While businesses, consumers and policymakers hope switching to electric vehicles (EVs) will help the UK to decarbonise, engineers and scientists such as Dr Jonathan Wellings, are busy ensuring that this technology is as sustainable as possible:
“While there is widespread consensus about the need to reduce carbon emissions, people are also concerned about the environmental impacts of battery production – a technology upon which we are going to rely, on the path to net zero by 2050.”
As a Lifecycle Engineer for the UK Battery Industrialisation Centre (UKBIC), Jonathan helps to collect and analyse data on the production and impact of the state-of-the-art batteries found in modern EVs and model how this might change in the future.
“Giving manufacturers the data they need on how their battery production processes are going to affect the environment is a very important step if the UK is going to maintain its leading role in this technology,” he says.
It’s unsurprising, then, that UKBIC, the UK’s national battery manufacturing development facility, collaborated with RECOVAS, an innovative consortium working to create a circular economy for EV batteries at a commercial scale.
With funding from the UK Government’s Advanced Propulsion Centre, the consortium also includes a new number of world-class organisations, including Jaguar Land Rover (JLR), BMW and Bentley; engineering company Autocraft Solutions; energy storage firm Connected Energy; the University of Warwick as well as metal recycler EMR.
So, how can UKBIC help RECOVAS achieve its goals?
“UKBIC can be extremely useful to a project such as RECOVAS because we have access to our own battery cell manufacturing line. Our existing collaboration with RECOVAS partner JLR has also yielded a good amount of data on their production of battery packs,” he says.
This experience has helped Jonathan develop environmental and economic models for the total lifecycle impact of a battery pack – a key part of UKBIC’s contribution to RECOVAS.
“The lifecycle models we’re creating cover everything from the extraction of raw materials to the production of cells from these materials and then the manufacturing of the battery packs themselves.”
By working closely with the other RECOVAS partners, Jonathan has been able to further enhance these models:
“Thanks to our partners at Autocraft, we've been able to include data for the ‘triage-for-repair’ process for battery packs which can be reused in a second life as a stationary energy storage solution.
“We've also been given data from our partners Connected Energy who are using these repaired battery packs as part of their network.”
“Finally, if the battery pack isn’t able to be used again it is taken through to a recycling stage and data provided to us by EMR is helping us model how these sustainably recycled materials could be fed back into the production of new battery packs, as part of a circular economy.”
Of course, almost every EV on the road today will have many years of useful life ahead of it, so how does Jonathan and his team go about modelling their impact accurately?
“We calculate how much energy the vehicle will use over its lifespan – based on an assumption that it will travel about 200,000 kilometres. The battery represents about a quarter of the vehicle’s weight, so we assign about a quarter of that overall impact and energy use to the battery,” says Jonathan.
When it comes to modelling the economics of a circular economy, meanwhile, his team focuses on both the battery’s depreciating value over the course of a vehicle’s life and its potential use for energy storage or recycling.
“Part of my role has been to predict and model to what extent there will be a market for these batteries for reuse and recycling,” he adds.
“By working with the RECOVAS consortium, we’re better able to predict how this future circular economy can work now and be improved upon in the future. In the long term, that will mean EV batteries are more sustainable and efficient – and RECOVAS shows that work has already started.”
