Carbon Footprint Research Of Lithium Ion Secondary Battery Industry

Lithium ion secondary battery production is developing rapidly because of its good electrochemical performance and environmental friendly of lithium ion secondary battery since its marketization. But with its development and growth, the environmental issues of lithium ion secondary battery industry will become increasingly evident because of producing, transporting and recycling. With more and more attention has been put on environment issues by policy makers, manufacturers and consumers,and as industry convergence became active,Therefore, concurrent and meaningful assessment on its environmental performance is important so that we can find ways to relieve potential negative consequences. Since global warming affects human life increasingly, and there is no report on carbon footprint of lithium ion secondary battery industry in China so far, we do some research on the carbon footprint of lithium ion secondary battery industry aiming to establish a methodology for lithium ion secondary battery industry. And in the paper, we also conduct case studies of lithium ion secondary industry trains in order to find factors that influence the carbon footprint.In this paper, we take life cycle assessment method and set lithium ion secondary battery industry chain as our study object. We separate lithium ion secondary battery industry chain into two parts. They are lithium ion secondary battery production company and lithium ion secondary battery raw material production company. In addition, we separate lithium ion secondary battery production company into four parts in order to study it. They are purchase phase, production phase, market phase, and wastes recovery phase.Through calculating, we can get three industry chains’ carbon footprint, the carbon footprint of battery industry chain outputting 90 million Ah lithium iron phosphate yearly is 6.05E+06kgCO2eq. The carbon footprint of battery industry chain outputting 70 million Ah lithium iron phosphate yearly is 1.60E+07kgCO2eq. The carbon footprint of battery industry chain outputting 30 million Ah lithium iron phosphate yearly is 2.21E+06kgCO2eq. Through the comparative between the battery industry chain outputting 90 million Ah lithium iron phosphate yearly and the battery industry chain outputting 70 million Ah lithium iron phosphate yearly, the output increment is far more than the carbon footprint increment. Through this case, under the situation that the project has no technical improvement, the result may benefit from the effect of economies of scale. Moreover, by analyzing, the lithium ion battery production company’s carbon footprint is most come from productive process. This may have some connections to transport distance, transport tools, and to the fact that China’ electric power mainly coming from thermal power generation.Lithium ion secondary battery industry carbon footprint research method system will be built in this research project, two lithium ion secondary battery industry chains in China are chosen to study in order to providing advices to the reducing of lithium ion secondary battery industry’ carbon footprint.