In the escalating trade war, with the United States pressing forward step by step and launching attacks on multiple fronts, my country's power lithium battery industry must also be wary of similar risks.
According to Battery China Network, my country currently has over 200 power battery manufacturers, making it the country with the most power battery companies globally. Data shows that in 2017, Chinese companies occupied 7 of the top 10 spots in global power battery sales. Forbes reports that by 2020, China's share of the global battery market is expected to exceed 70%.
Although my country has formed a relatively complete power battery industry chain and its scale is large enough, it is not strong enough. Some key core technologies are still subject to foreign control, and there is a risk of being "strangled" like ZTE.
Among these challenges, lithium-ion battery separator technology is currently a major pain point for my country's power battery industry. While positive and negative electrode materials and electrolytes in lithium-ion batteries are largely domestically produced, separator technology, a relatively recent development, suffers from low technological maturity among domestic companies. Although the domestic production rate of lithium-ion battery separators has been increasing in recent years, it primarily occupies the low-end 3C battery separator market. The domestic production rate of high-end separators remains very low, and high-end 3C battery and power battery separators still heavily rely on imports.
According to the "Development Plan for Energy-Saving and New Energy Vehicle Industry (2011-2020)" issued by the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology, my country's production capacity of pure electric vehicles and plug-in hybrid electric vehicles will reach 2 million units per year by 2020. Based on this estimate, the annual demand for high-quality automotive power battery separator materials in my country will reach hundreds of millions of square meters.
As is well known, the separator is one of the key internal components in the structure of a lithium battery. It must prevent the positive and negative electrodes from contacting each other while ensuring the passage of electrolyte ions. Therefore, the quality of the separator directly affects the battery's capacity, cycle life, and safety performance. A high-quality separator plays an important role in improving the overall performance of the battery.
It is understood that the separator is currently the high-value-added material with the highest technical barrier among lithium battery materials, accounting for about 15% of the cost of lithium batteries. Its technical difficulties lie in the engineering technology of pore formation, matrix materials, and manufacturing equipment.
The common problem with domestically produced separators is their lack of consistency, mainly manifested in irregular defects, substandard porosity, and uneven thickness, pore size distribution, and other variations. While domestically produced uniaxially stretched PP separators are relatively close to foreign products in terms of porosity and pore size distribution, biaxially stretched PE separators typically have lower porosity and less than ideal pore size distribution compared to foreign products. These issues represent a potential risk of dependence on foreign suppliers, and if not properly addressed, could hinder the healthy development of my country's lithium battery industry.
According to Battery China Network, Celgard Membrane Inc.'s PP membranes and Asahi's PE membranes represent the highest level of products in the current membrane industry. Since Asahi acquired Celgard in 2016, its best membrane products have all come from Asahi. Several other Japanese companies, such as UBE and Toray, also possess high-level products. my country lags far behind the US and Japan in PP and PE membrane technology, placing it in a passive position within the industry chain.
Currently, lithium-ion battery separator manufacturing methods are mainly divided into wet and dry processes. my country has made significant breakthroughs in the dry process for lithium-ion battery separators, but in the field of wet process separators, domestic separator companies are limited by various factors such as processes and technologies, resulting in relatively low product quality and a heavy reliance on imported production equipment.
Like semiconductor chips, high-end separator technology has a very high barrier to entry. It requires not only huge investments but also a strong R&D and production team, mature process technology, and high-level production lines, and breakthroughs cannot be achieved in a short time. However, the US-China trade war and the ZTE and Huawei incidents have sounded the alarm for my country's manufacturing industry. For the entire power battery industry, breaking through the high-end separator technology for lithium batteries as soon as possible is now imperative.
Encouragingly, domestic companies such as CAS Technology and Xingyuan Material have made significant breakthroughs in high-end separator technology. It is believed that in the near future, my country's power lithium battery industry will break the foreign technological monopoly and take control of the market.
Only with a strong spear in hand can one capture and subdue a powerful dragon. Especially now, as my country's manufacturing industry faces headwinds from the international economy, only by mastering core technologies can we avoid being controlled by others, prevent a ZTE-style crisis, and become true market leaders!
