Battery knowledge · Supply chain and regulation

Nickel sulfate

The battery-grade nickel chemical fed to precursor plants, made from high-purity class 1 nickel or increasingly from Indonesian laterite ore by high-pressure acid leaching. It is the largest cost in a high-nickel cathode.

Also called
class 1 nickel

Example

Supply chain and regulation: an example situation

Carbon footprints can be compared only with compatible boundaries and functional units.

Read Nickel sulfate alongside Critical raw materials in this context. Materials that an economy depends on and whose supply is concentrated or at risk: for batteries, lithium, cobalt, nickel, natural graphite and manganese. The EU and US both list them and attach sourcing and recycling targets.

See it in the plant

How the metals are separated, as a labelled cutaway with numbered steps.
Separate metals: how the unit works. Drawn by the Lemonergy recycling study for 100 returned NMC 622 packs of 60 kWh through mechanical + hydrometallurgy. The numbers match the steps below. Redraw it for your own fleet in the recycling study ↗
  1. Mix and settle: 5544 kg of solution meets an organic extractant in each mixer; in the settler the two liquids separate by density.
  2. Extract in turn: at a controlled pH the first stage loads manganese, the second stage loads cobalt and the third stage loads nickel into the organic; the other metals stay in the water.
  3. Strip and crystallise: sulfuric acid takes each metal back out of the organic, and crystallisers make MnSO₄ 900 kg, CoSO₄ 986 kg, NiSO₄ 2945 kg.
  4. Pass on: lithium stays in the water. 586 kg of raffinate goes to lithium recovery and 127 kg is bled off to stop sodium and sulfate building up.

Use in Lemonergy

Keep boundaries, dates, geography and units.

This is a reference concept. No executable Lemonergy block has been verified for this term.

References & further reading

Further reading on this topic

These sources provide broader context; they are not presented as citations for every statement in this entry.

  1. Regulation (EU) 2023/1542 concerning batteries and waste batteries

    European Union / EUR-Lex · 2023

    Topic background · Battery sustainability, information, waste management and battery passport provisions. Consult the current consolidated text and applicable implementing acts.