Low-carbon emitting Fe-cycle recovery of battery-grade FePO4 from biogas slurry for Li-battery application

Abstract

Under the background of carbon peaking and carbon neutrality in China, anaerobic digestion of sludge to produce methane was an important way to recover biomass energy. But plenty of as-generated biogas slurry (BS) with high P concentration was valuable and difficult to dispose. Here, this work proposed a low-carbon emitting Fe-cycle strategy to recover battery-grade FePO4 from BS. At pH=1.0, the P-leaching rate of Fe-sludge (42.93 ± 1.49 mg g−1) generated by polymerized ferrous sulfate (an inorganic polymer coagulant) addition into BS was 93.46 ± 3.56% and high-purity FePO4 (99.0%) could further be obtained by Fe3+ supplement and pH adjustment (pH=2.0). The contents of all elements in recovered FePO4 product fully complied with the battery grade of national industry standard of China (HG/T 4701-2021). After battery-grade FePO4 precipitate separation, recovery solution (RS) with remaining Fe3+ was reutilized to remove 88.05 ± 1.77% of P when mixed with BS wit RS/BS ratio of 2:1, thus achieving a Fe cycle utilization. Meanwhile, the recovery cost of 5.42 $/kg P and CO2 emissions of 80.83 kg/kg P were lower than those of current FePO4 industrial production (14.60 $/kg P and 110.60 kg/kg P). Finally, the LiFePO4/C cathode material based on recovered FePO4 from BS exhibited stable discharge specific capacity of 84.6–100.2 mAh/g during 100 charge–discharge cycles. In general, this study successfully manifested the feasibility of novel Fe-cycle battery-grade FePO4 recovery strategy from wastewater, paving a viable low-carbon emitting pathway for future Li-battery manufacture industry.