American Battery Technology Company (ABTC) is a Nevada-based, publicly traded firm developing recycling and extraction technologies for lithium-ion batteries and critical battery metals. It aims to create a domestic, circular supply chain for electric vehicles and energy storage by recovering and refining key materials like lithium, nickel, cobalt, and manganese.
After your experience at Tesla—helping launch the gigafactory and later leading R&D—what ultimately drew you to ABTC, and what lessons from Tesla have you carried over or approached differently?
When I joined Tesla in 2014–2015, it was still small and widely expected to fail. Tesla had never made batteries, yet the goal was to build the first gigafactory near Reno, as large as every other battery plant in the world combined. That single building doubled global capacity, and about 15 of us moved to Reno to launch the project. It felt like a startup under a bigger umbrella—remote, building a new business model, designing the facility and processes, and producing our first product in 2017. The factory then grew to 12,000 people in just a few years. I later moved into R&D, forming a team on battery materials as that became the bottleneck. Eventually, Tesla became very big and mature, and I wanted to relive those scrappy early days.
The biggest lesson was first-principle thinking—making decisions based on physics, not habit. Avoiding lazy thinking was critical. At ABTC, we’ve worked to build the same culture: achievement-focused, low on politics, and constantly challenging constraints. At Tesla, rapid growth diluted some of that over time; here, we’re intent on keeping it intact as we fill a major void in the market.
ABTC recently won the Global Voltas Award for battery recycling, underscoring your work in this field. How does your technology stand apart from other recycling methods on the market?
Back in the Tesla gigafactory days, most recyclers used brute-force methods—freezing batteries in liquid nitrogen and smashing them, burning them in furnaces, or shredding them into mixed material.
Recycling is really a chemical separation process, and the worst thing you can do is start by mixing everything together.
We took a different approach: reverse-engineering the battery in the opposite order it’s made—packs to modules to cells to electrodes to materials. Our process handles assembled, electrically charged batteries without discharging them first, allowing us to separate components strategically instead of creating a mess that’s hard to purify.”
Your technology has broad applications across the battery industry. Which markets do you see holding the greatest potential?
Vehicles are important, but we’re seeing rapid growth in stationary energy storage—both grid-scale and residential. While the form factors are similar, chemistries in stationary batteries are diverging from EVs and consumer electronics. We source feedstock from all three, though the ratios and needs differ.
Large stationary projects return massive volumes of material at once, while vehicles and electronics come back more steadily. Both segments are critical, but stationary storage has become especially significant—today, it represents about half of our feedstock, alongside vehicles, with consumer electronics a relatively small share.
There’s growing emphasis on domestic manufacturing and supply chain independence for critical minerals in the US. Despite political pushback and softer investment, do you believe scaling can happen soon—and succeed?
There’s broad political agreement on the need to ramp up domestic production of critical minerals. Administrations differ in approach—some emphasize subsidies and incentives, others tariffs and permitting reform—but together these tools can accelerate progress. The reality is the US is starting from almost zero in critical mineral production. It’s encouraging to see momentum, but there’s still a long way to go to close the gap.
In a closed-loop economy, suppliers and customers are tightly linked, and every industry in the loop can only move as fast as the slowest part. The challenge is getting everyone to ramp up throughput at the same time. We’ve been out of balance in recent years. EV factories were built first, then gigafactories, but upstream capacity to refine and produce metals has lagged. When sectors move out of sync, it creates bottlenecks.
Partnerships seem central to ABTC’s strategy—from your recent expansion with Call2Recycle into direct-to-consumer to collaborations with major industrial players. What kinds are you prioritizing as you grow?
At the consumer level, collection infrastructure is still limited, so many people don’t know how to return end-of-life materials. Many recyclers also struggle with scale, safety, or reliability, which makes reputation critical. We are excited to partner with Call2Recycle to enable deeper closed-loop systems for consumers and businesses in the U.S.
On the industrial side, the metals are specialty chemicals that require lengthy qualification processes. We’re working with major cathode companies and refiners to qualify our products. Last summer, we announced a strategic partnership with BASF, one of the world’s largest chemical companies and a major cathode manufacturer. Partnerships like these are critical to both supply and customer success.
ABTC recently announced it had reached the next level of baseline requirements for the Tonopah Flats lithium project, one of the largest in the US. What does this milestone signify for the permitting process?
Because most Nevada land is federal, we work closely with agencies on permitting. Our deposit is claystone, and no claystone resource has yet been commercialized for lithium. Most lithium today comes from hard rock in Australia or brines in South America, using processes that burn sulfur to make acid, dissolve claystone, remove impurities, and leave behind massive sulfate waste—energy-intensive, land-intensive, and environmentally costly.
We developed a selective lithium extraction process that removes lithium without dissolving the clay, producing a depleted claystone that can be returned to the ground. We don’t burn sulfur, consume huge amounts of acid, or create the same waste footprint. This lower-impact approach enabled us to complete baseline studies and move into final permitting. There are still steps ahead—federal permits, national reviews, and community engagement—but the local community has a strong mining history, has supported us for years, and we’re optimistic about moving forward together.
Looking ahead, what milestones are you aiming to achieve over the next year?
Our top priority is ramping up our first recycling facility and advancing plans for a second. We’re also moving into site work and design for our refinery, while formalizing additional partnerships.
The biggest driver is supply security. The US has built, and has plans to build dozens of $5 billion gigafactories, but nearly all their feedstock is imported. If supply chains are disrupted, those plants risk becoming stranded assets. Domestic production lowers risk, cost, and environmental footprint—driving us to build supply chains here at home. Today, we still source some materials abroad, but as the industry matures, it makes more sense for closed loops to exist regionally. That way, materials aren’t shipped globally, and each region maintains its own supply chain independence.
