Environmental Impacts Assessment of NCM Cathode Material Production of Power Lithium-Ion Batteries

The nickel cobalt manganese ternary (NCM) cathode material is one of the important parts of power lithium battery. The NCM cathode material production process including the Li2CO3 preparation, precursor preparation and synthesis process of cathode materials is resource-and energy- intensive, thus it leads to relatively severe environment pollution. In this article, life cycle assessment of NCM cathode material production using coprecipitation method in China was conducted based on ReCiPe method. The environmental impacts of the main processes were calculated. The main factors and sources causing environmental pressure were identified. The results indicated that the precursor production contributed the most to environmental impacts in the NCM cathode material production. The energy consumption of the precursor production was 612MJ, accounting for 94.6% of the total energy consumption of NCM production. The environmental impacts of the CoSO4 production and NiSO4 production were the main contributors to that of the precursor production. The primary cobalt and nickel resources in China with lower grade and difficult mining led to the high energy consumption of these two kinds of raw materials. Therefore, the development and utilization of the secondary cobalt and nickel metals will be a great potential to reduce environmental impacts of NCM production.