As described in greater detail in the Credit Bid Motion, that review, together with a subsequent audit, identified substantial concerns regarding certain charges billed in connection with the project, including charges attributed to RMF Nooter, LLC. Among other things, the audit indicated that RMF Nooter overbilled the Debtors by at least $16 million, including nearly $6 million in excess or duplicative labor costs.

The review also identified substantial excessive or duplicative equipment and tool charges, questionable crane-related costs, large tool purchases and transfers that were not properly credited to the Apex 1 project, and other wasteful or unnecessary expenses. ~ Document 208

The actual trigger for the halt at Kentucky was a stop-work notice. TKJV claimed Ascend let more than $41.5 million in approved invoices go delinquent, issued a seven-day stop-work notice in late October 2024, then Ascend suspended all work on November 1.

A former RMF Nooter employee described the Project’s site culture as one in which there was a “barrel full of money”. that people were intent on spending.

The numbers back that up:

• Seven days where billed work exceeded twenty hours

• 2,377.5 double-time hours

• 251 holiday hours

• 218.28 Sunday hours.

TKJV earned a flat 5% fee on total project costs, so every dollar RMF Nooter claimed on an invoice was a dollar TKJV got paid to wave through.

An example of Ascend's claims of wrongdoing by RMF Nooter and TKJV.

Ascend asked RMF Nooter in June 2024 to survey equipment for a piping misalignment issue on the mechanical vapor recompression (MVR) system. An MVR takes the waste heat and vapor from processes and, by using a compressor, increases the pressure and heat so it can be used in later stages. This MVR survey was due in eight days. RMF Nooter missed it, asked for a month long extension, then missed that too.

By August Ascend had to escalate straight to TKJV because a vendor rep was sitting on site waiting on data that was now nearly eight weeks late. Then, less than a month after that RMF Nooter's own superintendent on the MVR claimed he had no idea what was going on with the system.

Ascend's construction manager's read on it: the guy "was looking for reasons to not do any work."

At one point they had crews spending hours wondering around the site looking for missing equipment. At least ninety-six non-compliance reports were issued during construction, and Ascend believes the actual volume of defective work is much higher.

When Ascend finally pulled the plug on the project, they also accused TKJV of not properly winding the site down. Water in electrical cabinets, leaking roofs, exposed cable reels, and roughly eighty pieces of rented equipment that never got returned. This would explain why during my Q&A with Ascend they mentioned that the site had now been properly winterized.

The $16 million in alleged overbilling is separate from what it will actually cost to fix what's wrong with the facility itself.

The Credit Bid Motion puts the cost of redoing the defective and nonconforming work at "an estimated cost in the tens of millions of dollars," and says the facility "cannot be utilized in its current state" until that's done.

So even setting the billing dispute aside entirely, there’s a second, larger bill just to make the site functional on top of finishing the facility, which court filings list at 60% complete with $544 million invested, including the DOE grant.

RMF Nooter filed a roughly $40 million mechanic's lien over the unpaid bills.

They also objected to the restructuring firm Ascend brought in, Alvarez & Marsal (A&M), arguing the $1.5 million completion fee A&M stood to collect regardless of sale price or creditor recovery would eat into distributions for everyone, RMF Nooter included.

RMF Nooter also flagged that A&M has client relationships with Doral Energy and Fifth Wall, both of which are noteholders, equity holders, and contributors to the stalking horse bidder, the same parties A&M's CRO is supposed to be holding at arm's length.

Throughout the bankruptcy proceedings, RMF Nooter objected to any motion by Ascend that would involve allocating capital to anything other than the creditors. During a hearing on the DIP financing, Ascend's lawyer insinuated that RMF Nooter would prefer to sell off the company's option (referred to as an obligation by Jefferies' representative) to purchase land in Poland, which was essential to fulfill the contractual agreements with the Polish government regarding the grants they would provide.

Instead of allowing Ascend to continue operating in Poland, RMF Nooter wanted to use the proceeds from that kind of sale to reimburse creditors.

On the DOE side

Ascend isn't disputing what happened. Inflated labor hours, excessive tool purchases, equipment rentals nobody needed, all billed through for reimbursement. What it's not conceding is liability under the False Claims Act.

The settlement says flat out that it's neither an admission by Ascend nor a concession by the government that its claims weren't well founded. Nobody's declaring a winner here.

