Episode 59 Transcript: Why yes, you actually can recycle EV batteries

Molly Wood Voice-Over:

Welcome to Everybody in the Pool, the podcast where we dive deep into the innovative solutions and the brilliant minds who are tackling the climate crisis head-on. I'm Molly Wood.

This week, we are talking about one of my favorite topics--batteries. Because of course electrifying the things that currently run on fossil fuels and powering that electrification with renewable energy is one of the biggest things we can do to stop emitting greenhouse gas emissions, and ensure a survivable climate.

Electrification means batteries for cars, for energy storage, and batteries mean metals and in a phrase I heard in a Nevada gold mine once, what isn’t grown is mined. To make batteries more sustainable, reduce extraction from the earth and all the social and political and environmental costs of that and ensure a consistent domestic supply of those metals, we’re going to need to recycle. And all of that that brings us to today’s guest.

Mike O'Kronley:

Hi, I'm Mike O’Kronley and I'm the CEO of Ascend Elements.

Molly Wood:

and what are you doing at Ascend?

Mike O'Kronley:

So Ascend, well what we're doing actually is we are trying to clean up batteries. Batteries and battery production tends to be a little dirty, and a dirty from a CO2 perspective. Very energy intensive, lot of resources and materials are needed in order to make batteries. And what we're doing is we're on a mission to make batteries more sustainable. The battery materials we make are made from recycled batteries. So we're making really high performance.

cathode materials, so that's the positive side of the battery, we're making that from spent batteries in a very clean and sustainable way.

Molly Wood:

And is it, before I ask you more about the how, let's be more specific about what kind of batteries you mean. Is it all batteries? Is it EV batteries? Is it grid storage? Is it some combination thereof?

Mike O'Kronley:

Yeah, so more specifically, it's a lithium-ion battery, but even more so what the specialty that we focus on are NMC batteries. So that is a type or a specific category of a lithium-ion battery, and they're used primarily in EVs although not exclusively. They're also used a lot on grid storage. But for example, it is not the lead acid 12-volt battery that's in most internal combustion cars. So it is specific to lithium-ion, but we have a specialty in making NMC cathode materials. And so that's the type of battery that we focus on.

Molly Wood:

What is? Will I regret this? What does the NMC stand for?

Mike O'Kronley:

It's a nickel manganese cobalt oxide. So it sounds a little bit fancy, but no, but those are the three key metals that are in the cathode material. And it is the cathode material of choice for long-range premium EVs because they have a lot of energy density. So you can put a lot of energy into an NMC-type lithium ion battery.

Molly Wood:

I do not regret it.

Mike O'Kronley:

far more than an LFP-type lithium-ion battery. LFP is a lithium iron phosphate. And so they're very good, very long-life batteries. However, they just do not have the energy density. So they're good for certain applications. But if you want a long-range EV, which in the United States, that's what we want in this country, is a much longer-range EV to mitigate range anxiety. So NMC typically is the preferred cathode material that will go into lithium-ion batteries that go into EVs.

Molly Wood:

Right. And this is where we should say that certainly nickel and cobalt, I am, I don't know as much about manganese, but, but nickel and cobalt are the things that we hear about in the news being in short supply or hard to find or located in areas that engender a lot of conflict. And so it seems like recycling them, recycling those materials to the extent that you can is a pretty big deal.

Mike O'Kronley:

Absolutely. But you know, on top of that, both of those metals are far more expensive than manganese. So manganese is a much lower-priced metal. It is much more abundant. Nickel is the next where it is more expensive. Cobalt is very expensive, relatively speaking. And so and it's also highly concentrated in the Democratic Republic of Congo and so about 70 % of the world supply of cobalt comes from just one location one country. 

And so that's also what's what's making it a little more rare but also it's it has its own issues associated with mining and extracting this critical mineral out of the Congo Nickel is extracted many places across the world And that are not necessarily conflict zones. So there it's not as much of a concern but it's still an expensive material and in very high demand, especially in lithium-ion batteries.

Molly Wood Voice-Over:

So Mike was actually born and raised in Detroit, he ended up in the auto industry after college and then joined a battery company called A123 Systems about 15 years ago, developing EV batteries. That battery company was looking for new technology to make manufacturing batteries cheaper and more efficient.

Mike O'Kronley:

And so it was back in 2016 where I came across a little small technology company that was started out of Worcester Polytechnic Institute. There were three professors there that were developing a new way of making this cathode material from spent batteries. And it was a brand new process, had not been developed anywhere. In fact, they were the pioneers and they had patented a unique technology.

