Physics world.
Hello and welcome to the Physics World Stories podcast. I'm Andrew G. Lester,
and in this episode we're gonna be exploring the latest in research into lithium
iron batteries as they could play a pivotal role in our carbon neutral
future. Later in the podcast, we'll hear from Cornish Lithium,
a company looking into the mining of lithium in the southwest of the uk.
But first, the relive project.
A project funded by the Faraday Institute looks at recycling and reuse of ev
lithium iron batteries, ev or electric vehicle batteries.
And the research into them are revolving at a relatively rapid rate and
a roadmap for sustainable circular economy in lithium,
iron and future battery technologies has been published in J Fis Energy
from I O P Science, Dr. Gavin Harper.
The lead researcher on that roadmap is a research fellow at the Metford Tech UK
r i, interdisciplinary circular Economy Center for Technology Metals at the
University of Birmingham.
Lithium arm batteries are starting to become ubiquitous in everyday
life. Um,
as we push towards electrification and decarbonization.
There's, you know, a need for a compact store where you can, um,
you know, power electrical devices using the lightest,
smallest battery that's available. And, and to that end,
lithium ion batteries are the dominant technology.
So we're starting to use these batteries in a whole host of applications.
We're starting to manufacture them in ever greater numbers,
but there's a challenge and at some point those batteries are gonna reach the
end of their lives and at the point at which they reach the end of their lives,
there's a two-sided problem. On the one side,
there's a waste management challenge.
We need to do something with these batteries that's sort of, you know, safe,
responsible, effective, and environmentally sound.
But then on the other hand, there's this massive resource opportunity because,
you know,
companies around the world are clamoring for the key critical materials that are
used to manufacture lithium iron batteries.
And we need to ensure that there's good custody of those materials and that at
the end of their life they can find their way into brand new applications.
And so, you know,
it's that waste management coupled with the need to conserve critical
materials.
And obviously there's a geopolitical dimension to all of this as well. Um,
so it won't surprise you to know that lots of the core midstream
processing capacity for battery materials currently is located in
China. Um, they've had great foresight in developing, um,
battery manufacturing and materials processing and sort of seeing that the
electric vehicle's revolution was coming.
They've captured a great deal of that market with manufacturing capability.
Um, western automakers have been a little bit slower to catch on and I think
governments as well, um,
haven't seen the size of the price and the potential opportunity in the way that
China has done. And so countries around the world are playing catch up.
They will also need to secure access to critical raw materials if they want
to manufacture, um, batteries, indigenously,
and obviously a secondary source of recycled material processing that high grade
material once it's in a country makes an awful lot of sense.
When you're talking about these materials being recycled for use in other
applications.
Does that mean as batteries are you sort of taking car batteries and
recycling them into phone batteries? There's.
A variety of different pathways.
We want to try and keep materials in the highest value state possible.
Now, it may, may or may not be apparent,
but when we recycle lots of materials at the moment, we downcycle them.
And so, you know, we take them from a higher value, um,
state and we then turn them into something that's slightly inferior as a rule.
If you think about newsprint and paper as a really relatable example,
you know, lots of nice, you know, white and mixed papers and magazines go out,
go into the process and what comes out of it, you know, a slightly muddy gray,
um, you know, reasonable quality.
Now obviously with batteries and critical materials,
they're different to bulk materials. Um,
and they're sort of physical properties of those materials are as a result of
the amount of energy, um,
that has been invested into refining them into a very, very high quality state.
And so it's our own to keep these materials in as high value state as possible,
but I like to think of it as a bit like a game of snakes and ladders.
So if you start in the bottom with your raw materials,
every shake of the diocese,
a materials processing step that improves the physical properties of those
materials until you get to the top right hand side of the board and that's your
finished battery. Now, recycling processes,
they're a little bit like the snakes that go down the board and a process like
pyro,
rheumatology will take that battery in a high value state at the top of the
board and you'll slide all the way down almost to the bottom of the board
and then hydroma another technology. Um,
that is quite common in industry. That takes you a little way down the board,
not quite as far, um, but it still takes you back to a much earlier stage.
