-Policy is not comprehensive power lithium battery recycling technology route is still unclear

Policy is not comprehensive power lithium battery recycling technology route is still unclear
author:enerbyte source:本站 click498 Release date: 2022-12-28 08:40:51
abstract:
The development of new energy vehicles has driven the great development of power lithium battery industry, and the output has increased many times between 2014 and 2015. In 2015, the installed amount of power lithium battery exceeded 20 billion watt hours, and it is estimated that it will increase t...

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The development of new energy vehicles has driven the great development of power lithium battery industry, and the output has increased many times between 2014 and 2015. In 2015, the installed amount of power lithium battery exceeded 20 billion watt hours, and it is estimated that it will increase to about 50 billion watt hours in 2016.

The development of new energy vehicles has driven the great development of power lithium battery industry, and the output has increased many times between 2014 and 2015. In 2015, the investment in battery industry was about 100 billion yuan, and the output under construction and nuclear construction was 180 billion watt hours. So many batteries will enter the mass elimination period after 5 or 6 years. Who will recycle them? Where is the recycling industry? Unfortunately, there are no answers to either question.

In the past year, China has another record that can match the whole world: the production and sales of new energy vehicles. In 2015, the output of new energy vehicles in China reached 340500, while the global output just exceeded 500000. The sales volume reached 331100, including 254600 pure electric vehicles and 247500 pure electric vehicles (the rest were plug-in hybrid). The market share of new energy vehicles has exceeded 1%. No matter according to any standard, the painful market cultivation stage of new energy vehicles will soon become history and enter the stage of large-scale popularization.

One year's production and sales volume exceeded the retention volume of all previous years, which is undoubtedly an explosive increase. The industrial chain of new energy vehicles (mainly electric vehicles in fact) has been rapidly established, and the production of power lithium batteries has entered an unprecedented peak.

It is worth mentioning that the output of commercial vehicles last year was 102500, of which the 6-8m minibuses accounted for 80% of commercial vehicles. The latter relies on the central transfer payment and local financial subsidies, resulting in a demand explosion. Although the absolute number of commercial vehicles is less than that of passenger vehicles, the proportion of batteries used is reversed: 70% of power lithium batteries are used in commercial vehicles.

The development of new energy vehicles has driven the great development of power lithium battery industry, and the output has increased many times between 2014 and 2015. In 2015, the installed amount of power lithium battery exceeded 20 billion watt hours, and it is estimated that it will increase to about 50 billion watt hours in 2016. In 2015, the investment in battery industry was about 100 billion yuan, and the output under construction and nuclear construction was 180 billion watt hours. So many batteries will enter the mass elimination period after 5 or 6 years. Who will recycle them? Where is the recycling industry? Unfortunately, there are no answers to either question.

The technical route of battery recycling is not mature

Strictly speaking, power lithium battery has more than this life. It is because five or six years later, the energy storage capacity of the power lithium battery will drop to about 80%, which will affect the endurance and user experience, and it is time to replace it. The life cycle of power lithium battery may be more than 20 years, which is longer than that of the whole vehicle.

Its life cycle is generally calculated according to the number of charges and discharges. The number of charges and discharges varies greatly with the positive and negative poles of the battery. The power lithium battery has successively experienced lead acid battery, nickel hydrogen battery, lithium battery and fuel power battery (the latter is almost the unique technology of Toyota).

Lead acid battery has low cost, reliable performance and mature production and recycling technology, but is affected by specific energy, cycle times and other factors. Lead acid battery is important used in low-speed short distance vehicles or light hybrid electric vehicles. Even if the battery is used infrequently (the daily driving distance does not exceed 30km), the life of the lead-acid battery is only about 2 years. Moreover, the production and recycling process will cause serious pollution to the environment. Lead acid batteries have been excluded from the mainstream line-up of power lithium batteries.

The NiMH battery was vigorously promoted by Toyota, Ford and General Motors. Ford's Rmger pure electric vehicles and Toyota Prius hybrid vehicles all use nickel metal hydride power lithium batteries. However, this type of battery has a low specific energy value and is difficult to store hydrogen. It is generally used in hybrid vehicles as an auxiliary power and is difficult to be used in pure electric vehicles.

