Aqua Metals electroplates first critical battery metal from lithium battery black mass at Li AquaRefining™ pilot.
First sustainable lithium-ion battery recycling facility uses electricity to recover metals, building a low-emissions domestic supply chain of recycled battery minerals.
Aqua Metals, Inc. (NASDAQ: AQMS) (“Aqua Metals” or the “Company”), which is reinventing metals recycling with its AquaRefining™ technology, announced it has successfully recovered critical battery metal from spent lithium-ion batteries at production scale by electroplating.
The Company’s pilot Li AquaRefining system has proven the ability to remove impurities and trace metals from tons of recycled lithium battery ‘black mass’ and then selectively recover pure metal using electricity instead of polluting furnaces or wasteful chemicals processes.
🔥 What about we co-host a webinar? Let's educate, captivate, and convert the battery economy!
Batteries News is the global go-to online magazine for the battery industry, we can help you host impactful webinars that become a global reference on your topic and are an evergreen source of leads. Click here to request more details
Copper is the first of the valuable products recycled using electricity in the patent-pending Li AquaRefining process, a metal that is essential to clean energy technologies and building a domestic battery manufacturing industry.
The company intends to follow by recovering lithium hydroxide, nickel, cobalt, and manganese dioxide – recycling all the valuable minerals within common black mass feedstock. Because AquaRefining is designed to remove trace elements and recovers these pure metals selectively, we believe the innovative system can process feedstock with varying concentrations of critical minerals and adapt to future changes in lithium battery chemistries.
Steve Cotton, President and CEO of Aqua Metals, said:
Successfully recovering commercial quantities of pure metal from recycled lithium batteries using electroplating is a significant milestone for Aqua Metals and the entire industry.
“We believe Li AquaRefining can play an important role in accelerating the development of a secure, sustainable domestic supply chain for minerals essential to electric vehicle and battery energy storage manufacturers, and this is a key step towards delivering our clean recycled metals to market to meet the growing demand for domestically-sourced content.”
Reclaiming metals with the Company’s closed-loop electroplating technology enables economically favorable and efficient production of high-purity products from spent lithium batteries, without high-energy furnaces or the continuous waste streams and expense of one-time-use chemicals.
Aqua Metals believes in a clean energy future powered by renewables and sees recycling battery material with electricity derived from renewable sources as the only viable pathway to achieving net-zero operations. The Company currently purchases renewable energy credits (REC) for the electricity used at the pilot facility and offsets all remaining direct and indirect carbon emissions in its carbon footprint.
Ben Taecker, Aqua Metals’ Chief Engineering and Operating Officer, said:
We are seeing tremendous progress at our pilot facility, and copper is first in the suite of clean battery metals we expect to recover through Li AquaRefining.
“We are proceeding to the recovery of battery-grade lithium hydroxide – which we believe will also be a first for the metals recycling industry in North America – then plating high-purity nickel and cobalt, and finally recovering manganese dioxide. We look forward to providing continued updates of milestones and performance from our economically favorable and sustainable recycling technology pilot.”
About Aqua Metals
Aqua Metals, Inc. (NASDAQ: AQMS) is reinventing metals recycling with its patented AquaRefining™ technology. The company is pioneering a sustainable recycling solution for materials strategic to energy storage and electric vehicle manufacturing supply chains.
AquaRefining™ is a low-emissions, closed-loop recycling technology that replaces polluting furnaces and hazardous chemicals with electricity-powered electroplating to recover valuable metals and materials from spent batteries with higher purity, lower emissions, and minimal waste.
Aqua Metals is based in Reno, NV and operates the first sustainable lithium battery recycling facility at the company’s Innovation Center in the Tahoe-Reno Industrial Center.
To learn more, please visit www.aquametals.com
Aqua Metals Social Media
Aqua Metals has used, and intends to continue using, its investor relations website (https://ir.aquametals.com), in addition to its Twitter, LinkedIn, and YouTube accounts at https://twitter.com/AquaMetalsInc (@AquaMetalsInc), https://www.linkedin.com/company/aqua-metals-limited and https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCvxKNWcB69K0t7e337uQ8nQ respectively, as means of disclosing material non-public information and for complying with its disclosure obligations under Regulation FD.
READ the latest Batteries News shaping the battery market
Aqua Metals Electroplates First Critical Battery Metal from Lithium Battery Black Mass at Li AquaRefining™ Pilot, RENO, Nev., January 11, 2023