What we want to try and do, if possible,
is to direct recycle batteries where we keep the materials in a really high
value state. We don't come very far down the board.
We don't have to do too much work to then turn those materials into other
batteries. Um,
obviously lithium ion battery chemistries are used in a wide range
of different applications and the same chemistry may be used in a a mobile phone
as an electric car. Um,
it's not generally too much of a challenge to extract some value out
of batteries that are higher cobalt and nickel content. So, you know,
mobile phone batteries especially really high value, um,
lots of critical materials in them.
What's more challenging is some of the other battery types that are less reliant
on critical materials. So there's type of battery called L F P,
lithium iron phosphate, it's used in some cheaper electric vehicles.
It's also potentially used in stationary energy storage. Um,
people jokingly refer to 'em as rust and fertilizer batteries, lithium,
iron phosphate. There's not a lot of value in the raw materials there,
but there's a lot of value in the way that those materials are put together.
And so if you want to reduce those materials just down to um,
you know, their constituent parts,
you lose the intrinsic value that comes from keeping that material together.
And so some people are saying, well, what do we do with their left p batteries?
Because you know, there's not a lot of value there to recover.
Do we want to put a lot of effort into recycling them or do
we want to maybe downcycle them into, uh, say, you know,
agricultural chemicals for example because of the phosphate there? When.
You say a cheaper electric car, what, which ones are you talking about?
Obviously there aren't great deal of electric cars that are especially cheap at
the moment. , if you think about the older,
I dunno if you remember the G whiz Yes, that, uh, lots of people had on the, uh,
on, on the road as a way of getting round the congestion charge. And uh,
famously top gear blue, quite a few of those up I think, uh, you know,
crash tested them or whatever, you know,
the older generation of electric vehicles were based on lead acid batteries,
lead sulfuric acid, really nice simple battery to recycle, you know,
crack open the case, the lead sinks. Um, you know,
that's not particularly difficult,
but I'm talking about modern electric vehicles. Um,
but the difference between, for example, um,
your long range models and your standard range models.
So if you buy a sort of a lower range standard, um,
say Tesla model three, that will more than likely come with LFP batteries,
which have got, um, less range than the very,
very high end vehicles Mercedes E Q s, which will have, um,
batteries with cobalt and nickel rich chemistries because you need that
chemistry to be able to achieve the range that high performance requires.
Gavin.
Is keen to point out the difference between reuse and recycling.
We talk about recycling, you know, we can also call it urban mining.
And when you think about, for example, all the discarded computers,
they've got hard drives with magnets in pumps, motors,
other electrical devices.
If we can develop recycling technologies that are able to take that secondary
material and turn it into, um, you know,
new products in a way that's cost efficient,
then we should really be making use of those urban minds and materials.
You may or may not know,
there's a thing that people call the waste management hierarchy and it's like a
sort of cascaded series of uses. So first of all,
it's best if we can avoid making the waste in the first place.
Let's not make waste. That's the sort of start of the hierarchy.
And then the next step down on that ladder is to say, if we're gonna make waste,
it's better if we can find a way of reusing it before we recycle it.
So, you know, if you've got, um, you know, a bag, a plastic bag,
it's much better to be able to just use that again as a plastic bag rather than
turning that plastic into another recycled plastic bag because you have to
invest energy into it.
Now there's this whole school of thought around battery reuse where we could
take electric vehicle batteries and reuse them and reuse tends to apply
to using them in another application. So for example, um,
we tend to say once a battery is less than 80% state of health,
that's the point at which we want to retire it from its initial application.
And what you've gotta remember is that the degradation of batteries is
non-linear. So it's not as if it will just progressively get worse.
It gets to a point where it reaches what they call the knee and once it crosses
that point, degradation happens much more quickly.
So the idea with reuse tends to be that you take a battery out of a,
a application where it's being used intensely and you put it into one where it's
not gonna be used quite as intensely. So for example,
if you were using that battery as backup storage in a ups, you know,
you charge it to an, an UPS is uninterruptable power supply,
you charge it up to a level where, um, you know,
the battery can just sit happily at that state of charge and then it only
needs to be discharged in the event of a power failure, for example.
