Question, for anyone out there who might know: How much lithium (and of what quality) can be recovered from a typical modern li-on battery? How difficult is the process?
> I mean when you get a rate that high, it seems like it must be just a relatively heavy element, and a metal, like Gold, and relatively unreactive (just carrying ions and such).
This is the opposite of the truth. Lithium is not dense at all (~.53g/cm^3), especially for a metal, and as a Group 1 metal is extroardinarily reactive - if you cut lithium it will oxidize as you watch, and if you expose it to water is will explode into flaming chunks.
> I imagine they don't get to 100% because they just don't bother to heat it high enough to melt things in there with a ridiculously high melting point and risk creative copper fumes and whatnot (from some metals evaporating). i.e. it's still easy, they just don't want to.
No. Lithium has a very low melting point (roughly 180C/355F).
Furthermore, your contention that a process with an efficiency of 93% should be easy to bring to 100% is so off base I don't even know where to begin. Squeezing out the last few percentage points is the hardest part!
My chemistry is very bad, but that seems to be in 3M HCl with added H2O2 at 80°C. Combining that mix with Lithium batteries, to me, sounds like a process that may be difficult to safely scale up from the lab.
So, if battery life is 10 years, and we can recover 93% of the lithium, in 90 years we'll have lost roughly half of it, and in 400 years we'll be left with 5% of our present supply.
That is: we lose half the original amount after 9 recyclings, and 95% in 40. Scale time to exhaust known lithium reserves accordingly in the event battery life is longer or shorter than stated above.
The lithium does not dissapear. If we ever do 'run out' of lithium (or similar resources), then we would still be able to mine it from our own waste. The only question is how expensive the resource has to get before it becomes economical to do so.
But considering that, oh, say, batteries returned for recycling are going to be a relatively rich source of lithium, the recycling waste itself is no more viable a source than any other ore.
You can separate minerals from one another given sufficient energy inputs, but then you're getting at the issue of EROEI for the entire battery storage chain. Pretty much anything, even gold, can be extracted from seawater, given sufficient energy investment.
