Will the Lithium-ion battery recycling market surpass $20 billion (current USD) before 2031?
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What will be the share of lithium consumption in 2030 in the United States met by lithium that was recycled or repurposed in the United States?
Will the famed South American lithium triangle (Bolivia, Chile, and Argentina) overtake Australia in lithium production before 2031?
EV Battery Supply Chains and EU Regulations: 3 Scenarios
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A lot of recent expansions/constructions of recycling facilities announced just in thepast few days:
Ecobat to Build New Lithium-Ion Battery Recycling Facility in Arizona
CASA GRANDE, Ariz., Feb. 20, 2023 /PRNewswire/ -- Ecobat, the global leader in battery recycling, is building its third lithium-ion battery recycling facility and its first in North America. The new facility in Casa Grande, Arizona will initially produce 10,000 estimated tons of recycled material per year, with plans to expand capacity to satisfy the increasing need to recycle lithium-ion batteries.
This EV battery recycling plant in Ohio is planning a huge expansion
Bolstered by federal funds, Cirba Solutions is growing fast to meet rising demand for recycled metals and minerals.
Researchers invent easier, less expensive way to recycle batteries
Lithium-ion rechargeable batteries are already widely being used in electronic devices and electric vehicles, enabling an accelerating shift towards clean energy. But they come with environmental and human costs, which must be mitigated.
Materials in batteries, such as lithium, nickel, cobalt metals, and graphite, are increasingly scarce and expensive. Mining these materials requires a lot of energy and water. And as the demand is only accelerating, we are rapidly running out of the ingredients for Li-ion batteries, but demand is only accelerating. We need to reuse valuable components, but recycling batteries is difficult.
Researchers from Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) have invented a material that solves these issues, making the process of extracting the ingredients for reuse easy, economical, cleaner, and more sustainable.
A battery materials recycling company is doubling down on Northern Nevada with plans to build a new facility for extracting materials from lithium-ion batteries.
By the time Aqua Metals fully builds out its commercial battery recycling campus just east of Reno-Sparks, the facility will be able to produce materials equivalent to 100,000 electric vehicle battery packs per year, said President and CEO Steve Cotton.
“Our plant is a giga-recycling facility with 5.5 gigawatt hours of ultimate capacity,” Cotton said. “That’s a lot.”
@PhilippSchoenegger Made a very slight edit (the No resolution criteria was identical to the Yes criteria) and set live. Let me know if this looks okay!
@Gaia Sorry for that oversight!
The full negative resolution criteria should probably be something like to capture that it has to be continuously below 20 billion to resolve negatively.
This question will resolve as No if any reputable firm (including but not limited to the three cited above) estimates the lithium-ion battery recycling market to be lower than $20 billion for every year up to (and including) 2030.
Other than that, looks good, thanks!
@PhilippSchoenegger I went ahead and made this change by just removing the paragraph about No resolution and just saying it resolves as No otherwise to avoid confusion.
On the sections of the fine print quoted below, if it's okay with you I'd prefer we just remove them.
If one reputable source resolves this question either positively and negatively, leading to resolution, later estimates by other sources will not lead to re-resolution of this question.If two or more reputable sources published/discovered at the same time disagree on the size of the market cap (with at least one indicating a market cap of above $20 billion), Metaculus administrators will wait for three independent sources to publish their estimates for 2030 (or earlier, if a market cap of $20 billion is surpassed for a previous year) and side with the majority position, i.e. where two reports outvote one report.
And replace them with
If one credible source results in a resolution of Yes later estimates or revisions by that source or other sources will be irrelevant for the purposes of this question.
The second paragraph I think makes things too complicated and I think this question would be a lot more resolvable if we just have the threshold be any credible estimate qualifies, even if other estimates conflict. What do you think?
@RyanBeck Sounds good, I was actually looking for the one time you had suggested this before to see if it'd apply here too but couldn't find it in the morning. Happy for it to ahead as it is now!
PhilippSchoenegger
·Lithium-Ion Battery Recycling Market to Cross USD 14.90 Billion by 2030 owing to Rising Demand for EVs and ESS