DOE paid out $5.3 million on the inflated claims between September 2023 and February 2025. The audit was initiated after a former subcontractor employee voluntarily disclosed information to Ascend.

There is no dates listed in the filings for when the audit was conducted, but Ascend disclosed the problem to DOJ and DOE in February 2025, then roughly one month later the company replaced Michael O’Kronley as CEO with Linh Austin.

Total settlement: $7.5 million.

Of that, $5.3 million is restitution, same number DOE paid out. The rest is the penalty stacked on top. In exchange DOE drops claims under the False Claims Act, the Program Fraud Civil Remedies Act, and the Contract Disputes Act, plus the usual common law grab bag: breach of contract, payment by mistake, unjust enrichment, and fraud.

This only covers Ascend as a company. Individual liability is carved out and preserved, so nobody employed now or in the past gets a free pass on this conduct just because the corporate entity settled.

If the settlement falls through or gets unwound later, the government's claim reverts to the full $16 million, the original exposure number, plus penalties. So Ascend settled for under half of worst case, before counting what years of FCA litigation would have cost in legal fees alone.

The funds to pay off the DOE are a setoff against the closeout audit of the same DOE grant that funded Apex 1, so no cash payment from Ascend is required. It just zeroes out the contract and lets them close the grant. This, however, doesn't dismiss the DOE's reversionary claims on the equipment that was purchased and installed using grant money.

There are still some fiddleybits and assets left in the bankruptcy, with the main one being Apex 0, the Black Mass processing facility in Georgia. So far, the only real information related to that is the $5 million credit bid proposed by the Junior Note Holders, a filing by the landlord of the Covington location for close to $900k in damages to the property, and a company that is leasing out a parking lot and tractor trailers for storage who is owed for unpaid bills as well.

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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 and or persons mentioned to be included in the article.

It has been a while since I have had a video to break down like this. A few years ago videos of Ryan’s panels and presentations were fairly common. They are now few and far between. While there is no groundbreaking information revealed, it is a good video that sums up the past, present, and hopefully future of the company, and considering where it was held, I felt it was worth going over.

Warning on the audio: even after running it through a few filters there was only so much I could do with limited time and budget.

Ryan Melsert’s Background

First up is Ryan’s background. Some may have never heard the story of how he and a handful of engineers found themselves in the middle of nowhere, tasked with building a first-of-its-kind gigafactory for Tesla.

Lithium-ion Recycling

The recycling platform that American Battery Technology Company has developed is focused on the processing of the actual battery waste. Rather than placing the emphasis on the back end of the process, they built a black mass production platform with the sole purpose of lowering costs by decreasing the energy and inputs required, while simultaneously reducing impurities and increasing the recovery of battery metals.

Rather than applying heat to break the cell apart, they use a process of controlled failure induction, forcing the cell’s own failure modes to trigger in a controlled sequence and effectively making the cell do the disassembly work itself.

All of those failure modes we now intentionally cause during the de-manufacturing process to make these subcomponents essentially fall apart from each other. ~Ryan Melsert - Fastcompany - 2021

By doing this, what they call de-manufacturing, they are also able to extract the lithium during the black mass creation stage. Normally lithium is recovered in the next stage, black mass processing, or with some platforms through a carbonation step that produces lithium carbonate directly from the black mass, which requires a thermal pre-treatment.

The ABTC process is able to recover the lithium as an intermediate that can then be fed directly into the lithium hydroxide monohydrate component of the recycling platform.

By recovering the lithium early they are able to capture what other platforms lose: the lithium bound into the copper and aluminum foils and other low value materials. Those materials are separated out during the black mass creation stage and do not go on to black mass processing. They are sent to their own separate processing stream, which destroys any lithium still attached to them.

The end result is theoretically a lower impurity black mass that simplifies the hydrometallurgical processing stage and reduces its costs.

Tonopah Flats Lithium Project

Chevron, who announced last year that they were tossing their hat into the lithium arena, first looked at Nevada claystone as a lithium source back in the late 1970s and even filed a patent for it. Their approach was thermal, and what could best be described as brute force. They would dissolve the entire claystone and end up with a slurry containing a broad range of the periodic table. Yes, it had lithium in it, but also everything else that was in the clay alongside it.

