Battery materials maker BASF and Sweden’s Stena Recycling announced a black mass purchase agreement. They said it is part of a broader envisaged collaboration, the goal of which is setting up a recycling value chain for the European electric vehicle (EV) battery market.
The companies said in a statement they will focus on developing improved black mass production processes to achieve high recovery rates for metals such as lithium, nickel and cobalt. This will support closed-loop solutions for the European EV battery market. That means collection, assessment and pre-treatment of end-of-life lithium-ion batteries, followed by black mass production.
Valuable metals, such as lithium, nickel, cobalt and manganese can be subsequently chemically recovered from the black mass.
BASF of Germany will further process the black mass at its prototype metal refinery in Schwarzheide. Stena Recycling and BASF aim to transfer such a model into BASF’s planned commercial-scale battery recycling metal refinery in Europe, they said.
Marie Vassiliadis of Stena told BEST production volume will depend on the inflow from the markets: “The inflow will consist of end-of-life batteries, warranty cases from our customers and production scrap from the gigafactories.”
Photo (from left): Mats Berneblad and Marcus Martinsson, Stena; Dr. Birgit Gerke and Dr. Daniel Schönfelder, BASF. Photo: BASF
