Electro-extraction: a cleaner way to recycle batteries

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MEGAN O'CONNOR: My name is Megan O'Connor. I'm the CEO and one of the co-founders of Nth Cycle . We've developed a new technology to refine the critical minerals that we need for the energy transition.

So one of the main issues that we have around the critical minerals that we use in all of the technologies, like lithium ion batteries that power electric vehicles or motors that power the wind turbines, is that we simply don't have enough of these critical minerals to make that transition happen over the next 10 to 20 to 30 years.

And one of the big issues that we have in particular with recycling is that there's no good alternative for the refinement. So we can collect these batteries, shred them down into this waste material, but then we don't have that last step-- to turn that waste product into metals to put back into manufacturing. And the current technologies that do exist to do this are very dirty and they're inefficient.

So we have pyrometallurgy, which is just a complex fancy word for smelting. So you can think high temperatures and pressures. And then we have hydrometallurgy, which you can think cycles and cycles of acid baths, lots of heavy chemical use. Both of these are very energy intensive, they're very carbon intensive, and they're very wasteful. And so we need a new way to actually refine a lot of these materials to put back into our supply chain so that we can actually get the amount of metals we need to make that transition happen in the time frame that we need it to happen.

Today, only about 5% of lithium ion batteries are recycled worldwide. So that's very low compared to other recycling of batteries, like lead acid. In terms of how we process these materials from the ground, in terms of mining, over 65% of our cobalt, for example, is mined in the Democratic Republic of Congo, where they use children to mine. They call these artisanal mines.

And so it's very difficult from not only a social perspective but also geopolitical in where these materials come from. And so that's a big concern that we have here in North America, is that there's not enough of these materials, but how do we trace them back to a sustainable source longer term?

In terms of our reliance on overseas supply chains, we're extremely reliant on both China-- we have seen a big impact in terms of the Russia-Ukraine war, because a lot of nickel is refined over in Russia and Ukraine. And so we are extremely reliant on a number of these different materials, which is a huge pain point we have here in North America. We have all of the resources. We have the primary ore. We have a lot of these batteries that are coming out of consumers' hands and out of EVs. We just don't have a way to process them.

So even when we mine the material here, nine out of 10 times it's shipped overseas to be refined into the semi-finished or finished products, like a battery. We then buy it back, use it here, and then, even still, once it reaches its end of life, we ship it back a third time for it to be recycled or landfilled in some capacity. And so we're losing that valuable material three times within this product's life. And so there's a number of different steps. But the major pain point is in that refining step.

So in grad school, I started to think about and dig into the literature about the circular economy, right? It was a very new term back in 2012 when I started graduate school and thinking about the critical mineral supply chain and how that so impacted the transition and the time frame that we would be able to transition in from fossil. And I saw in the media, there was not a lot of attention that was being drawn to the fact that we just simply don't have enough of these materials to make that happen in the time frame that we needed to have it in.

And so the more I kept digging into this, the more I realized it was a technological issue. And that's exactly why I went to grad school, was to try and build technology that could help save the world in some respect. And so I think it was just luck, in that I found myself able to participate in what was called the Green Electronics Summit at the university that I attended. And this professor had brought folks from Apple, Dell, Intel, the major consumer electronics brands, to the university to talk about their corporate sustainability issues over the next 10 to 20 years.

And over and over again in that room, I kept hearing, recycling or end-of-life management of these devices was going to be a huge problem. Again, we still don't have a way to process them here. We simply ship them overseas, which we can't do anymore.

And then, the other side of that was the supply chain, right? They knew we didn't have enough materials, especially as this electrification movement was growing with electric vehicles, which use orders of magnitude more, say, cobalt and nickel than you would see in a traditional cell phone battery.

And so I walked out of that meeting thinking, like, there's got to be a technology that I can find or develop to try and solve this issue. And that's when my PhD advisor stepped in-- Desiree Plata, who's a professor at MIT now-- and she said, hey, I actually know this professor at Harvard, Chad Vecitis, who had developed this technology that we think could do this.

And so we partnered with him. I worked on that technology for the metals recycling application. And that's what ended up being my PhD thesis.

So we partnered with the folks in the recycling or the mining space that have the solid materials, whether it's a battery or the ore that comes out of the ground. They shred it down into a material that we then take, and we do dissolve it into a water-based solution that will then go into our electroextraction unit.