What ABTC has done is take a cleaner and more targeted approach. While concentration and sorting are common steps in mineral processing, ABTC developed a sequentially progressive platform that pushes that concentration further at each stage.

They run the crushed ore through a designed sequence of attrition scrubbing, hydrocyclone classification, and hydroclassification, each step making a progressively finer cut to isolate the ultrafine lithium bearing clay while discarding the gangue, the non-lithium bearing rock that makes up the bulk of the ore. By the time the clay leaves the beneficiation circuit, it has been concentrated by roughly seven times compared to the raw ore.

The concentrated clay is then briquetted, pressed into dense blocks with a binding agent, before being fed into the leach circuit. This step exists for a practical reason. Raw smectite clay in water disperses into an extremely fine suspension that will not settle or filter. Briquetting gives the clay enough physical integrity to survive the leach circuit and be handled by the downstream separation equipment.

Rather than flooding the claystone with concentrated acid and dissolving everything in sight, the leach uses a combination of dilute sulfuric acid and a peroxide oxidant. The dilute acid etches the surface of the clay particles, opening up diffusion channels that allow the oxidant to penetrate deeper into the clay.

Once inside, the oxidant weakens the ionic bonds holding the lithium in place, and the hydrogen ions from the acid swap positions with the lithium ions in a selective ion exchange process, pulling the lithium into solution while leaving the bulk of the other metals, magnesium, iron, aluminum, and others, largely undisturbed in the solid.

The patent behind this process claims a lithium selectivity ratio of up to 60 to 1 over other metals in the leachate, which means for every 60 parts lithium pulled into solution, only one part of everything else comes with it. The result is fewer unwanted minerals entering the processing circuit that would otherwise have to be treated and disposed of, reducing both the time and energy required at every step that follows.

The leached slurry then enters the countercurrent decantation circuit, a washing system where the solids and the wash liquid move in opposite directions through a series of tanks. The solids move forward getting progressively cleaner at each stage, while the liquid moves backward getting progressively richer in dissolved lithium until it exits as the concentrated solution sent on for further processing.

A filter press recovers the last of the dissolved lithium from the solid residue before it goes to tailings. The solution at this point is carrying more than just lithium, so it goes into the precipitation circuit where reagent additions drop the magnesium, iron, calcium, and strontium out of solution as solid precipitates, which are then filtered out.

The cleaned solution is then concentrated through reverse osmosis before entering the crystallization circuit, where two successive crystallizers first remove the remaining bulk impurity salts and then crystallize the lithium out as lithium sulfate monohydrate.

The lithium sulfate crystals are dissolved back into solution and passed through an ion exchange circuit for a final polish, removing any trace impurities that made it through the earlier stages. That purified lithium sulfate solution then enters the electrochemical conversion step.

The electrochemical conversion step is where the lithium changes into its final form. The solution is passed through a stack of specialized membranes arranged in alternating layers.

One type only allows positively charged ions like lithium to pass through. Another type only allows negatively charged ions like sulfate to pass through. A third type, called a bipolar membrane, splits water molecules into their two components, hydrogen ions and hydroxide ions, using an electric current.

The lithium ions migrating through the first membrane meet the hydroxide ions produced by the bipolar membrane and combine to form lithium hydroxide. The sulfate ions pulled through the second membrane combine with the hydrogen ions to regenerate sulfuric acid, which is recycled back into the process to meet internal demand.

The process produces more acid than it consumes internally, and ABTC is looking at the surplus as a commodity to sell offsite, adding a potential revenue stream beyond the lithium hydroxide product itself.

The hydroxide produced beyond what ends up in the final product is returned upstream to assist with impurity removal and to clean the system as it runs. The lithium hydroxide solution then goes through a final crystallization step where lithium hydroxide monohydrate crystals are formed, washed, and dried before being bagged as the finished battery grade product.

Politics and the Quad Partnership

While the US remains divided on how it wants to handle critical minerals policy domestically, most agree that it is not something the country can tackle alone. China controls the majority of mining, recycling, and processing across nearly every critical mineral that matters, and that is not a problem any single country can spend its way out of.

The Quad Critical Minerals Initiative is the most recent attempt to address that. Announced at the Quad Foreign Ministers’ Meeting in New Delhi on May 26th, the partnership brings together the United States, India, Japan, and Australia with a stated goal of mobilizing up to $20 billion in combined government and private sector support across mining, processing, and recycling.

