Analyzing Production, Recycling, and Supply Chain Risks for Battery Minerals in Electric Vehicles and Stationary Storage

This dissertation seeks to understand the long-term implications of uncertain energy storage deployments and chemistries on battery mineral infrastructure. We analyzed supply chain risks, production capacity, and recycling in use-case scenarios that varied battery chemistry and demand. We first analyzed tradeoffs between battery mineral supply chain risks and battery performance characteristics for global stationary storage. We compared electrochemical batteries, including lithium-ion batteries (LIBs), and found that lithium iron phosphate (LFP) generally has the fewest supply risks despite high material needs and low specific energy. LFP may be the most appealing choice for stationary storage installations where energy and power density are not essential. Our results indicate that supply chain risks for lithium nickel manganese cobalt oxide (NMC) 811 are similar to NMC 111. However, surprisingly, in our framework, the nickel in NMC 811 has more environmental impacts than the cobalt in NMC 111. Our research on global material production capacity for scenarios of LIB chemistry mixes and electric vehicle (EV) car deployments suggests that meeting global demand for refined cobalt may be challenging in 1 to 15 years, even under high production capacity levels. Class 1 nickel demand in EV cars may surpass production capacity in 15 to 20 years under average and high production levels. Our findings indicate that nickel composition in spent end-of-life (EOL) EV batteries in the U.S. will remain high relative to cobalt or lithium in the next 30 years, regardless of which battery chemistry becomes dominant in the market. High nickel content may alleviate recyclers' concerns about recent developments to swap out nickel- and cobaltconcentrated chemistries for LFPs. The mass of U.S. EOL battery materials in all scenarios surpasses our slow, medium, and fast growth cases for U.S. recycling capacity. The findings of this thesis are relevant to policies that aim to reduce long-term risks to battery materials.