Electroextraction is a new technique that we have developed internally. So electroextraction uses carbon filters, combined with the electrochemical reaction. So you can think of it at a really high level like a Brita filter you'd see at home, where you have that activated carbon filter that you pour your drinking water through, and it pulls out all the heavy metals in that one stage. So it's non-selective. It just pulls everything out at once.

We've taken that same basic idea of using carbon filters with water, but we've applied a specific electrical current across that filter so that it selectively removes one metal over the other. And so you can imagine in our system, we have multiple of these carbon filters, with different electrical currents going across each. So that, in series, we can pull out, say, copper, cobalt, the rare earth metals, so on and so forth. And so that's how we're able to separate that. And so it's a completely new way to think about both water filtration and electrochemistry.

Right now, if a battery comes out of a consumer's hand, it usually ends up at, say, like a Best Buy or some regional facility. Right now, a lot of the other companies in this space are trying to do a centralized approach, which is the very industry standard way of recycling. So you take that battery. You have to ship it to one centralized facility, maybe across the country. They shred it down, and then they ship it overseas to be chemically processed into something new.

We saw that as a huge pain point in the industry. Because lithium ion batteries-- I'm sure, as everybody has seen the videos over the past couple of years-- can start spontaneously combusting even when they're not at their end of life. So you can imagine, when we have all of these batteries-- whether they're EV packs or consumer phones, right-- and they have some kind of defect, and they're all jostling around in the back of a truck, it causes a lot of safety concerns with just the shipment of those batteries to that centralized facility.

So we saw that and said, we've developed this modular technology that has a much smaller footprint and can operate efficiently with just one unit on site. So we can actually go to these regional or local levels where the batteries are being collected, process them there into a much safer material that can then be transported and put directly back into the supply chain.

So the technology can work with almost any metal on the periodic table, which is really nice in the flexibility. So we can go after more than just lithium ion batteries. We can go after any type of electronics waste. So we can pull out the rare earths from the magnets, which are the speakers in a lot of the phones and receivers. We can go after the lithium ion battery. We can go after the different circuit boards and whatnot in computers and pull out the copper and the gold and the other precious metals that are in there.

So we can go to a lot of these general scrap facilities that get everything-- as you can imagine, they get cars, they get cell phones, they get laptops-- sort of whatever has an electronic component in it-- and we can help them take that generalized mixed waste and turn it into these individual valuable products.

The first market we're targeting is the scrap space. So we work with both lithium ion battery recyclers and general scrappers. And right now, we do have a couple of commercial projects happening. I can't announce who those are at this time. But by the end of the year, we will have our full-scale system on their site.

We are also starting to do trials with different mining companies at the smaller scale. There's a couple of different areas that we can fit into a mining flow sheet. We can do the primary ore itself, in terms of that processing. We can fit into a refinery and actually help them capture a lot of the lost yield, in terms of different bleed streams that come off. And we can also sit at the front of a refinery, to help them get as much capacity in as they possibly can.

In terms of our business model, we take a very partnership approach. Because we're trying to solve one piece of a very large puzzle in terms of just how we chemically recycle or refine these materials, we'd like to take that partnership approach and partner with these mines, again, who are struggling-- maybe towards the end of their life and want to extend that lifetime, they want to increase yield.

And on the recycling side, right, a lot of the recyclers here are very used to and have only done the mechanical recycling side of things-- they have never done the chemical recycling. So by us partnering with them-- and we're going to own and operate our technology on their site-- we're able to give them that operational capacity that they otherwise would not have had.

And in terms of the mining space, it's still on that partnership track. But instead of owning and operating our assets under a tolling model, we're going to sell them the units and then help to operate in some capacity.

So very excited to announce that we closed our series A funding round, which was 12 and 1/2 million, back in February. So we're using that 12 and 1/2 million to go out into our first three commercial projects. So I mentioned the first one will be at the end of this year, and the other two will be in Q1 and Q2 of 2023.

And so MIT has been a big help not only in this program but, as I mentioned, our co-founder is a professor at MIT. And so she's been instrumental in helping us with the initial ideation of the product itself, but then also in the early stages of the technology development.

Yeah. So in terms of our ideal partners, we're looking for mining companies, recycling companies, refining companies-- really, anyone in the metal supply chain who wants to make their business more sustainable or is struggling in terms of the refining process itself and getting to that mine's end of life or aren't really sure how to chemically recycle these materials. And so we're looking for any of those partnerships to build over the next several years to start deploying our technology worldwide.

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