India is actively building out its battery metals industry and is going to need partners to do it, more specifically technology partners. The country has the scale and the demand, but the processing technology and technical expertise required to build a domestic battery supply chain from the ground up takes years to develop.

The goal is not to shut out China altogether, but through multilateral partnerships decrease their dependency on them. Ryan was invited to present at the Consulate General of India in New York two weeks after that partnership was announced.

Question 1:

The audio quality is very poor, and I struggled to make out the question, but essentially what was asked is that with China controlling the processing and manufacturing of battery materials, the rest of the world will continue to be subjected to whatever prices China dictates.

This is a defeatist attitude I see a lot, even from US politicians. We can’t beat them so why not just accept it and allow them to continue doing what they are doing. The audience member points to India as an example, where the battery accounts for roughly 65% of the cost of an electric vehicle.

They also suggest that the path forward is to fund and develop alternatives, something I have seen many politicians suggest as well. That is fine, we should always be looking for alternatives and funding should be set aside for viable ones. But starting over from scratch is rather foolish when China has largely positioned itself to dominate any alternative that is put out there, if they have not already invented it themselves.

Question 2:

What is the limiting factor that is holding everything back, and what is the silver bullet?

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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 and or persons mentioned to be included in the article.

As of April 1, 2026 China’s most stringent battery recycling rules to date went into effect.

• Automakers and battery manufacturers are required to establish collection networks in every region where they sell products.

• Batteries must stay with vehicles when scrapped.

• A national traceability platform now tracks every battery from production through end-of-life.

• Informal operators are effectively prohibited from handling end-of-life batteries.

Projections put LFP at 60% of available feedstock by 2030, but LFP has no cobalt or nickel to recover. China imports more than 95% of its cobalt, and 90% of its nickel. If NMC maintains any of its current market penetration, newer chemistries like Lithium Manganese Rich (LMR) start scaling, or LCO continues its dominance in consumer electronics, the import dependency problem China faces with those transition metals does not go away. Recycling must continue to move to the center of China’s security of supply strategy for battery materials.

One of the major hurdles these rules are trying to address is a spatial mismatch. China has high geographic concentrations of licensed recyclers located in the same provincial regions as the manufacturing plants, but that does not match where the EVs that need their traction batteries collected are. In the provinces generating the largest volumes of retired batteries, licensed recycling capacity is sparse.

That is where informal workshops move in. They skirt basic industry and environmental costs, which lets them outbid licensed facilities at the point of collection and intercept cells before they ever reach a licensed recycler.

I have talked about this problem for years, with my first article on it published in 2023:

What this new research does is put real numbers on it for the first time, across 364 cities, 300 recycling projects, and 24 battery chemistries, down to the city level.

Licensed recycling facilities are running at only 39% capacity nationally. Not because there is a shortage of feedstock, but because the batteries and the recyclers are in the wrong places relative to each other.

The new policies are focused on enforcement, which helps, but the research points to a solution for the larger problem. If you let batteries move freely across provincial lines to wherever licensed capacity actually exists, capacity utilization jumps by 67%. The scale of the mismatch shows up clearly at the provincial level.

• Guangdong has the largest share of end-of-life batteries in the country at 14% of the national total and the highest GDP, but faces intense informal competition at the point of collection. Licensed capacity exists but informal operators are winning the price competition for feedstock.

• Zhejiang and Jiangsu generate large volumes of retired batteries but have comparatively sparse licensed recycling projects, which produces high formal capacity utilization in the facilities that do exist combined with persistently high informal recovery.

• Jiangxi, Hunan and Hubei sit on substantial formal treatment capacity but do not generate enough local battery volumes to keep facilities running. Even with cross-provincial transport those provinces struggle to hit 50% utilization.

What the research makes clear is that there is no single national fix. The right intervention depends on what kind of problem each province actually has.

• High-volume coastal provinces need cross-regional routing and enough licensed capacity to compete with informal operators.

• Central provinces sitting on excess capacity need to become consolidation hubs that pull in material from surrounding areas.

• And everywhere informal operators dominate, the fix is a combination of registration requirements, penalties, and financial incentives that make joining the regulated system more attractive than staying outside it.

