Urgent Demand For Decarburization of Lithium Copper Foil

"the copper foil industry has been developed for a hundred years, and in the new century, the problem of production energy consumption of copper foil may be more serious than overcapacity."

At the 2022 lithium battery annual meeting, Dr. Luo Jia, president of Telford Technology, pointed out that copper foil is only one of the many raw materials for lithium battery batteries, but its unit product requires a lot of energy consumption. The power consumption of electrolytic copper foil for the manufacture of 1GWh lithium battery is about 5 million kilowatt-hours, and the existing process has a great restriction on the reduction of energy consumption in the production of electrolytic copper foil.

At the same time, under the background of the global dual-carbon strategy, the problem of carbon emissions at the manufacturing end and raw material end in the manufacturing process of lithium battery will become more and more prominent. Facing the restriction of energy consumption index in the era of TWh, copper foil enterprises are faced with great challenges in capacity expansion and energy saving.

How to reduce the production energy consumption and manufacturing cost of lithium copper foil and realize decarbonization and zero carbon of copper foil products as soon as possible has become an urgent problem to be solved in the next century of electrolytic copper foil industry.

Multi-path promotion of decarburization and consumption reduction of lithium battery copper foil.

The industry has entered a new cycle, the new energy industry is moving from high-speed development to high-quality development, green and low carbon has become an important driving force for the high-quality development of the new energy industry.

On the one hand, China's dual-carbon strategy overlays European legislation to strengthen carbon emission management, the power battery industry chain to achieve green low-carbon sustainable development has become an inevitable trend, low-carbon will become one of the core elements of the global competition of Chinese battery products. 

On the other hand, the international mainframe factory has put forward decarbonization and zero-carbon requirements for its battery suppliers in the whole life cycle of power battery production, transportation, application and recycling, and extends the carbon footprint back to the upstream material field.

As a key auxiliary material in lithium battery, lithium copper foil accounts for about 5-10% of the material cost of lithium battery. 

Taking 6 μ m copper foil as an example, 1GWh lithium battery consumes about 600t of lithium copper foil, while electrolytic copper foil consumes about 5 million kilowatt-hours of electricity to make 1GWh lithium battery. 

Among them, the per ton power consumption of electrolysis process is about 7000-8000 kilowatt-hours, and that of other processes is about 2000 kilowatt-hour. 

This means that lithium copper foil will become one of the main materials for battery companies to accelerate decarburization, and copper foil enterprises are also facing huge decarburization challenges.