Doosan to enter EV sector with battery recycling business

South Korea’s major power plant builder Doosan Enerbility Co. plans to set up a battery recycling subsidiary, targeting the sector expecting rapid growth on the rise in the global electric vehicle industry.

Doosan Enerbility said on Friday its board of directors approved the establishment of Doosan Recycle Solutions, a unit that reprocesses waste batteries to collect lithium, a core material for EV cells.

“We decided to found a subsidiary with an independent management system to dominate business opportunities in the rapidly growing battery recycling market,” said Doosan Enerbility Vice President of Strategy Choi Jaehyuk, who has been working on setting up the subsidiary.

“We aim to accelerate business growth with fast decision-making and expertise, utilizing our own competitive technology,” Choi said in a statement.

BETTER ECONOMICS, HIGHER COLLECTION RATES

The global battery recycling market was forecast to soar by more than 120 times to 87 trillion won ($67.8 billion) by 2040 from an estimated 700 billion won this year, according to SNE Research, a Seoul-based energy market tracker.

Doosan Enerbility proved its own technology developed in 2021 to collect lithium from waste batteries. The technology treats materials in waste batteries by heating them, separating the lithium using distilled water and extracting lithium carbonate through the crystallization method.

Its process is simpler than those of the existing technologies, improving the economics of extraction while increasing lithium purity and collection rates through eco-friendly methods without chemicals, the company said.

Doosan Recycle Solutions plans to build commercial production facilities with a schedule to start processing about 3,000 tons of materials per year to extract lithium from the second half of 2025.

The company also aims to expand its business in cooperation with raw materials suppliers.

Write to Mi-Sun Kang at misunny@hankyung.com
 

Jongwoo Cheon edited this article.