It is a well-produced piece of industry analysis from a credible organization. The data in it is real. The growth it describes is genuine.

But the framing is doing something that has become a pattern in energy storage coverage, and it is worth unpacking carefully, because the story being told to investors is not the same as the story the data actually supports.

The report leads with a power figure to describe a storage milestone. It compares growth rates to solar and wind in a way that implies similar maturity, while giving less attention to what those figures mean and how storage is actually deployed and used and how that translates into global lithium demand.

Part of the confusion also comes from how different assets are described. EV batteries are treated as single function systems built for one primary use. Energy storage is often described in similarly simplified terms, as if it also serves a single purpose. In reality, storage performs multiple distinct grid services across different parts of the system.

What battery storage actually is and does, what the lithium math shows when you run it honestly, and what is really happening in the EV market that analysts keep trying to patch over with energy storage projections all point to the same thing.

Once you break it down, the timeline for lithium demand from energy storage looks very different from the common narrative, and understanding that difference is what investors need to know to take advantage of that demand.

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I have, as some would say, gone over Redwood Materials’ process in ad nauseam, and I have also broken down at least a dozen other processes. People want to understand the industry, and I have always said that if you have a basic grasp of the technology, everything else falls into place.

If you were looking for a comparison, Ascend and ABTC are a logical pair. Ascend will produce a collective intermediate product and then convert it into an engineered product in-house, while ABTC will produce individual salts that can either be sold directly or, in the case of a tolling contract, a business model Ascend also uses, be returned to the feedstock owner. Those salts can also be further processed into an engineered product by ABTC’s partner BASF, depending on the client’s needs.

Where they are similar is that they both produce a lithium-depleted black mass, but how they get there is different. Ascend has a patented pending carbonation method for producing lithium carbonate that is built into the black mass production component. ABTC has a trade secret protected hydrolysis component that produces a lithium intermediate, which is fed directly into an electrochemical lithium hydroxide conversion platform.

That difference in approach reflects the roles they will fill within the supply chain. One will be focused on removing impurities and producing precursors. The other will be focused on extracting and refining specific salts to give OEMs more control over their inputs. By knowing those differences, you can better understand how they will solve different problems in the supply chain.

As for an idea that is common among retail investors, competition. Competition is a good thing, and in the lithium-ion industry it is essential to driving innovation. While Ascend and ABTC will be competitors, they will also be working together in the broader effort to build out a domestic battery metals infrastructure, and both will be vital to solving a problem that I go into in more detail below.

It is through an understanding of the technology these companies will be deploying that you can see how and where they will fit into the industry as a whole.

Ascend Elements Bankruptcy Update

One of the core confusions is that people see a bankruptcy filing with sale dates on the calendar and assume the company is being dismantled. The reality is the opposite. The dates exist because the court requires a structured process before any sale can happen. The schedule is procedure, not a liquidation countdown.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​

Ascend filed Chapter 11 specifically to preserve the assets as a whole and find a buyer who can fund continued operations. Linh Austin, the current CEO, stated in the First Day Declaration that the cases were commenced to stabilize operations, preserve liquidity, and provide the breathing room necessary to explore an asset transaction that would provide the best value to the company and its creditors. A sale was already being negotiated before the filing, as confirmed in the filing itself, but the weight of the outstanding debts made it impossible to close.

The 363 sale package people are now posting about gives them a court-supervised framework to do that cleanly, and the protections that come with it make a completed transaction more likely now than it was outside of bankruptcy. The filing itself confirms over $145 million in statutory liens from contractors and subcontractors actively clouding the assets, with related litigation still pending in Kentucky state court. Without the bankruptcy process those liens make the assets nearly unsaleable.

The simple version: they filed bankruptcy to preserve the assets, not to sell them off for scrap. The calendar dates are the court’s way of ensuring the process is orderly, transparent, and competitive. While some creditor filings argue the timeline is compressed and the sale process is being rushed, it is still just a procedural schedule set by the court.

Where the media got the narrative wrong.

It is also worth spending some time on how Ascend got to this point. The DOE grant cancellation makes for a convenient headline, but the more honest read is that the inexperience, and perhaps the hubris, of the previous management put this company in a hole before the current team, the one that filed for bankruptcy, ever walked in the door.

That may sound like the company looking for a convenient scapegoat, but in this case the public information largely points to that conclusion, and Austin himself confirmed it in the First Day Declaration, stating that the reconstituted management team inherited a set of pre-existing operational and financial challenges including near-term liquidity pressures, construction delays, and cost disputes with contractors.

