American Battery Technology begins second phase of lithium-ion battery recycling plant

American Battery Technology Co. (ABTC), a critical minerals and lithium-ion battery recycling company based in Reno, Nevada, will begin the second phase of construction on its $30 million lithium-ion battery recycling facility later this month. The second phase will encompass the infrastructure and shell of the precommercial battery recycling plant in Fernley, Nevada.

“We are excited to continue to accelerate progress towards the construction and commissioning of our first precommercial scale battery recycling facility,” says Ryan Melsert, CEO of American Battery Technology Co. “As we finish above and below ground utility and site work, we are now in a position to continue straight through with the full construction of all of the on-site buildings and facilities.”

According to a news release from ABTC, the lithium-ion battery recycling facility will have three functional building areas totaling about 100,000 square feet of floor space. The three areas include the battery recycling production building, an office building with laboratories and a warehouse.

Melsert says the facility will include several scales of analytical and process development laboratories, in addition to pilot development facilities. The analytical and process laboratories will become ABTC’s global development center. The facilities will provide infrastructure and experimental tools to support the current and future operations of the company’s battery recycling and primary battery metal extraction technologies.

When open, the plant will be scaled to process 20,000 metric tons of feedstock annually. This will produce battery-grade materials to be redeployed into the North American battery supply chain in a true closed-loop circular fashion. Right now, it is unclear when the facility will open, Melsert says.

“While the domestic manufacturing capacities of end-use products and lithium-ion battery cells have grown rapidly in the U.S. in recent years,” Melsert says. “Unfortunately, the upstream domestic production capacities of the battery metals that supply these operations have not kept pace. American Battery Technology Co. is addressing this challenge by developing technologies and commercializing systems for the recycling of lithium-ion batteries and the recovery of constituent battery metals as well as for the production of battery metals directly from primary mineral resources in the western U.S. to create a closed-loop circular economy for the domestic U.S. battery manufacturing supply chain.”

Construction of the facility will take place in phases and span several months. Once completed, the company will hire 50 employees to operate it.