The American Battery Technology Company (ABTC) has experienced a boom in the battery recycling business while others have fallen away. ABTC attributes this to experience meeting multiple layers of regulatory requirements, capacity to salvage critical materials from grid-scale feedstock, and commitment to being involved in every stage of design and operations.
How has the American Battery Technology Company achieved a boom in production?
The battery market and specifically the recycling market have been exciting. In the U.S., companies have pulled back a fair amount. We have been able to step up and fill the void, seeing our highest production ever and operating our plants with a positive gross margin. Electric vehicle growth has slowed compared to expectations from a year ago, but the stationary grid-scale battery market has grown extremely quickly from a very large demand for stabilization using non-dispatchable power.
The form factors, or, types of battery cells, are fairly different between EV and stationary batteries but the underlying materials and chemistry are pretty similar. Because we work in the material space, we can receive batteries from either market and then sell products back into both. This diversification helps us when one industry slows and another speeds up. Another big part of our success has been right-sizing with the market. We sized our plant for where the industry actually is, not where we were hoping it would eventually go.
What is an example of handling grid-scale battery waste?
We are part of the United States Environmental Protection Agency project handling burnt-out waste from the battery fires in Moss Landing, Calif. at the beginning of 2025. The city, county and even the Department of Transportation and federal EPA all become involved in how such material is shipped to the recycler, processed and refined. There are also strict timelines–the waste needs to be refined into products quickly. There are many old plants throughout the country going offline now. Very few recyclers domestically can handle that type of material or the regulations required to process it quickly and to sell it back into the market. So, the fact that we have handled these projects successfully more than once is meaningful.
What is the current progress of the new Tonopah Flats lithium project in Nevada?
The project is moving very quickly. Last summer, we reached out to the White House and the National Energy Dominance Council, and they selected Tonopah Flats as one of a handful of critical mineral projects to receive fast-track federal permitting. Because the project is on U.S. Department of Interior land and also involves U.S. Department of Energy funding, having a federal liaison and coordinator really streamlined the process.
Four years in, we are almost finished. Few companies come out on the other side of this valley, so breaking ground at Tonopah Flats and ramping up that project will be a major milestone for us. With many more supply and product ofqf-take agreements in hand, we are looking to expand into additional facilities. We also still see opportunities to grow and improve our first recycling plant in Reno and have announced plans for a second recycling facility in the Southeast U.S. for expanded capacity and geographic diversity.
How does ABTC source and refine materials?
Our Tonopah project combines a mine and a refinery at the same site, which makes a major difference in both economics and operational impact. And at our recycling facilities, we receive, process and chemically refine batteries into final products all in one place. Conventional claystone lithium processing requires getting dozens of dump trucks of solid sulfur, then burning and hydrolyzing it into sulfuric acid in a combustion plant. We designed the Tonopah process to avoid this traditional route. With recent sulfur supply disruptions tied to global issues, we are thankful we did.
Our process is far less dependent on chemical consumables and is truly first-of-a-kind. We process hundreds of tons of material using in-house stainless steel vessels for impurity removal, conversion, and crystallization trains. We have been sending the battery-grade lithium hydroxide produced to customers for over a year. Visitors to the demonstration facility see far more than laboratory trials or PowerPoint presentations. We unload large cubic-meter sacks of claystone from the mine and run them through every extraction and refining step. Instead of leaving behind one big open pit, the operation looks more like a traveling wave. As we are mining in one part, we are backfilling another with lithium-depleted claystone–almost like real-time remediation.
What are the ingredients for continued success?
I have said before that in a closed-loop supply chain, you only grow as fast as your suppliers can provide material and your customers can purchase your products. We have very close relationships with both and consider them more partners than contractual arrangements. We also built the plant ourselves by repurposing equipment from out-of-business breweries and cannabis processing facilities. We even built our own control panels and wrote our own control strategy in-house. That is how you know the principles really work. Before we sign up a tradecraft contractor, we warn them that we are going to be very involved, hosting the weekly check-in meetings, embedding in their teams.
You have to have that visibility and hands-on interaction to have confidence in what is going on. This is how I know to de-risk commercial-scale projects the best. At ABTC, we have in-house R&D and analytical chemistry teams. I have brought over my old engineering director, procurement director, and a lot of the construction managers and operations leads from Tesla.
You can call it scrappy, like the early days: the successes are yours and the failures are yours, too. You do not get to blame outside contractors. It is important to stay in touch with these fundamentals and not let hype cycles or downturns influence you too much.
