How to deal with the impending power lithium battery of 'scrap tide'

'The general service life of power batteries is 5-8 years, and the effective life is 4-6 years. This means that the first batch of new energy vehicle power batteries put on the market in my country is basically at the critical point of elimination.' National People's Congress representative, Tian Zhang Tianren, chairman of the board of directors of the Energy Group, said that attention should be paid to the regeneration and recycling of new energy power batteries to reduce environmental hazards and ensure the safety of national strategic resources.

In 2018, my country's new energy vehicle production and sales exceeded 1.2 million, an increase of about 60% year-on-year, ranking first in the world. It is expected that the production and sales will exceed 2 million by 2020 Mark. According to calculations, combined with factors such as the age of car obsolescence, battery life, etc., from 2018 to 2020, my country's accumulative scrapped power batteries will reach 120,000 to 200,000 tons. By 2025, this number will increase to 350,000 tons.

This year, at the two sessions, Zhang Tianren submitted the 'Recommendations on Strengthening the Recycling and Utilization of Discarded Power Lithium Batteries and Ensuring the National Resource Strategic Security.' He said that the current retired lithium batteries for new energy vehicles have two main destinations. One is cascade utilization, which is used for telecommunications base station backup power, etc.; the other is recycling, where heavy metals are extracted and reused after disassembly. 'From the perspective of the full life cycle, the batteries used in the cascade need to be recycled after they are finally scrapped.'

On the one hand, there will be a large number of scrap lithium batteries that will emerge on the other hand. , my country's lithium resources are heavily dependent on imports. Data shows that my country’s dependence on lithium mines exceeds 85%; “Chinese demand” has also driven the price of battery-grade lithium carbonate to skyrocket, from less than 50,000 yuan/ton at the beginning of 2015 to 180,000 yuan/ton at the end of 2017, an increase of three times It has greatly increased the procurement costs of my country’s lithium-ion battery manufacturers and challenged resource security.

Zhang Tianren said that improper handling or random disposal of scrap lithium batteries will cause great harm to the ecological environment. For example, heavy metal elements such as cobalt and nickel in the positive electrode material, organic matter in the electrolyte, and carbon material in the negative electrode will pollute the water and soil, and it may be difficult to recover for decades.

In this regard, Zhang Tianren suggested that relevant departments should speed up the development of management, technology and evaluation standards for the recycling and recycling of used batteries, such as battery residual testing standards; speed up research on finances and taxes Incentive policies such as preferential treatment, industrial funds, and point management, explore market-oriented models such as power battery residual value trading, and promote the recycling of power lithium batteries.

“At present, the regeneration technology is not yet mature, and the dismantling is mainly done manually, and the cost remains high.” Zhang Tianren said that the weak links in recycling should be organized to organize production, education and research Joint research and breakthroughs in key common technologies to effectively reduce production costs; encourage lithium battery manufacturers with production capacity and technological advantages to build recycling projects, and strengthen planning to avoid 'catch up' recycling projects, leading to overcapacity and waste of resources Wait.