AE Elemental, a joint venture of US-based Ascend Elements and Poland’s Elemental Strategic Metals, has opened its first commercial-scale EV battery recycling facility. The plant in Zawiercie, Poland, can process 12,000 tonnes of used lithium-ion batteries each year – or approximately 28,000 EV battery packs annually.
Ascend said the plant will disassemble, discharge and shred EV batteries to produce black mass. That can be used to make new EV battery materials, including cathode active material (CAM) and cathode precursor (pCAM).
Commercial-scale lithium extraction capabilities will be added to the facility this autumn to be operational by 2026.
The company’s technology is based on a hydro-to-cathode direct precursor synthesis, which it claims leaches out impurities, keeping the valuable metals in solution. This eliminates multiple steps in the recycling flow. The process includes shredding, leaching, impurity extraction and cathode production.
Company spokesperson Thomas Frey said: “Instead of extracting 98% of the stuff we want and then recombining them, we are removing 2% of the stuff we don’t want and then adjusting the elemental ratio of metals to form new NMC pCAM and CAM.”
It uses microstructure engineering techniques to adjust the elemental crystal structure needed to develop new cathode material to precise customer specifications.
Frey declined to discuss profitability: “We are a privately owned company and do not disclose earnings, but generally the materials we produce from used lithium-ion batteries (pCAM and CAM) are 6-10 times more valuable than the ‘black mass’ produced in most battery recycling operations.”
