Inside Clean Energy Commodities with Mary Schilling, Yale College '20

Mary Schilling is a commodity trader at Glencore. On October 11 at the 2024 Yale Clean Energy Conference, she talked with Dr. Laurent Pilon of the U.S. Department of Energy’s ARPA-E program about critical materials in the circular economy of batteries. The Yale Clean Energy Forum had the chance to catch up with Mary afterward to hear more about her industry-leading knowledge of the critical materials that are enabling the clean energy transition. This interview has been edited for clarity and length.

I wanted to touch on some of the topics you brought up in your talk. I was wondering first about the collection feedstocks you brought up, and how that’s a big bottleneck—maybe one of the biggest bottlenecks—in the US market at this point. At this time, what do Glencore’s feedstocks look like?

I would say we have two arms to the recycling. First, we have what we would call our traditional recycling. That is focused on electronic scrap, essentially: consumer electronics, post-consumer, post-manufacturing, and industrial wastes—essentially anything that has precious metals of any kind that we can recover in our primary smelter. Our other arm is lithium-ion batteries. We can accept whole batteries or shredded batteries. A battery can come as a huge pack and get broken down into smaller modules and then into individual cells. We can receive everything from cells to packs for end-of-life lithium-ion batteries. Then we also take production scraps, including components like the copper foils that make up the batteries. If there’s anything in the production process that goes wrong, we can take and process that scrap as well. It’s a broad mix. Basically, we’ll take in any electronics except for a whole computer—we’re the level after that. The balance of material is quite important, and in a whole laptop there’s quite a bit of extra plastic and other things that we don’t necessarily want to put in the smelter because it will get burnt off. To avoid that, we try to get down as much as possible to the metal-bearing components, and that’s what we’ll take in. We don’t personally do that—we’ll purchase things like circuit boards from another scrapyard.

Can you share a little more on refining capacity in the United States? Why do you say the United States needs to build capacity?

When I talk about the need to build up capacity here, I’m referring to the post-shred stage—the actual refining of metals. North America doesn’t have much capacity to handle the anticipated volume of materials. If we were to collect everything that’s out there today, we don’t currently have the refining capacity to actually get the metals out of it. And in order to actually meet the growing demand as electrification becomes more of a common global goal, we’ll also need more capacity. Take the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) for example. It has required that, for electric vehicles (EVs) to get the tax credit, there needs to be an increasing percentage of recycled content in the batteries over time. For US producers to meet that demand, we don’t quite have the capacity, but there’s going to be a need for it.

Where is all the excess material that we’re not able to recycle ending up today?

We in the United States only collect about five to ten percent of our electronic scrap that could be recycled. In Europe it’s a bit better, about fifty percent of that material, but it’s not incredibly high anywhere. Therefore, a lot of it is going directly to the landfill. Of the material that is collected to be recycled, a lot of that material is going overseas. If it’s a company that’s attempting to not do business with China, I would say it’s primarily going to Southeast Asian countries, Korea, or Indonesia. But otherwise, it will probably end up in China.

You talked earlier about co-locating as a way of reducing the tremendous costs and emissions associated with transporting materials all over the world. What does that look like in practice?

It involves a lot of partnerships. Glencore is a mining and refining company, and that’s specifically what we do well. So for co-location, an ideal setup would look like operating next to a battery production factory, which is likely co-owned by an automotive company like Toyota or Honda as well as a battery manufacturer like Samsung or Panasonic. Having that battery factory next to a shredder and a refinery is essential for taking away the hazard of transporting shredded materials and the cost of transporting the refined metals. Since refining is a chemical process, especially if we get to the goal of hydrometallurgical refining, all the materials are in liquid form. It takes a lot of energy and therefore cost to crystallize the materials so they’re in a transportable state. If we could avoid that step by co-locating with a battery production factory, we could essentially ship the liquid form that they need to make the batteries directly into the factory and reduce the costs and the hazards involved. There’s also an assumption that if you’re in an area where there is already a car production or battery production facility it will be easier to get the permitting and regulations in place with the local municipality.

It would take a partnership between an automotive company, a battery manufacturer, and a recycler with a refinery. We are currently looking to build that out. Currently the closest we are getting is a facility in Europe where we are developing a hydrometallurgical refinery and potentially co-locating. Even if we do not co-locate with a battery producer, we can co-locate with the stage before battery production—the pCAM, which is the pre-cathode active material. When you hear of NMC, the nickel-manganese-cobalt is referring to the cathode active material. If we can co-locate our refinery with a pCAM, at least, we can produce that first step with the liquid product and take away the transportation step.

For these sorts of projects, it can take up to ten years to construct a plant. Do you think there are inefficiencies that can be cut to speed up the building process?

One piece that could help is permitting. On the regulatory side, if there were fewer permitting requirements and fewer regulatory requirements, we could get to the actual building stage much quicker. Permitting can take two to three years to get on some of these facilities. I think if there was a little ease, or if the government worked a little better with the recyclers trying to get their permitting, that would help the timeline. Additionally, I would say one of the other main pieces we’re seeing specifically on the battery side is that, due to the lack of consistency of the feedstock and technologies, these refineries can take many years to “perfect the secret sauce” so to speak. The actual output product, whether it’s sulfate products or the actual black mass, can take years of work to bring to a quality that the battery producer will accept. I think if there was more standardization on the chemistries and the technologies of the batteries, the output product would be much more consistent, and so it would limit how long it takes for the battery producers to accept the recycled materials.

You brought up the standardization of batteries. It’s a nice idea, but we’re also in a time of rapid development and competition over battery technologies. Is it really possible to set standards at this time?

I think it’s important to keep talking about standard technologies because, even if not total standardization, there might be a level of agreement between producers about, say, where the battery will be in your car. That sort of thing I think we could reach an agreement on. But the technology for each of these companies is the bread and butter, the thing they’re really competing over. We haven’t gotten to the point of the internal combustion engine where, I imagine, there’s a pretty set engine design that you’d find in most cars, and what the companies play around with on each car are the other premium features. Here, companies are really competing on the actual battery. With some chemistries you can go farther but not as fast, and with others you can go fast but your battery won’t last as long. I agree that standardization is a nice idea, but I don’t know how realistic it is in actuality. That’s why I think the more important thing right now is to develop recycling technologies that can handle many types of batteries. Easier said than done, obviously, but recyclers need to adapt to the fact that we’ll be in a changing environment at least for the foreseeable future.