Ann: Collaboration to Commercialise Battery Recycling in EU, page-4

There doesn't seem to be any competition in Europe for processing black mass as it is all exported to Asia for processing. Here is a synopsis from the CEO

Iondrive’s battery recycling technology replaces conventional hydrometallurgical processes to extract the critical minerals (valuable metals) from battery black mass (spent batteries that are ground up).

Conventional hydromet processes use strong mineral acids that are toxic in a single pass through the process and leave large waste quantities that consume considerable water in processing the waste streams. Moreover, these processes operate at high temperatures, i.e. large energy consumption, that further increase the environmental footprint.

The patented Iondrive process uses benign organic solvents and a deep eutectic solvent (DES) in a closed loop process to extract the desired metals very selectively. The solvents are recycled and re-used multiple times (c.f. single-pass of conventional processes using acids like sulphuric acid), while the energy consumption is less and much less waste is generated. This culminates in a process with a significantly smaller environmental footprint.

Iondrive also aims to produce pCAM materials from the recovered metals – addressing a huge market opportunity in EU that currently do not have pCAM manufacturing capabilities.

Large-scale bench trials (1,000x times scale-up) have confirmed that the chemistry scales, and therefore now becomes and engineering challenge to design a process that is economically viable. The results were validated by an independent 3’d party, IMO (Independent Metallurgical Operations, Perth), that duplicated the trials at a 1,7000x scale-up.We are currently completing a Prefeasibility Study (PFS) that uses the process data from the large-scale trials as input for process design of a commercial-scale process (10,000 tpa). The engineering company engaged for this work, WOOD Group (Perth), will also provide a Capex and Opex estimation. A second activity of the PFS, in parallel, is a benchmarking study performed by PEM RWTH (Germany) to compare Capex and Opex vs conventional hydromet processes in their database.

The next stage in the commercialisation pathway is a Pilot Plant operation to further scale the technology and change from a batch process to a continuous process. The aim is to design and build a fully integrated continuous process and host it in a consortium of participating industry partners at PEM’s facilities in Aachen, Germany.We have recently signed a Collaboration Agreement with PEM with the following Objectives:Source funding for the Pilot Plant (private funding and Gov grants – EU + Germany/Netherlands);Design, build and operate the Pilot Plant in PEM’s facilities;Establish a Consortium of strategic industry partners that represent the different areas in the value chain of battery recycling;Each industry partner to produce product at pilot plant-scale level with a view of producing battery cells that the automotive OEMs can put through their qualification processes to validate that recycled metals perform as well as virgin metals in EV batteries.Both the technology development activities and market development activities are aimed at enabling Iondrive to take an early mover position in the EU as a recycler of spent EV batteries and a producer of pCAM materials for battery manufacturing.

It is also worth noting that participation of Iondrive in the Consortium of industry partners not only secures entry into the EU market, but also secures supply of black mass as a scarce feedstock and secures off-take of pCAM products – thus significantly strengthening and de-risking the business model.