UK start-up Altilium remains confident about the economic feasibility of battery recycling and cathode active material (CAM) production in the UK despite the ongoing low metal price environment.

Company’s chief operating officer and co-founder Christian Marston told Kallanish in an exclusive interview that Altilium is adopting a “step-by-step” strategy to ensure it can scale up and de-risk battery recycling. “We’re working to give the UK a domestic, non-Chinese, sustainable source of critical minerals to enable the energy transition,” he adds.

“To make battery recycling economic, you have to do it at scale, and you need to reduce the OPEX and CAPEX, have very high efficiencies in recovery rates, plus have payables on all your materials,” says Marston.

In addition to recovering critical minerals such as nickel, lithium, cobalt, manganese and copper from batteries, Altilium is also studying how to monetise graphite. This is particularly important with the increased adoption of lithium iron phosphate (LFP) batteries, which don’t contain expensive metals like nickel and cobalt.

“Something we’re also about to start is looking at how we use carbon savings; how do we monetise those? Is it carbon credits? Is it a green premium?,” the executive continues. “We think that there is possibly a green premium [from] 2030 onwards, for low-carbon, non-Chinese supply chain… I think it’s quite a unique approach.”

The company is working with battery materials company Talga Group to develop a material that Talga can process in their standard flowsheet as an alternative to natural graphite. Marston claims that the partners have achieved a life cycle assessment of anode graphite produced from recycled graphite material 70% lower than a Chinese supply into the UK. Talga is planning an integrated graphite-to-anode project in Sweden, though it also has silicon and other materials development in the UK.

Founded at the end of 2020, Altilium has reached many milestones, including raising $12 million in a Series A fundraising from Chile’s lithium miner SQM. Work is ongoing for a Series B raise, with another multinational expected to help unlock further progress on its industrial-scale refinery in Teesside. The project is proposed to process 50,000 tonnes of black mass per year and produce 30,000 t/y of CAM. This could supply 20% of the UK’s forecast demand by 2030.

Citing “transformational support” from the UK government thus far, the executive emphasises the need for further public finance support in the UK and abroad.

“The amount of money you need for this energy transition is kind of breathtaking. We can engage with an SQM but there’s not enough SQMs or Black Rocks in this world to fund the energy transition,” says Marston. “There needs to be public government money involved.”

Regulatory tailwinds in Europe and the US power Altilium’s “sense of urgency” and provide long-term support for its business model. Despite the downturn in the metals market, Marston adds: “We’ve re-run the numbers with current lithium, nickel [prices]; we stress-tested it and it still works. Battery recycling works at scale.”

Under its modular, staged development, the company will finish a “mini-commercial” plant by year-end that will process one EV battery per day and produce metric tonne-levels of CAM and precursor CAM (pCAM). These materials will be used to produce 100 cells to be qualified by the UK Battery Industrialisation Centre (UKBIC) against standard cells in Q1 2025. These cells will be NCM 811, a “modern chemistry” produced using feedstock from Nissan’s old NCM 111 Leaf cells, as well as other sources including second-life energy storage batteries, Marston explains.

While it prepares to produce a battery intermediate product such as nickel mixed hydroxide precipitate (MHP) and a lithium sulphate at its brownfield plant in Bulgaria, Altilium is also commissioning engineering studies for its UK greenfield plants. Last week, it completed a study for its black mass recycling plant, set to be the largest in the UK and “possibly Europe.” Co-located with the Teesside refinery, the station will process a mix of feedstock and produce 40,000 t/y of black mass using wet shredding technology.

With its mission to be a “UK champion for battery recycling,” Altilium says it will provide domestic EV and battery manufacturers with the critical minerals and infrastructure needed for batteries, electrification and the energy transition. The 2026 timeline for “giga-scale” recycling in Teesside has not been delayed, but is likely to be built “in a modular way, step-by-step,” Marston concludes.