Since 2006, the lithium ion power lithium battery with the highest energy density has really become popular. Such as the lithium iron phosphate battery vigorously advocated by BYD. It is worth noting that BYD does not provide technical means for battery recycling.

As for fuel power batteries, it is said that Toyota has already had recycling means, but there is no possibility of commercialization in China in a short time. Therefore, the important problem we are facing is still the recycling of lithium ion power lithium batteries.

Even if only lithium batteries are considered, there are many types of batteries, which leads to the complicated technical route of recycling. The battery must be pretreated first, including discharging, disassembling, crushing and sorting. The disassembled plastic and metal shells can be recycled, but the cost is high: because the residual voltage is still as high as hundreds of volts (excluding 18650 batteries), there is a certain danger; For the sake of safety, the battery shell is packaged in a non detachable form, which takes a lot of effort to open. As far as pretreatment is concerned, it must be a loss making transaction.

Even for lithium batteries, the cathode materials are various, including lithium cobalate, lithium manganate, lithium nickel cobalt manganate, lithium iron phosphate, etc. Leaching with acid and alkali solution, and then extracting metal oxides through various chemical processes. However, the extraction conditions of these oxides are different, and the mixed liquid is more difficult. The battery is classified according to the positive material in advance, and the cost is not low.

Recycling positive metal is already the most profitable link in the battery recycling industry. However, the procedure is too complicated, and companies that can settle accounts are deterred from it, unless the metal price is as high as that of 2011. Now the prices of bulk commodities, nonferrous metals and rare earth products are hovering at a low ebb. It is quite uneconomical to use these methods to recover metals, not to mention the more troublesome waste liquid treatment afterwards. According to the current technical level, the waste liquid treatment alone is enough to eat up the poor recovery of metals.

The anode material is graphite (silicon battery is only a laboratory scale), which is too cheap and can only be discarded and buried. Fortunately, graphite itself does not pollute the environment, it only takes up space.

Under the current technical conditions, no company will actively invest in the recycling industry. Then there is only one way to deal with it passively.

As for the promising battery methods such as graphene and supercapacitor, the biggest advantage is that they do not need to be recycled (and there is no resource worth recycling), and there is no pollution when discarded. However, its technical difficulty may still force us to use the existing technical methods.

Policy is not omnipotent

Since 2014, the production of power lithium batteries has been in short supply. This obviously stems from the dual traction of policy and market. However, the recycling industry is still at a loose and disorderly level. In fact, even the competent departments of the industry (the National Development and Reform Commission and the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology) are not clear about what the large-scale power lithium battery recycling companies have and what their recycling capacity is.

The reason for this situation naturally lies in the current technical means and the inability to create recycling profits. In other words, the new value created cannot offset the cost of recovery. The head killing business has been done, while the loss making business has not been done.

By 2020 at the latest, it is time to replace the power lithium batteries on the first new energy vehicles sold. In view of the current sales situation of new energy vehicles, the waste batteries to be disposed may exceed the current estimate of the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology by 120000 to 170000 tons, and may exceed 200000 tons.

As far as effective recycling means are concerned, garbage is just a resource misplaced. However, for electric vehicle manufacturers and power lithium battery manufacturers who are blind in both hands, this waste may be more like a time bomb. If a profitable recycling industry has not been established within 4 years, these companies will be flooded with waste batteries like a tide.

Why do these companies bear the brunt? Recently, the Technical Policy for Recycling and Reusing Electric Vehicle Battery (hereinafter referred to as the "Policy") jointly released by the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology and the National Development and Reform Commission (NDRC) defined the subject of responsibility for the first time, which is the same as the logic of pollution control: whoever produces is responsible, and whoever pollutes is responsible.

The rules of the game show that, at least at this stage, from the government level, battery recycling has not been seen as a profitable business, but has to be the trouble of accountability.

