NCET Biz Tips: From mining claims to battery innovator

There is something compelling about companies that start from humble beginnings and achieve great success. It is said that these success stories tap into universal themes of hope, resilience, and even the entrepreneurial spirit’s capacity to overcome obstacles and reach for greatness.

Such stories often serve as a source of inspiration. They show that anyone, regardless of their background or initial circumstances, has the potential to achieve great success.

Our Reno area has its share of companies that remind us that success is attainable through hard work and determination. One of those standout companies is American Battery Technology Co. (ABAT), traded on Nasdaq as of September.

ABAT initially started as a company with only a few mining claims. Yet, in the last few years, with a new team and leadership, has grown to become an important integrated battery materials company. ABAT has been able to commercialize its technologies for both primary battery minerals manufacturing and secondary minerals lithium-ion battery recycling.

Fifty-six employees and five Nevada facilities strong, ABAT separates itself from other recycling and extraction companies with its innovative, first-of-kind processing technology. This technology unlocks domestically manufactured and recycled battery metals critically needed to help meet the significant demand from the electric vehicle, stationary storage, and consumer electronics industries.

Expanding on ABAT’s recycling process, their team has developed a “de-manufacturing” process to extract metals and recover materials from spent batteries. This system does not utilize brute force methods common today, such as smelting, shredding, or grinding. The results are a reduction of waste, conservation of natural resources, and decreased air pollution associated with smelting. In addition, higher material recovery rates are attained, and battery-grade materials are captured with no degradation of quality compared to conventional virgin sourced materials.

ABAT’s extraction process was also developed in-house. Its first-of-kind extraction and purification processes utilize selective leach extraction (SLE), enabling low-cost extraction of lithium from sedimentary claystone resources. These technological advancements allow for significantly lower consumption of chemical reagents, lower levels of contaminants in the generated leach liquor, lower water consumption, and lower overall production costs.

Recognized success has come quickly in the past few years. ABAT has been awarded several government grants for multi-partner projects to advance sustainable battery technology.

Two U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) grants were received to demonstrate and commercialize next-generation techniques for lithium-ion battery recycling processes. ABAT was one of only five companies selected nationwide for this competitive funding on one of those grants.

Two more DOE grants were received in 2021 and 2022. One grant was to fund the demonstration and scaling of ABAT’s extraction technologies into a multi-ton-per-day field demonstration system. The second grant was received to design, construct, commission, and operate a $115M commercial-scale facility to commercially scale ABAT’s novel process for the manufacturing of battery-grade lithium hydroxide monohydrate.

What is the American Battery Technology Co. team most proud of? It’s the company’s commitment to leave things better than when they found them. That applies to the places in which ABAT employees live and work, the people they interact with, and the wider environment.

Challenges? Many of us are aware of the rapid growth and demand for lithium-ion batteries to power our vehicles, stationary grid storage systems, and consumer electronics. Unfortunately, the upstream domestic production capacities of the battery metals that supply manufacturing operations have not kept pace. That has led to three big challenges.

First, security of supply. Less than 1% of the global manufacturing capacity of each of the primary battery metals (lithium, nickel, cobalt, and manganese) is currently within the U.S. Our federal government considers all four minerals to be essential to the economic and national security of our country.

Second, cost of supply. The cost of manufacturing and importing battery metals has grown rapidly in recent years as demand has grown at a far faster pace than new supply can enter the market.

Third, the environmental impact of supply. Conventional methods of mining battery metals can result in the emission of large amounts of greenhouse gases, air pollutants, and contaminated water and soil.

How is ABAT overcoming those challenges? ABAT has pioneered innovative, first-of-kind technologies in order to provide a domestic supply of battery materials. ABAT’s first-of-kind technologies have been proven at bench scale to have both lower costs and reduced environmental impacts when compared to conventional methods.

ABAT does field questions every day about their operation. The most common questions revolve around, “Do you make end-use batteries?” No. “How is your technology more sustainable than others?” We continue to demonstrate that sustainability can be enhanced and improved with our pioneering extraction and recycling innovations. “How can you be both a recycling company and a mining company?” We view it as a 1 + 1 = 3 advantage.

Today, Nevada is well-known for gaming, mining, and transportation logistics. On the mining end, Nevada is becoming a key domestic source of lithium. Emerging companies like American Battery Technology Company are taking the lead to help power a global transition to electrification and the future of sustainable energy.

If you want to learn more about ABAT and its sustainability solutions, you have an opportunity right around the corner at NCET Tech Wednesday on Nov. 8.

Sign up early for American Battery Technology Company’s presentation from 4 p.m. to 5 p.m. with networking from 3 p.m. to 4 p.m. During your visit, you will learn about:

• Global battery metals supply challenges.

• Creating a robust domestic battery metals chain.

• How to increase the supply of battery-grade metals.

• Innovative processes to lower the cost of extracting battery-grade metals.

• Ways to lower the environmental impact of recycling and extraction of battery metals vs. current conventional methods.

Register now by visiting ncetevents.org.

Bill Leonard is VP of Communications at NCET and a freelance B2B & SaaS content writer of conversion-driven customer case studies and white papers. Connect with Bill at Case Study Ink on LinkedIn. 

NCET produces education and networking events to help people explore business and technology.