we truly want these cars to be “green.” So Toxco is in a very good position.

This entry was posted on Saturday, August 15th, 2009 at 8:53 pm and is filed under electric vehicles, energy storage. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.