So what we did is we went ahead and as a battery manufacturer, we tested this cathode material in a battery and we tested it head to head with the cathode material that A123 was buying from a major cathode supplier already. And this little small startup out of Worcester Polytechnic Institute, three professors, you know, with a great idea, they made cathode material from waste batteries and it outperformed one of the world's leading cathode manufacturers. I was like, wow, how did this even happen? And so that's where, you know, a few light bulbs went off. It was like, wow, this could be game-changing technology. I need to get into this more.

Molly Wood Voice-Over:

A123 became an investor, Mike became an advisor and in 2020 he joined full-time as CEO to commercialize the tech.

Molly Wood:

So let's talk about the problems that are solved here because you just alluded to two of them. One is the ensuring an ongoing supply of these critical minerals.

Mike O'Kronley:

Mm -hmm.

Molly Wood:

But the second is solving a question that I hear come up a lot. People often say, well, I don't know what's going to happen to this battery when this EV, you know, when it's past its useful life. And for a long time, in terms of EV adoption, that just wasn't an issue. There weren't enough of them on the road for batteries to actually be coming off and having their own environmental impact. So talk a little bit about solving both of those problems at once.

Mike O'Kronley:

Yeah, so actually what we're doing solving many problems, those two and a few other ones, but certainly let's start with critical materials.

Molly Wood:

Yeah. Yeah, tell me all of them. Okay.

Mike O'Kronley:

So we already talked about nickel and cobalt. Lithium is another one that's often grouped into their, these are critical minerals in a lithium ion battery. Depending on the supply and demand, price fluctuates quite a lot. We saw, in the, in 2022 and even the beginning of 2023, very high prices for all of these critical minerals because we weren't able to supply enough relative to where the demand was. And so we saw very high price fluctuations. So this is something that EV makers really have a lot of concern about when they're trying to put out a vehicle, an EV into the market. They really want to know what is it going to cost me to put a battery in a car and deliver this car and to have real wild price fluctuations does not work for them.

They were also just recently burned in when we had the pandemic. We had chip shortages and they so much so that they couldn't deliver vehicles because they couldn't put the proper number of chips into a car. So security of supply for a vehicle OEM, someone is manufacturing an EV.

is really, really important. It's paramount. If you're missing one or two key components, you can't build and ship a vehicle and your revenue drops to zero when that happens. So, security of supply is very important in the industry.

And so, when you have so much of the supply chain highly concentrated in one region of the world, we talked about cobalt, most of it coming out of the Congo, most of all of these battery materials are essentially refined and produced in China, there's a lot of geopolitical tension there and certainly there's EV makers, I'll say in the western world, whether they're in North America or Europe, they don't want to be beholden to one highly concentrated source for getting these critical elements that will allow them to make and produce and ship EVs.

So having a local supplier being able to control a certain amount of their sourcing is very important. You see now that vehicle manufacturers are even making investments in mines where they mine lithium or where they mine nickel or cobalt. This is something that really hasn't happened in the past. The supply chain was always robust enough, but this is something that is too big of a risk in the industry. And that's why you see the OEMs going really far upstream making these investments because it's not necessarily about pricing, it is about security of supply.

Molly Wood:

Right.

Mike O'Kronley:

So what we do is we work with OEMs and we help them with that. So we're not going to be able to totally offset mining, for example. But we can certainly help augment that. Any material that is a manufacturing scrap or end of life battery, we don't have to go back to the mine. We're essentially recapturing all of that valuable material, producing new battery material and we can deliver it right back to the OEM.

So in a way, when they have warranty returns, end of life batteries, they take back an EV and sell you a new one. They have manufacturing scrap up at the front end. They're essentially, they're controlling a lot of, battery material. There's a lot of these critical minerals that are in these batteries that ultimately they would like to have back right into their supply chain. So in that way, this is a problem that we are helping OEM solve. And so in addition to that, everything that we make by this process of recycling and producing cathode materials, it's now all in the US, 100 % IRA compliant.

And as you may know, in the US, we have the Inflation Reduction Act. To get a full credit for that, you have to have materials that are made in the US or with a free trade partner. And so we help the OEMs pass along that $7 ,500 credit because the material we make, because it's out of recycled content qualifies for this credit. So that's, you know, we're helping solve a lot of problems there. You know, if you look, if you look at Europe, they have some legislation there too, where battery makers, OEMs, anybody that's putting a battery out into the market in the future in 2027 and beyond, you have to have a certain amount of recycled content in new batteries. And so this is actually making a demand for some recycled content and for recycling materials. And so.

