Recently, the market price of battery-grade lithium carbonate has soared, and the quotation has reached 430,000 yuan / ton, while at the beginning of last year, this figure was only 53,000 yuan / ton.
The soaring price of raw materials has made many people smell business opportunities, and many companies engaged in battery recycling have even begun to hoard a large number of goods in case the subsequent price continues to rise. This has also allowed the power battery recycling industry, which has been tepid, to enter the eyes of the public and capital.
At the same time, on February 11 this year, the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology, the National Development and Reform Commission, the Ministry of Science and Technology and other eight departments recently issued the "Implementation Plan on Accelerating the Comprehensive Utilization of Industrial Resources", which proposes to improve the recycling system of waste power batteries and promote the safe ladder application of waste power batteries in the fields of power backup, charging and replacement.
In fact, in August last year, the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology, the Ministry of Science and Technology, the Ministry of Ecology and Environment, the Ministry of Commerce, and the State Administration of Market Supervision jointly issued the "Administrative Measures for the Cascade Utilization of New Energy Vehicle Power Batteries", proposing to encourage cascade utilization enterprises to cooperate with enterprises such as new energy vehicle production, power battery production and scrapped motor vehicle recycling and dismantling, strengthen information sharing, use existing recycling channels, and efficiently recycle waste power batteries for cascade utilization.
If the timeline is extended again, you can see that in recent years, the policy documents related to power battery recycling can be described as one after another, from the formula whitelist enterprises to the clear recycling responsibility subjects to the introduction of guidance management measures, almost every year there will be new policies and various proposals and suggestions for power battery recycling.
The purpose of these policy documents is naturally to regulate the power battery recycling market and accelerate the establishment of industrial order, but at the same time, it also shows from the side that the current degree of regulation and perfection of the power battery recycling market is not high.
This situation is obvious, after all, the recycling of power batteries is an emerging market that develops with the development of the new energy vehicle industry. Even if the mainland began to vigorously develop new energy vehicles in 2014, it took into account the problem of power battery recycling, but at that time, power batteries were just used in electric vehicles, and no decommissioned batteries made the recycling policy stay on paper.
So to be precise, the mainland power battery recycling market has only begun to really appear in the past two years.
According to relevant data, by the end of 2021, the number of new energy vehicles in the country reached 7.84 million, accounting for 2.60% of the total number of vehicles, an increase of 59.25% compared with the previous year, and still maintaining rapid growth. This is bound to bring an increase to the power battery recycling industry.
Decommissioned power batteries can not become "garbage" in any case, which is definitely a logical and goal-oriented opportunity for relevant practitioners.
But is this really the case?
Cascade utilization and dismantling and recycling
We need to understand the two main ways of current power battery recycling: cascade utilization and dismantling recycling.
After the retirement of the new energy vehicle power battery, there is generally still 80% of the remaining capacity, which can be downgraded for other scenarios to maximize the utilization of residual energy. After several years of exploration and development, the echelon utilization of decommissioned power batteries in mainland China has been applied in the fields of power storage systems, communication base station backup power supplies, low-speed electric vehicles and intelligent street lights.
For example, in July 2020, saicel-GM-Wuling's Baojun base megawatt-level large-scale photovoltaic wind energy integration cascade utilization energy storage power station was put into use.
The current power battery echelon utilization will generally choose lithium iron phosphate batteries, which is based on economic and safety considerations.
The precious metal content in lithium iron phosphate batteries is not much, and it cannot produce too high economic value and resource scale benefits in dismantling and recycling; at the same time, the safety of ternary lithium batteries is greatly reduced after the battery capacity is attenuated, and its spontaneous combustion temperature is much lower than that of lithium iron phosphate batteries, which makes it unwise to use decommissioned ternary lithium batteries for cascade utilization.
The cascade utilization of lithium iron phosphate batteries generally includes the dismantling of the battery pack to obtain a monomer, screening detection, pairing and reorganization, system integration and other steps, of which residual energy detection and pairing recombination are the more critical links in the cascade utilization process, and are also a more technical part
Due to the variety of power battery cells, the parameters of a single cell are highly personalized after decommissioning, and the residual efficiency is also different. At present, the relevant departments have issued the national standard of "Vehicle Power Battery Recycling Residual Energy Testing", which standardizes the testing process and method of decommissioned power batteries. Through the residual energy detection, enterprises can screen out the battery cells with similar usage (mainly referring to charge and discharge conditions) and can be recombined for subsequent processing.
