More black mass is headed to Lancaster, Ohio, thanks to beaucoup government bucks and an innovative battery recycling process from North Carolina-based Cirba Solutions.
Canary Media reported that the company has opened its expanded lithium-ion power pack recycling facility in Ohio in part with $82 million from the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law. The $400 million total expansion paid for the addition of two more battery recycling lines that will process 15,000 tons of so-called black mass a year, all per Canary.
The report describes black mass as a "cakey, powdery" substance chock-full of valuable metals like lithium, nickel, cobalt, and manganese — the expensive elements needed for lithium-ion chemistry to work. Canary reports that the plant should be able to make enough "metal salts" for 250,000 electric vehicle batteries a year.
"We have an opportunity now through this energy transition … to move from a system that is linear and extractive to something that is circular and much more sustainable," The U.S. Energy Department's Giulia Siccardo told Canary. She is the director of the Office of Manufacturing and Energy Supply Chains.
Metals inside batteries are an international commodity as cleaner technology like EVs become prominent. Worldwide EV sales hit 3 million during the first quarter of the year, a roughly 25% increase from the same period in 2023, according to the International Energy Agency. Sales are encouraged stateside by valuable tax breaks and yearly savings on gas and maintenance costs.
China dominates battery production and the supply of key metals for them, as noted by NPR. The country mines greater than two-thirds of the planet's graphite supply, owns almost half of all cobalt mines, and has control of a quarter of all lithium, all per the report.
The foreign materials dependence can be troublesome, as evidenced by Chinese trade rules reported last year. Environmental and human rights concerns regarding workers at foreign mines are also cited by Canary as problems robust domestic recycling can address.
"It's exciting from a supply-chain-security and energy-security standpoint if we no longer need to be dependent on imports," Siccardo said in the Canary report.
Cirba has also landed another $200 million from the same infrastructure law to build a lithium-ion processing facility in Columbia, South Carolina, according to its website. A news release on that project states that it will "produce battery-grade salts for approximately 500,000 EV batteries annually."
Cirba lists six locations on its LinkedIn page, including the headquarters. And Canary reports that the company plans to more than double the five battery processing facilities it has operating by 2030. What's more, other businesses are working on similar projects, all geared to reclaim the precious materials needed to power our EVs and other tech.
Some of the millions going to Cirba's Ohio site will also support work to find second-life "applications" for EV batteries, according to Canary. California's B2U Storage solutions is using old power packs for grid storage, as another example.
While international supplies and dirty mining processes are concerns for lithium batteries, they still power cleaner rides when compared to gas-burners. Better recycling methods can help to transform the sector into more of a circular one, reducing the need for mines.
Importantly, the power packs limit production of harmful, heat-trapping air pollution, which NASA links to numerous weather-related problems.
"We're going to create a closed-loop material processing system in Lancaster, where we can return all those elements back into the domestic supply chain," Cirba CEO David Klanecky told Canary.
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