The first users to buy electric vehicles Where are the batteries now?

Who would have thought that the new energy vehicles that have been promoted by subsidies and tax exemption policies have actually increased in price one after another, looking like they are not worried about selling, and even the new things that scalpers have sold electric vehicle orders.

According to the data of 2021, the annual retail penetration rate of domestic new energy vehicles has reached 14.8%, and the latest statistics this year show that the penetration rate of new energy vehicles in March has exceeded 20%, and new energy vehicles are indeed not worried about selling.

BYD even directly announced the suspension of fuel vehicles is more indicative of the strong sales of new energy vehicles, according to the China Automobile Association, China's new energy vehicle sales are expected to reach 5 million in 2022, an increase of 47% year-on-year.

The eye-catching sales of new energy vehicles have led to a surge in demand for power batteries, which has directly led to a sharp rise in raw material prices, of which the average price of battery-grade lithium carbonate has risen from 50,000 yuan / ton in early 2021 to more than 300,000 yuan / ton; cobalt prices, nickel prices, and lithium iron phosphate have also risen sharply.

In this case, it has become profitable to recycle decommissioned power batteries to obtain related metal materials, and has also spawned a hundred billion-level industry - power battery recycling.

For the treatment of decommissioned power batteries, in fact, the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology formulated industry specifications as early as 2016, and has announced three batches of power battery recycling whitelist enterprises, but in the case of soaring raw material prices, many small workshops are accelerating into this "gold mine", and the entire recycling industry has also produced a lot of chaos.

Small workshops grab food, and the regular army has no rice to cook

Power battery recycling used to be a money-losing business, the recovered raw materials sold can only meet 1/3 to 1/2 of the cost of recycling, qualified recycling companies often need to rely on government subsidies.

The situation has changed from the second half of 2021, the production and sales of new energy vehicles are booming, the price of superimposed raw materials has risen sharply, making decommissioned power batteries become hot, and thousands of small workshops have joined the power battery recycling industry, and you can even see a large number of long-term purchases of power batteries on idle fish.

As of April 2022, the rising trend of raw material prices is still oscillating upwards, and the battery-grade lithium carbonate quotation exceeds 500,000 yuan / ton, up nearly 5 times from the same period last year; the electrolytic cobalt quotation also exceeds 500,000 yuan / ton, up 59% from the same period last year; the price of electrolytic nickel exceeds 200,000 yuan / ton, up nearly 80% from the same period last year.

In the power battery recycling market, the current price of waste lithium iron phosphate batteries has increased from about 2,000 yuan / ton in early 2021 to nearly 20,000 yuan / ton, the recycling price of waste ternary batteries has exceeded 40,000 yuan / ton, and the higher value of lithium cobalt oxide even exceeds 100,000 / ton; and the recycling market also has a price a day.

As far as the current decommissioned power battery market is concerned, there is no specification in pricing, and there is no clear pricing mechanism, which is often the highest price.

Different from the regular army, small workshops do not need to care about environmental protection and fire protection, with lower manpower, plant equipment costs, in the decommissioned power battery acquisition can be more affordable price, resulting in a large number of power batteries into the small workshop.

The large price deviation of the regular channel recycling is fundamental

Perhaps many people, even some new energy vehicle users, do not quite understand how the power battery flows into the small workshop. For example, a common and easy-to-understand example in our lives, when we buy a new mobile phone or a new computer, many manufacturers have provided the option of depreciation offset, but after several years of equipment, the recycling value given by the manufacturer is directly 0 yuan, and the official means "free recycling".

Similarly, when our cars are scrapped, the recycling company directly calculates the price according to the price of scrap iron, which is surprising that the value is low.

For the sake of interest, some consumers will choose to sell the power battery separately when the vehicle is sold or scrapped.

Although the current "Detailed Rules for the Implementation of the Measures for the Administration of the Recycling of Scrapped Motor Vehicles" has content on the scrapping of new energy vehicles, it is stipulated that recycling and dismantling enterprises should enter the code, quantity, model, flow direction and other information of the power batteries of scrapped new energy vehicles into the national battery traceability platform.

However, the provisions on the scrapping of new energy vehicles are not clear, and the provisions of which for new energy vehicle power batteries are incomplete, only the owner of the motor vehicle needs to explain the situation in writing, and it is not mandatory to scrap the whole vehicle. In this way, it is possible that new energy vehicles will be scrapped in the absence of batteries, and the flow of power batteries will not be able to check, and there are users who do not scrap.

At present, the batteries that have truly entered the scrapping stage of enterprises on the white list are basically electric buses, taxis and other operating vehicles that have reached the mandatory scrapping period in the early stage of entering the official business system, as well as vehicles scrapped by some individual users.

