FOREFRONT

Tarascon Jean-Marie
College de France, Paris, France; Reseau sur le Stockage Electrochimique de l’Energie (RS2E), FR CNRS 3459, France

Our planet faces formidable sustainability challenges with on the one side the frightening
climatic consequences of global warming from the combustion of fossil fuels and on the
other side the world’s need for energy which will at least double within the next 20 years
while fossil fuels are limited. Great hopes are placed on the use of renewable energies such
as wind, wave, and solar which can generate huge amounts of electricity. However,
because of their intermittency, the use of such energies will require the major develop-
ment of electrical energy storage. Today pumped hydroelectric storage handles 98% of
the 1.5% electricity we are storing; the rest (2%) being handled by various systems among
which batteries. Similarly, batteries are sorely needed to facilitate the development of
electric transportation. Rechargeable Li-ion batteries (LiBs), by having the highest energy
density of any such device, have conquered consumer electronics and emerged as the
technology of choice for powering electric vehicles (EVs), and show great promise for
providing load-leveling for mass storage of renewable energy.
Present LiBs are using Li-based inorganic compounds (e.g., LiCoO2, LiFePO4,
LiMn2O4), carbon, or Si as the negative and Li-based salts (e.g., LiPF6, LiTFSI) as the
electrolyte. Due to the massive deployment of LiBs in portable devices, the battery sector
has become the second largest demander of Li today with a 27% share of the yearly Li
production. It should be recalled that nearly 0.15 kg of Li is necessary to produce
1 kWh of battery that is nearly 4 kg of Li for the 25e30 kWh of batteries needed to
power EVs having 180 km autonomy. Those numbers regarding Li needs become
colossal when considering the foreseen development of EVs, which could reach 50%
of the worldwide multimillion cars fleet by 2050. Such numbers are not expected to
decrease since the upcoming battery technologies alternative to Li-ion (Li-S or Li-O2)
are also using Li-metal. They could even further explode, reaching 400 kt/y in 2050
as compared to 36 kt/y today, if the Li-ion technology is successful in capturing the
large-volume grid application market.
Such evolutions can occasionally trigger severe concerns about the global reserve of
lithium as dramatically expressed in several newspapers a few years ago. Although some
fears regarding Li-shortage were too alarmist, they had the advantage to raise the com-
munity’s awareness of the need for setting studies toward the development of models
to forecast the worldwide Li reserves under various scenarios, questioning once for

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good the issue of Li-recycling and its associated chemical processes while encouraging
researchers to eventually look for some possible alternatives to Li. Within this context,
there is no better time to bring out this new book entitled Lithium Process Chemistry e
Resources, Extraction, Batteries, and Recycling as it addresses in a clear, pedagogical, and
comprehensive way, through its eight chapters, issues regarding the Li production, its
reserves, and its recycling aspects.
The field of LiB being a lucrative domain because of their foreseen applications in
large-volume markets, venture capitalists like to paint a frightening scenario in which
Li could become as precious as gold for the years to come, with the Andean South
American countries becoming soon the “new Middle East.” Aside from these business
objectives, what is really the truth? Are the Li reserves both limited and geographically
concentrated in a few risky countries? Such questions will find an answer in Chapter 1,
which not only considers global lithium resources but also the economy of their
exploitation.
Recycling strategies being dependent upon whether Li is part of the electrode
material or of the electrolyte, it is important to recall the fundamentals of LiBs so that
the reader can grab the scientific background, including physicochemical and electro-
chemical aspects. This is nicely done in this book as the Chapters 2, 4, and 5 are respec-
tively devoted to the fundamentals of Li batteries (LIBs), the processes in going from a
Li-based electrode and the types of electrolytes used presently or to be used in the future.
All together these 3 chapters establish a sound scientific platform for understanding better
the complexity of recovering Li from Li-based batteries. As scientists, we also owed
explanations to the public regarding the greenness and sustainability aspects of LiBs which
may be questioned from life cycle assessment’s (LCA) results. Moreover, within the
foreseeable production of billions of LiBs per year, recycling will undoubtedly become
more important than ever in the next decades, and this not only for Li but for all energy-
related materials linked to the field of energy production, harvesting, conversion, and
storage. Today’s pyrometallurgy and hydrometallurgy processes to recover Li will have
to be improved and new ones developed to meet the stringent European norms which
can be viewed as incentives to favor recycling. These recovery aspects are comprehen-
sively described through Chapters 3 and 7 related to the Li-production processes and
the LIB recycling, respectively.
Venture capitalists should not be totally blamed since painting catastrophic situations
frequently raises the awareness of scientists and push them to find alternative solutions.
Let us simply recall that it was the 1972 oil crisis which pushed scientists to deviate
from high-temperature synthesis processes and to discover the alternative and less-
consuming “Chimie douce” approach, which is now used worldwide. Equally, five years
ago due to fears of Li-shortage, chemists/electrochemists searched for alternative
solutions to LIB systems. New technologies have emerged such as the use of organic
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electrodes, either in nonaqueous or aqueous electrolytes, are subject to intense studies as

will be reported in Chapter 6.
The importance of sustainable development has rekindled interests for LCA studies.
While LCA is becoming very fashionable these days, most people do not really appreciate
the complexity of such analysis which considers all the steps pertaining to the full-chain
process involved in going from material production to its consumption and its recycling.
LCA analyses for batteries are worrisome as they indicate, for instance, that 380 kWh of
energy is needed to produce 1 kWh of battery with the overall process releasing 80 kg of
CO2. At the system levels, LCAs are also used to recommend which of the envisioned
development scenarios is the most valuable, sustainability-wise. Addressing these different
aspects required humungous amounts of data combined with various hypotheses which
can lead, for the same problem, to totally different results. Caution must then be exer-
cised as the results of such analyses are dangerously used by our governing institutions
for making decisions. Thus it is essential to inform the community on how such calcu-
lations are made, what are the uncertainties, and this is what Chapter 8 is doing very well.
Wandering through these 8 chapters, the reader will learn and realize that by
combining future brine exploitation with an efficient Li-recycling process involving
the collect of battery elements as urban mines and the development of novel sustainable
chemical recovery processes, the wide deployment of EVs will not put the Li reserves at
risk for many centuries.
In conclusion, we should acknowledge the authors to bring forward all the aspects
dealing with the Li recovery chemistry, the sustainability of Li-based batteries, and their
recycling via diverse chemical processes in a single and well-written book, which is timely,
as recycling has become a burning hot topic nowadays. No doubt that this book will
benefit the battery community, but also the battery users and more so numerous students
and scientists who want to launch and/or switch their research endeavors toward the recy-
cling aspects of energy-related materials for the years to come. Let us hope that it will also
help, by showing the multifaceted aspects of the chemical recovery processes, to revitalize
the image of “recycling chemistry,” too frequently associated with an old and boring
chemistry. Lastly, owing to the foreseen importance of recycling linked to today’s ener-
getic transition, it has become imperative for our university/engineering institutions to
launch masters devoted to the recycling problematic. This book written in a concise
manner could serve as a bible to support such new courses.