In the pairing and reorganization process, manufacturers need to use battery balancing technology to solve the consistency problem of multiple cells. At present, this is almost a world problem, requiring engineers and technicians to consider the charge and discharge voltage and charge and discharge efficiency of different batteries, and to develop an optimal solution to avoid bad conditions such as thermal runaway batteries.
The system integration link needs to introduce a new BMS system, so that the battery management system can better apply the performance of this "new" battery pack, and combined with life prediction technology to ensure that it can work stably for a long time. Finally, through encapsulation, packaging, and application in specific clients.
In addition to cascade utilization, the ultimate destination of the power battery is disassembly and recycling.
Dismantling and recycling is to disassemble, crush, and refine the decommissioned power battery, and then obtain precious metal compounds (mainly nickel, cobalt, manganese, lithium compounds), and then sell these compounds to obtain profits. At present, the more common recycling processes on the market are mainly dry recovery and wet recycling.
Dry recycling refers to the direct recovery of materials or valuable metals without the help of media such as solutions. The most commonly used technical means of dry recycling is high-temperature pyrolysis, that is, the use of high-temperature incineration decomposition to remove binders, to achieve material separation, and after high-temperature incineration, the metal and its compounds in the battery will oxidize, reduce, decompose, vapor volatilize, and then collect it through condensation.
The principle of recovering power batteries using high-temperature pyrolysis is simple, widely used, and can recover a variety of heavy metals such as mercury and zinc. However, the high temperature pyrolysis method has large energy consumption, low recovery efficiency, and has secondary pollution and safety problems. For example, LiPF6 in the electrolyte is prone to hydrolysis when exposed to water, producing toxic gases; organic solvents may burn and explode during the recovery process because of their low flash point.
Wet recycling is the process of crushing and sorting, dissolving and leaching out of waste batteries, including hydrometallurgy, chemical extraction and ion exchange. The use of wet smelting and recycling, first of all, the inactivated waste battery should be crushed and ground to achieve homogenization, and then physically sort the crushed products to meet the requirements of wet recovery.
Wet recycling is widely used, and the recovery of decommissioned power batteries can recover rare metals and other metals to a large extent, with high recovery rate and purity, and lower equipment investment costs. However, this method often causes the overall cost to rise due to the long process, and the continuous use of chemical reagents will cause environmental pollution, such as inorganic acids in the recovery process will produce harmful gases, and the extractants used also have an impact on soil and water.
In addition, there are also some new power battery recycling methods on the market, such as the power battery recycling company Saidmei is through fine mechanical splitting to obtain battery parts, and then repair them, and finally form a reusable shell, electrolyte, diaphragm, copper foil, aluminum foil, positive powder, negative powder and so on. This method does not generate metal compound raw materials, but instead supplies qualified battery parts directly to the battery production and manufacturing process. At the same time, this method can also better control chemical pollution.
There is also bioregrieving technology, which mainly uses microbial leaching to convert useful components of the system into soluble compounds and selectively dissolve them, to achieve the separation of target components from impurity components, and ultimately recover lithium, cobalt, nickel and other valuable metals. However, at present, this technology is still in the early stage of development, and there are many uncertainties.
Insufficient volume and technical difficulties
At present, one of the biggest reasons affecting the power battery recycling industry is likely to be the lack of market volume.
Mainland from 2015 began to vigorously develop new energy vehicles, according to the average service life of power batteries 5-8 years to calculate, in 2020 the mainland has ushered in the first wave of power batteries decommissioning. According to CCTV financial channels, the total cumulative decommissioning of power batteries in mainland China will reach about 200,000 tons in 2020, and this number will rise to about one million tons by 2025.
The volume of hundreds of thousands of tons looks scary, but it is not very high.
Taking domestic garbage as an example, the amount of domestic garbage generated in the mainland in 2020 is about 360 million tons, compared with hundreds of thousands of tons of decommissioned power batteries, the volume of 100 million tons has better supported the development of the garbage recycling industry, and nourished companies including recycling equipment manufacturing, centralized disposal, transfer, incineration power generation, hazardous material treatment and other links.