So it's not cycling all the time, it's having a, a really easy shift.
And so it doesn't need to be, you know,
a really good quality battery that is capable of doing lots of cycles.
We're also seeing this whole informal reuse market where, you know,
people are selling old batteries, crash damage, batteries, whatever on um,
you know, marketplaces like eBay. Um,
and then there are a whole legion of people who have got old classic cars
where the body of the car is nice,
but the engine maybe was a dud and it makes more sense for them
rather than trying to source scarce engine parts or, you know,
components that no longer exist to say, you know what,
this car only gets used at weekends. I can buy, um,
some older electric vehicle batteries. They might not be, you know, the best,
they might not be suitable for long miles,
but all you want them for is going around the block or you know,
going to the shops or whatever. Um,
and so they're repurposing those and reusing those in older heritage
vehicles.
Now there there's a whole bunch of longer conversations that we could have
around potential safety concerns and some of the implications of that.
Um, you know,
I'm not necessarily saying that I'm wholly on board with that as a good idea.
Um, but it's something that's happening out there and it's, you know,
so reuse is, has has got a lot of potential as well as recycling.
I've got an electric car parked on the drive there,
I've got a battery for my house here. The electric car's, what,
40 something kilowatt battery,
the house is a nine point something kilowatt battery.
So if if that car sort of went to 80% of that, that's a,
an awful lot of storage that I could be putting into my house, isn't it?
Yeah, for sure.
And I think the other thing is to thinking about into the future,
um, you know,
it is not necessarily an s sum game that you've gotta take that battery out of
the car to use that as backup power for your house. So if you look at, um,
I think Hyundai's one of the manufacturers that's been, um,
really quick off the blocks with this, there's this concept of vehicle to grid,
you know, where your vehicle can potentially be used as storage.
And I think that actually makes a great deal of sense.
If we look at how battery technology has innovated in the past few years,
we are seeing batteries last much longer than people anticipated. Um,
this is a challenge for recyclers cause they're taking a lot longer to come back
to the end of life and reach recycling, um, as people anticipated. Um,
and so people's projections on when those batteries will need recycling are by
and large quite a bit out. Um,
but if you've got vehicle to grid technology on the vehicle,
you can trade energy between, you know, the house and the vehicle. Um,
some companies are starting to offer smart tariffs where if you use energy at
different times, um, you know,
you get preferential rates and you could imagine a future whereby,
you know,
as we start to decarbonize as we need people to be more flexible in their use of
electricity. Um, and as there is less, you know,
thermal power plant providing spinning reserve on the grid, um,
we could actually have a legion of electric vehicles with a degree of
flexibility as to when they're charging and being charged and able to
supply power back to the grid trading energy with the grid.
And why I think this makes lots of sense is, um, first of all,
the battery is contained within the application that it was originally
engineered to be within. So, you know, a battery's within a vehicle,
there are no safety concerns about it being, you know, sort of, uh,
maced into a new configuration. You know, it's been done professionally.
Um, it's where it should be. The second thing is,
is that because batteries are lasting so long,
if you look around scrapyards at the moment,
you will see many cars with perfectly good engines because engines
last longer than vehicles. As a rule,
it's rare that people scrap a car because the engine has blown
up. You know,
more often than not it's because it's been involved in a prang or because it's
failed, its mot on rust or you know, something's wrong with it.
Where the cost of repair exceeds the value of the vehicle.
Obviously there're classic vehicles.
There are things that are really aesthetically nice that people prize and will
maintain and hold on for, for a long time.
But in terms of run of the mill vehicles, you know,
people get to a point where they think, ah, you know, the,
the novelty of this car is well not fit, may still be barely functional.
And so when you talk about battery life improving, you know,
there are people that are now talking about this concept of million mile
batteries. Well,
how many million mile cars do you see out there other than the odd taxi,
you know?
And so if we've got batteries that are able to perform with that level of
repeatability, um, there,
then why wouldn't you use that asset on your driveway to generate you money,
um, by being able to buy and trade power with the grid. And, and you know,
that's a different scenario with very long life batteries compared to one where
we might have thought some time ago when batteries were more of an unknown,
well, why would you want to degrade your very expensive battery to, you know,
earn a few pence here and there selling with the grid? But I mean,
as we've seen with the energy industry, price gouging consumers,
um, recently, you know, energy costs are bigger than, uh,
anyone anticipated in a long time. And every little helps.
