Name: The Hunt for EV Battery Minerals Is Pushing Startups Deeper and Higher
Uploaded: 2023-12-06T10:30:00Z
Duration: 5 min 53 s
Description: As electric-vehicle adoption rises across the globe, the race to find new deposits of critical minerals like lithium and nickel is driving miners to explore the deepest mines, the ocean floor and even space. WSJ’s George Downs explores the new frontiers of EV battery mining. Illustration: George Downs/The Wall Street Journal

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As electric-vehicle adoption rises across the globe, the race to find new deposits of critical minerals like lithium and nickel is driving miners to explore the deepest mines, the ocean floor and even space. WSJ’s George Downs explores the new frontiers of EV battery mining. Illustration: George Downs/The Wall Street Journal

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The Hunt for EV Battery Minerals Is Pushing Startups Deeper and Higher

This little rock has come from the bottom of the Pacific Ocean, some 14,000 feet down. Now it may look like a lump of coal, but it's actually dense with cobalt, nickel, manganese, and copper, some of the key minerals in ev batteries. The fact that a company has been to the bottom of the ocean and brought this to the surface shows just how far we're now willing to go in the hunt for the minerals that will power our electric vehicles. See, as demand for electric vehicles increases, the need for their critical minerals is set to explode and dramatically outpace supply. That's pushed some startups to pioneer new techniques that could fundamentally reshape how we find and extract the minerals for our batteries. So what do the new frontiers of EV battery mineral mining look like? Let's start with this rock. It's a test sample that comes from here, a huge area 1,000 miles off the coast of Mexico called the Clarion Clipperton Zone. And down there, our rock isn't exactly a rare find. There are thousands of these potato-sized nodules. Holding another one of them is The Metals Company CEO, Gerard Barron.

We're very fortunate that our nodules literally lay on the ocean floor a little bit like golf balls on a driving range. We don't have to go and dig or drill or tunnel to find them. They're literally laying there waiting for us to pick them up.

The company's plan is to send down robots like this to collect the nodules and bring them up to the surface for processing. Now, while companies have wanted to mine these fields for decades, a combination of technological limitations and regulatory hurdles have prevented anyone from exploiting the resource. But that could all change if and when the UN's International Seabed Authority finalizes its regulations on seabed mining. So far, the governing body has given out 22 licenses to contractors to explore the ocean floor, but not to mine it.

It's a bit of a land grab, and I think as we move closer to the final mining code being adopted, which we expect no later than 2025, countries are awakening to the fact that this is an enormous economic and national security opportunity.

But as with most mining, deep seabed mining isn't without its controversy, especially as thousands of new species have been discovered down there. Some groups have called for an outright ban of the practice. Meanwhile, countries like Canada and companies like BMW and Volvo have asked for progress to be paused until protection of the marine habitat can be guaranteed. The Metals Company says that its operation will have the lightest impact on the marine ecosystem.

Some people wanna move forward in a very precautionary manner as do we. That's why we've spent now more than $400 million to fully understand those impacts.

Now, while our ocean floor minerals have been known about for decades, finding new deposits to mine can be challenging and time consuming. It usually involves setting off seismic charges or taking core samples, and then spending weeks analyzing that data. But startup Fleet Space says that its satellite network could change that.

We do an ultrasound for Mother Earth. We can't wait 15 years to find each new deposit as has been the case in mining before.

The company deploys a grid of ambient noise tomography sensors in the ground that pick up natural micro vibrations.

And they listen to the ambient rumbling of the earth and generate a three-dimensional image of the subsurface down to about 2.5 kilometers.

The data from those sensors is then collected in real time by a network of satellites, which send it off for instant processing. Fleet Space says that this gives its customers, who includes the likes of mining giant Rio Tinto, the ability to know what might lie beneath them within days as opposed to months. The company told me that usually, it can take around 600,000 meters of drilling to find a new deposit.

No one really wants to do that, and governments don't want to allow people to just drill at random until they hit things either. We don't wanna turn the world into Swiss cheese looking for the metals that are gonna sustain our energy transition.

But there's one potential source for these minerals that doesn't involve going to the bottom of the ocean or drilling lots of holes. It involves utilizing a resource that is right in front of you right now, recycling old batteries. According to analysts, there's already around 650,000 tons of battery minerals in the US alone in cars, phones, laptops, and other industrial sources. And startup Redwood Materials formed in 2017 by former Tesla CTO JB Straubel has the ambition of recovering the mineral stored in those items when they reach the end of their life, turning them back into battery materials. The company says they do this by discharging the batteries and dismantling them into their individual components. Those components are then shredded and turned into something called black mass, which goes through a hydrometallurgic process to isolate the critical minerals. Redwood says this will enable it to extract 30% of the lithium and nickel and 100% of the cobalt needed to make a cathode. The problem is, while there's set to be lots more EVs on the market over the coming decade, it will be several more years before the batteries in today's EVs reach the end of their useful life and need to be recycled. So right now, the company is mainly recycling batteries from portable electronic devices as well as manufacturing scrap, the waste product that's created when making batteries. That's still enough for the company to get through 40,000 metric tons of recyclable material a year, though it has ambitions to create enough anode and cathode materials for 5 million electric vehicles by 2030. Now, these companies may be taking different approaches, but they have something in common. They're all betting on a future where these minerals are valuable and needed and their plans have come to fruition. But right now, the price of some of these raw materials has been falling as demand for EVs softened slightly. And the more minerals like this that are discovered and mined, the cheaper they could become as they go from being something really rare and precious too, well, pretty common.