Battery recycler Ascend Elements is to supply cathode precursor materials (pCAM) to a major US company for use in its battery manufacturing. It estimates the deal could run to $5 billion.
Deliveries will begin in Q4 2024. Ascend claims it is about to become the top domestic supplier of sustainable, engineered battery materials to the North American lithium-ion battery industry. It will specifically supply high-nickel, NMC pCAM.
The $1 billion contract has an option to be extended up to $5 billion. Ascend did not name the client, saying it was for contractual reasons. In February, it announced a tie-up with Japanese car maker Honda to supply a consistent supply of recycled nickel, cobalt and lithium.
Mike O’Kronley, CEO of US-based Ascend Elements, said: “Nearly 100% of the world’s pCAM is produced in Asia. There is no reason we can’t manufacture critical battery materials like this in the United States. In fact, we need to manufacture our own battery materials to secure the supply chain in North America, reduce carbon emissions and ensure our energy independence.”
The company is building a cathode manufacturing facility with capacity to produce NMC pCAM for up to 750,000 electric vehicles per year. In October 2022, the US Department of Energy awarded $480 million to Ascend towards construction of the southwest Kentucky plant. Ascend plans to invest more than $1 billion in it.
Ascend Elements uses a manufacturing process called Hydro-to-Cathode direct precursor synthesis. This produces NMC pCAM and CAM recovered from used lithium-ion batteries and gigafactory manufacturing scrap. It said the closed-loop process eliminates several intermediary steps in the traditional cathode manufacturing process, which cuts costs and carbon.
Company spokesperson Thomas Frey said instead of extracting the individual metals one at a time in series, the process extracts the impurities and leaves the desired metals in solution. “We then adjust the elemental composition or ratio of elements in the solution and precipitate the designed type of cathode material,” he said.
Image: Recycled materials seen with a scanning electron microscope.
Credit: Ascend Elements