Just a quick aside here,
because I know some of you who are listening may be interested in the
practicalities of batteries within the home as it stands at the moment.
And as I mentioned to Gavin,
I do have an electric car and have a battery in my house.
We've got solar panels on the roof and the idea behind it is,
of course it's good for the planet.
That's the main motivating factor for me doing it.
But it's also with the price of energy and the cost of living as it is at the
moment, putting that initial outlay out there to buy the batteries,
put the solar panels on the roof and have an electric car,
means that I'm not paying petrol prices.
I'm paying very little for the fuel,
the electricity that goes into my car. I have a flexible tariff,
whether electricity's cheaper overnight.
Clearly I'm getting solar energy during the day.
So if I've used up all the solar energy and I need to charge the car overnight,
it'll cost me about four pounds to fill up the car with electricity.
That gives me about somewhere between 120 and 150
miles. If I'm charging up with solar energy, of course it's free.
If you imagine how much money you are spending on petrol yourself,
perhaps you might see the attraction of a system like this.
But this podcast isn't really for consumer advice.
And I wanted to talk to Gavin about those geopolitical arguments that he'd
referred to.
To some extent, it doesn't matter where things are produced, you know,
you can take a view that, um, you know,
free markets deliver the best solution and let's just buy things from
the place that gives us the cheapest labor and the cheapest product. That's,
that's one way that people see the world.
Another way to see the world is to say actually the car industry,
something that's really important. It provides jobs, it provides livelihoods,
it provides honest wages, it supports families. Um, you know,
hundreds of thousands of people in the UK working car factories and
supply chains.
And so it's really important to preserve some of that domestic industry in the
uk. And at the moment we have an industry where we have absolutely phenomenal
expertise in the UK around internal combustion engines, um,
and lots of plants that are capable of producing internal combustion engines and
lots of expertise and skills and the whole range of suppliers.
But actually that's pretty useless in the next few years because, um, you know,
demand for those engines is gonna die back. Um, as you know,
there's a push to reduce our use of fossil fuels.
And so if we want to have vehicles made in the uk,
it's important that we have the solutions in the uk, um,
to be able to develop those and produce those indigenously.
And the countries that are able to secure the manufacturing
capability for batteries and for motors are gonna become
the focal points for where vehicles are made in the future because that gives
you your competitive advantage. You know,
why would you want to make a car somewhere where you didn't have ready
access to the batteries and the motors when they're, you know,
the enormous part of, um, adding value to the vehicle. You know,
there was a time,
if you could go back to the sort of earlier days at the British motor industry
where we did alliances with other countries that didn't have the
capability to manufacture their own cars. And Britain would sell,
you know,
what they called C K D completely knocked down kits where it would
be a car in a box and it would be shipped out to some far flu country
and someone with a bag of spanners would then put the car together out of the
bits of the Kit Mac Carno style. Um, you know,
is that what we want for the UK going forwards? You know,
we used to have so much suffering capability and you know,
we really want to try and look at the potential for retaining those good jobs in
the UK by ensuring that we've got the battery and motor manufacturing capacity
and also the critical materials that are gonna supply those supply chains.
I'm picking up from this that that's not kind of what's happening.
We're not moving towards that politically in the country at the moment.
Well, I think, you know, there's been a lot of rhetoric,
there's been a lot of hot air, um, there's been a lot of press releases.
Um, you know, there's,
there's other people that have observed the battery industry
and have looked at initiatives around the world. And you know,
what matters at the end of the day is bricks, foundations, you know,
actual things being built, not just nice visions and architects,
renderings.
And I think the challenge is that in the UK there's been an awful lot of
enthusiasm.
We've got phenomenal research and innovation capability in the uk.
You know, it's the old story that the UK has got real leadership around
science,
but we're just really rubbish at translating that into actual physical product.