The Policy stipulates the collection, classification, storage, transportation, cascade utilization, regeneration, supervision and management of waste power lithium batteries. Seemingly complete, in fact, only one thing is clear: the subject of responsibility and the way of accountability, that is, a traceability system has been established.

Within a few years, battery and electric vehicle manufacturers will see the same tide of used batteries being transported back continuously, just as they are sold today. Of course, the difference is that they will become hot potatoes at that time.

However, the market cannot be established only by administrative orders and punishment mechanisms. What is missing from the Policy is just crucial to the company: how to benefit.

Relevant experience of Japanese enterprises can be referred to

Until today, Japan has no special regulations on power lithium batteries. However, there is no reason to formulate a separate law for power lithium batteries when Japanese environmental protection regulations (Law on Effective Utilization of Resources, Energy Conservation Law and Renewable Resources Law) are clear. The law itself cannot solve technical problems.

Japanese enterprises started more than ten years earlier than us in the field of new energy vehicles. Toyota's Prius was born in 1997. According to the inference that the Japanese attach great importance to waste recycling (the national waste disposal rate reaches 100%), Japan should establish an industrial chain of power lithium battery recycling within five years of the birth of new energy vehicles, but in fact it has not.

Even for Toyota, the recycling of nickel metal hydride batteries (lithium battery for hybrid vehicles) is also facing the dilemma of no profit. This is the reason why the project of recycling nickel metal hydride batteries was not started in China until 2011.

At home, Toyota cooperated with Sumitomo Metal, and with the help of the latter's world-class high-purity extraction technology, Toyota realized the multiple utilization of nickel in the lithium battery for hybrid vehicle power. This business can recover 50% of the nickel in the battery pack; At the same time, Toyota Chemical Engineering and Sumitomo Metal Mine are equipped with special production lines that can recover the battery consumption equivalent to 10000 hybrid vehicles every year; In 2012, Honda cooperated with Japanese Heavy Chemical Industry Corporation and did similar things. However, Honda's recycling project can recover more than 80% of the rare earth metals for manufacturing new nickel hydrogen batteries.

A few years ago, nickel recovered from hybrid vehicle batteries could only be used to produce stainless steel. With the development of high-precision nickel extraction and separation technology, the nickel recovered now can be used to produce new batteries. Toyota has promoted nickel recycling technology to overseas plants.

Recycling batteries is the responsibility. However, Japanese enterprises also rely on recycled metals (including rare earth elements, which are extremely valuable for Japan) as the driving force of the recycling industry.

In Europe, Toyota showed a more positive attitude, which is related to the more stringent environmental regulations in Europe. Toyota announced last year that it had achieved the goal of 100% recycling of hybrid vehicle batteries, compared with the previous recycling rate of 91%.

At the same time, Toyota extended the partnership between SNAM (France) and Umicore (Belgium) to recycle nickel hydrogen batteries and lithium batteries respectively. Since 2000, Toyota (including Lexus) has sold 850000 hybrid vehicles in Europe, which is larger than the current new energy vehicles in China.

At the same time, in order to prolong the service life of power lithium battery, and prevent the peak output limit. Toyota also promoted the cascade utilization project of power lithium batteries. Last year, Toyota used the waste batteries of Camry hybrid vehicles for energy storage and power supply of facilities in Huangshi National Park.

Nissan also cooperates with Sumitomo to develop a battery system using the waste lithium battery of the electric car LEAF as an auxiliary energy storage system for solar power generation, which is used for independent power supply at night and in the weather with insufficient sunlight.

The 4REnergy Company, a joint venture of Sumitomo Corporation and Nissan, has become the most successful lithium battery recycling company in business since its establishment five years ago with the goal of commercial recycling of EV waste lithium batteries.

The relevant experience of Japanese enterprises in establishing the recycling industry chain in a global cascade shows that even though the Policy is published, the whole society is aware that the establishment of the battery recycling industry is imminent, our success in 2020 is also a small probability event. Unless we can introduce the technology of a Japanese company (provided that the other party is willing to share it at a cost), the establishment of the time node is likely to be pushed to 10 years later, when the waste batteries have already piled up in the backyard of the responsible company.

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