New Regulations on Power Battery Maintenance Take Effect

The supporting implementation rules for Ministry of Industry and Information Technology (MIIT) Order No. 73 have been fully rolled out. The cost ceiling for repairing or replacing LFP batteries is set at 150 yuan/kWh, and for ternary lithium batteries at 180 yuan/kWh—meaning the once-common practice of "replacement instead of repair" costing tens of thousands of yuan has become a thing of the past. For the chemical and materials industry, however, a far more significant signal than the repair price cuts lies buried in another detailed rule: the residual value of end-of-life batteries belongs to the vehicle owner and can be transparently deducted from repair costs.

What appears to be a consumer-friendly policy designed to benefit vehicle owners in fact installs a "compliant raw material engine" for the entire rare and precious metal recycling industry chain. In the past, large volumes of end-of-life batteries flowed into the black market due to opaque repair practices, causing valuable lithium, cobalt, and nickel resources to be lost in crude smelting processes. Now, for the first time, the ore veins of this "urban mine" are being systematically channeled through formal repair channels to compliant chemical recycling enterprises.

From a resource strategy perspective, the improvement of the power battery repair and recycling system is essentially the construction of a flowing "urban mine." According to MIIT data, in 2024, China's comprehensive utilization of power batteries reached 301,000 mt, from which 2,000 mt of lithium metal, 2,000 mt of cobalt, and 5,000 mt of nickel were extracted, equivalent to 4%–7% of the resources required for power battery production during the same period.

This proportion may appear modest, but the growth curve is extremely steep. The State Administration for Market Regulation estimates that by 2030, the market size of power battery recycling in China will surpass 100 billion yuan, at which point recycled metals will account for a substantially higher share of power battery raw material supply. Compared with the long process of ore mining, beneficiation, and smelting, battery regeneration and extraction technologies consume significantly less energy, generate markedly lower carbon emissions, and reduce dependence on imported ore resources.

It is worth noting that the large-scale recycling of end-of-life LFP batteries is also accelerating. Although the LFP chemistry contains no high-value metals such as cobalt or nickel, the recovery value of the lithium element is becoming increasingly prominent. Institutions including the Guangzhou Institute of Energy Conversion under the Chinese Academy of Sciences have developed a Joule-heating shock-activated water leaching technology that has achieved a lithium leaching rate exceeding 99%, while the leaching tailings can be synergistically upgraded to produce high-energy-density cathode materials, further improving resource utilization efficiency across the entire system. Overall, this new maintenance regulation is not an isolated consumer-side policy but a critical link in the entire power battery recycling industry chain — front-end maintenance standardizes the export of end-of-life batteries, mid-end recycling ensures the collection of rare and precious metals, and back-end metallurgy achieves closed-loop resource regeneration. As compliance across the entire chain deepens, China’s circular supply capacity for rare and precious metals will continue to be released.