Processing and Separation of Battery Critical Materials from Recycled Batteries

The demand for electric vehicles has grown rapidly over the last several years, leading to a substantial increase in the demand for the raw critical materials needed for the batteries that power them. To ensure a stable supply of these critical materials, such as lithium, graphite and cobalt, a domestic supply needs to be utilized. Once readily available supply of these materials is from recycled batteries. Current battery recycling only recovers very little if any of the lithium and nothing at battery grade including the graphite, and cobalt. The lithium is lost during processing due to limitations in current technology. This proposal seeks to address the commercial lithium-ion battery recycling processes by recovering lithium from the wet comminution process and recovering battery critical materials from the black mass using Precision Periodic novel Nano Beadssorbent material. Nano Beads novel design overcomesmany of the shortcomings of existing technology and has the potential to transform the lithium battery recycling industry. The Phase I effort will focus on initial testing designed to gather information on the optimum operating conditions for a pilot system as well as a techno-economic and carbon footprint analysis. Phase II will build pilot systems similar to ones previously deployed by Precision Periodic. After initial testing and validation of the pilots, the techno economic and carbon footprint analysis will be revised and customer acquisition will begin. Phase III will begin large scale commercial deployment. The results of this proposal would be a novel, commercially ready, process using Precision Periodic’s Nano Beads. This process would provide a sizable domestic source of lithium, cobalt and graphite while eliminating waste from current recycling processes and limiting CO2 production.