The US is repeating China’s early mistake of concentrating manufacturers and recyclers in the same locations rather than building a collection infrastructure where the end-of-life batteries actually are. The US does not have the informal workshop problem, but moving end-of-life cells from a salvage yard 2,000 miles to a processor is a collection and transportation problem that gets worse the larger the volume grows. A coherent national strategy has to account for where end-of-life batteries retire, and right now the US does not have one.

China is staring down a wave of material which started at 90,000 tonnes in 2020 and is expected to hit somewhere between 5.5 and 7 million tonnes by 2030. The US end-of-life wave keeps getting pushed back due to the longevity of lithium-ion, with EVs now looking at lasting not 8 to 10 but 12 to 15 years, but it will hit. When it does, a patchwork of state EPR rules with no federal framework connecting collection to processing means the US could arrive at that moment in worse shape than China, which at least has a national system it is actively trying to fix.

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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 and or persons mentioned to be included in the article.

Turner-Kokosing Joint Venture (TKJV) won the auction for the Hopkinsville facility. TKJV is the construction company that actually built the facility for Ascend Elements, but they were never fully paid for the work they did.

What makes this more interesting is that Ascend Elements, who are the debtors in this bankruptcy, invited American Battery Technology Company (ABAT) to participate in the auction. ABAT showed up, raised their offer during the bidding, and still lost to TKJV.

That leaves ABAT as the backup bidder, meaning they are next in line if TKJV cannot close the deal. Ryan Melsert, CEO of ABAT, filed a court declaration explaining why ABAT should be allowed to be the winning bidder not the backup bidder.

At the core of Ryan’s argument is how the federal government handles assets that were built with grant money. Here is what he is working with:

• The Department of Energy funded Ascend’s construction of the Hopkinsville facility through a grant program

  • ABAT separately holds a DOE grant from that same program, sized for a facility with exactly the same capacity as Hopkinsville

  • The filing lists the grant at $150 million, though federal sites have the award at $144 million with ABAT’s sub-contractor Argonne National Lab getting around $6.4 Million.

• Federal regulations provide two pathways when a DOE-funded asset changes hands

  • The Continued Use Pathway allows the asset to transfer to another party operating under the same grant program without any financial penalty

  • The Disposition Pathway requires the government to be compensated for its share of the asset’s value before anything else happens

Because ABAT’s grant comes from the same program as Ascend’s, Ryan argues ABAT can take ownership through the Continued Use Pathway cleanly. Any other buyer is looking at a more complicated and expensive conversation with the federal government

United Electric Company’s objection is where this gets interesting. United Electric Company is an electrical subcontractor that TKJV brought in to do work on the facility, and they were never paid either. They have an $18.7 million lien on the property, meaning they have a legal claim against the asset for the money they are owed. They are one of several unpaid contractors in the same position, and the total amount owed to that group exceeds $120 million.

United Electric Company worked out an agreement with TKJV and dropped their objection to that sale. But they are still firmly objecting to any sale that involves ABAT. The specific protections they are asking for tell you quite a bit about what they are worried about.

• Their claims must attach to any money generated by an ABAT transaction

• They will not be bound by whatever value ABAT assigned to the property during the auction

• They want to see the full terms of ABAT’s purchase agreement before anything moves forward

When you step back and look at the full picture, there is a fairly logical path that emerges here. TKJV is a construction company with no interest in operating a battery recycling facility long term. What they want is to recover the money they are owed for building it.

ABAT has a DOE grant that fits this specific facility and lost the auction. A private sale from TKJV to ABAT after the bankruptcy closes takes care of both parties. TKJV gets paid, ABAT gets the facility and finishes construction using their grant money, and the DOE’s requirements under the Continued Use Pathway are satisfied, the site used $216 million of a $316 Million cash share grant so ABAT’s grant could actually pay to finish it.

There is another possible outcome worth considering though, and this is what Ryan’s filling is all about.

A bankruptcy judge looks at more than just who bid the most money. If the DOE signals that the Continued Use Pathway is the preferred resolution, and if Ryan Melsert’s argument that ABAT is the cleaner buyer gains any traction with the court, the judge could decide that awarding the sale to ABAT makes more sense for the estate overall.

The big caveat is that ABAT would need to satisfy the claims of the major creditors, and TKJV sits at the top of that list. If ABAT can put together a deal that makes TKJV whole, or reasonably close to it, the court would have a real argument in front of it.

