The focus of this presentation will be on the over ten-year effort on chemical looping combustion and gasification conducted at the University of Kentucky on the Iron-based oxgen carrier development, attrition, iron enrichment and direct iron production. UK IDEA has been working on bimetallic OC using red mud from a bauxite refinery and empowered by low content of copper oxide to tune the heat of reaction of OC matching the fuel heating value. During CLC operation with iron-based OC, Fe cycles between oxidation states in reactor environments, which experiences chemical, mechanical and thermal stress and can lead to attrition and possible Fe migration that affects the surface morphology, porosity, and mechanical strength of the particles. UK IDEA results for cycled OC show it is possible to extract and up-concentrate iron, with up to a concentration of 89 wt% Fe₂O₃ in attrition fines from bauxite waste (with 43 wt% Fe₂O₃) during abrased attrition in the CLC process. Using this methodology, the CLC attrition process creates a valuable resource. More detailed information will be disclosed at the conference.

Designing a cost-effective process that is ready for implementation prior to the time frame of 2025-2030 is urgent for recovering valuable materials from the end-of-life lithium-ion (EoL Li-ion) batteries. This is because (1) Power generation utilities are teaming up with Li-ion battery energy storage to move towards achieving carbon neutrality; and (2) The recent year-on-year increase in EV registrations is estimated to be around 40%. In this scenario, with the assumption that the average lifespan of Li-ion batteries is 8-10 years, by 2030, about 200 kilotons of EOL Li-ion batteries will need to be recycled to support environmental conservation efforts. To address this urgency, a thermal process assisted by fluidization using CLC as principle was developed at UKy by utilizing a fuel reactor to recover the metals from the EOL Li-ion battery followed by separating the individual species in a stirred reactor. Such a process offers the advantages versus the existing technologies, which is no need of strong acids and reducing agents in the process. In this meeting, UKy will present (1) the metal recovery results using a bench-scale process, (2) improving the process performance by altering the operating parameters, e.g., temperature, etc., and (3) disclosing the underlying mechanisms for decomposing lithium oxides under reducing environments.