Ascend was originally awarded two DOE grants totaling $480 million: a $164 million CAM grant and a $316 million pCAM grant. The CAM grant was voluntarily returned in February 2025, just weeks before Austin formally became CEO, citing changing market conditions. I wrote this in an article after the news about the CAM grant was released.

Ascend Elements’ decision to drop CAM production and its associated grant to only produce pCAM, backed by a $316 million grant, fits a U.S. market where cell manufacturers like StarPlus Energy, LG Energy Solution, and SK On stick to entrenched CAM processes, leaving little room for new CAM suppliers. pCAM, derived from black mass and tailored to an OEM’s specific requirements for their CAM process, adds value and allows more OEMs to produce CAM using domestically sourced recycled material as well as primary sources.

In reality it was not changing market conditions but rather a complete misread of it by the former management.

Austin had been on the board since September 2024 and per the First Day Declaration was asked to step into a more direct advisor role in December 2024, so if I had to guess he was the one who pushed that grant return before the title change was even official.

Then in October 2025 the DOE canceled the remaining $100 million of the pCAM grant. A DOE spokesperson Ben Dietderich said in a statement:

The projects had missed milestones, and it was determined they did not adequately advance the nation’s energy needs, were not economically viable, and would not provide a positive return on investment of taxpayer dollars.

If you look at the delays at Apex 1 and the delays on other projects that had their grants terminated, that is a logical assumption to make, the milestone part at least, the rest could be debated.

As for the company’s response, Austin said at the time that the DOE decision did not change their trajectory and that they would replace the funding with equity, project finance, and municipal bonds. What that statement did not reflect was that the liquidity crisis was already well underway, construction had been halted, contractor liens were piling up, and the company was already in discussions with noteholders about bridge financing.

The grant cancellation did not cause any of that. It just removed one more possible solution from a list that was already getting shorter. By the time eight of the eleven senior leaders had been replaced, the structural damage was already done and, for all practical purposes, the course the company was on was irreversible.

The September 2024 timeline tells its own story. On September 9, 2024, SK ecoplant, Ascend’s largest individual equity holder with a board seat, sold its entire 7.7% stake to Seoul-based SKS Private Equity for approximately $98 million. That same month the COO and VP of Construction both quietly left the company, and Austin joined the board. Less than two months later the work suspension directive at Apex 1 was issued. A major strategic investor with inside knowledge of the company did not stick around to see how it played out.

Much of what happened can be laid directly at the feet of former CEO Michael O’Kronley. For those of us who had been following this company from early on, who admired what Ascend was trying to do and the caliber of the people attached to it, the incompetence at the top was never far from the conversation.

I still need to dig up the post, I do mention some of it in the Redwood article I linked to above, where I went off about O’Kronley routinely in interviews and panels botching basic concepts like tolling contracts versus market orders, and confusing closed-loop and linear economy concepts with scrap and end-of-life feedstock supply.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​

There is another aspect of his leadership worth looking at. I said before that I was not sure who was better at getting funding from investors, Ascend or Redwood. Both were raking in capital. Ascend alone raised over a billion dollars across its Series C, Series D, and subsequent rounds between 2022 and 2024.

The First Day Declaration confirms that in 2023 and 2024 alone roughly $650 million of that went toward the buildout of the Apex 0 and Apex 1 facilities, that was equity, not debt. The Senior Secured Convertible Notes and Junior Secured Convertible Notes came later in 2025 as bridge financing, by which point things were already deteriorating. The capital was there. The problem was not the ability to raise it, it was the ability to deploy it effectively and keep the projects on track.

Their communications strategy was not much better. While they were excellent, and in my opinion the best in the industry, at providing educational material about lithium-ion, their ability to communicate with the general public about the company itself was abysmal. This is a common problem for the companies in the industry, and one I have pounded the table about non-stop and have been very vocal about.

I had a LinkedIn exchange with an executive who was, at the time, their SVP of Communications, and I was informed that they built their messaging around what journalists ask for. That is, in my view, one of the most asinine approaches to developing a communication platform and engaging the public. The only worse approach is locking everything behind the phrase “proprietary technology.”

I believe I told him to get an intern to look at social media. Not to engage directly, never do that, but simply to observe. You would see very quickly that the information journalists are pushing is often full of irrelevant noise that ends up driving more misinformation, not less.

