Nam Juny spent 30 years exporting used Korean cars and auto parts around the world before identifying an opportunity in the emerging global battery market.
In 2018, the 57-year-old scrapyard owner, a veteran of the trading arm of the defunct Daewoo Group, founded Bastro, a Seoul-based startup that repurposes electric vehicle batteries for other uses. His logic is simple: An EV battery will die twice—once when it can’t power the car, and then when it can’t power anything else.
Second Life is often overlooked. Once a battery capacity has been reduced to around 70-80% of its original capacity, it is no longer suitable for use in a vehicle. But it could still potentially be used for other purposes, from lighting streets and homes to powering appliances and providing energy storage.
Bastro turns EV batteries into portable power units for use in the home during power outages. It’s an example of “upcycling” — repurposing batteries without breaking them down into their component parts — as opposed to “recycling,” which involves dismantling spent batteries and reassembling them into new metal supplies.
To achieve a “circular economy” for batteries, they must eventually be recycled. But Nam argues that battery recycling is a complex, dirty and energy-intensive process that should be postponed as long as possible.
“I have a ’10+10′ principle, which means that the average EV battery should be able to last 10 years in the car and then another 10 years for other purposes,” he told the Financial Times at his workshop. said in the interview. in Seoul. “It’s a horrible waste to have a battery sent for recycling when it’s only half used.”
Still, it’s unclear how regulators will ensure batteries are available for “upcycling” before they are eventually disassembled. This may not have been a problem when the number of used EV batteries was relatively small, but it could become a problem in the next decade as electric vehicles become more common in Europe and North America.
“This is an important aspect that the industry has yet to address,” said Tim Bush, an EV battery analyst at UBS in Seoul.
The many challenges Nam faced in Seoul help illustrate some of the problems the wider industry may face. One is safety. Bastro’s power units are made from recycled nickel-manganese-cobalt (NMC) batteries exclusively produced by a leading battery manufacturer in Korea. But NMC batteries have an unfortunate history of catching fire, and all the batteries he uses require exhaustive testing before they can be used by consumers. “If one of my units caught fire in someone’s house, we’d go bankrupt and I’d go to jail,” he said.
Bush noted that in the future, used EV batteries will have to be tested on a large scale, not only for safety purposes but also to determine the value of individual cells.
“With a car with an internal combustion engine, you have an odometer and you can see how many miles the car has driven,” Bush said. “But with batteries, there isn’t necessarily a relationship between the number of miles driven and the health of the battery.”
“What matters is how the battery is charged and at what temperature, and how the vehicle is used.”
It’s also unclear who is best positioned to capture value in the recycled battery supply chain. Battery manufacturers, recyclers, manufacturers, dealers, leasing companies, insurance companies, scrap yard owners and individual vehicle owners may all find themselves vying for a piece of this new market.
For example, individual consumers who have already purchased a car may be content to let an electric car manufacturer buy batteries from them. Another solution is for the manufacturer to retain ownership of the battery. But if drivers have nothing to do with the battery’s future, they may have little incentive to take care of it. The fewer batteries left in a reusable state, the greater the environmental penalty for the entire EV supply chain.
In the meantime, Nam is focusing on developing his product and expanding his network of recycling stations, awaiting the supply and demand for used batteries that he has long predicted will materialize.
“We’re making products with batteries that still have 70 to 80 percent of their capacity, but at 10 to 20 percent of the cost of new products,” Nam said. “We’re turning bronze into gold.”
christian.davies@ft.com