American Battery Technology Company – an American critical battery materials company that is commercializing both its primary battery minerals manufacturing and secondary minerals lithium-ion battery recycling technologies – and TechMet-Mercuria, a responsible energy metals platform providing working capital financing, leading-edge marketing expertise, and logistics solutions to supply critical battery metals to support the growth of the electric vehicle, energy storage, and renewable energy industries – have announced the initiation of their strategic partnership. This partnership includes the manufacturing, sales, and marketing of ABTC produced recycled metal products, and a non-dilutive investment into ABTC of up to $20 million through the pre-purchase of these recycled metal products.
ABTC is currently undergoing commissioning of its 20,000 metric tonnes per year commercial-scale lithium-ion battery recycling facility located in the Tahoe-Reno Industrial Center, which employs ABTCs internally-developed processes to first systematically “demanufacture” batteries back into their constituent components. This first-of-kind ABTC process allows for the high-efficiency separation of the engineered structural and support materials in lithium-ion batteries for sale as byproducts, and then the production of a high-value intermediate black mass filter cake that has the majority of these potential contaminants removed.
This process is significantly different than the majority of battery recycling operations, where all materials are simply mixed together through either non-strategic shredding or combustion-based operations, in which cases the contaminants are mixed together with the high value metals lowering the overall value.
“I am very pleased to kick off our strategic partnership with TechMet-Mercuria,” commented ABTC CEO Ryan Melsert. “There is a wide variety of value that can be recognized through the sale of these types of intermediate black mass filter cakes in such an immature market, and through our strategic business cooperation with TechMet-Mercuria we are able to leverage their team’s expertise and capabilities to ensure we have access to the highest tiers of global customers.”
As ABTC brings additional phases of its recycling processes online it will then transition to further processing this intermediate black mass internally instead of selling it as an intermediate product, and will instead manufacture its own battery cathode grade nickel, cobalt, manganese, and lithium hydroxide products for sale to domestic-US battery cathode refiners.
“There is an immense and immediate global demand for recycled high purity black mass materials from lithium-ion batteries, especially those materials produced in systems that have removed the majority of other battery components that would have become contaminants,” stated Quentin Lamarche, Co-Managing Director of TechMet-Mercuria. “Through this strategic partnership the ABTC and TechMet-Mercuria teams are working to market, transport, and sell these intermediate recycled black mass materials to strategic metal refiners throughout the world.”