American Battery Technology Company, an American critical minerals and lithium-ion battery recycling company has received approval of their Core and Shell Building Permit, paving the way for the company to construct its planned pre-commercial battery recycling plant in Fernley, Nevada, just east of Reno.
The American Battery Technology Company lithium-ion battery recycling facility will consist of three functional building areas with a combined floor space of approximately 100,000 square feet. The the structures will house a battery recycling production building, an office building with laboratories, and a finished goods warehouse. The onsite analytical and process laboratories, along with the pilot bays for validating next-generation technologies, will become ABTC’s global development center, providing the infrastructure and experimental tools to support current and future operations of our battery recycling and primary battery metal extraction technologies.
American Battery Technology’s recycling production building will bring to scale the company’s closed-loop battery recycling process, where battery contents are removed using automated 3-hour process of ingesting materials. The chemicals used in that ingestion are then kept in a “closed system”, cleaned, filtered and reused, before individual metals are separated and purified into battery grade components.
Once the extraction and recycling process has been completed, the company then sells high grade metals including lithium, cobalt, nickel, aluminum, copper, and graphite to OEMs and manufacturers.
When operations commence, American Battery Technology’s pilot plant will be scaled to process 20K metric tons of feedstock per year.
A recent report by Lux Research found that more than 1 million tons of batteries are expected to reach end-of-life and need to be recycled by 2030, a capacity that neither the U.S., nor the world at large are currently able to handle.
Lux said a variety of technologies and further innovation will be needed to meet the demand of end-of-life batteries, and capacity will need to be expanded, and that the development of a clear code for recycling standards could be the first key towards tackling the upcoming wave.
