Tracing past, present, and future battery critical elements in the United States: material flows of lithium and cobalt”

The Critical Materials Institute is an initiative by the Department of Energy to establish for the United States a more sustainable supply of rare and/or difficult to obtain materials. The Yale contribution to this project is to generate material flow analyses and future scenarios for a selection of critical materials. In our most recent effort, a detailed historical cycle was derived for lithium, a critical material widely employed in batteries. An example of the results is shown below: U.S. lithium end of life flows in different uses over time and their recovery potential.