According to the news of the daily economic news on January 11, the price of nickel, cobalt, lithium and other metals in the upstream of power batteries fluctuated sharply beyond market expectations, such as the average price of battery-grade lithium carbonate has jumped from 50,000 yuan / ton in early 2021 to the recent 290,000 yuan / ton, an increase of 480%, the highest quotation even exceeded 300,000 yuan / ton, and the cobalt price has also hit a new high in nearly 3 years.
In this context, battery recycling has begun to become the new favorite of the market, industry insiders said that the more metal prices rise, it means that everyone's attention to decommissioned power batteries will be higher, and the recycling price of power batteries will be higher and higher.
It is not difficult to imagine the boom in the power battery recycling market. "The batteries that come out of every company have a lot of buyers flocking to it." Bao Wei said that with the growth of metal prices, battery recycling prices have also reached new highs.
"Everyone is very hot, and the recycling price is the same as seafood, one price a day." Lu Hancheng, general manager and senior engineer of Ganzhou Haopeng Technology Co., Ltd. (a subsidiary of Xiamen Tungsten Holdings), also told the "Daily Economic News" reporter.
According to data from the China Automotive Technology and Research Center, in 2020, the cumulative number of decommissioned power batteries in China will exceed 200,000 tons, and the market size will reach 10 billion yuan; by 2025, the scale of China's waste power battery recycling market will exceed 40 billion yuan; by 2030, the recovery of ternary lithium and lithium iron phosphate batteries will become a 100 billion-level market.
To be honest, seeing the soaring price of lithium carbonate and the boom in battery recycling, what should we think?
First of all, the shortage of lithium resources is actually a bottleneck problem that currently plagues the new energy automobile industry. To be honest, we have to understand that lithium resources are actually a very scarce resource, lithium content in the earth's crust is about 0.0065%, known lithium-containing minerals have more than 150 kinds, mainly in the form of spodumene, lithium mica, lithium permeum feldspar, phosphite and other forms, but lithium resources are actually the entire world's new energy automobile industry, if you want to develop, you must have the necessary resources, so in this case, the shortage of lithium resources has become the key to restricting the development of the entire new energy automobile industry. Because the current power battery is basically all lithium carbonate to make the battery, whether it is a ternary lithium battery or other technology, the demand for lithium resources is increasing, itself less reserves and larger demand, the two eventually formed a very big problem, resulting in a serious shortage of lithium resources, so the current crazy rise in the price of lithium resources, in fact, is the embodiment of the contradiction between supply and demand in the entire market.
Secondly, from the current point of view, the use of sodium ion technology to replace lithium as the choice of new energy vehicle power battery, or in a stage of technical exploration, the entire market is not mature, want to achieve complete substitution, in a short period of time is still very unrealistic, so for the current market, trying to further recycle has become the most critical thing, so we see the current recycling of waste batteries has become a market of fragrant food, on the one hand, because the price of lithium carbonate is really too exaggerated, On the other hand, from the perspective of long-term market development, the recycling of this battery is likely to become a development direction to solve the problem, which is also the key reason for the large-scale promotion of new energy battery recycling in the current market. However, because the recycling technology is actually very immature, so from the current point of view, the recovery of new energy batteries may still be in a preliminary stage, although a price a day, but overall to achieve comprehensive recycling and reuse, it still needs a long process.
Third, from the perspective of long-term market development, the current logic of new energy battery recycling is mainly divided into two aspects, on the one hand, the new energy battery is recycled from the new energy vehicle in a cascade utilization way, and the waste battery is used for the energy storage market or other low-speed electric vehicles after a section of recycling, on the other hand, it is the use of direct recycling to extract lithium carbonate and other lithium resources, from the current point of view, in fact, the most promising development should be cascade recovery, However, most of the new energy automobile companies still use the direct recycling method, so from the perspective of the entire market, the development of the market is still in a more aggressive and aggressive state.
In the face of this 100 billion market, we must have a clear trend analysis and judgment, which is a very important resource for lithium resources in the future, but whether it can be really used well, the key is to see how the recycling technology is, and what is the demand of the market?