HydroVolt's plant at Fredrikstad can handle around 12,000 tonnes a year, which Andreas Frydensvang puts at the equivalent of about 25,000 electric vehicles. The number that shapes the company's design, though, is not capacity.
It is distance.
Cars end their lives where they end their lives. Somebody has to go and get them, and if all the processing happens in one large central facility, that means moving big packs, still charged, over long distances. Frydensvang's verdict on that arrangement is that it is both extremely costly and challenging.
So HydroVolt breaks the process up instead.
The first problem is a transport problem
Pre-treatment sits close to where the materials end their lives. The plan is small facilities near big scrapyards, places that can already receive end-of-life vehicles, where the electricity comes out and the pack is dismantled locally. Only then does anything travel: discharged, short-circuited modules going on to central processing.
That split earns its keep twice. It takes cost out of the logistics for HydroVolt, and it makes the transport itself safer, which is a benefit that accrues to everyone else on the road rather than to the company.
The next step, and the one HydroVolt concentrates on hardest, is crushing and sorting. Frydensvang describes the core mission as getting the highest possible recovery rates out of that stage, as sustainably as possible, and the difficulty is what arrives at the front of it. The feedstock is unusually varied: different battery types from different manufacturers and different car models, all going into the same process. Mixing that and still coming out with good material is the technical work.
HydroVolt does not take it any further itself. It partners with refineries that process black mass into new critical raw materials, and Frydensvang's argument for why any of this is worth building is that the material never has to leave the system. A battery reaches the end of its first life, gets recycled, and becomes a new battery again, in his phrasing, in eternity. That makes recycling an important source of critical raw materials for battery production in Europe rather than a waste-handling obligation.
He is generous about how Fredrikstad got built. Northvolt and Norsk Hydro, HydroVolt's two owners, did not behave only as shareholders. Both sent qualified people into the establishment of the plant, and that, he says, is why it was done as quickly and as well as it was.
Nobody has yet agreed what good black mass is
Put it to Frydensvang that black mass is not a standardised product and the answer comes back immediately: not at all. It can come in all different qualities, and producing the best possible black mass is a substantial challenge on its own.
The awkwardness in that is structural. HydroVolt makes black mass but does not process it, so the specification it is working towards belongs to somebody else. His answer is to settle the definition in conversation: good dialogues with the different processors about what HydroVolt needs to do to supply the best possible material into their hydrometallurgical facilities.
That openness extends further than the large processors. Asked whether anyone looking for black mass should get in touch, he says yes without qualification. There is a great deal of innovation going through the value chain at the moment, and he wants to hear from the small startups that are changing how recycling is done as well as from the established names.
The reason is that the target keeps moving. Innovation in pack assembly and in cell manufacturing changes what the best way to recycle a given material actually is. New chemistries do the same. LFP has been big in China and is becoming more relevant in Europe, and at some point it will need to be recycled here.
Closed loop means two different things
Northvolt is an important partner and HydroVolt will supply it with black mass. There will be other partners too, and some OEMs may demand a closed loop of their own.
Which raises a definition the industry has not settled. Frydensvang thinks closed loop is a term that needs to be defined together, because at least two readings are in circulation. One is closure at the atom level, where a customer gets its exact same raw materials back. The other is that it gets the same quantity of the same quality back.
Those are two very different things to set up, and different clients and prospective clients are asking for different ones.
On geography he is less equivocal. Europe should be able to close the loop on the continent, with a complete value chain and every step in it present: cell manufacturing, the applications where cells live their first, second or third life, recycling, and the refineries and pCAM capacity that turn recovered material back into something a cell maker can use.
Pack design decides the recovery rate
Recyclers inherit decisions made years earlier by people with different priorities. A well-glued pack is safe and holds together, and is correspondingly difficult for anyone else to take apart. Frydensvang treats the balance between performance, safety and recyclability as a real trade-off rather than a false one.
His response is to get into the conversation early. HydroVolt proactively initiates talks with cell manufacturers and with pack assemblers, feeding back the knowledge and experience it has accumulated so that recyclability is one of the inputs into how a pack is put together. Certain ways of doing it, he notes, have a great impact on the recovery rates that are achievable later.
He is careful not to leave it there, though, and the second half of his answer is the more telling one. Recyclers also have to adapt and adjust their own processes, so that they are able to recycle a pack regardless of how it has been assembled.
LFP may be the easier one to process
The chemistry shift is the live commercial question. Strip out the nickel and the cobalt and the value in the black mass falls with them, which is why some recyclers say they can absorb 10 or 20% LFP in their feedstock and would rather not go much beyond that.
Frydensvang is more relaxed about it, and his reasoning is not about value but about cost. Processors of LFP black mass are maturing. The research is still early stage but there is a lot of it. And the recycling process for LFP can be much simpler than the one for NMC, which helps the business case from the other direction.
What follows from that is a point about structure rather than chemistry. Different chemistries will need different business models before they become economically viable, and the content still has to be recycled whether or not the old model fits.
Otherwise it will not make any sense, he says, especially for the recycler.
This piece draws on the full conversation, which is available with a complete transcript on the episode page.