Eighty worn-out GM electric vehicle batteries have come back as new ones. General Motors said this month it finished a pilot in which battery cells made with 100% recycled nickel, cobalt and manganese went into its first EVs, and those vehicles are now headed to customers.
Melissa Flaherty, GM’s director of sustainable EV battery ecosystem, described the project in a company post on September 22. In plain terms, the metals that sat in old packs were pulled out, refined and built into fresh cells.
From old pack to new cell
GM worked with Cirba Solutions, which recovered the 80 end-of-life batteries and recycled them at its facility. The result was “black mass,” a blend of battery materials produced by taking lithium-ion batteries apart and separating what is inside.
Black mass is only the start. It has to be turned into cathode material, and the nickel, cobalt and manganese in it help set a battery’s cost, safety and performance. GM said the recovered material became more than 12 metric tons of new cathode active material, which it called the most important part of a cell.
Testing came next. Once the cells with recycled content performed as well as cells made from virgin material, Ultium Cells built new battery cells from the cathode material. GM crews assembled them into modules and packs at Factory ZERO and Spring Hill.
This month the first vehicles with those cells came off the lines at Spring Hill Assembly and Factory Zero. They include the Cadillac LYRIQ, LYRIQ-V, VISTIQ, ESCALADE IQ and IQL, the Chevrolet Silverado EV Trail Boss and the GMC Sierra EV AT4. LG Energy Solution was among the other partners GM named.
What recycling can recover
Flaherty wrote that current processes can recover up to 95% of the nickel, cobalt and manganese in a battery and up to 80% of the lithium. The range depends on process conditions and battery chemistry, she said, and later advances could push it higher.
Raw materials are among the biggest costs in a battery cell. GM argues that reusing them can lower the price of batteries over time and cut reliance on newly mined supply.
Other uses before recycling
Recycling is often the last stop, not the first. GM’s remanufacturing and refurbishment programs aim to reuse more than 70% of pack components. Some batteries go to stationary storage first, and with Redwood Materials GM is putting roughly 10,000 second-life batteries into energy projects, among them what the company calls the largest second-life battery microgrid in North America.
Flaherty said the pilot took years of engineering, testing and logistics work, and that more EV batteries will reach the end of their lives over the next decade. GM planned to talk about the work at Climate Week NYC, where it is a title sponsor of the Nest Campus.
Sources
- How recycled minerals from GM EV batteries are helping power new ones
- Germany's new method recycles 95% of lithium-ion batteries | Kateryna Hnatyshak posted on the topic | LinkedIn