In fact, the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology of the Mainland announced in September 2018 in the first batch of enterprises that meet the "New Energy Vehicle Waste Power Battery Comprehensive Utilization Industry Specification Conditions" five enterprises: Huayou New Materials, Haopeng Technology, Grimme, Bangpu Cycle, Guanghua Technology, their total decommissioned power battery processing capacity has exceeded 600,000 tons.
An executive of a battery recycling company told 36Kr reporter: "Now the power battery recycling industry is still insufficient, the industrial chain is not perfect, and this situation can not use capital to 'ripen', some investors hope to immediately see a hundred billion or even trillion-level market, which is unrealistic." ”
However, in the case of insufficient volume of decommissioned power batteries, the asset investment of recycling enterprises is huge.
In terms of retired power battery echelon, the power battery pack design of different models is diverse, the cost of disassembly is very high, and after the battery is disassembled, it also needs to go through residual energy detection, battery module regrouping, system integration, battery management and transportation to be truly used.
In the whole process, the enterprise needs to carry out a large number of technical investment and equipment investment, because the industrial chain is not mature, in the residual energy detection, restructuring and integration and other aspects of the application of automation, intelligent equipment is relatively small, from the existing data point of view enterprises have to rely on manual to complete the relevant tasks.
At the same time, in order to ensure the consistency of the battery, enterprises must introduce battery balancing technology, but the research and development of this technology is also very difficult, and the research and development progress of the battery balancer on the market is very slow, especially the efficient transfer real-time battery balancing technology, and there are very few R & D institutions and enterprises that master this technology.
And in the actual echelon utilization process, even if the batteries with excellent consistency are assembled together, different degrees of differences will still occur after dozens of charge and discharge cycles, and this difference will gradually increase with the extension of the use time, and the consistency of the battery pack will become worse and worse.
In addition to the technical difficulties at the production end, on the application side, the utilization of cascades is also facing the threat of market shrinkage.
In 2018, Huang Shilin, vice chairman and chief strategy officer of CATL, said at an industry forum: "We took the battery at the end of life to recharge and discharge repeatedly, and then dissected it to see what changes at the physical level." At present, the accumulation of basic data of the cascade application battery is far from enough, and what will happen at the end of life is actually a question mark, and it will take at least a few years to figure it out. ”
That is to say, the echelon utilization of power batteries is likely to have hidden dangers in safety, and to solve this hidden danger, enterprises may have to pay higher costs.
On June 22, 2021, the "New Energy Storage Project Management Specification (Interim) (Draft for Comments)" drafted by the National Energy Administration proposed that in principle, large-scale power battery cascade utilization energy storage projects should not be built until the battery consistency management technology has made key breakthroughs and the power battery performance monitoring and evaluation system is sound. Power battery cascade utilization energy storage projects that have been completed and put into operation should regularly evaluate battery performance, strengthen monitoring, and strengthen supervision.
This means that the "big projects" that use decommissioned power batteries to build large energy storage facilities may be suspended, but it remains to be judged whether "small projects" such as communication base stations and low-speed electric vehicles have a corresponding demand volume and can cover the production costs of enterprises.
In fact, the market trend can also be seen from the recent actions of Huawei and many battery manufacturers on large-scale energy storage projects. Compared with the "second-hand goods" of retired lithium iron phosphate batteries, enterprises are now more inclined to use new ternary lithium batteries as the main body of energy storage when building new energy storage projects, and the blessing of large factory technology will also make the energy storage project itself safer.
In terms of dismantling and recycling, although automation equipment has been developed to a certain extent, the equipment cost of manufacturers and other fixed assets are also higher. "Electric Vehicle Observer" once wrote that a power battery recycling enterprise with certain automation capabilities and in line with environmental protection policies has a fixed asset investment of more than 10 million yuan.
A battery recycling company carries out the commissioning and installation of related equipment
An industry insider said that based on the average power battery recovery price and raw material price last year, including equipment depreciation costs, environmental treatment costs, labor costs, energy consumables costs, etc., the recovery cost of ternary lithium batteries per ton is about 20,000 yuan. If you take the NCM523 ternary lithium battery as an example, it can extract about 71kg of lithium per ton, 300kg of nickel, 122kg of cobalt and 170kg of manganese (all compounds), if these precious metal compounds are sold, the income generated is basically about 40,000 yuan.