According to relevant statistics, the theoretical recovery of waste lithium-ion batteries in mainland China in 2021 will be as high as 591,000 tons, of which the theoretical recovery of waste power batteries will be 294,000 tons, of which a large part will be treated by enterprises that do not have recycling funds.

The difference between regular troops and small workshops dealing with decommissioned batteries

In general, when the power battery in new energy vehicles is greater than 20%, it cannot meet the requirements of electric vehicles and needs to be "decommissioned".

For this kind of decommissioned battery, it is normal to carry out cascade utilization and dismantling and recycling. Of course, there is a set of specifications for whether to carry out cascade utilization or dismantling and recycling.

Decommissioned batteries with an attenuation range of 20%-40% can meet the ladder utilization of secondary use, such as in communication base stations, solar street lights, UPS power supplies and other small energy storage fields, or low-speed vehicles, two-wheeled vehicles, tricycles, forklifts, sanitation vehicles, etc.

A few days ago, SAIC-GM-Wuling used the decommissioned Baojun E100 and E200 power batteries to build a megawatt-level large-scale photovoltaic wind energy integration cascade utilization energy storage power station. The energy storage power station has reached 1000kWh of storage and a rated output power of 250kW, and is currently put into use.

As for what is the use of this energy storage power station? Simply put, you can understand it as a giant charging treasure. During the trough period of electricity consumption (such as early morning), the grid load is light, the power station can obtain electricity from the grid (the power grid charges the power station), and store this power in the battery, and during the peak period of electricity consumption, these batteries can reverse the charging of the grid to alleviate the pressure on the grid.

It is understood that the power station can also convert solar energy and wind energy into electric energy through photovoltaic and wind power generation systems, and these energy are also stored in decommissioned power batteries.

If the attenuation is more than 40%, the power battery can generally only be dismantled for resource utilization, especially the content of precious metal elements such as nickel, cobalt and manganese in ternary lithium batteries is high, and the recycling value is high under the market of doubling and rising raw materials.

For the battery recovery treatment process, the mainstream method is basically a chemical method, including three methods: fire treatment, wet treatment, and electrode repair and regeneration.

Wet processing is mainly the use of acid and alkali to dissolve the electrode material, and then in the liquid tank to achieve the separation and purification of each element. The core of this technology is the extraction and purification of chemical solvents with specific formulations, which is basically difficult for small workshops to formulate accurately.

The pyrocyte treatment is mainly to disassemble or crush the battery after high temperature incineration to oxidize and decompose the organic matter in the battery, and the metal elements in the electrode material and packaging material are converted into stable metal oxides, and then separated and recovered.

Pyrometallurgy mainly takes nickel and cobalt as the main objects, and the material recovery rate is only about 50%, while the recovery rate of raw materials in hydrometallurgy can reach more than 95%.

Electrode repair and regeneration process is a processing process that has emerged in recent years, which disassembles and separates the electrode material in the waste lithium-ion battery, uses electrochemical or physicochemical methods to process, restores its damaged structure, electrochemical properties, so that the material can be used again for use or as a precursor to the preparation of new electrode materials.

The above three methods correspond to the treatment methods of formal enterprises, and small workshops will obviously not adopt them.

For small workshops, it does not have the detection capacity of the usable capacity of the battery, if the price of raw materials on the market rises rapidly, the disassembly profit is greater, it will obviously be directly dismantled; they will be directly resold or simply treat the old battery, and the black powder after the waste battery is crushed and sorted will be sold to the recycling enterprise.

When the disassembly is not profitable, then the small workshop will also process it in a cascade, and the remaining batteries with higher capacity will be used for energy storage, low-speed electric vehicles and other fields. However, the safety performance of the battery in the small workshop is a significant problem, and it is inevitable that hidden dangers will accumulate during use.

Some two-wheeled electric vehicle fire incidents, in which the battery problem, is likely to be flown out by this kind of refurbished small workshop.

Regulation is hard, hard, too hard

According to the China Automotive Technology and Research Center, the cumulative number of power batteries decommissioned in China will exceed 200,000 tons (about 25GWh) in 2020, and by 2025, this figure is expected to rise to 780,000 tons. New energy vehicles from 2014 to the development so far, the first batch of automotive power battery retirement peak has arrived, decommissioned batteries will be more and more, but the chaos of recycling will only become more and more chaotic.

Even though the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology has introduced an integrated traceability supervision platform, all power battery recycling industry chain enterprises are included in the recycling supervision system, such as automobile dealers, automobile traders, motor vehicle scrap recycling enterprises, etc., and the government supervises the recycling process uniformly. But it is not profitable, and consumers value more the price given.

From the current point of view, the power battery recycling competition is the recycling price and channel, perhaps only the recycling price of the regular enterprise and the battery value match to reduce the inflow into the black market.