Molly Wood:

interesting.

Mike O'Kronley:

As a result, we're helping OEMs in Europe now with compliance. So they can't put a new battery out into the market without having these minimum recycled content in there. So that's one problem that we're solving. The other problem that we're solving is really about, and I mentioned it at the beginning, is that we're helping clean up the battery supply chain.

Molly Wood:

Mm -hmm.

Molly Wood:

Yeah.

Mike O'Kronley:

making batteries and in particular these battery materials are very carbon intensive. So much so that an EV as the way it's manufactured today with the battery is more carbon intensive at zero kilometers or zero miles than an internal combustion engine vehicle. So there's, we have to, as an industry reduce our carbon impact and our carbon footprint. Well, the reason why that carbon footprint is so big is largely because of the battery and it's largely because of the cathode material that's in that battery.

And so through our process, this innovative process that these three professors developed over a decade ago at Worcester Polytechnic Institute is to drop the CO2 footprint of this key material, this cathode material by over 90%. And so just swapping out the cathode material alone allows that EV now to have a lower CO2 footprint just by swapping out one thing, the lower CO2 footprint than an internal combustion engine vehicle. And so that is, that's dramatic.

Molly Wood:

Right.

Molly Wood:

And yeah, and then let's clarify that that is, that has, it sounds like very little to do with the process of creating the cathode material that where all of those sort of emissions savings come in is not mining, not transporting, and then not refining. It's really just down to refining kind of.

Mike O'Kronley:

Yeah, so there is a manufacturing component to it, but you're right. So we're not shipping these materials all around the world. So there's, we're not mining it, concentrating it and sending it off for refinement. That's essentially, it's already semi -refined in a battery. So that's part of the process that we're taking out.

Molly Wood:

Right.

Mike O'Kronley:

Our process itself is also inherently efficient. So because we're starting with very concentrated forms of lithium and nickel and cobalt, it's much easier to process that and turn it back into new battery material. And so all of that combined, plus using renewable energy, is what allows us to drop the CO2 footprint so significantly.

Molly Wood:

Right. So then you have a vehicle that is significantly lower emissions compared to its ice counterpart. 

Mike O'Kronley:

Yes.

Molly Wood:

make this a selling point of these cars. Like it would take a sophisticated buyer to parse that much, but I feel like, you know, I would be thrilled to go in and say this, I'm going to buy this car that also has a battery that's made of recycled materials.

Mike O'Kronley:

Yeah, so this is a part that could be a selling feature, but at least in the United States, it's not. It's not, you know, and so, yeah, exactly. So buy an EV because it's more fun, it's nicer to drive, and you never have to fill the thing with gas. So it's super convenient. But you're doing something better for the environment. And then, you know, what a lot of people think, and you're absolutely right, total life cycle emissions on an EV is...

Molly Wood:

It'll take some time. We're just still trying to buy UVs up here.

Mike O'Kronley:

better and will always be better than an internal combustion engine vehicle because it's operating at far more efficient, number one. The number of electrons that go into it to moving the vehicle is more efficient than burning gasoline, which is 20 to 30 % efficient. So it's huge efficiency gains, but also you're not emitting CO2 as you drive. So that's huge. But what we're doing and what we help OEMs do is lower their zero kilometer or zero mile CO2 footprint which is also very significant and we need to be doing all of these things.

Molly Wood:

Talk to me about some of the other problems. So that's two big ones, but you've alluded to solving lots of other problems in this industry. I'm curious about some of those.

Mike O'Kronley:

Yeah, so an interesting thing, and we had recently performed a study on this where we surveyed a large population. I believe it was over a thousand EV buyers. And one of their concerns was, you know, this battery, what's going to happen to it? It can't be recycled. And so most people have a mental picture. So I think the number was over 50 % believe that the EV battery could not be recycled. Yeah.

Molly Wood:

It's a, this comes up constantly. Like people constantly as an, as a, an objection to buying an EV say this battery is just going to go into a landfill at the end of its life. I mean, that is like a very persistent, hopefully myth.

Mike O'Kronley:

Well, it's absolutely a myth, you know, but if you look at the mental image that most people have, they have a cell phone. Everyone's got a cell phone. There's a lithium -ion battery in that cell phone. What do you do with it? They feel like, well, I can't throw this thing away because it's got a battery in it, it's got electronics in it, I shouldn't throw it away. So what do they do with it? They stick it in their drawer and just let it sit there. Or they try to give it to a friend or whatever. But they just like, I don't want to throw this away. I don't know what to do with it. And it ends up being a problem. And then so you probably have a few, I have a few old cell phones and consumer electronics in my drawer too.