And I think, you know, for all of the, um,
excitement and um, you know, press releases about government support,
what we haven't managed to do in the UK is really establish that battery
manufacturing capacity at scale.
And if we look at Europe and if we look at America, um,
they realize the urgency with which they need to play catch up.
And so the um, you know,
resources that are being diverted into, um,
trying to establish those industries from the ground up
are sort of commensurate with the scale of the challenge.
And I think although there's been some support in the uk, um,
it doesn't meet toe to toe with either the scale of the challenge or
the scale of investment that other competing nations are putting into this.
And of course, you know,
there's a whole range of other geopolitical factors in terms of where the
country's at at the moment with Brexit, um, you know,
which make the UK a more challenging place to consider
investing.
Can we in the UK be mining these materials or do we have to go elsewhere to,
to get the materials in.
The first place? So I think, you know,
it depends on the material that you're talking about. Um,
certainly in far as far as lithium,
there's been a flurry of excitement around Cornwall. Um,
there's a number of firms there that are looking at using innovative
technologies to extract lithium, um, from deposits there.
I think my understanding is that those technologies will produce
lithium that's a little bit more expensive than it can be produced around the
world.
So that works in a market where lithium price is high because of demand.
And I think, you know,
potentially we are in a scenario where the lithium price will be high because
there's phenomenal demand for lithium iron batteries. Um,
and people can only develop mines and capacity at a certain rate.
Now in terms of other materials, nickel, um, you know,
it's spread a little bit more around the world.
There's more diversity of sources. Um,
type one nickel is the thing that we are really interested in. Um,
so that's high quality nickel, um, that can be used for battery cathodes.
Other lower quality type two nickel is more appropriate for sort of use in
mythology and allies. Um, not really suited to be in a battery grade. Um,
cobalt is the one that's really problematic.
So the majority of the world's cohort comes from the Democratic Republic of
Conga. Um, it's a country that has lots of challenges. Um,
there is concern around artisan small scale mining, um, you know,
children in the supply chain and in informal mining. Um,
there's also the fact that sort China has really, um,
secured a great monopoly on cobalt processing around the world.
So most of the world's cobalt comes outta the DRC flows into China,
where China then, you know, add the value and then it flows out.
So that's in terms of battery materials and, and there's not really,
um,
a great opportunity to diversify the production of battery materials in the
UK Rich Geological Survey have recently done a report of
uk um, natural resources and, but then again, you know,
there are challenges with mining and extractive industries. Um, you know,
do people necessarily want that on their doorstep? And,
and there's a whole debate around, you know,
all the challenges that you'd have to do around mind development.
One company hoping to take advantage of the geological treasures hiding in the
ground in the UK is Cornish Lithium.
Ali Salsbury is a project geologist for Cornish Lithium.
I run a lot of our drilling programs and sampling campaigns to actually abstract
the geothermal water from our boreholes.
And I'm involved in the exploration process to find where we want to drill for
research boreholes and exploration boreholes to get this geothermal water out
the outta the ground.
Cornwall has a quite a unique geological setting in the overall
UK setting.
Really it's underlaying by this huge granite bath lift that spans all the way
from the isles of silly in the west to the west of Devon
on the dartmore granite.
And the granite pluton has essentially made it quite a special place
because it brought with it as it was exhumed,
lots of mineralizing fluids and this caused lots of the tin and copper
mineralization has been historically mine in Cornel,
but as well as the granite Pluto itself.
Cornel's been historically fractured throughout the 300 million years since
the granite was exhumed.
And this is allowed for water to ingress into these fractures through
seawater meteoric water.
And over that time period it's leached bits of lithium out of this
mineral called, uh, micr that you find in granites across the globe.
But the micr and cornal is particularly enriched in lithium and
it's leached into these geothermal waters which we are intercepting at depth and
pumping to the surface to extract the lithium from. How.
Easy is it to get the lithium from those waters and what kind of quantities are
we talking about?
It's quite a new industry, really,
this lithium extraction technology,
it wasn't really known about 6, 7, 8 years ago.
So there are lots of companies looking at trying to get the,
all the best ways to get the lithium out of the outta the water.
