Selective Metal Recovery: Innovating Leaching from Lfp-NMC Cathode Mixtures in Lithium-Ion Batteries

Lithium-ion batteries lie at the heart of the energy transition and electric mobility. In the coming years, numerous gigafactories and recycling plants will be constructed worldwide to produce and recycle batteries for electric vehicles. While recycling plants currently focus on batteries for electric vehicle, there will also be a need to develop the recycling industry for smaller batteries, such as those used in electric bicycles, a market that is rapidly expanding. The chemical processes required to recycle these batteries may not necessarily be the same as those for batteries in electric vehicle due to differences in the composition of the materials to be processed. For electric vehicles, the composition will be well established as the materials will mainly come from either NMC (LiNixMnyCozO2) or LFP (LiFePO4) technologies. However, for batteries in electric bicycle and electric scooter, the materials to be processed will be a mix of NMC and LFP technologies. Therefore, it will be necessary to develop a flexible process capable of extracting metals from the feed which the composition will vary. Furthermore, the hydrometallurgical processes used to treat these materials must be capable of recovering cobalt, nickel, manganese, and lithium despite the presence of varying and significant concentrations of iron, which is generally challenging in hydrometallurgy. This talk will demonstrate how we can take advantage of the physicochemistry of transition metals in the presence of phosphate to develop an effective leaching process that selectively dissolves cobalt, nickel, manganese, and lithium from mixtures of NMC and LFP, resulting in a sufficiently pure leachate to facilitate downstream purification steps through liquid-liquid extraction after leaching.