CATL-SC crowned world's first zero-carbon battery plant

Contemporary Amperex Technology's Sichuan Plant has been certified as the world's first zero-carbon battery factory.

CATL-SC, located in Yibin in southwest China's Sichuan Province, managed to achieve the coveted title through a comprehensive 'green' approach to manufacturing, logistics and transportation, supported by intelligent management, which enabled it to be rubber-stamped with the PAS 2060 certification on carbon neutrality from leading testing, inspection and certification company SGS.

What is describes as a 'trailblazing smart plant management system' enables the interconnection of data through automatic capture of the plant system data and equipment operation data.

In terms of green manufacturing, CATL-SC has built a central control and management system for digital production. Equipped with global visual management, it has significantly reduced process losses, and with the support of the AI visual inspection system, which features automatic learning and extraction of defect characteristics, it has improved the detection rate in processes such as slitting and calendaring.

All waste produced during manufacturing will be recycled, and the recovery rate of precious metals such as nickel, cobalt and manganese can reach 99.3%.

CATL-SC has comprehensively upgraded the logistics chain and factory transportation by widely applying driverless logistics vehicles, electric forklifts, etc., which enables zero-carbon operation among supplier factories, raw material warehouses, processing factories, finished product warehouses, and customers' factories. At the same time, employees are encouraged to use electric vehicles and shared mobility, thus reducing their carbon footprint in all aspects of production and life.

Three rivers, the Jinsha, Minjiang and Yangtze, traverse the city's northern part, providing abundant water resources, which enables the plant to reduce 400,000 tons of carbon emissions every year as over 80% of its energy consumption comes from hydropower.

As the world's first zero-carbon battery plant, CATL's Sichuan plant sets an example of how battery production can be carbon neutral, and also offers a brand new solution featuring electrification + zero carbon to the market.

In future, CATL will replicate its experiences in the "lighthouse factory" in other facilities in an effort to achieve carbon neutrality for all its 10 production bases worldwide, thus building a more sustainable industry ecosystem and contributing to the global carbon neutrality goal.