In defence of lead … and lithium

ted in the early 2010s that many of the objections, mostly about price, were being overcome.

“We’re watching lithium batteries slowly climb the energy storage chain,” he said. “They’ve started to make the jump from laptop batteries to small hand-held tools. It won’t be too long before they will be powering golf buggies and forklift trucks.”

Trinidad’s projections proved true.

Now it’s hard to find a hand-held tool — from electric screwdrivers to chainsaws to vacuum cleaners — that doesn’t have its battery counterpart. In the past four to five years lawn mowers powered by lithium batteries have entered the market for electric versions given they offer freedom from a power cable.

And yet further up the energy chain, lithium batteries now account for roughly a quarter of the motive industrial forklift sector and their market share is growing by around 2% annually.

A decade ago if you mentioned “intercalation” to lead battery engineers their minds would go blank, probably thinking that it was something consenting adults did in the privacy of their home. Talk to the equivalent lithium technician and mention how important cast-on straps are in battery manufacturing and they’d think the same. Probably worse in fact.

In part it was easy to see the confusion, there was a bigotry on both sides of the battery chemistry mixed with an enormous combination of arrogance and ignorance.

And this came from both sides.

From the lead side of thinking, lithium batteries were just another fad that the battery industry would fight off.

“We’d seen off the challenges from fuel cells, supercaps, the laughable twotonne EV1 from General Motors and even sodium sulfur batteries in cars,” one engineer said to Batteries International just before the Covid pandemic.

“We were confident that while lithium had its role to play in mobile phones and laptops but knew that it couldn’t fill the spaces needed where heavy duty energy was needed.

“And it was at a laughable cost — we were looking at $1,000/kWh for lithium batteries to power a car when a gallon of gas [petrol] was just a few dollars.”

But commentators such as Francisco Trinidad, the former director of battery technology at Exide Technologies spot-

The price of lithium batteries may be close to double that of lead batteries (given some of the extraneous features required) but other factors come into play.

The total cost of ownership can be lower for lithium. The TCO, for example, falls if forklifts are to be used 24/24 in a multiple shift operation. The batteries no longer need to be changed so the downtime of being re-charged is avoided. There’s less inventory too, with no need for the extra battery for the charging. Moreover, the battery lifetime for lithium is longer.

“This ascent up the product chain was inevitable,” says Ray Kubis, a former president of Eco-Bat and EnerSys and now the chairman of bipolar battery firm Gridtential. “The amount of money thrown each year into research by the lithium battery industry is probably the equivalent of all the money invested in R&D for lead in the past 20 years … or even longer.

“Their investments have not been wasted and we’ve watched how lithium performance has shot up. If only if lead had done the same.”

In one of the more poignant reminders of this is the fact that some of the latest lead R&D using equipment, such as the synchrotron at the US’ Argonne National Laboratory, were first used to investigate lithium batteries over 10 years ago.

And lithium research at the ANL has not stopped. Just this February, working with the Illinois Institute of Technology, the research team announced they had tested a lithium-air battery that could power a vehicle with a 1000 mile driving range on a single charge.

Larry Curtiss, team leader and Argonne Distinguished Fellow, said at the time: “The lithium-air battery has the highest projected energy density of any battery technology being considered for the next generation of batteries beyond lithium-ion.”

This was as much as four times above the present day lithium ion and Argonne said “could even power domestic airplanes and long-haul trucks”.

Finding lead R&D

Mention of the advances being made in lithium highlight the attractiveness of the sector to new researchers and why most potential PhD candidates avoid lead — after all this is a chemistry that dates back to 1859 and Gaston Planté’s first rechargeable battery.

This explains the often insufferable style of many in the lithium battery industry. They see themselves as being at the cutting edge of technology and frequently as potential saviours of the planet as we drift into a new decarbonized world powered by renewables.

The fact remains, however, that they are not potential saviours of anything but advancers of an alternative energy technology.

In particular, all the earlier criticisms of lithium batteries on safety, price and recyclability hold true, at least to some extent. For some people — a leap of faith is the only way to find the industry’s claims justifiable.

“Much of the earlier enthusiasm for lithium came from over-excited motor car journalists, ignorant politicians looking for the next bandwagon to land on and a general public hungry for something new,” was the sweeping over-statement one lead aficionado

CHOOSING THE CHEMISTRIES: THE NEXT PAGES

• No one size of battery fits all needs and the same goes for chemistries, as our cover feature articles show.

• Lead majors Sunlight and Amara Raja explain why they are among contemporaries integrating lithium into their portfolios.

• Lithium ESS proponents Freyr, Fluence and Eleven ES give us their commercial perspectives and we also go back to battery basics, to consider various competing lithium technologies.

told Batteries International quite recently.

There may be some truth in the matter but a more informed look has to check out the technology.

In the area of safety, much improvements to lithium batteries need to be made. At the time of going to press a cargo vessel carrying electric vehicles was being towed to port after a suspected EV battery fire that immobilized the ship. In February 2022, the Felicity Ace container ship sunk at sea after days battling an EV fire for days.

This January, Havila Kystruten, a Norwegian shipping firm, announced a blanket ban on EVs and hybrids from travelling in their fleet — an astonishing edict given that 80% of all new vehicles sold in Norway are electric.

A report in 2021 by IDTechEx, a research consultancy reported that onein-three EV fires occurred with ‘no obvious cause’ while the car was parked. It also noted that 17% of EV fires occur in regular driving and a quarter occur when charging.

While electric vehicles do not pose a greater fire hazard than regular cars, their fires are more difficult to put out. They require a considerably larger amount of water to extinguish. While a burning petrol or diesel vehicle may need 1,600 to 2,000 litres of water to be put out, a fire in an EV often requires as much as 11,000 litres, mainly to cool down the burning battery.

Lithium critics can also point to the huge summer of EV recalls in 2021 when GM led a crowded field of manufacturers at a cost of approximately $1 billion, for GM alone.

Claims about recyclability continue to dog the lithium sector. The image it tries to project is one of being green — decarbonizing the world and so environmentally positive.

In fact it is the opposite. Despite the best efforts of some of the cleverest researchers, there is no way yet of recycling the commonest lithium battery — LiFePO4 — at a profit. The lithium extracted is minimal and the iron and other elements have little commercial value. Instead the batteries have to be collected, smashed up into the black mass or smelted or hydrometallurgically treated. All that requires expense and energy for little of commercial value.

Recycling of lithium batteries containing cobalt, nickel and manganese can be profitable but waste battery streams carrying these metals can’t be guaranteed.

Recycling problems

Since lithium batteries cannot be put into landfill — they leach and poison the groundwater — they must be processed. The old rule on recycling lithium said that the price of recycling was 10% of every $1000 that a battery cost when new.

Another aspect of the green credentials of lithium is the cost of shipping it around — lithium mined in, say, the Atacama desert in Chile is dispatched to China where it is processed and then the cells are shipped to be made into batteries in Germany where they are put into cars that are then distributed around the world. At the end of battery life they are then shipped back to China.

But the counterpoint to all this is simply that of cost. Although the lead industry is eager to talk up the fact that the price for lithium batteries has risen in the past year and analysts suggest it is likely to remain at $150kWh for some time, the fact is that the price of lithium batteries has plummeted in the last decade from above $1,000kWh to present levels.

And even while the cost of manufacturing and shipping batteries is far higher than lead, overall the total cost of ownership of batteries for EVs can be less than lead if other factors are considered.

In the end, it’s a straightforward and astonishingly simplistic choice — lithium batteries are better than lead ones. Sometimes. And sometimes vice versa with lead over lithium.