The profit of about 20,000 yuan per ton is not low from the perspective of waste recycling, but most of the hundreds of thousands of tons of power batteries decommissioned in the mainland are lithium iron phosphate batteries, and the proportion of ternary lithium batteries is very small. Some institutions predict that after 2023, the amount of ternary lithium battery decommissioning will increase significantly.
This makes the current stage of the power battery recycling industry is very embarrassing, there is a disassembly recovery value of the ternary lithium battery has not yet reached the large-scale retirement age, has been decommissioned lithium iron phosphate battery in the main component of iron phosphate content of about 95%, basically do not have the value of dismantling, to do dismantling and recycling is to lose money.
Zhang Tianren, a deputy to the National People's Congress and chairman of Tianneng Group, once pointed out that the value of the material extracted by an ordinary recycling enterprise from a ton of lithium iron phosphate waste battery is 8110 yuan, but the recovery cost is as high as 8540 yuan. Such companies often need government subsidies, and the final income is even higher than that of scrap iron.
Therefore, as far as the entire market is concerned, the current battery volume of hundreds of thousands of tons is not enough for several battery recycling factories to "plug the teeth", and the recovery of the vast majority of power battery recycling enterprises on the market is far lower than the design capacity when the factory was built.
Battery channels
Ternary lithium battery is a good thing, and it is a good and lacking thing at present, then it will definitely be stared at by many pairs of eyes.
Relevant practitioners said that the decommissioned battery channel is the most important link in addition to technology for enterprises engaged in dismantling and recycling. Because the scale of the entire power battery recycling market has not yet been formed, who can have a good battery channel in this case can survive, develop and even make a profit in the early stage of the development of the industry.
According to relevant data, there are 36,000 existing power battery recycling related enterprises in the mainland, but more than 60% of them are small and medium-sized enterprises with a registered capital of 5 million yuan or less. According to the list of enterprises that meet the "New Energy Vehicle Waste Power Battery Comprehensive Utilization Industry Specification Conditions" released by the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology, there are currently only 47 enterprises that meet the industry standards for battery recycling.
The third batch of power battery recycling enterprises white list
There is no shortage of workshop-style companies and informal channels in this industry.
At the beginning of 2020, China Automobile News had a report pointing out that a large number of decommissioned power batteries were actually digested by some informal recycling companies. The five power battery recycling whitelist enterprises mentioned above in 2018 have a total of 600,000 tons of power battery recycling capacity, but the actual data is that in 2018, the mainland decommissioned power batteries 74,000 tons, and the five whitelist companies only recovered a total of 0.5 million tons that year.
That is to say, more than 90% of the decommissioned power batteries in that year flowed to "channel providers" and informal recycling enterprises, and this situation is still very common.
For example, in the shopping platform search for the keyword "disassemble power battery", you can see a large number of a variety of battery packs and batteries, including Ningde times, Panasonic, Lishen and so on. Merchants will not only mark the remaining capacity and discharge voltage of the battery, but even "one piece to sell" and "batch discount".
For merchants who have not obtained battery recycling qualifications, this sales behavior is not compliant, but its profit is much higher and easier than the model of dismantling the battery and then refining the precious metal compound and selling it.
From the perspective of obtaining the channels for decommissioned power batteries, most of the power battery recycling points are obtained through auctions, but the auction process is not strict, and it is relatively easy for some unqualified companies to obtain bidding qualifications. After obtaining the bidding qualification, because these companies will not invest too much in environmental protection and equipment, their profits are very considerable, and they can often give higher bidding prices to get batteries.
To this end, in early September 2021, Zhejiang Hangzhou Energy Storage Industry Association also organized 9 key enterprises in the production of new energy vehicles and batteries, such as Hezhong Automobile, Geely, WM Automobile, Zero Run, Wanxiang 123, Ruipu Energy, Tianneng, Chaowei, Nandu Power Supply, etc., jointly launched a statement to increase restrictive conditions in the transaction and auction of waste power batteries, and bidding enterprises must be standardized waste power battery comprehensive utilization enterprises announced by the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology to ensure that batteries flow to normative enterprises.
However, the joint declarations produced by such associations and enterprises can play a very limited role.
The lack of volume and the lack of channels can not be guaranteed, which makes it impossible for enterprises with automated dismantling and precious metal recycling capabilities to make large-scale profits, and the scale of recycling cannot be expanded.
