The tone setters

From its facilities in Reno, Nevada, and the surrounding area, American Battery Technology Co. (ABTC) is taking every necessary step to help formulate a circular battery supply chain in the United States.

At the same time, the company is progressing on its own terms, using the collective expertise of its in-house engineers to promote research and development (R&D) across its operations, from technologies used to extract and recycle lithium-ion battery (LIB) materials to the customization of its equipment and facilities.

ABTC has expanded its reach further the last three years, creating a process to extract virgin lithium from sedimentary claystone deposits and convert it into lithium hydroxide for use in new battery cells.

The company has scaled its operations in a relatively short time, moving from laboratory testing to bench- and pilot-scale production to commercialization at its first large-scale recycling facility at the Tahoe-Reno Industrial Center (TRIC) in McCarran, Nevada. CEO and Chief Technology Officer (CTO) Ryan Melsert says a disciplined and self-reliant approach to each endeavor has helped set ABTC apart in the industry.

“I think [what stands out] is the fact that we tend to do so much in-house,” Melsert says. “It’s rare. We have our own R&D team, our own engineering and construction operations. The fact that we don’t rely on licensed technology or outside contractors to come and build a portion of our plant for us [is unique]. We really do just have that mentality of wanting to own our future and design, construct and operate in-house. I think the most exciting thing is, while being disciplined, how quickly we’ve scaled.”

ABTC’s capabilities haven’t gone unnoticed by customers in the automotive and battery manufacturing sectors or the federal government, which has awarded the company and its project partners nearly $300 million since 2021 through various Department of Energy (DOE) programs. The company mostly processes end-of-life electric vehicle (EV), consumer and stationary storage batteries but also takes in manufacturing scrap.

“Just over the past few years, we’ve gone from lab to bench to pilot and now these very large commercial-scale systems,” Melsert says. “We speak with automakers and battery manufacturers very often. What we usually hear from them is that same feedback, that it’s rare for a company to really go through those steps in a disciplined fashion. That gives them confidence that we’ll continue to scale, and that sets the right type of tone where they want to be partners with us going forward.”

Steady growth

ABTC previously was known as American Battery Metals Corp. and focused on acquiring the rights to mineral properties. By the end of 2019, the company brought in new leadership and shifted its model to battery recycling and primary metals extraction, with Melsert joining the company as CTO after spending years as the R&D manager for automaker Tesla’s Gigafactory Battery Materials Processing group.

While developing Tesla’s Nevada gigafactory, Melsert and his team designed processes for building battery cells and eventually realized they had an ideal skill set for breaking them down. He identified a void in the market for recycling and, along with some members of his team, made the move to American Battery Metals to head up its new battery recycling operation.

“There are about 36 gigafactories now in the U.S. putting material into the field, and very few recycling plants actually able to process it when it comes back out again,” says Melsert, who was named CEO in 2021. “So, we’re really growing into a void in the market.”

In 2019, the firm won the Battery Recycling Circularity Challenge, sponsored by battery materials manufacturer BASF and partners Stanley Black & Decker and Greentown Labs, for its novel LIB recycling process that extracts and purifies each individual battery element, including lithium, cobalt, nickel and manganese, into battery-grade quality materials that can be reintroduced directly to the supply chain. Later, the company won another award from the U.S. Advanced Battery Consortium, sponsored by automakers General Motors, Ford and Stellantis, that allowed it to work with partners to further prove its processes while making new cathode material for use in new vehicle batteries.

In the years since, the company, renamed American Battery Technology Co. in 2020, has sought to demonstrate its processes in a step-by-step manner, beginning with laboratory testing and working toward commercialization. Its R&D team took residence at the nearby University of Nevada-Reno’s National Center for Applied Research incubator facilities in 2021 and has worked with university faculty, staff and students to develop grant proposals and prove technologies at bench scale before scaling them up.

In 2023, ABTC opened its first commercial-scale recycling facility, a 120,000-square-foot plant at the TRIC in McCarran, Nevada, where it recovers black mass from EV batteries that it sells to customers as intermediate material. The facility can process 20,000 metric tons of battery feedstock per year.

“All the equipment needed to do that is installed, and as we’re ramping up, we’re essentially just running that equipment more frequently to get to that capacity,” Melsert says, noting ABTC purchases individual components for its system, such as conveyors and reactors, and customizes each piece in-house.

With the help of nearly $190 million in DOE grant funding received in late 2024, ABTC plans to build a second recycling facility in the southeastern U.S. that will increase its capacity by approximately 100,000 metric tons per year.

Working in reverse

Melsert says ABTC’s recycling process takes the techniques he and his former Tesla team learned at the gigafactory and runs them in reverse order.

“With very large packs, there are ways to selectively break down the cells out of the pack without opening the cells themselves,” he says. “There are ways to remove the actual support material before you access the high-value powders, and then it really is about being a much more holistic design.

“Once you open a cell, it becomes very reactive. There are components that react with the oxygen in the air and components that react with moisture. So, you start having essentially a dynamic composition. Once the cell is opened, there’s a specific order about how to separate those components and how to process them.”

Melsert says some recyclers break down a battery, recover intermediate material like black mass and sell it to smelting companies that mix it with primary materials. However, he says, that product might not always return to the supply chain.

