Climate Tech Reporter David Roberts discusses battery recycling with ceo of a company that is working on scaling up a newer fossil fuel free method of melting down and separating battery metals. This method has advantages of not burning up most of the valuables and sending them into the open atmosphere as well as not requiring a constant stream of harsh chemical feed, or having chemical waste.
Today his small scale plant is handling mostly the waste from faulty primary manufacturing, and is looking to scale up in time for the 2030 boom in lithium battery recycling.
Efficiently loss makes them net negative. But ideally they’re net zero.
I don’t think it works like that. When you lose energy in an inefficiency, it’s neither deleted from existence nor stored in an inefficiency box, it’s released as heat or chemicals back into the atmosphere. When your internal combustion engine only gets 40% of the energy from combustion turned into moving your vehicle forward, the only thing that means is that you need 2.5x more fuel and emissions than a perfectly efficient system would
That’s true for fossil fuels, but not renewables.
If producing synthetic methane or biofuel pulls 100g of carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere, but the whole process of producing the fuel is only 80% efficient, then you can only burn 80g of carbon dioxide. That’s net negative.
This is different that the efficiency of the ICE, which of course means the carbon still ends up in the atmosphere.
What so 20% of carbon in the production ends up as some kind of slag? That’s a pretty slow way to sequester. For at scale sequestration, I would rather see more permanent and efficient systems.
I mean, I’m all for capturing the methane given off by farms and landfills anyway and using that to generate what it can, but I don’t think that’s a wise choice to base large segments of the economy on. It could account for maybe a few megawatts of the 200-400 giga watts we need.
Its a battery. So only to be used in off-peak or as a dense fuel where we havent yet built electric lines above roads to power busses and trains
Batteries are charged in off peak, but may be used during peak to flatten out the grid and to make up for low solar/wind days
I don’t think biofuel is net zero or net negative at all. The production has byproducts (some of which are useful) and the use in cars still produces carbon monoxide, nitrogen oxides, hydrocarbons, and VOCs. Some of those less than gasoline, most about the same or slightly less, but more when it comes to nitrogen oxides and VOCs. Here is a dense but very informative meta analysis on it.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7735313/
That’s not power to gas. I prefer synthetic methane.