Recycling of Critical Materials to Meet Clean Energy Goals

The goal of the U.S. Department of Energy’s Critical Materials Institute (CMI) is to increase the resilience of supply chains for critical materials essential to the clean energy transition and decarbonization. These materials (e.g., rare earth elements, lithium, cobalt, nickel, graphite) are contained in components and devices indispensable to electric vehicles and renewable energy adoption, such as magnets and motors, hard disk drives, and batteries. In addition to developing technologies to enhance primary production and developing substitute materials and processes less reliant on critical materials, expanding and improving the recycling and recovery of materials from end-of-life products will be necessary. Current recycling methods such as pyrometallurgy can recover most of the metal value in end-of-life products, but rare earth element (REE) and lithium recovery are challenging. Moreover, pyrometallurgy and other conventional end-of-life recovery approaches often have significant energy and environmental costs. CMI has focused on developing more environmentally sustainable approaches for critical material recycling, often coupled with co-recovery of high value materials such as copper and gold that can improve economic returns. These lower impact processes may include unconventional methods such as microbiology and electrochemistry in the recovery strategy, as well as novel chemistries. Researchers must consider upstream and downstream operations, and in some cases develop complete flowsheets to maximize recovery value. Iterative economic and environmental assessments during development mitigate the risk of funding approaches with limited commercial utility. This presentation will cover a selection of critical material recycling approaches developed within CMI, an Energy Innovation Hub funded by the Advanced Manufacturing Office of the U.S. Department of Energy.