ABTC uses a strategic demanufacturing approach that doesn’t involve smelting or simplistic shredding or grinding but instead uses automated deconstruction combined with a targeted hydrometallurgical process that breaks up a battery pack into modules, then to cells, then to subcell components before sorting and separating the subcell components into nine different products.

“We can take all vehicle battery packs that are still assembled and still electrically charged, feed them into our recycling plant at one time and go through all the steps necessary in a closed, contained system to disassemble those batteries to open up the cells and to extract each of the elements of value, one at a time, and purify those up to battery-grade quality,” Melsert says.

In the first phase of its recycling process, ABTC recovers copper, aluminum, steel, lithium intermediate and black mass intermediate material. In the second hydrometallurgical and selective leaching phase, the lithium intermediate is refined further into a battery-grade lithium hydroxide, while black mass is refined into battery-grade nickel, cobalt, manganese and lithium hydroxide products.

Melsert says that as the recycling facility has ramped up its operations, it has been able to stand on its own as a cash flow-positive business unit. ABTC has maintained a close relationship with Germany-based BASF, which operates U.S. battery cathode manufacturing plants in Michigan and Ohio and supplies feedstock to ABTC while also buying products from its recycling facility.

“We engage pretty much all the automakers and cell manufacturers,” Melsert says. “Until recently, there were a lot of one-off transactions in the market, but it’s developing much more now with longer-term, multiyear partnerships where there are three-, four-, five-year agreements to recycle all their waste and also for them to buy the product back out again.”

Staking a lithium claim

While recycling is a major focus for ABTC, primary lithium extraction has posed an exciting opportunity.

ABTC owns more than 10,000 acres of mineral leases in Tonopah, Nevada, called the Tonopah Flats, where lithium has been found in sedimentary claystone deposits, and has spent the last three years developing a way to extract that lithium.

“In the U.S., we have some [lithium deposits], but not a huge amount of those conventional resources,” Melsert says, noting that different types of lithium deposits occur throughout the world, such as lithium-rich brines in South America and lithium contained in hard rock in western Australia. Those deposits typically are extracted near the source, turned into an intermediate material and largely sent to China where they are refined into battery-grade products.

At Tonopah, one of the few known lithium deposits in the U.S., ABTC has been developing a process that extracts the lithium from the claystone without using large quantities of chemicals, such as acid.

“That’s been a game-changer in the economics and in the environmental impact of the process,” Melsert says. “It’s a very low-chemical-intensive process to recover the lithium, and then we can use a simplified purification train.”

Melsert says some other lithium processors in the U.S. are attempting to make a lithium carbonate product, which generally is easier to purify and sell into the market, but many U.S. customers are more interested in buying lithium hydroxide, which he says is more difficult to make. That’s why ABTC spent much of 2024 building a multiton-per-day demonstration facility near Reno that consumes its Tonopah-sourced claystone to produce battery-grade lithium hydroxide.

ABTC’s refinery will be capable of producing approximately 30,000 tons per year of lithium hydroxide, Melsert says, adding that the U.S. currently doesn’t produce much of that product domestically. By comparison, he says, fewer than 5,000 tons of lithium carbonate are produced annually in the United States.

“This one refinery can become a very big percentage of domestic capacity,” he says. “There’s just really nothing out there in the U.S., and when we speak to automakers, they’re interested in recycling, they want to have their material handled responsibly and they want to be able to buy the recycled products.

“But lithium is a pretty small percentage of the battery. Only about 2 or 3 percent of a battery by mass is lithium. So, when you recycle it, every proposed recycling facility in the country combined would make less lithium product than our one lithium refinery in Tonopah. … When we talk to automakers, specifically the procurement departments, they say it’s great to source from recycling, but this refinery has real scale to it. It’s something that can actually move the needle from their side.”

Doing its part

Melsert says that along with a disciplined scale-up, ABTC has found success because of its commitment to following through on its promises—a factor he believes has helped the company secure numerous DOE investments.

“The way [the DOE] gives out grants, they tend to be technology-based review processes,” he says. “It is very rigorous about analyzing technologies against each other. Whose [process] is better? Who has better yields and processing costs, and who has the partnerships to really scale these up?

“I think the best way to win those is like we did. You start off with a small [grant application], you say you’re going to do something at the laboratory scale, and then you do it. And then as you apply for a medium-sized grant, it’s the same thing.”

Whether it’s recycling or creating a primary lithium product, ABTC’s aim is to enable a circular supply chain in the U.S., reducing the need for materials from countries such as China, for example, which, according to reports, controls about 70 percent of global EV battery manufacturing.

“When we step in, we now want to address this part of the supply chain by providing those materials needed from our recycling system and from primary lithium refining to change what is now the bottleneck in the domestic closed-loop supply chain,” Melsert says.

“Sometimes people ask, ‘Why are you building a recycling facility and a primary lithium refinery there? Very few companies do that’. And my answer is always that the industry needs it,” he continues. “Recycling alone can’t solve these [domestic supply chain] problems. And refining alone can’t solve these problems. If the industry needs both, and it really does take a lot of the same skill sets and technologies to build these facilities, then it makes sense for them both [to be] under one roof.”

The author is associate editor of Recycling Today and can be reached at cvoloschuk@gie.net.