Utmel: Global Power and Energy Storage Battery Recycling Scale Will Exceed 1TWh by 2030

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Nov 11, 2022, 05:04 ET

SHENZHEN, China, Nov. 11, 2022 /PRNewswire/ -- Utmel said that the rapid penetration of the global new energy vehicle market has stimulated the installation of power batteries to increase year by year. At the same time, the technological route of lithium iron phosphate batteries in the field of electrochemical energy storage has become the mainstream solution of newly installed capacity in recent years, and its proportion is rapidly increasing.

Utmel estimates that the global recycling scale of power and energy storage batteries will exceed 1TWh by 2030, with lithium iron phosphate batteries accounting for more than 58% of the total.

Despite fierce competition, the actual recycling scale of retired power batteries is small.

However, there are still several major problems to be solved in the battery recycling industry at this stage.

First, the lithium ion battery recycling industry is still in its early stages, with approximately 70% of used batteries originating from defective products and wastes of battery factories, implying that the actual recycling scale is still small.

Second, the number of participants in the battery recycling industry is increasing, and the overall industry standardization still needs to be improved.

Take the Chinese market as an example, since 2020, China has continued to introduce power battery recycling policies. In 2021, the newly registered battery recycling-related enterprises exceeded 10,000, an increase of about 4 times compared with 2020.

However, according to the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology of China's Industrial Specification Conditions for Comprehensive Traction of Waste Power Batteries of New Energy Vehicles enterprises (hereinafter referred to as the white list of enterprises), only 45 will be operational by the end of 2021. According to Utmel statistics, the annual production capacity of whitelisted enterprises' waste battery comprehensive treatment has exceeded 1.01 million tons, and the planned production capacity of enterprises' waste battery treatment has exceeded 4.25 million tons. However, the actual recycling volume of lithium-ion batteries in China in 2021 is less than 300,000 tons, indicating that the battery recycling industry's idle capacity is quite obvious.

Echelon and recycling go hand in hand to create a circular economy in battery industry.

In China, one of the world's largest new energy vehicle markets, the installed scale of the global power battery market will exceed 3TWh by 2030, and the installed scale of China's power battery is expected to occupy about 45% of the world. Therefore, the effective use of the battery life cycle will be one of the important ways to build a low-carbon economy in the future. Besides, battery recycling and utilization can not only make up for resource shortage, but also reduce the impact and pressure on environment and resources compared with the exploitation, production and use of primary mine resources.

According to Utmel's research, the recycling of used lithium-ion batteries in China is currently divided into echelon use and recycling. The echelon use is the gradient utilization of power battery storage capacity decay to less than 80% in such fields as power backup, small energy storage, low-speed vehicles (such as take-away two-wheelers, express three-wheelers) and four-wheeled micro-electric vehicles, etc. However, most of the echelon use in the field of energy storage is still in the experimental demonstration stage and is excluded from large-scale energy storage projects by the National Energy Administration of China; while the regeneration utilization is mainly the dismantling of retired power batteries to recover lithium, cobalt, nickel and other valuable metals and reuse them for regenerative manufacturing of battery materials. The recycling is mainly to recover lithium, cobalt, nickel and other valuable metals after dismantling and reuse them in the regenerative manufacturing of battery materials.

SOURCE Utmel