And Ascend is now seeing the result of that communication platform, with headlines stating that it was the grant cancellation that was the core reason they had to file for bankruptcy.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​

What the 363 Sale Actually Means

According to a declaration filed by Jefferies Managing Director Michael O’Hara, who is leading the sale process on Jefferies’ side, Jefferies contacted approximately 120 potentially interested parties and executed around 18 confidentiality agreements during the process, which kicked off in fall 2025 and was re-engaged in March 2026 when liquidity issues reached a breaking point.

This tells you they were trying to find a buyer well before they ever walked into court. They were also looking for a DIP lender at the same time, which is basically someone willing to loan the company money to keep operating during the bankruptcy process itself. Those are two separate asks, and at the time of filing they had neither.

Separately, a creditor objection filed on May 1 by United Electric Company, Inc., which is owed at least $18.7 million and is part of a broader group with more than $120 million in mechanic’s and materialman’s lien claims, argues that the sale process is being run on a compressed timeline that benefits the secured noteholders.

The filing points out that these noteholders are not putting in new capital, while still seeking significant control over the case and the outcome, including having a hand in a process that will ultimately determine how their own debt gets resolved.

The key dates are as follows per public information.

The IOI deadline was May 1 and has now passed. An IOI, or indication of interest, is the first step where potential buyers signal they want to learn more before committing to a full bid. An April 30 filing sought approval to keep certain parties confidential, coming one day before the IOI deadline, which could logically include parties that submitted IOIs or were considering doing so.

The stalking horse designation deadline is May 6. The bid deadline is May 9. The baseline bid deadline is May 11. If more than one qualified bid is received, the auction is scheduled for May 12 at 10:00 a.m. CT at Norton Rose Fulbright’s Dallas office.

No stalking horse has been named yet. A stalking horse is essentially the baseline buyer, the party that sets the floor price for the auction and receives certain protections, such as a break-up fee if another bidder prevails. Having one in place signals to the market that there is meaningful interest and provides a credible starting point for the process.

The absence of a named stalking horse suggests Jefferies is still working the process, although it is also possible that one exists but the identity is being withheld for now and may not be disclosed even if a stalking horse is announced, potentially until later in the case or after key legal milestones are completed.

The second day hearing is May 7, which is where the motions that were only granted on an interim basis at filing, things like cash management and critical vendor payments, get finalized after creditors have had a chance to object. It is also where the court gets a look at where the sale process stands given the timeline. This upcoming week is going to tell us a lot about where this ends up and possibly the final outcome for Ascend Elements.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​

Closing Thoughts

The loss of Ascend Elements as a lithium-ion recycler could have serious consequences for the United States’ effort to build a domestic battery metals supply chain. This is similar in effect to the loss of Li-Cycle, a company that failed due to major missteps by management; in their case it was overreaching instead of focusing on what was needed now, not what would be needed in five years.

With the loss of Ascend, the existing infrastructure is nowhere near large enough to absorb their roughly 30,000 tons per year of scrap and end-of-life processing without disruption, and that jeopardizes the buildout of a domestic supply chain.

Just the other day, I covered a startup focused specifically on lithium-ion black mass production, which also appears to have the corporate logistics infrastructure needed to export that material out of the United States into Asia. Without Ascend, it becomes more likely that what are effectively national security and economic resources will be lost to China.

In a previous article, I was able to submit questions via a third party to Ascend Elements, and they had one of the best answers when it came to the problem of losing feedstock to China:

Ascend Elements: Our model is designed to facilitate use of materials in-region via secure logistics, documented chain-of-custody, and fee-for-service/tolling options that return cathode precursors or lithium salts directly to U.S. customers. With Georgia online and Kentucky staged, and with Poland ready to serve EU demand, we expect meaningful U.S. processing headroom to expand over the next five years, especially as we replicate our already-commissioned Georgia line in Kentucky. That scaling, combined with customer tolling, is the best answer to keeping black-mass refinement in-region.

It is going to take quite a bit more than one or two domestic lithium-ion recyclers to build the infrastructure needed, especially given the long lead times associated with primary mining and refining projects. Each recycler plays a role in lowering input costs and improving the competitiveness of cells produced in the United States.

Without them, cell manufacturers will continue to be dependent on imported inputs, which raises costs and will limit their eligibility as vendors for federal infrastructure programs.

I have had no direct communications with the company since the change in management, and while I had plans to reach out to them after the bankruptcy announcement, I decided not to due to what are most likely confidentiality issues surrounding the legal case and the limitations on what they would be able to share.