The contractors who are still owed money, represented in part by United Electric Company and their $120 million in collective claims, are the ones left trying to recover whatever is available after any of these transactions get structured.

Whether it ends up being a private sale from TKJV to ABAT, or the court decides ABAT is the better buyer outright, the unpaid contractors below TKJV are looking at a barren landscape when it comes to getting reimbursed.

If there is anymore filings that drop I will do another update.

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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 and or persons mentioned to be included in the article.

Battery storage is growing at a rather impressive rate, and while I have talked about the misrepresentation it is causing in the context of the supply-and-demand landscape for lithium, there is another aspect showing up: the recycling of LFP, which is causing even more misinformation, and for some, they are using it to push fluff.

The Ascend Elements bankruptcy looks to be nearing its end, and with the 600 pages of documents I have been able to find, I have confirmation of what I have been calling the Bonehead Maneuver and that it was at the core of the company’s failure. But the solution may be what allows the company that emerges to continue and help develop a Western lithium-ion supply chain.

The latest news, of course, is that EV adoption is rising due to the conflict in Iran, with articles showing how fossil fuels are inadvertently accelerating the transition. But this is not new, and oddly enough the initial research was also started due to a conflict in the Middle East. Engineers years ago were looking for ways to utilize what had been thought of as waste from oil and gas production, to support an EV industry that had not been a thing since the early 1900s.

And lastly, I have talked about the segmentation of the EV market before and how automakers completely misread the market both here and in the EU. But there is a blame game going on where the media wants to point the finger at everyone but those who really created the problem.

Those are the topics I will be covering this Sunday, while I am working on an updated technical and regulatory look at using mining and manufacturing waste to produce critical materials.

Read more

New filing on the Ascend Elements Chapter 11 bankruptcy. Turner-Kokosing, the contractor that filed the lawsuit against Ascend Elements over unpaid construction work on the Hopkinsville facility, is now the successful bidder for those same assets. They are effectively converting their creditor position, which was around $138M, into ownership of the Kentucky site.

There is nothing on the Georgia site, which is the one that is operational and producing battery-grade lithium carbonate. This was just the Kentucky site APEX 1. Turner-Kokosing will likely not want to try to get it going unless the state steps in with incentives, which, interestingly enough, there is a spin to.

American Battery Technology Company jumped in on the auction but did not win; they were either interested in the site or attempting to acquire assets at a discount. We will not know the sale price or related details of the sale for about a week, but it will be interesting to see what their limit was.

I am hoping we see details about the Georgia site soon. That one may get complicated for two reasons: it is part of a billion-dollar offtake agreement for lithium carbonate, and it is using a proprietary early-stage lithium extraction component.

But so far all the company has been able to clear out of the bankruptcy is the Poland operations and the IP portfolio.

Now on to the documents I read last night.

First, the IP that is used in Georgia was bought by the company created by Kinterra Capital Corp to purchase the IP portfolio and the Polish assets. What they have done is set up a license agreement to allow Ascend, or whatever the company will be called after this, even though they also bought all the names and internet assets as well, to continue the black mass production platform. Payment for that license is data and ongoing operational updates. In other words, they are allowing them to use it for free as long as they share the information, and has allowed the site to remain in operations for now.

On ownership of the sites, with Poland and Kentucky out of the way, there is just Georgia. What they have done is take $5 million in notes, and that is going to be their bid. If no other bidder comes in higher, say like American Battery Technology Company, then that asset will be rolled into the new company created to purchase everything but Kentucky.

There is also an unresolved issue that may keep potential bidders away from the Georgia facility. The lawsuit with Duesenfeld is still ongoing, with claims that the site used equipment manufactured specifically for their IP, specifically the wet shredding and drying machinery supplied by the German company URT.

However, since the site later pivoted to an ESLR component invented by CTO Eric Gratz, the dispute may now be more about compensation for alleged past infringement rather than claims that the original equipment or process is still actively being used.

The case is currently stayed pending the bankruptcy resolution, meaning it is not actively moving forward right now. Once the bankruptcy process closes, the litigation resumes and is currently scheduled for trial in January 2027. Any buyer of the Georgia site is therefore not just acquiring an operating facility, but potentially buying into ongoing litigation exposure.

As for what I can find that is contested, there is the H2O Innovation equipment and agreements entirely. The information is vague, but that looks to be licensed or leased equipment and not part of the sale, but that looks like fiddlybits right now that the new owner will have to sort out after the sale.