Molly Wood:

My mom stopped taking them.

Mike O'Kronley:

We all do it, right? So that is the mental picture that most people have. And so now you amplify that by 10 ,000. I'm gonna go out and buy an EV, because there's about 10 ,000 cell phone batteries in an EV.  So, you know, this is something that this perception that exists in the market that you can't recycle these things is absolutely false. And the reason for that is like we already talked about, a lithium ion battery is made up primarily of metals. So this consists of nickel, cobalt, manganese.

lithium, these are all metals.

There's a lot of copper and aluminum in there. And so what you probably also know, and the average consumer knows, is that metals are highly recyclable. Your car is made out of highly recycled steel, as an example. Your beverage cans that are aluminum, highly recyclable, very high recycle rates. You can do this with metals. And you can get the same material properties with metals that's not necessarily the same case with plastics, as an example.

So your battery is made up mostly of metals and they're effectively infinitely recyclable. And plus they are very expensive metals. So the last thing you want to do is throw them away or discard them. There's a lot of value there. So much so that it's going to affect the residual value of that EV. And so, you know, and this is in a very good way.

Molly Wood:

Effect in a good way. Because right now we're having a conversation about people being very concerned about their residual value. And I think you're making a really important point, which is like, there's kind of a little diamond in there that's never going to get cheaper.

Mike O'Kronley:

Yeah.

Yeah, so that's exactly it. There is a very valuable nugget at the bottom of that car that's called your battery and it's got a lot of valuable metals in it. We call them critical minerals, but you know you might as well for this purpose call them precious metals. So you certainly don't want to be throwing away precious metals or even critical metals and so there's a lot of value sitting in there. And so in the typical EV it's measured in the thousands of dollars. And so the even an EV that's got 18 years on its life, the wheels are about to fall off and whatever, the car is essentially worthless, there's scrap value there and there's a whole lot of scrap value in just that battery. And that's something an internal combustion engine vehicle just does not have.

Molly Wood Voice-Over:

Time for a quick break. When we come back, how Ascend plans to get the battery materials to recycle in the first place.

Molly Wood Voice-Over:

Welcome back to Everybody in the Pool. We’re talking with Mike O’Kronley, CEO of Ascend Elements about creating a circular economy for batteries. Also we digress slightly into cookies.

Molly Wood:

Okay, so talk to me about your process and the sourcing. Like ultimately, this is a circular process that depends on supply, AKA batteries coming out of those EVs. How does that work? And how, I guess more importantly, how does it scale?

Mike O'Kronley:

Mm -hmm. Mm -hmm.

Mike O'Kronley:

Yeah, so when we source batteries at the front end of our process, and again, what we are doing and making is we're making the most expensive material that goes into a new battery, the cathode material. And we make this material and synthesize it from spent batteries. So the beginning of the process does involve collecting and sourcing batteries and battery material. Now this battery material comes from two primary sources. One we've been talking about, end of life batteries.

So we've already had EVs on the road for more than 10 years. We do have EVs coming, batteries coming back today. They are in small numbers. We have had, unfortunately, a few recalls where that's added to the amount of battery material that needs to be recycled. But so that's, I'll say a smaller part of the market. The larger part of the market today and what a lot of people don't know or recognize is the fact that battery manufacturing plants themselves produce a lot of manufacturing scrap. And so it's not that it's an inefficient process, it's just the way batteries are manufactured.

And so, and as an example where you can maybe visualize this as part of the battery manufacturing process is stamping out electrodes, the positive and negative side of the battery. These are coated foils and it's just a stamping operation. And so similar to when you stamp out anything, whether it's cookies out of a, you know out of a rolled out piece of dough or a big straight to cookies.

Everyone loves cookies You know, so there's there's a lot of stuff that you essentially stamp away and you don't it doesn't end up in the final product You know, so but it's still good material and in the case of cookies you rolled back up and and then you essentially stamp on another cookie Well in in batteries and battery manufacturing you stamp this out. It's not going in the first wave, but you certainly have material that's there and

Molly Wood:

I was going straight to cookies in my mind.

Molly Wood:

Make more cookies. Yep.

Mike O'Kronley:

and you don't want to throw it away, we take that material and we process it and that's a very good source of feedstock for us for making this cathode material. So this is a waste product.

Molly Wood:

And what would have otherwise happened to this waste product, like actual waste of this really valuable material?