While I do not have any insider information pertaining to the legal case or the operating status of the company right now, I was contacted by someone that is knowledgable of the company and while nothing of substance or any specifics about the case was shared, the overall tone in the email was very optimistic.

And that is the thing: the industry needs good news and could stand a small injection of optimism; it has been a rather dour few years for the lithium-ion recycling sector. Not only is it getting rather tiring to constantly be covering negativity in the space, but investment has to start flowing again if any of the operations needed to move the industry forward are going to materialize, and that is unlikely to happen against the backdrop of the current bleak sentiment investors are facing.

What the sector needs right now is a clear signal that progress is still possible, and a leaner, more efficient Ascend Elements emerging from bankruptcy is exactly that kind of signal.

If you found this article valuable, consider becoming a subscriber. The Critical Materials Bulletin is supported by readers, and for $5 a month or $55 a year you can help fund research that produces clear, no nonsense reporting that informs and advances the discussion on critical materials and battery metals.

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DISCLAIMER: This article should not be construed as an offering of investment advice, nor should any statements (by the author or by other persons and/or entities that the author has included) in this article be taken as investment advice or recommendations of any investment strategy. The information in this article is for educational purposes only. The author did not receive compensation from any of the companies mentioned to be included in the article.

Luckily the first part is easy. If I had to guess, has around 10 specific aspects of their technology that are covered under trade secrets. I was reminded how competitive the industry is when a friend shared an article that BASF and Duracell are back at it, with BASF suing them for infringement of their trade secrets.

Trade secret laws allow ABAT a lot of wiggle room in what they are required to divulge to the public under SEC rules, and I think at times they are going way too far in claiming proprietary technology as a reason they are declining to answer basic business model questions. But I have to acquiesce to the idea that the safest policy is to treat everything as a potential hazard to the protections they are afforded under trade secret laws.

So it is not that nothing actionable is happening at the company, and I do not for a second at all think that, rather they are not willing to publicly announce anything that may have an adverse effect on their protections.

As for the mining methods, my OG X post was referring to this:

To produce this lithium hydroxide, ABAT developed its own proprietary extraction technology that uses selective leaching and purification rather than the environmentally intensive evaporation ponds or high-temperature roasting used by conventional producers.

That there is some of the slop that Maxim Group dropped in its pump piece, which I have to agree with the consensus is a prelude to an offering. I am not against the company doing an offering, but as an investor I want to know the specifics of what they plan to use the funds for, not the standard boilerplate that it will be used for expansion and general operating expenses.

But the wording in the report is a common phrasing when the analyst knows less than even the average retail investor. Not every region is going to have the same resources. For example, the spodumene that the Secretary of the Interior is promoting, using restaurant math and sleight of hand, is what is available in regions like the Carolina tin-spodumene belt, not claystone. Interesting fact, however, the claystone flowsheet up to extraction is based on spodumene mining.

I am working on a piece about the new USGS release on Appalachian lithium and will have that out this week. But I have looked at the Carolina tin-spodumene belt in an earlier piece.

And where the environmental aspect that is different comes into play is how the lithium is extracted, but the Maxim Group are doing the same thing so many juniors are doing, using legacy technologies to prop up the platform they are promoting. Spodumene has to be calcinated at high temps then leached using an acid roast circuit. All of that was historically done using carbon intensive energy infrastructure that was compounded by the fact that the spodumene had to be shipped from Australia to China.

That is all changing, gases from the process are being collected, cleaned, or even like in the case of Tesla used to create the reagents they need for the extraction and conversion.

Side Note: Speaking of Tesla, the usual suspects were harvesting views again by cherry-picking two minerals that showed up in water tests in a ditch, causing people to clutch their pearls at the alleged evils Tesla is perpetrating, while ignoring that the water was in a drainage ditch and that the discharge from the pipe at the Tesla lithium refinery was not what was tested.

Of course, the real story was not really about the minerals they highlighted, because they didn’t do the research. Rather, it was the high salinity in the ditch water that very well could be caused by waste from the Tesla facility, based on the alkaline leach process they are using instead of a standard acid roast.

The energy sources that these sites did use are now moving to renewables. To put it this way, what Maxim wrote is only relevant if we refuse to look at the last 10 years of innovation when it comes to lithium extraction.

