Power batteries are the core of pure electric vehicles, and their high prices have always restricted the development of electric vehicles. The reason is mainly because lithium-ion batteries contain rare metal cobalt, and the price of cobalt is relatively high.
Therefore, how to reduce the cobalt content has become a common challenge for all major battery companies.
A few days ago, at the 2021 Consumer Electronics Show (CES), Japanese electronics manufacturer Matsushita stated that it will work to develop lithium-ion batteries that do not use cobalt. It intends to reduce the use of cobalt from less than 5% to 0% in the next few years.
It is understood that the average content of cobalt in the earth’s crust is 0.001% (mass). Nearly a hundred types of cobalt-containing minerals are known in nature, but there are no separate cobalt minerals. Therefore, the production is scarce and expensive. Most of the global cobalt production comes from the Congo ) And Zambia.
Since cobalt does not participate in the electrochemical reaction, reducing the content of cobalt while increasing nickel is a good way to increase battery energy density and reduce battery cost.
Therefore, under the premise of a consensus on the high nickel system, mainstream power battery companies including Panasonic, LG, and CATL are working hard to reduce the use rate of cobalt.
It is worth mentioning that, as a long-term battery supplier customer of Panasonic, Tesla has previously announced plans to reduce the proportion of cobalt use to zero.
It is foreseeable that in the future, low-cobalt and cobalt- free batteries will become the research and development direction of next-generation power batteries.
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