Energy transition from fossil fuels to renewables has set the stage for a boom in the battery market, both for storage and recycling.
French oil and gas supermajor Total wants to capture more of the growing Chinese battery market and has struck two separate deals to gain market shares in the world’s largest electric vehicle (EV) market and the world’s top liquefied natural gas (LNG) demand centre.
To achieve this, Total’s subsidiary Saft has signed an agreement with China’s privately held Tianneng Group to create a joint venture (JV) to expand their lithium-ion battery production, the supermajor has said.
Manufacturing will take place at the Changxing Gigafactory, with a potential capacity of 5.5 gigawatt hours (GWh), several GWh of which are already in operation.
British Petroleum (BP) is also investing in batteries. Last year, the company announced the acquisition of a US$20-million stake in StoreDot, a developer of ultrafast charging battery technology. Ultra-fast charging is at the heart of BP’s electrification strategy. StoreDot’s technology shows real potential for car batteries that can charge in the same time it takes to fill a gas tank.
The total size of the battery storage market will increase from $1.98 billion in 2018 to $8.54 billion in 2023. According to an estimate from GTM Research, total U.S. storage deployment should increase from 1.2 GWh in 2018 to more than 10 GWh by 2023. Investment in battery storage was $440 million in 2017, and will increase to $3.1 billion by 2022 to meet the surge in demand.
Growth in battery storage market has been in lockstep with growth in the battery recycling market too. A recent report from Allied Market Research calculated the lithium ion battery recycling market would reach US$2.27 billion by 2025. That is up from US$138.6 million in 2017, which means a compound annual growth rate of almost 42 percent.
This is an impressive growth rate that will necessitate better recycling methods such as the one developed by the Rice University researchers in the United States of America, especially if the methods are cheap and less harmful to the environment than established processes.
A materials science lab at Rice University has developed a relatively green lithium ion battery recycling process that allows for the retention and subsequent reuse of valuable component elements such as cobalt.
The method involves a so-called deep eutectic solvent – a compound that freezes at much lower temperatures than its constituent compounds – that can dissolve a variety of metal oxides, and the researchers reported that it had successfully extracted a substantial portion of the cobalt used in lithium batteries.
Battery recycling certainly looks like the next frontier in energy storage and electronics. As the race to make batteries more reliable and longer-lasting continues, another one is beginning that will seek to find out how to better dispose of these longer-lasting and more reliable batteries once their life is over.
