Investment needed to secure critical materials to power EU’s electric future

As EU leaders are under pressure to do more to support investments in gigafactories, European institutions are also calling for urgent action to plan for a reliable and sustainable battery materials supply chain — including new mining and recycling projects.

The European Commission says it will publish legislative proposals for raw materials critical to the battery industry in the first quarter of 2023.

On issues of materials supply the Commission is under pressure from industry representatives too including Europe’s metals association, Eurometaux, which is warning that the US Inflation Reduction Act also risks draining much-needed investment in the supply chain away from Europe.

Eurometaux sustainability director Kamila Slupek said on December 12 new rules set to be introduced as part of the EU’s Batteries Regulation must be accompanied by “an even stronger industrial plan to grow Europe’s battery materials supply chain in the face of US subsidies and China state support.

“In the next two years we need much more European investment into mining, refining, and recycling operations for battery materials,” Slupek said.

Recycling will be Europe’s best longterm opportunity to establish strategic autonomy for battery metals, she said, but the batteries market will expand rapidly this decade and no one knows now how much battery scrap will be available by 2030.

Eurometaux said in a study published last spring that Europe needs to combine long-term recycling growth with new primary metals supply and make “strategic choices on how it will supply its accelerating metals demand”.

According to the study, the EU will require significant new supplies of nickel, lithium, and cobalt for its domestic battery cathode manufacturing plans. Of these metals, Europe only has a significant existing market for nickel, which is mainly used in stainless steel.

By 2050, batteries will be Europe’s major use for lithium, nickel, and cobalt under all the study’s scenarios, with new demand reaching up to 3500% of Europe’s lithium consumption today, 350% of cobalt, and 110% of nickel.

The battery market will need to be the subject of regular attention because uncertain technology developments after 2030 will likely impact these long-term projections, and so regular attention will be required to the battery market.

For the next 14 years, Europe’s energy transition will predominantly require new primary metals supply from mining and refining, Eurometaux said.

However, plans for most new mines expected to be started up in Europe face an uncertain future due to lack of local acceptance, technical uncertainties or permitting challenges.

Secondary supply from recycled sources will take a more prominent role as current clean energy technologies begin reaching their end of life.

After 2040, recycling could be Europe’s major supply source for most transition metals, alongside the continued need for primary metal, but Eurometaux said this would need major efforts to build new recycling capacity and overcome bottlenecks.

Research by Energy Storage Journal shows little has changed since the European Commission’s lofty ambitions for lithium ion battery recycling were unveiled several years ago.

A report by Germany’s independent non-profit environmental research body the Oko-Institut, published in March 2018, told the Commission that the best thing it could do was to follow the example of the lead acid industry in recycling batteries to create a “sustainable” process for conserving raw materials and repurposing EV batteries for energy storage.

That report — ‘Ensuring a Sustainable Supply of Raw Materials for

Electric Vehicles’— showed that China was already “well ahead” in having a transparent structure that efficiently regulated the use of materials in the electro-mobility sector.

Fast forward to the present day and the needle on the Commission’s sustainability dial has barely moved into more positive territory.

In its most recent study, ‘Mobility sector: roadmap for responsible sourcing of raw materials until 2050’, published in August, the institute notes that lithium is still not being recycled in the EU.

And the study warns that while there is a transition in cell chemistries away from “expensive resources like cobaltand nickel-containing lithium nickel manganese cobalt oxide towards cheaper materials like lithium iron phosphate… there is as yet no recycling concept specified for LFP, as the focus of material recovery has been on cobalt, nickel and copper”.

The study also highlights a growing trend where used batteries are, in the institute’s words, donated to countries outside the EU for use in projects such as solar power systems in Africa.

The institute says it is hard to justify the shipping of old batteries to lowand middle-income countries while using new batteries to cover the need for electricity storage in the EU.

“In many countries around the world, recycling structures for LIBs are still lacking. Exporting the batteries back to Europe for recycling, as often announced, is also nearly impossible, as shipping companies are reluctant to take on board LIBs at their end of life due to the risk of fire and the resulting insurance costs.”

Now the institute is calling for restrictions on exports of cars and used batteries from the EU and a program of “mandatory recycling”.