The Department of Energy in the filings state that any equipment acquired or used with federal funds is subject to a reversionary interest, meaning the federal government retains a proportional ownership claim and may assert rights to recover value or control if those assets are sold or otherwise disposed of in violation of the grant terms.

However, as best as I can tell, the Georgia site was not included in the DOE grant funding, only the Kentucky site. Since Kentucky is now owned by the main creditor, I am not seeing any reason for the DOE having any legal claim over Georgia, there does seem to be a tax burden that the new owner will have to take on but that falls under fiddleybits again.

So as long as there is not a bidder higher than $5 million, the company will consist of the Polish facility and the Georgia site, along with all the contracts and IPs associated with those sites. Since that location is operational and has employees, it is not something that can be easily liquidated, and I am sure there is local backing to make sure that does not happen.

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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 and or persons mentioned to be included in the article.

They picked up the full IP portfolio, the patents, and all developed processes. The purchase price was $3 million in cash plus a credit bid tied to the CLN obligations, meaning the noteholders under both the Senior Secured Convertible Note and the Subordinated Secured Convertible Note used their debt as part of the consideration.

The auction itself bounced around several times. Originally scheduled for May 12, then pushed to May 13, then moved to a TBD date before ultimately being cancelled altogether once KinTerra was named the successful bidder. No competing bids, no auction was held.

Also included in the sale were equity interests giving the buyer indirect control of roughly 44 to 45 hectares of land in Opole, Poland, within the Wałbrzych Special Economic Zone, pending approval by the Polish government.

The filing explicitly states that none of the acquired assets were developed with DOE funding and that the DOE holds no reversionary interest in any of them. That is a very specific inclusion, and it was added to preempt any potential federal challenge.

The filing also includes that the debtors are not seeking approval of any sale transaction concerning the assets in Hopkinsville, Kentucky. None of the US based tangible assets were included in this sale. It is the Kentucky site APEX 1 where construction liens and secured debt sit, and it may be the focus of the motion by a couple of creditors to convert the proceedings from Chapter 11 to Chapter 7.

The one U.S. based asset that may continue is APEX 0 in Georgia, which was not listed in the new filing. It has no ties to DOE funding and, as far as I know, no liens attached to it. That operation may also continue as a separate entity from the Polish side, which was originally structured as a joint venture. The process used in Georgia is their black mass production platform, which includes the in-house developed early-stage lithium recovery component.

This sale effectively removes the IP portfolio from the bankruptcy proceedings. The platform used in Georgia was invented by CTO Eric Gratz, while the Hydro-to-Cathode process, developed by founder Dr. Yan Wang and originally intended for deployment in Kentucky and Poland, is now fully outside the U.S. bankruptcy proceedings and can be deployed in Poland.

The company will likely continue, just not in the form we know it. I would be disheartened, however, if all U.S. operations end up shutting down. The need for lithium-ion battery recycling has never been greater than it is right now, and losing domestic capacity at this moment would be a real blow to the industry.

We have already lost so much lithium-ion recycling capacity in the U.S. with failed companies and Redwood pivoting to cascade utilization due to the inability to produce battery grade. If the current trajectory continues under the Trump administration, where battery metals are increasingly being used as leverage in critical material trade negotiations, U.S. cell manufacturers may stay dependent on imports for battery metals until primary projects come online in the next decade. Which brings into question their viability due to not being able to compete with China’s much lower costs even with tariffs.

One final note: I have seen motions filed by both American Battery Technology Company and Princeton NuEnergy requesting access to all case documents and to be kept in the loop on the proceedings. Neither has filed anything tied to bidding yet, but that could change if this moves toward liquidation. If there are additional assets outside of facility-based engineering components, such as equipment, there may not be that much unless Georgia is rolled into the liquidation.

But if that is the case, the equipment sales could get complicated since it is part of a patented protected process, which as stated above is now out of the bankruptcy proceedings. There could be deals on granulators and other generic stuff that has been in use for some time and greatly depreciated, but that could be exactly what those two companies are waiting for, garage sale discounts.

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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 and or persons mentioned to be included in the article.