And what we're doing is we're trialing lots of different technologies on the
particular chemistries that we have or that we see in,
in the water that are abstracting. And it's a combination of either,
um, membrane filtration, so what you might see in a Britta filter for example,
but on a bit of a more complicated larger scale or absorption or absorption
techniques.
So specially manufactured media that attracts the
lithium ions that are free in the water and it sticks to these,
this media and then we wash it off and we're left with a lithium chloride
concentrate,
which we can then process to a lithium grade battery material.
Do you have any concept of, you know, h how much there is there,
how long could this be a process of for how many batteries is it gonna make?
Yeah, no, yeah. Um, it's, it's, to be honest,
it's a bit of a work in progress at the moment,
but we are aiming to have up to 20 or
25 boreholes across the county that we can abstract this water from and we're
expecting to be able to get between 500 and thousand
tons of, um,
lithium carbonate equivalent at lce per year outta these boreholes.
And that equates to, um,
if you have about 200 kilograms of lithium in a car battery,
it's um, I, you can do the math ,
but it's, it is a reasonable amount. And I should say we also have a, um,
hard rock project running in parallel that we've just released our scoping study
for, uh, at the end of last year.
And that's essentially repurposing an old China clay pit that will,
that will be mining the lithium from the granite itself because that region in
Cornal ounce ment ost is particularly enriched in lithium and we're expecting to
be able to produce between eight and 10,000 tons of lce per year from that
side of things.
And I think somebody did the mass for that and it's that that equates to about
40,000 car batteries. Okay. A year.
Wow. Okay. That's, that's quite a lot isn't it?
What I would say is that our listeners are very interested in physics,
so quite a lot of them will be doing the math themselves as.
.
For how long would you be able to extract that lithium per year?
We've done extended pump tests on some of our wells,
but we're in the process of upscaling that test work to exactly
understand the sort of resource that we're looking at.
But we're expecting them to have quite a long life cycle.
So it is a very difficult question to answer and it's,
it's something that we're working on at the moment, to be honest, when.
Your explorations and your testing's going to be giving us the answers that we
need in terms of quantity and longevity.
We're currently constructing a demonstration plant over
in our hard rock, um, facility and that's coming online within the next year.
And then we're hoping to get into commercial production for that by 2026.
And we believe that we'll have our first commercial geothermal waters
borehole up and running by 2028.
So it's on those sort of time scales when we'll be able to start answering
those, those questions. We've only been around since 2016. The first tech,
first technical team or first members of the technical team were hired in 2018
and since then we've been working very hard to answer those exact questions.
, as Govin mentioned earlier in the podcast,
question marks arise whenever mining happens,
particularly if it's in your own local area. If you don't know Cornwall,
it is a particularly beautiful part of the world.
Having a mining company there must surely raise some questions along these
lines. Here's Ali Salisbury again.
Well,
I think there are lots of misconceptions surrounding exactly why people want to
go into mining and want to go into geology or want to go into exploration.
For myself, I couldn't see myself working for an oil and gas company,
for example, or a company that was a,
a mineral exploration company that was looking for gold or,
or some sort of material that wasn't gonna be useful for the green revolution
that we're seeing. It's just close to my heart really.
I became a geologist cuz I liked science and I liked the environment and I like
nature. It, it all makes sense to me really. Um,
what I can say is that we are trying to do the most responsible thing we
can. We see where lithium's mind across the rest of the planet.
It's,
it's not always done in the best way we believe and we're trying to go above
those, um, above what's being done elsewhere.
So in terms of our lithium and geothermal waters projects,
we are using this technology called direct lithium extraction that
is completely contained process and w we don't require lots of water.
We don't require lots of, um, open space to,
like they do in South America where they're flooding huge lagoons to evaporate
the water off, to concentrate their lithium up where we are using, um,
yeah,
the suite of technologies to actually extract the lithium straight out of the
water without those, without those requirements. And for our, and,
and the, the footprint on the ground itself is going to be pretty small.
We're envisaging,
it's going to be the size of a small supermarket or you know,
what do you call them,
a small little like Tesco metro type thing on the surface of the ground,
which we can then cover with a,
with a barn looking structure and we can have all of the equipment contained
within there over a small diameter ball hole.