The addition of evaporation ponds just further reinforces that the analyst that wrote this was going off a script and copy and pasting. If you want to compare it to a brine you would use direct lithium extraction, and the most common of that type is absorbent, where you pass the brine through what is basically a sponge with lithium shaped holes that mostly traps just the lithium.

The bulk of the lithium projects in the US will be brines, the main drawback is while a single claystone project will be able to have a initial production of 30,000tpa of LCE a brine project would max out in the range of 5,000tpa to 25,000tpa of LCE. But then you start to get into the oilfield brines where you have tens of thousands of sites that can be set up to extract and convert around 10-100tpa of LCE from oil and gas production waste.

And while metal extraction from clay is not truly new, look up aluminum, the lithium extraction process shares a lot of the same fundamental aspects as the Bayer process: selective dissolution from a clay followed by extraction and purification, this is the same engineering framework. To get a real 1:1 however you have to compare extraction of lithium from claystone to other claystone projects, the problem is you would be comparing demonstration scale to demonstration scale and not commercial, which can only look at the differences and possible advantages one has over the other. Of course that has never stopped me from at least exploring the technology.

Each region is going to have its own lithium resource, and all of them have next-generation technologies being leveraged to extract that lithium. In order for the lithium-ion industry to succeed in the US, it is going to require as much lithium as possible from all these different types of sources, and even then that may not be enough.

Including legacy comparisons or distorting the extremely fast paced and innovative path the industry is on, one that already takes a good portion of my day just to keep up with, in order to prop up one platform is sophomoric and asinine.

If you found this article valuable, consider becoming a subscriber. The Critical Materials Bulletin is supported by readers, and for $5 a month or $55 a year you can help fund research that produces clear, no nonsense reporting that informs and advances the discussion on critical materials and battery metals.

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DISCLAIMER: This article should not be construed as an offering of investment advice, nor should any statements (by the author or by other persons and/or entities that the author has included) in this article be taken as investment advice or recommendations of any investment strategy. The information in this article is for educational purposes only. The author did not receive compensation from any of the companies mentioned to be included in the article.

Tesla’s lithium refinery in Robstown, Texas has been accused of discharging industrial wastewater into a drainage ditch. That kind of discharge is not unusual in itself. Facilities do it all the time once the water has been tested and shown to meet permit limits, and Tesla does hold a Texas Commission on Environmental Quality (TCEQ) permit that allows controlled discharge under those conditions.

The accusation is not that they are unlawfully discharging waste, something the state knew about but apparently did not inform the district authority that manages the ditch, but that what is being dumped into the drainage ditch is being labeled as violating those limits.

Electrek basically decided without exploring the actual report or permit, to grab two of the most well-known elements and by using conjecture build a narrative that Tesla is 100% guilty. They leaned hard on imagery like invoking Erin Brockovich and the claim that Tesla misled people by saying they are using a cleaner way to produce lithium. A process Electrek does not go into detail on, and based on the elements they picked, clearly does not understand. Inside Climate News, one of the sites that originally released the news at least kept things more grounded, even if they too are guilty of pushing narrative over context.

This leads us to one of the reasons why a quote from a few hundred years ago popped into my head: Arsenic. When it comes to mining and refining, arsenic is the first thing opponents reach for, and it has been used as a proverbial canary in the coal mine for lithium projects for years.

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As always, the articles are heavy on the “who” and “where” but light on the “how” and “what.”

The “who” is a company called Mangrove Lithium, and the “where” is Canada.

The “how” is electrochemistry.

Mangrove’s platform is adapted from chlor-alkali processing, a well established industrial method that uses electricity to drive chemical reactions and separate ions across a series of membrane-divided chambers.

To understand how that works, it helps to know what an ion is. When an atom gains or loses electrons it becomes electrically charged. A positively charged atom is called a cation and a negatively charged atom is called an anion. Collectively they are called ions. The entire process is built around creating and moving specific ions in specific directions using electric fields and selective membranes.

The first and most important of the reactions happens at the gas diffusion cathode. Oxygen is supplied to the cathode, where it is reduced, meaning it gains extra electrons. When oxygen picks up those extra electrons, it becomes highly reactive, carrying more charge than it can hold in that state. To stabilize itself, it attacks two water molecules (2H₂O) to grab their protons which results in breaking their structural bonds. By capturing these electrons and pulling protons from the water, the oxygen transforms into the final result: hydroxide ions (OH⁻).

This is different from American Battery Technology Company’s platform.

