A battery that goes into ABTC's recycling plant comes out as nine separate products.
Lithium is one of them. The others include nickel, cobalt, manganese, aluminium and copper. Ryan Melsert's reason for splitting the output that finely is commercial before it is technical. Those metal prices tend to move up and down out of phase with each other, so a plant selling all nine is protected when any one of them falls.
The comparison he keeps returning to is with plants that were never meant for batteries. A lot of early recycling capacity was designed for general metal scrap, for aluminium and for steel, and batteries were pushed through it afterwards. Those systems work, in the narrow sense. They can recover the nickel, the cobalt and the copper. Everything else is difficult.
ABTC drew its process from a blank piece of paper with batteries as the design feed, which is why Melsert can talk about recovering a large share of the battery by mass rather than a few token elements.
Running the manufacturing line backwards
The company came out of cell manufacturing rather than out of waste handling, and that shows in how it thinks about the problem.
Many of ABTC's founders spent years at domestic US battery manufacturers. A number of them, Melsert included, were on the initial team that helped design and build the first Tesla Gigafactory near Reno: manufacturing process design, cell layouts, utility systems, commissioning, ramping the lines. That work is what showed them the gap. Recyclers at the time took whole batteries and dropped them into shredders or into furnaces, mixing everything together at the first step.
The alternative was to back the manufacturing process out instead. Disassemble packs, then modules, then cells, and reach the high-value materials before anything gets blended.
ABTC was formed about four years ago. It demonstrated the technology early, won a competition hosted by BASF, then another hosted by Ford, General Motors and Stellantis, and built its first commercial-scale recycling plant. That plant started up last autumn and is now in commercial production.
Melsert is careful about the labels people use for what happens inside it. The front end is automated disassembly, stripping out support material and the byproducts that can be sold on. The back end sits within the hydrometallurgy family, but he objects to the assumption that hydromet means solvent extraction. ABTC's answer is a single circuit reaching battery-grade purity across several products without the conventional solvent extraction trains.
The plant has no high-temperature operations and no combustion on site. Chemical agent consumption is low, so it generates little wastewater.
A claystone nobody has processed
The second business is primary lithium, and it exists because Melsert does not think recycling can carry the load on its own while the amount of batteries in the field grows this fast.
Central Nevada holds a material called a claystone with a lot of lithium in it. His claim is that no process to date has been able to get that lithium out economically, and that no commercial-scale plants do it anywhere, though a handful of claystone-bearing deposits exist around the world.
ABTC spent about three years on a technique to liberate the lithium, purify it and turn it into a battery-grade lithium hydroxide. Bench scale two years ago. A pilot plant over the past year. An operational demonstration facility now.
What makes the route worth pursuing, in his account, is what it does not need. Recovering lithium from hard rock spodumene or from a brine is energy intensive and reagent intensive, and the acids, solvents and oxidisers used to purify the material drive the cost and the emissions together. Claystone processing, as ABTC has designed it, needs much less of both.
The same logic decides where the plant sits. Many processes today put the mine and the concentration step in one part of the world and the refinery on another continent. ABTC intends to build its refinery directly on top of the resource.
Neither business works on its own
Melsert's argument for keeping recycling and primary lithium inside one company is that the industry needs both and cannot get to either alone. Demand cannot be met by recycling. Large volumes of primary material do not work if nothing closes the loop at the end.
The practical case is that the two businesses barely differ. The same engineers and scientists develop the processes, the same operators run the plants, and the materials are made to the same specifications and sold to the same customers.
What he notices in customer conversations is a difference in emphasis. Automakers and cell manufacturers see recycling as valuable and know it has to happen, but the recycling industry takes a while to grow. It is the lithium resource, the process for making it and the scale it can move at that gets them excited, because the magnitude is what moves the needle. They do not have to choose: recycled material is available now, while the primary resource is built out.
BASF is where that turns into a contract. It is one of the only companies currently manufacturing high energy density cathode material inside the US, which makes it close to an ideal customer for recycled metals. ABTC sent samples for several years, small ones at first and then much larger batches, made to the specifications BASF needs at the input to its plant. The two signed a partnership agreement last summer. ABTC handles collection and recycling in North America and sells the metal products on for cathode production, so an automaker can hand over end-of-life material and buy recycled-content cathode back out of the same arrangement.
On cost, Melsert thinks recycling wins on geography rather than on subsidy. Shipping material to Asia to be refined and shipping it back again carries large transport costs, and a plant close to both its suppliers and its customers can undercut that.
The credit that matters is not the $7,500 one
Most attention on the Inflation Reduction Act goes to 30D, the $7,500 a consumer can claim on an electric vehicle. Melsert points somewhere else.
48C is an investment tax credit administered through the Department of Energy and the IRS to defer capital cost on domestic facilities. ABTC applied last summer and went through the final rounds in the autumn. Winners were announced at the end of March, and around 9% of requested funds were awarded.
ABTC took a $20 million credit against its current recycling plant and a $40 million credit towards its next one, already in design and planning on the strength of the material the company has under negotiation. The award letters exist now; the money comes back once the facilities are built and shown to be operational.
More than a PowerPoint deck
Feedstock arrives from everywhere. Scrap from industry, a fair amount from strategic automakers and battery manufacturers, a fair amount from brokers and aggregators. Melsert expects the OEM share to rise as service centres begin collecting end-of-life material and manufacturers recognise the value of keeping control of these elements.
Which brings him to what he thinks decides who survives in this sector, and it is not the technology.
Moving to a closed loop in the US is a matter of relationships with the cathode manufacturers, the cell manufacturers and the vehicle OEMs. A lot of people are trying to enter the field, he says, and very few can back things up with more than a PowerPoint deck.
Making material. Delivering samples. Building facilities. Doing what was promised. That is what converts into a partnership, and partnerships keep the feed coming in one door and the product going out of the other.
This piece draws on the full conversation, which is available with a complete transcript on the episode page.