Singapore-based battery recycling technology firm Green Li-ion, which develops and delivers modular battery recycling plants, aims to among the first to achieve precursor cathode active material (PCAM) production in North America. The firm has taken over a plant in the US' Oklahoma, which Green Li-ion will now be the operator of and is confident of launching this year. Argus spoke with Green Li-ion chief executive and co-founder Leon Farrant about its developments and the battery recycling industry. Edited highlights follow:
Could you briefly explain Green Li-ion's hydrometallurgy recycling technology?
We take any type of lithium-ion battery wastes, in crushed format that could be black mass, black powder or end-of-life (EOL) batteries and mix them together. And we convert those in a direct approach straight into PCAM or battery-grade cathode material [along with] lithium carbonate, battery-grade anode material, graphite.
Some people think that's pretty boring but it is the first [technology] in the world that can take all of those different materials mixed together.
[Our plants] are also modular so we can simply install them around the world. Wherever the wastes are produced, we can actually convert them into battery materials that can be dropped straight back into electric vehicles' battery cells.
How do you see modular solutions, like what you are doing, fit into whether it is battery producers and/or recyclers' strategy?
We see countries vertically integrating. What that means is they need to produce battery materials and also convert crushed and EOL batteries back into battery materials for cell production.
The biggest gap created right now, [whether it's] the Inflation Reduction Act or Europe's funding strategy, is that they caused a lot of newcomers to come into the collection and crushing of batteries. Gigafactories also came in a big way. But there's no one that converts crushed batteries into battery material that can be used in the gigafactory. That's where we fit into the macroecosystem.
The original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) and battery makers are also vertically integrating. They own their EOL batteries and/or battery production wastes because of the EPR [Extended Producer Responsibility] legislation. They are forced to take responsibility for it. But they also realised they can't lose these materials and need to control them. They have billion dollar plants and we have like a sub-10mn worth of module that can just be installed and integrated.
How's your solutions' capital expenditure (capex) and operating expenditure (opex) measure up to the conventional method of battery recycling?
We don't have anything to directly compare to because no one's going directly to cathode material. But we can compare it to those that separate them into individual metals, which are far less valuable and about 25-50pc of PCAM's value.
We have done a case study against a listed [firm] that [does that] for OEMs. Their opex is 8pc higher per metric tonne and our capex is 42pc lower. But our outcome's PCAM, so on the same line, our revenue's 52pc higher.
The recycling value of lithium-iron-phosphate (LFP) batteries is relatively low, which is increasingly a problematic issue. Is that something Green Li-ion has sorted out?
We've built and sold a commercial-scale LFP battery recycling plant, which is the first in the world that can recycle LFP batteries in a commercially viable manner.
What we have to do is to extract the maximum yield and value of battery-grade graphite, make battery-grade LFP cathode material and extract [extremely] high yield and purity of lithium carbonate. Opex also has to be much lower than our other machines for marginal profit.
But there's no other solution for it, for LFP. And then you've got Europe, where they pay gate fee to the recyclers, to take LFP batteries. And it's really big, really big gate fee. Because they have to pay for the batteries to be incinerated right now.
