According to foreign media reported on October 26, China is trying to 2020 before the global graphite processing capacity increased nearly three times to meet the growing demand for lithium-ion battery industry.
Chinese enterprises Shanshan Technology, BTR New Energy Materials and LuiMao Graphite (in conjunction with Beiqi Automobile Group Co., Ltd.) are building lithium-ion battery graphite plate-level super-large factory with a total processing capacity of 260,000 tons per year.
Data show that the improvement of processing capacity allows the battery industry to produce 300 gigaw hours per year from the lithium battery, which is sufficient to support the 600 million Tesla model 3 series sedan.
But with the lithium battery demand continues to rise, processing capacity may not be able to keep up, which will lead to supply chain bottlenecks. Senior analyst Andrew Miller said that in fact graphite is the most raw materials in raw materials, much more than cobalt. It is naturally occurring in the form of carbon, which in essence is not uncommon, the key is to be able to find the correct type of graphite.
The battery industry uses two types of flake graphite, one is synthetic, the other is natural, both must be as pure as possible, can also be complementary. Miller said to allow the battery manufacturers to seek to provide the best performance and Value of the combination.
However, even as processing capacity continues to increase, Miller said the sharp rise in demand for graphite still means that the supply chain will be constrained, after all, this demand has never been before this situation led to some observers that lithium-ion battery production is facing graphite China, which has extensive natural reserves of graphite, is clearly eager to solve supply chain panic, but one of its problems is how to deal with those that are useless to the battery industry.
Miller said one of the great challenges of the graphite industry is the distribution of production, because it is impossible to only sell graphite to the battery industry.
All in all, the lack of supply of any material market may increase the risk of lithium-ion battery production.