Mike O'Kronley:

This is where it becomes interesting. So a battery manufacturer is making lots of batteries. There's been a lot written about new battery plants being built all across the United States. Even before one of those battery plants opens, they have the need to have a recycling company take their battery scrap, process it, and put it back into the supply chain. So that's even before day one, before they ship out their first good battery, they have to have a partner that can take this material. But interest, well, it's not by law, but it just makes good economic sense. You certainly don't want to pay to throw it away. You've got companies that can take it and make something valuable out of it. So we buy it from them. So this is what they need. They need a partner to do this. Now at the same time,

Molly Wood:

Yeah. By law, it's a it's a regulatory thing or it's just a hmm, right, right. Okay got it.

Mike O'Kronley:

They also are incentivized to have sustainable battery material that goes into their battery in the beginning. So we take their, this is where we partner with them. We take their scrap, we process it and we return it right back to them. And so it's a one -stop shop, yeah.

Molly Wood:

Right, you become a one -stop shop. So then they don't have to source cathode material from somewhere in China, and while they're selling you scrap that can become cathode. I mean, when you really think about what's been happening before, it's very inefficient.

Mike O'Kronley:

It's very inefficient. Yeah, so we're helping again, make things more sustainable, take this scrap part of the process and return good valuable material right back to that same battery manufacturer.

Molly Wood:

and one thing I want to put a finer point on, cause I don't want to let it go by is that the cathode material that you're making, repurposing creates batteries that are just as efficient if not more. So there is no, it's not a concessionary recycling situation. They go just as far. The cars go just as far.

Mike O'Kronley:

Yeah, like, absolutely. Just as far, just as energy dense. But the nice thing about it, and again, remembering that the fundamental property here is that we're working with metals. We can reprocess these metals in such a way that gives the exact same or even better performance characteristics as something that was made from mine materials. Now you don't necessarily get that with recycled plastic. And we all have seen and felt recycled bags or different recycled plastics or even recycled paper products. They somehow feel different. And it's not possible to take a plastic because it's typically a mixed stream. There's all different types of plastics, different molecules, and you get different, I'll say mechanical properties out of it. Paper and plastics. And that's what people know and feel. They see it in their everyday lives. Well,

Molly Wood:

Yeah.

Mike O'Kronley:

If you pick up a soda can, for example, you can't tell if that was recycled metal or not. It feels exactly the same. You can design and engineer a process that it gives the exact same properties with metals.

Molly Wood:

And so does that, over time, will it start to translate into lower prices? I mean, we're already seeing them come down a little bit, but that's the holy grail right? Is having these

cars be on par.

Mike O'Kronley:

So I, I would say when we look at the EV industry in general, um, there there are, they do come at a price premium. There's a typically, I believe now it's, it's around a 5, 000 price premium on a, on an equal vehicle to have a, an EV. So they are priced more expensive at the same time. The most OEMs that are putting these vehicles out into the market, they're losing money on these EVs. So it's not just about price.

Overall, the cost of these vehicles is higher than the cost of a comparable ICE vehicle. But we've been making the ICE vehicles for over a century now. Um, it's going to take a little bit of time. We've got to get to scale. And yes, the whole industry right now, um, from the EV manufacturer to the battery manufacturer, to the material suppliers, um, everybody that's feeding this, it's, it's an industry problem because we need to collectively reduce the cost of producing these EVs.

Uh, we have to hit price parity.  And even get, uh, get more efficient in it.

So, um, so that's something the entire industry is working on. So anywhere we can make the process of making an EV or a battery more efficient, we will be bringing down the cost. And that's something that once we bring down the cost and we're more successful at that, then adoption will be even wider. Uh, which, and then volumes will go up. So the, uh, the hope certainly of all of our investors is that, well, we're gonna, we're going to get it on volume because this is going to be the thing in the way that we're going to do business.

Molly Wood Voice-Over:

Ascend Elements is currently operating a plant in Georgia that is recycling batteries.Now they’re extracting lithium and selling that as they build an even bigger plant in Kentucky to make recycled battery material at scale and it will be the first plant in all of North America to make this battery material called cathode precursor, meaning, domestic supply. That plant should be coming online in 2025.

Ok! That's it for this episode of Everybody in the Pool. Thank you so much for listening.

Email me your thoughts and suggestions to in at everybody in the pool dot com, find transcripts of the show over at the website, everybody in the pool dot com and subscribe to the newsletter there for weekly updates and occasional rants and music recommendations and who knows what else.

Together, we can get this done. See you next week.