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“The startup Ascend Elements has outlasted several rivals…”

That sentence sets up a rather bleak tone, especially when it does not include that this is a Chapter 11 bankruptcy. And what is that? Chapter 11 lets a struggling company restructure its debts under court supervision while staying open for business, with the goal of emerging financially stable rather than shutting down entirely. The company is not sugarcoating it, however, and I did see that a liquidation package has already been submitted in case the primary and secondary goals are not achieved.

Now, the primary goal is to find someone to step in and buy the company or a major stake. Next, they are looking for stopgaps to give them more time to settle debts by producing and selling products. The last, and unwanted, outcome is that if neither of those happens, they would liquidate.

For those who were watching, like me, an indicator that something was going sideways was when SK Ecoplant sold its position in the company and construction on APEX 1 in Kentucky was paused. An investigation into a procedural violation of a Section 106 review of the APEX 1 site, which looks to be about the company and DOE not performing proper due diligence, did not help much. That led to a non-profit seeking a $50,000 “donation” to drop the investigation. This of course was a direct result of the fast and loose DOE of the Biden administration and the previous management’s inexperience when it came to large scale projects.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​

I will go into more detail later about the former leadership at Ascend in a separate piece, but for now I will leave it at this: this is what happens when a company tries to transition from pilot to commercial scale under leadership rooted more in tech and academia than in large-scale industrial execution, with a CEO whose previous role was Executive Director of Corporate Strategy at A123 Systems.

As for the “viable technology,” you need to be specific. Granted, due to a lawsuit, the company was forced to transition from a black mass production platform that used a low-pressure drying stage to evaporate the electrolyte and deposit the lithium in it back into the black mass, to a carbonation method that was developed in-house that uses the graphite to convert the lithium into lithium carbonate in situ.

That is what is running in Georgia and is the first commercial scale battery-grade output from secondary sources in North America. The problem is the boondoggle that caused them to switch technologies also looks to have pushed the facility to its maximum when it comes to utilities, and they did not have the funding to fix that problem. As for hydro-to-cathode and other tech like recovering and regenerating the graphite, that has not been implemented at scale, but the early-stage lithium recovery has.

The VC paragraph that has the “100% recovery” is just slop. Lithium-ion recycling itself is not hard. China has built a recycling infrastructure that now sits at overcapacity, with some reports listing overcapacity for secondary lithium carbonate at 6:1. The issue is implementation at scale, and it is what can be seen in mining and recycling as well. In the United States there is a stigma about mining due to misinformation and the fact the country has just forgotten how to do it. And recycling is hampered by that narrative, but also another one that recycled material is inferior to virgin sourced, an idea that a team led by one of the founders of Ascend Elements disproved by showing that cathode active material produced from recycled material is actually superior to virgin sourced due to the recycling process.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​

These narratives have created a very unattractive investment landscape that many investors do not want to deal with. It is not that latter-day “alchemists” over-exaggerated what they could do, rather they could not secure the funding to make it happen. Plenty of MOUs and LOIs, but nothing binding. On a bar chart of investment across the supply chain, the recycling column would look like a rounding error.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​

Now onto a few other things in this “article”:

Cirba Solutions is not 35 years old; it in fact came to be a few years back when three different companies merged. The original was the battery recycling arm of the Kinsbursky Brothers, a battery and precious metals recycler in California, which acquired and consolidated Toxco’s lithium recycling assets into what became Retriev Technologies. That platform largely stagnated for years until it was later merged with Battery Solutions and Heritage Battery Recycling to form Cirba Solutions as a consolidated platform.

They are building a full lithium-ion recycling facility in Ohio with partial funding from the DOE, but for now they have just repurposed legacy battery recycling equipment at one site to produce black mass.

Redwood Materials has gotten a lot of attention lately because they have shifted toward cascade utilization after hitting bottlenecks of their own. This mostly comes from trying to repurpose their old churn and burn setup for recycling batteries into a thermal pre-treatment and black mass production system. They have made progress, including producing a mixed metal sulfate and lithium sulfate monohydrate, but that is still intermediary material and not battery grade.

They did avoid a major pitfall that snagged Ascend, who had the final $100 million of a DOE $316 million cash match grant terminated for their APEX 1 construction. Before the last election they walked away from a $2 billion DOE loan.

Some think it was due to them seeing the pullback in the EV industry, and this was before the ESS emergence, and they didn’t want to be beholden to an administration that looked to be very negative on EVs and anything renewable.

