Supply risks associated with lithium-ion battery materials

By Christoph Helbig, A. Bradshaw, Lars Wietschel, Andrea Thorenz, Axel Tuma. 2018

297 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Abstract One possibility for electrification of road transport consists of battery electric vehicles in combination with carbon-free sources of electricity. It is highly likely that lithium-ion batteries will provide the basis for this development. In the present paper, we use a recently developed, semi-quantitative assessment scheme to evaluate the relative supply risks associated with the elements used in the functional materials of six different lithium-ion battery types. Eleven different indicators in four supply risk categories are applied to each element; the weighting of the indicators is determined by external experts within the framework of an Analytic Hierarchy Process. The range of supply risk values on the elemental level is distinctly narrower than in our previous work on photovoltaic materials. The highest values are obtained for lithium and cobalt; the lowest for aluminium and titanium. Copper, iron, nickel, carbon (graphite), manganese and phosphorous form the middle group. We then carry out the assessment of the six battery types, to give comparative supply risks at the technology level. For this purpose the elemental supply risk values are aggregated using four different methods. Due to the small spread at the elemental level the supply risk values in all four aggregation methods also lie in a narrow range. Removing lithium, aluminium and phosphorous from the analysis, which are present in all types of battery, improves the situation. For aggregation with the simple arithmetic mean, an uncertainty analysis shows that only lithium-iron phosphate has a measurably lower supply risk compared to the other battery types. For the “cost-share” aggregation using seven elements, lithium cobalt oxide has a substantially higher supply risk than most other types.

Subfields: Automotive Engineering, Electrical and Electronic Engineering, Mechanical Engineering

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/57834f5939a0ecfe8debe953e0d6e21012c2d27c

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In Automotive Engineering

1. J. Van Mierlo
2. Jens Leker
3. York R. Smith
4. Haruka Pinegar

In Electrical and Electronic Engineering

1. J. Van Mierlo
2. Jens Leker
3. York R. Smith
4. Haruka Pinegar

In Mechanical Engineering

1. York R. Smith
2. Haruka Pinegar

Citations in the corpus

• A Bottom-Up Approach to Lithium-Ion Battery Cost Modeling with a Focus on Cathode Active Materials (2019, background): “For instance, factors such as political instability, dwindling of resources, or the occurrence of monopolies can create supply risk and strongly affect cost stability [48].”
• Recycling of End-of-Life Lithium Ion Batteries, Part I: Commercial Processes (2019, background): “Nevertheless, recycling rates of these metals must be improved as metal consumption in production of EV LIBs is tremendous (current recycling rates of nickel, manganese, and copper are 58%, 53%, and 53%, respectively) [28].”
• Eco-Efficiency of a Lithium-Ion Battery for Electric Vehicles: Influence of Manufacturing Country and Commodity Prices on GHG Emissions and Costs (2019, background): “Most LIB Batteries 2019, 5, 23 9 of 17 cost assessments focus on LIBs without specific details regarding its chemistry [5,50]; nevertheless, we focus on a battery pack with NCA as active material.”
• Understanding the future of lithium: Part 1, resource model (2019, unknown): “One potential limitation of this work is the lack of consideration for short-term supply disruptions (Helbig et al., 2018), or potential knock-on effects from developing near-by or co-located deposits.”