And then on our hard rock side of things, we are um,
actually repurposing an old China clay pit.
So it's infrastructure that's already on the ground and it's, uh, sort of a,
a mine sided quarry that we can actually reutilize, um,
and reuse for the purposes of mining lithium outta the ground.
And in terms of energy consumption, um,
for processing the lithium out of outta the awe that we find there,
we're using a, a process called the lipo process,
which doesn't require huge roasting temperatures of the mineral to liberate the
lithium out of it. So for example,
in Australia to liberate lithium outta spa mean, which is the,
or that they find there,
they need to roast it up to about a thousand degrees Celsius. And it's,
we don't need to go through that process at all. We actually,
we use an acid leaching process completely contained within, um,
the self-sustaining system as well.
So we don't have any leachate leaking out or any environmental ramifications
in that sense of things.
It, you have this lithium, are there
electric vehicle battery manufacturers knocking at your door waiting for it
to come along?
So currently in the UK there's not really a battery manufacturing,
um, supply chain. We have electric vehicle manufacturers, but they just build,
they put the PO components together that they receive from elsewhere.
But we're definitely hoping that,
that there will be a battery factory up and running by the time that we're
at commercial production that we can sell our product to. Um,
in terms of who that might be, I'm just a lowly geologist and it's for,
for it's for other people to answer those questions. But from what I,
from what I've heard there, there has been,
there have been discussions and there has been interest.
Clearly if a key aspect of using batteries is for
environmental reasons, then sourcing them locally is of particular interest.
And I'm sure geologists all over the world are working in a similar way
looking for lithium and other crucial battery components in the ground beneath
your feet, wherever you are.
If you are an electric vehicle owner or perhaps you've considered being one,
you've probably had the question posed to yourself or even asked yourself the
question,
is it really more environmentally friendly to have an electric vehicle
than a petrol one? Here's Gavin Harper again.
So I think there's an awful lot of media hyperbole and,
and it's just such a shame the environment in which we live in.
People are bombarded with information and,
and not all of it is obviously factual or correct, you know,
to really make a sober analysis of the merits of different products against each
other, we need to do a lifecycle assessment Now, um,
if you look at the lifecycle of an electric vehicle versus a conventional
vehicle, um, there are more impacts in manufacturing in an electric vehicle.
So we need to put more energy,
more material because they're a little bit more complicated to make in the first
place. And I think the impact at end of life as well is a little bit greater.
Um,
but there's a bit more involved in recycling an electric vehicle compared to a
conventional vehicle.
But what that neglects focusing on those two ends of the vehicle life is that
actually by far the bulk of the vehicle impact occurs in the use phase.
You know, when that vehicle is being driven out and about. And so by comparison,
um, the impacts at the beginning and end of life are relatively negligible, um,
that you think about the massive carbon emissions that come from driving
vehicles, hundreds of thousands of miles and you know,
that's been modeled and even in scenarios where your electricity comes from
a relatively high carbon source, um,
because of the intrinsic efficiency of electric power trains and also the fact
that, you know,
it's more efficient to generate energy in a centralized thermal power station,
you know, than in lots of little motors in individuals cars. Um, and it's also,
it's, you know,
potentially easy to control the emissions as well when you do it on scale. So,
you know,
the impact of electric vehicles in a whole range of scenarios is lower,
um, than conventional vehicles.
Does that mean that there's not room for doing things better? No,
I think there's lots of scope, there's lots of room.
Certainly the more that I've looked into critical materials and vehicles,
the more it's made me, you know, a little bit of, uh,
healthy cynicism about some things. But I think these are all, you know,
exciting challenges to work on and, uh, you know, we need to strive for better.
Thank you very much to Gavin and Ali for talking to me.
We'll post links to their work,
including that roadmap to this lithium iron battery future and the article
associated with this episode of the podcast on physics world.com.
Don't forget,
you can find another podcast from Physics World called Physics World Weekly,
but the Physics World's Stories podcast will be back very soon when we'll be
looking at the growing impact of the Jocelyn Benell Graduate Scholarship Fund.
And thank you very much for listening.
Physics World.