Automotive Engineering - September 2023 - 27

BATTERY RECYCLING FEATURE
Through the extraction process, Cirba Solutions can recover nickel sulfate,
cobalt sulfate, lithium carbonate equivalent, and other materials, then put those
recovered materials back into the battery supply chain.
Cirba Solutions can recover more than 95% of critical materials
contained within an EV battery. Image shows a Cirba Solutions
worker disassembling an EV battery to prepare for recycling.
black mass, then the materials will need additional
processing to get to a battery-grade material.
Otherwise, a process can go directly to a batterygrade
salt that is at a purity level for new cathode development, "
Klanecky said, noting the company's extraction
process has intellectual property protection.
Ascend Elements uses a novel technique for processing
materials to become battery-ready cathode
material. " Our patented Hydro-to-Cathode direct precursor
synthesis process eliminates energy-intensive
intermediate steps and produces new cathode precursor
(pCAM) without metals extraction or separation, "
Ascend Elements CEO Mike O'Kronley said.
Instead of extracting metals from black mass, impurities
are extracted via the Ascend Elements process that
leaves cathode minerals intact in an aqueous solution.
" We then use microstructure engineering techniques to
adjust the elemental crystal structure needed to develop
new cathode material to precise customer specifications, "
said O'Kronley. By eliminating the intermediate
processing steps, the carbon footprint of new cathode
material is reduced by more than 90% compared to
traditional cathode manufacturing methods.
" We can recycle a 10-year-old battery from a firstgeneration
EV, break it down to an aqueous solution
containing lithium, nickel and cobalt atoms, then rearrange
those atoms into the newest type of cathode
active materials, " O'Kronley said, citing lithium-nickelmanganese-cobalt-oxide
(NMC) 811 or a high nickel
cobalt manganese aluminum (NMCA) as examples.
The incoming feedstock can be a mixture of different
lithium-ion battery types and elemental compositions,
such as used batteries from EVs, laptops, cell phones,
scooters and power tools. " Even gigafactory scrap and
AUTOMOTIVE ENGINEERING
An artist's rendering of
Ascend Elements' future
Apex 1 facility in Hopkinsville,
Kentucky. The Hopkinsville site
covers more than 140 acres
with approximately one million
square feet of facilities' space.
waste can be part of the mix. There's no need to sort batteries into
different categories before recycling, " O'Kronley pointed out.
U.S. battery recycling production ramps up
In addition to its headquarters and R&D center in Westborough,
Massachusetts, Ascend Elements has a 150,000 square foot battery
recycling facility in Covington, Georgia and a cathode sintering pilot
plant in Novi, Michigan. The company is investing more than $1 billion,
including $480 million in grant funds from the U.S. Department
of Energy, to build and equip a sustainable cathode manufacturing
complex in Hopkinsville, Kentucky. It will be the first pCAM facility in
the U.S. The plant, expected to be operational in late 2024, will have
the capacity to produce NMC pCAM for up to 750,000 EVs annually.
Cirba Solutions has five plants in the U.S. and a facility in Canada. A
seventh plant in North America is targeted to break ground in late
2023. That $340 million-plus South Carolina facility will be operational
in phases starting in late 2024. An existing Cirba Solutions plant in
Lancaster, Ohio is undergoing an $275 million expansion (the Ohio
plant project includes more than $82 million in federal funds). " We'll
increase the capacity of incoming batteries that can be processed by
more than 600 percent, and we'll expand the product offering coming
September 2023 27
CLOCKWISE FROM TOP LEFT: CIRBA SOLUTIONS; CIRBA SOLUTIONS; ASCEND ELEMENTS
Automotive Engineering - September 2023

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