NREL: Improving Battery Manufacturing and Recycling to Help Save The World

At the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL), researchers are advancing battery manufacturing and recycling technologies that improve electrification equitability while reducing greenhouse gas emissions and energy consumption. Watch this video to see how NREL is helping accelerate the movement of renewable energy and energy-efficient solutions into practical applications.

Transcript

00:00:06 Energy storage is a critical component for  really any sort of renewable energy. So,   renewable energies by nature are intermittent.  You could imagine with solar you don’t always   have the sun shining, with wind,  maybe the wind isn't always blowing.  So, energy storage is critical to be able to  kind of transfer the power that we're generating   at one time or place and translate that to  energy or power at another time or place. The biggest change in batteries over the  last 20 years is probably just the scale.   The number of batteries that we're currently  producing globally is growing very rapidly   every year. As we develop more battery  systems, get more batteries in vehicles,   more batteries in stationary energy storage  systems for storing renewable energy,   we really need to make sure that those batteries  are safe and that they last a long time and that  

00:00:52 we recover those valuable resources at  the end of those batteries’ lifetime. We're going to need multiple streams of the  battery materials in the future. Right now,   we can't mine enough nickel, cobalt,  manganese for all the batteries that   are anticipated to have in the future. NREL is part of the ReCell Consortium,   which is a DOE funded consortium of multiple  national labs and universities that's working   on trying to develop direct recycling  processes that are more energy efficient   and low cost and restore the material  back to that very pristine, nice state. A lot of that involves taking a battery,  putting it into a safe state, shredding it,   separating out all the different  components, the cathode, the anode,   the separator, the current collector,  recovering the materials of choice,  

00:01:45 and then basically re-engineering them so that  they can put into batteries of the future. Here at NREL we've started with a lot of  bench scale process development and then   we're at this critical point where we need  to think about how this can scale to actually   work in an industrial fashion. I think there's more of a move   to incorporate these recycled materials  into novel products. And in some cases,   we're actually looking at ways that, rather than  just recycling a material as is, we’re thinking   about how we can jump the gap and create a  better engineered material from the recycled   product that is kind of even more advanced  that can go into next generation batteries.  Industry would want to partner with us because  we do the difficult research and development to   get the processes to the point that they can  become economically viable in the future. So  

00:02:42 NREL and DOE takes the risk of investing in  these research and development technologies,   and then the industry benefits from that. What makes NREL unique is actually the   breadth of knowledge that we have here. We have  a lot of different techniques from modeling and   analysis as well as basic chemistry expertise  with regards to end-of-life batteries and how   to restore them. We also have a lot of unique  ideas that we've been able to work on from the   original concept all the way to kind of proving  them out and showing different companies and   other universities and labs why each of  these techniques is worth investigating.  Working at NREL is great because we have a  really broad impact on the energy industry in   the United States. Everyone from academic groups  to small companies to very large companies work   with NREL to develop new technologies or learn  more about how to electrify mobility, electrify  

00:03:38 energy storage, and develop new technologies to  enable a carbon free energy economy in the future.