US-based battery recycler ACE Green Recycling has been focusing on the US market, particularly its upcoming Texas recycling site, and is looking to go public in the US in mid-2025.
Argus spoke with ACE Green Recycling's vice-president of investments and strategy, Aaron Wee, about the firm's upcoming developments and the battery recycling industry. The interview is split into two parts and part one's edited highlights are as follow:
ACE floated a battery recycling target when you signed the Glencore offtake agreement back in 2022. Has your target in terms of recycling volumes changed?
Targets like that are still definitely in the works. But we'd like to tell the market that at this point we're focusing on our lead recycling facility in Texas that will be coming up hopefully by next year.
That will initially start at [a battery input capacity of] 30,000 t/yr, moving on to 100,000 t/yr. For lithium, the play is very much still within the lithium-iron-phosphate (LFP) battery space. But as we all know, the lithium market is a little bit more challenging these days. [Lithium prices] used to be a little bit higher, but this is still very much in play for us.
ACE had mentioned plans to boost its LFP battery recycling capacity in India to up to about 10,000 t/yr by 2026. Has ACE been able to secure sufficient feedstock to run the plant?
We have our initial facility for lithium battery recycling just outside of Delhi. That has been in operation for 2-3 years now with a nameplate [battery input] capacity of roughly 2,000 t/yr. That's not exactly a large amount, but for the lithium battery market that we've seen, it is still possibly one of the more efficiently run LFP-focused lithium battery recycling sites. As for our Indian expansion plans, those are still very much in the works. But [for ACE], it's going to be a US-focused play right now.
What does ACE feel about the battery competition and battery recycling competition in the US? How about India and Europe?
For lead recycling, traditionally, most lead recycling has always been done through smelting, which involves a lot of energy and also produces slag materials. We believe that our technology is radically different. We don't need to burn any fossil fuels in a large smelter, and we produce no solid [toxic] waste.
For lithium battery recycling, we have seen a lot of innovative companies in the US and Europe trying to break the stranglehold of Chinese lithium battery recycling. But as we all know, China started the lithium battery train 10 [or] 20 years ago, so they have clear advantages in what they do.
Solvent-based extraction requires a tremendous amount of capital expenditure (capex), so there's no such thing as a small solvent-based extraction lithium battery recycling facility. Most of these are in the tens of thousands of tonnes in order to be commercially viable, and that produces a lot of liquid waste.
We are differentiated in the fact that we do not use the traditional solvent-based extraction method. Our modular systems are able to be deployed at significant capex reductions and also produces zero toxic liquid discharge. And that's been a problem for several of our competitors, in terms of being able to acquire the right permits for Europe especially. Most of them have focused on nickel-manganese-cobalt (NMC).
Right now, the amount of [lithium battery] feedstock in nearly every economy isn't going to be as strong.
Electric vehicles (EVs) have been purchased and they've been on the roads for quite some time, but the first true generation of EVs [were] only rolled off about five years ago. [Now's] just about the time when LFPs might have to be replaced. NMCs will take another couple of years. But we're only going to see this enormous uptick in battery feedstock, maybe by 2027 or 2028.
