Battery metals
- Also known as
- critical minerals, energy transition metals
Battery metals are the metals and minerals used to make rechargeable batteries, particularly lithium-ion batteries for electric vehicles and energy storage. The group usually includes lithium, nickel, cobalt, manganese and graphite, and often copper, which is essential to electrification.
What are battery metals?
Rechargeable lithium-ion batteries rely on a small group of mined materials. The cathode typically contains lithium with combinations of nickel, cobalt, manganese or iron phosphate, and the anode is usually graphite. Copper and aluminum serve as current collectors and wiring. Demand for these materials has grown with electric vehicles and grid energy storage.
Several of them appear on the U.S. Geological Survey’s list of critical minerals, which identifies minerals essential to the economy whose supply chains are vulnerable to disruption. The International Energy Agency has analyzed how clean energy technologies are raising demand for them.
How they are produced
Battery metals come from very different deposits and processes:
- Lithium from hard-rock ores, such as spodumene, concentrated by methods including froth flotation, and from brines concentrated by evaporation or direct extraction.
- Nickel from sulfide ores, commonly concentrated by flotation, and from laterite ores treated by leaching or smelting.
- Cobalt, mostly recovered as a by-product of copper and nickel production.
- Graphite, natural flake graphite commonly upgraded by flotation, or synthetic graphite made from petroleum coke.
- Copper, from sulfide ores by flotation and smelting, or from oxide ores by heap leaching and SX-EW.
Why processing efficiency matters
Declining ore grades and complex ores mean mines must process more rock per unit of metal. Improvements in metallurgical recovery, reagent performance and water use therefore carry weight in the economics and environmental footprint of battery metal supply.
Frequently asked questions
They overlap. Critical minerals is a policy term defined by government lists, which cover many minerals beyond batteries. Battery metals is an industry term for the materials used in batteries.
Rarely. Most cobalt is produced as a by-product of copper and nickel mining.
Sources
- U.S. Geological Survey list of critical minerals, U.S. Geological Survey
- The Role of Critical Minerals in Clean Energy Transitions, International Energy Agency (IEA)