I also think they looked at the problems they were having and knew that they had made missteps and would need to once again reinvent themselves, and didn’t want the Trump administration having a say in the growth or even course change they were planning. Politics aside, the current Department of Energy is very unstable, and this results in the unpredictability that investors detest.

They were able to replace that federal funding with private, but once again I think they had decided back then that they had to shift away from recycling and engineered products to cascade utilization, and this is actually an example of a latter-day alchemist promising more than they could deliver.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​

So we are looking at a fledgling lithium-ion recycling industry that is mostly bogged down with inadequate and inexperienced leadership when it comes to building out large projects, and an investing community very averse to the risks inherent in base material production that is only compounded by the fact that the market is almost completely dominated and manipulated by a country that has spent the better part of a decade creating state-sanctioned overcapacity.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​

Since this was meant as a note/X post and went long I really did not have any media lined up for it. So here is Abe next to a 1024wh power box from EcoFlow that will most likely last 10+ years before it needs to be sent to the recycler.

If you found this article valuable, consider becoming a subscriber. The Critical Materials Bulletin is supported by readers, and for $5 a month or $55 a year you can help fund research that produces clear, no nonsense reporting that informs and advances the discussion on critical materials and battery metals.

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DISCLAIMER: This article should not be construed as an offering of investment advice, nor should any statements (by the author or by other persons and/or entities that the author has included) in this article be taken as investment advice or recommendations of any investment strategy. The information in this article is for educational purposes only. The author did not receive compensation from any of the companies mentioned to be included in the article.

Epiroc Minetruck MT65 S haulers emerge from an underground mine entrance carrying spodumene ore to a stockpile, diesel exhaust rising with them from below. On the surface, loaders and ancillary equipment keep the operation moving, adding their own smoke to the air. And beside all of it, catching the Western Australian sun, solar panels stretch across the plateau and wind turbines turn slowly against the sky. One side of that picture is what mining has always looked like. The other is what it is becoming. How the industry closes the gap between the two is where the story gets interesting.

This is Liontown Resources’ Kathleen Valley Lithium Operation, Australia’s first underground lithium mine, and it runs on what Zenith Energy describes as Australia’s largest operating off-grid hybrid power system. Built, owned, and operated by Zenith under a 15-year power purchase agreement, the system combines 17MW of solar, 30MW of wind, and 17MW/20MWh of battery storage, with gas and diesel kept in reserve for when they are needed. The combination has delivered a minimum of 60% renewable energy from day one, with the system dropping into engine-off mode whenever the sun and wind are doing the heavy lifting.

When it comes to the mine’s location, Kathleen Valley is not the exception, it is the rule. The world’s critical mineral deposits do not sit conveniently beside power grids, fuel terminals, or population centers. They sit in deserts, mountain ranges, and remote boreal forests, places where every input has to be planned, transported, and paid for at a premium. For generations that meant fossil fuels. Diesel for the trucks. Diesel for the drills. Diesel and natural gas for the generators keeping the lights on and the processing plant running 24/7. It worked, but it was never efficient and it was never cheap.

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That interest has produced a steady stream of articles on the subject. Most focus on novel recycling processes, the majority of which are rebranded versions of methods already in commercial use, or bench-scale systems not far removed from a whiteboard. What almost none of them do is examine the regulatory frameworks that actually govern how recycled lithium-ion material moves across borders, how it is classified under international law, and what that means for where recycled material can and cannot go.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​

A article from Recycling Today illustrates the problem clearly. The article focuses on a Malaysian-based lithium-ion recycler and its positioning to take advantage of recent changes to China’s black mass import policies. It is not, on its face, an article about a recycling process, but it shares the same fundamental flaw: it contains nothing about the regulations that govern the trade it describes. The result is a narrative that is, in at least one key respect, technically false. Understanding why requires starting with the regulations themselves.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​

What is Black Mass

Black mass is an intermediate produced during the second stage of lithium-ion recycling, after initial cell collection. In this stage, cells are processed into what is essentially a highly refined ore. Its precise composition varies depending on the platform used. The percentage of valuable metals recovered, the impurity profile, and the physical characteristics all differ from one commercial platform to another.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​

One impurity of particular concern is fluoride, which can arise from the breakdown of lithium hexafluorophosphate (LiPF6), a common battery electrolyte salt. Fluoride can corrode equipment, impede the recovery of valuable metals such as lithium, cobalt, and nickel, and require additional treatment steps that increase processing cost and complexity.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​

China’s Import Policy Changes

China updated its black mass import policy in 2025. The announcement was issued jointly by six ministries and agencies, including the Ministry of Ecology and Environment and the General Administration of Customs, and established that qualified black mass would no longer be classified as solid waste and could be imported freely, provided it meets strict specifications.

