What are the influencing factors of China's lithium battery cathode material industry in the next 5 years
Favorable factors
1. Listed in the first batch of key new materials application demonstration guidance directory
20177 On the 14th, the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology of the People's Republic of China issued the 'Guiding Catalog for the First Batch of Key New Materials Application Demonstration' The 'Guiding Catalog' involves 4 new materials in the field of new energy, including high-performance lithium battery separators, lithium nickel cobalt manganate ternary materials, anode materials, and high-purity crystal lithium hexafluorophosphate materials.
2. The industry develops rapidly and forms an industrial base
Due to the lithium and cobalt required for the production of lithium battery cathode materials in my country Metal resources such as, manganese and nickel are abundant, and the downstream application market for lithium batteries such as consumer electronics and new energy vehicles has expanded rapidly. In recent years, China’s lithium battery cathode material industry has continued to grow and develop. The domestic lithium battery cathode material industry is highly concentrated, and three major lithium battery cathode material industry bases have been formed in the Beijing-Tianjin area, the middle and lower reaches of the Yangtze River and South China.
3. The development of downstream industries drives industrial growth
Driven by the rapid development of lithium batteries and their downstream industries, lithium batteries The growth of cathode materials is relatively rapid. As a key component of electric vehicles, the power lithium battery is one of the key components that affect the performance, cost and user experience of the entire vehicle, and it is also the component that accounts for the largest proportion of the entire vehicle cost, and its cost accounts for half of the entire vehicle cost. In terms of breakdown, the cost of the four key materials of positive electrode material, negative electrode material, separator and electrolyte account for more than 80% of the battery cost. The cost of the cathode material also accounts for about 40% of the total cost of lithium-ion batteries.
4. Continuous technological innovation
Relying on the Yunnan Provincial Key Laboratory of Advanced Battery Materials, built by Kunming University of Science and Technology, it mainly focuses on Research on lithium-ion batteries and key materials has been carried out, and core technologies such as lithium-ion ternary battery cathode materials, battery preparation and management have been developed. Since the '13th Five-Year Plan
With the support of the national key research and development plan, the team of Professor Xia Dingguo of Peking University has carried out research on new high specific energy manganese-based cathode materials, which has made breakthroughs in doping, coating and nano-morphology Due to the limitation of traditional modification methods, a manganese-based lithium-rich power battery cathode material with O2 configuration was prepared by combining LiMO2 phase and single-layer Li2MnO3 phase. This positive electrode material has a specific discharge capacity of more than 400mAh/g and a specific energy density of more than 1380Wh/kg, which provides the possibility for the development of a new type of lithium ion battery with a specific energy greater than 500Wh/kg. It is the highest ratio reported at home and abroad. Energy density manganese-based lithium-rich cathode material for lithium-ion batteries. This research provides a new direction for the design of new high specific energy lithium-ion battery cathode materials, and breaks through the limitations of foreign layered manganese-based lithium-rich material patents (O3 configuration).
Disadvantages
1. Excessive low-end products, insufficient high-end products
As my country's cathode material production capacity is mainly concentrated in low-end products, there is still insufficient production capacity in some high-end products, such as high-performance ternary materials. Therefore, the lithium battery cathode material industry is currently in a stage of oversupply, and the main driving force in the future will come from the growth in demand for power batteries. And in terms of product distribution, low-end products have overcapacity and high-end products are undersupply.
2. There is a certain gap with advanced Japanese and Korean companies.
The main cathode material companies with a certain capacity and reputation in the world Concentrated in Japan, China and South Korea, the scale of cathode material companies in other countries in the world is generally small and their products are relatively single. Therefore, the three countries mentioned above are recognized as the three giant countries in the global cathode material industry.
Japan and South Korea have developed early in the cathode material industry. In recent years, they have been committed to high-end cathode material products such as ternary materials. However, domestically, due to various reasons In the past, the development center of the lithium battery cathode material industry was concentrated on lithium iron phosphate. With the development of the new energy automobile industry in the past two years, the state and enterprises have gradually paid attention to the development of the ternary material industry, but they are still with advanced Japanese and Korean companies in terms of technology. There is a certain gap.
3. Substitution risk
The lithium battery cathode material industry has fast product upgrades and continuous improvement in performance requirements. In addition, although alternative technologies such as fuel cells, lithium-sulfur batteries, and lithium-air batteries are still far from large-scale industrialization, it does not rule out the risk of technological innovation replacing existing products in the future.