Of course, practitioners can also find another way to turn themselves into technology providers under the premise of having relevant dismantling and recycling technology. A power battery recycling solution provider said: "Our third-party enterprises do not have to worry about channel problems, do not have to consider how to get decommissioned power batteries, and do not have to consider who to sell the recovered precious metals." What we offer is technology and services. ”
Price drops and market competition
From the world's point of view, lithium ore resources are mainly concentrated in South America and other places, due to the epidemic situation, many large lithium mines can not be expanded as planned, has been mined out of the original also due to the epidemic can not be delivered to the Chinese market on time.
The Chinese market is precisely the largest incremental market for new energy vehicles in recent years, and this serious imbalance between supply and demand in the market is the most important reason for the continuous sharp price increase of battery raw materials.
Therefore, the recent phenomenon of "coefficient inversion" between decommissioned power batteries and new batteries (the price of old batteries is higher than that of new batteries) will gradually disappear with the end of the epidemic and the release of domestic battery manufacturing capacity. When raw material prices tend to be stable, companies still rely on automation equipment, advanced recycling technology and recycling scale to ensure profitability.
There are many problems in the power battery recycling industry in mainland China at this stage, and the types of batteries, the number of decommissioning, the technical costs of pairing reorganization and dismantling and recycling are all factors affecting the development of the power battery recycling industry.
Even environmental impact assessments have affected battery recycling. A practitioner told 36Kr: "At present, the recycling method of most enterprises in the mainland is still high-temperature pyrolysis, which has a certain pollution to the environment, so the recycling plant can only be built in the fourth- and fifth-tier cities with low environmental impact assessment requirements, but this will increase the transportation cost of batteries." ”
These problems can hardly be fundamentally solved in a short period of time. Therefore, for recycling companies, the current market competition situation is: cruel and unclear.
According to the "White Paper on the Development of China's Lithium-ion Battery Recycling and Dismantling and Cascade Utilization Industry (2021)" jointly released by the research institute EVTank, Yiwei Economic Research Institute and China Battery Industry Research Institute, Grimme and Bangpu are the two leading enterprises in lithium battery recycling in 2020, and in terms of actual processing volume, the total market share of the two companies is more than 50%.
But even for head manufacturers like Grimme, battery recycling is not its main business. According to Grammy's 2020 annual report, the revenue from the "comprehensive utilization of power batteries" is still very small, and the annual revenue of the business is more than 93 million yuan, accounting for only 0.75% of the total revenue.
And from the perspective of the development of the recycling industry, the car company or battery manufacturer as the main body of battery recycling responsibility has become a trend, on the one hand, to reduce the recycling process due to battery model, data mixing caused by technical pressure, on the other hand, car companies naturally have sales outlets, can better grasp the battery channel.
However, car companies or battery manufacturers often bind deeply with third-party recycling companies, and when this high-viscosity cooperative relationship is reached, it will greatly squeeze the market space of small and medium-sized recycling manufacturers. For example, WEILAI and Huayou Energy have reached a strategic cooperation, and CATL acquired Guangdong Bangpu as early as 2015.
This means that for small and medium-sized recycling manufacturers, in the case of the obvious shortage of the current decommissioned power battery market, they also face the pressure of the industry's "giants" and "irregular army" on battery diversion, in this case, the profit difficulty seems to have become the industry consensus at this stage.
In the long run, the type and battery composition of power batteries are also developing rapidly, and new batteries such as hydrogen fuel cells and sodium-ion batteries have begun to be applied in the market.
In particular, sodium-ion batteries, including Ningde Times, Zhongke Haina, Three Gorges Energy, including a number of manufacturers, have announced that they will mass-produce sodium-ion batteries for low-speed electric vehicles, smart street lights, base stations and other scenarios. And this will also directly affect the power battery recycling industry, after all, sodium compounds are too worthless.
The mainland is the most active country in the world to develop new energy vehicles, and if it is not surprising, in the future, the mainland will have the world's largest power battery recycling market. But even as the world's largest, the industry is still facing a lot of uncertainties, that is, it needs to continue to promote and develop policies and technologies, and it is also vulnerable to fluctuations in the global resource market.
Even if a large number of research reports show that the future continental power battery recycling market has a scale of more than 100 billion, but in general, the "alchemy" industry in this new energy era is not friendly to small and medium-sized enterprises, and the "temptation" may be greater than the "return".