For Category 1 NMC and LCO chemistries, those requirements include a minimum combined nickel and cobalt content of 25%, a minimum lithium content of 3.5%, and a water-soluble fluoride limit of 0.4%. The fluoride limit is the most consequential of these criteria for international suppliers. While framed publicly as an environmental measure, it is a direct response to the processing problems fluoride creates for Chinese refiners: the same corrosion, yield suppression, and additional treatment costs described above.

Side Note: Since the specifications include a minimum lithium content threshold, black mass produced by at least two cradle-to-gate recyclers in the United States, Ascend Elements and American Battery Technology Company, would be immediately disqualified for Chinese import. Both use an early-stage lithium recovery process that results in a black mass with only trace amounts of lithium remaining, putting them well below the 3.5% minimum required under Category 1 NMC and LCO criteria.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​

The Recycling Today article is a product of the interest these changes have generated. The Malaysian recycler profiled is positioning itself as a midstream processor, taking in black mass from various sources, upgrading it to meet Chinese import standards, and routing it into the Chinese market. The article suggests that European black mass could be part of that feedstock supply.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​

That is where the absence of any regulatory context becomes a problem.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​

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“Canada and Australia together produce about a third of global lithium and uranium.”

To be fair, I am not going to look up uranium, but what I do know about the uranium suppl…

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Sort of.

The January 14, 2026 Section 232 proc…

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China built its lithium and battery industry by reversing the traditional Western order of development. In the United States and Europe, the usual sequence starts with upstream innovation. Money flows into research, patents are applied for, and products are designed around intellectual property and branding. Manufacturing scale comes later and is often outsourced to protect margins.

China deliberately prioritized scale from the outset

State guided policy, subsidies, low cost financing, and industrial clustering created capacity far beyond what short-term demand required. That scale created a self reinforcing cycle. Large scale production flooded the market with lithium carbonate, cells, and packs. That volume generated enormous amounts of data on performance, defects, yields, and supply chain bottlenecks at levels that could never be achieved at bench or pilot scale.

That data fed rapid engineering iteration. Chemistries, processes, and designs improved from constant factory feedback. Costs fell and efficiency rose. Cost leadership followed, exports grew, and competitors without similar scale fell to the wayside.

The Chinese domestic market, the world’s largest for EVs and energy storage, absorbed a significant share of that supply, but China’s production scale is so large that even this demand could not absorb it all. A meaningful share has to be exported to keep factories running at high utilization and clear the surplus. Exports are not optional. They are structurally necessary to balance this overcapacity.

This is where the financial layer becomes important.

When the Guangzhou Futures Exchange launched its lithium carbonate futures, it faced the problem every new contract faces. A market needs buyers and sellers to function, and a new contract with no trading history, no price reference, and no proven link to the physical material gives companies little reason to participate.

The exchange and regulators however did not wait for activity to appear on its own. They actively recruited companies from across the lithium supply chain to participate. Processors, refiners, and cell manufacturers were encouraged to trade as hedgers, using the contracts to protect themselves from price swings. Their participation created a steady base of real trades that tied the futures price directly to China’s lithium production capacity.

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Sen. Cortez: “Let me ask you this, and maybe I’m wrong about this…

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Although the United States does not rely on direct imports of lithium and cobalt from China, it remains vulnerable to China’s leverage, having imported more than half of its lithium from Argentina an…

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This update comes as global demand for advanced technologies and energy systems needed for high-tech manufacturing intensifies, elevating minerals whose absence could disrupt economic or national security functions. The 2025 list follows the three-year cycle mandated by the Energy Act of 2020, under which the USGS assesses minerals that are essential to the U.S. economy, have vulnerable supply chains, and serve vital functions in manufacturing.

In this article, based upon USGS reports, announcements from the Trump administration, and briefs from international agencies, I summarize the newly included minerals, their primary industrial, commercial, and defense uses, and the potential reasons for their inclusion.

Copper

Copper’s addition to the 2025 List of Critical Minerals reflects its importance in electrical systems, increased electricity consumption driven by artificial intelligence and manufacturing growth, and industrial applications (USGS, https://www.usgs.gov/centers/national-minerals-information-center/copper-statistics-and-information).

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