A lot of it still needs to be broken down, and as stated in the note, the names, phone numbers, and emails of the people involved were not redacted. I do not have permission from the investor to post the full documents, nor do I want to, simply because of all the private information left in them and I have no desire to manually redact any of it.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​

If you are curious where Part One is you can find it here, it covered the documents from a FOIA for the grant application.

For now I just want to cover one topic, and that is how they plan to operate the second site. This information comes from multiple correspondences over the last few months with the State of South Carolina Department of Environmental Services (DES).​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​

Depending on how they want to approach the waste handling regulations, they may have to purchase a second property, and this could be one of the reasons for no real progress updates.

Unlike Nevada, where facilities have up to 30 days before material is considered storage and feedstock is delivered and processed within 24-hours, South Carolina’s just-in-time window is 8-hours, leaving significantly less flexibility on processing feedstock.

ABAT has two options, and the documents make this distinction clear:

Option 1: Operate as a destination facility. All incoming feedstock must be processed within 8-hours of receipt. No storage permit is required, and the facility avoids EPA Treatment, Storage, and Disposal Facility (TSDF) certification and the heavier regulatory burden that comes with it.

Option 2: Cannot meet the 8-hour window, if that is the case DES stated this directly:

If you cannot process the waste within 8 hours of receipt you fall into storage and must get a storage permit.

That means a Resource Conservation and Recovery Act (RCRA) storage permit and full EPA TSDF certification, with location standards and additional fees.

Under this pathway ABAT would look to have the actual processing equipment, including shredding, slurry processing, and hydrometallurgical treatment tanks, classified as exempt recycling units under RCRA, meaning the machinery itself would not require its own permit. The storage of the batteries prior to processing would still fall under the full weight of TSDF regulations.

However that 8-hour rule is not federal law. As DES explained:

This is an interpretation from the department from the federal regulations. It was established as a precedent that they set with facilities operating in their state for the expectation of being staged vs stored.

The 8-hour requirement does not seem like a major issue at first. To be clear, this does not mean the facility can only operate for 8 hours a day. What it means is that from the moment any feedstock enters the facility it must be fully processed within 8 hours of arrival.

The issue comes when you get to the question of feedstock storage, and what happens when they cannot meet that window. ABAT asked what the regulations on a separate parcel for a Large Quantity Handler (LQH) storage property are:​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​

An intermediate storage facility cannot be on the same property as the destination facility. In the past, the required separation would typically be around a half mile to meet the destination facility definition.

So even under Option 1, ABAT could possibly need a second site for buffer storage, and that storage property would still need to be permitted as a TSDF. So the company is not fully escaping the TSDF burden either way, they are just potentially limiting it to the storage property rather than the processing facility itself.

The original assumption by some of us was that local partners would be able to hold their waste until ABAT was ready to process it, effectively handling at least a portion of the storage burden, this timeline changes everything.

Not all feedstock will come from local partners, incoming material from other sources would still be subject to the 8-hour clock upon arrival, making a second property likely unavoidable, or processing limits would have to be worked into the just-in-time schedule to allow for delays due to unforeseen circumstances. That kind of limit could cut into yearly throughput and overall profitability of the site.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​

On the question of fees, the picture is not yet complete. What is known is that a TSDF carries an annual fee of $600.00 per year. However, as DES noted:

For storage of wastes, [redacted] will follow up with additional SC DES team to determine if a set storage fee would apply for storage or waste onsite.

That question remains open, meaning there is a potential additional cost that has not yet been resolved. And that is before you factor in the cost difference between building a smaller facility dedicated purely to storage versus an all-in-one solution that combines storage and processing under one roof.

That all-in-one approach would be a much larger and more complicated build, and with many states including South Carolina taking a harder look at how lithium-ion batteries are stored following the 2024 CMR fire, the larger facility requirements alone could make that option cost prohibitive without state and local incentives.

That harder regulatory stance is not new. Back in 2024 companies were trying to use the Commercial Chemical Product (CCP) exemption under 40 CFR 261.2(c)(3), which allows off-spec batteries that never made it into service, either because they failed quality testing or were damaged in transport, to be managed as a product being reclaimed rather than as hazardous waste.

Several of the new lithium-ion recyclers wanting to set up in South Carolina, many of whom were planning to use EV manufacturer reject batteries as their primary initial feedstock, were looking to route that material through the CCP exemption to sidestep RCRA hazardous waste regulation entirely.

The fact that the current correspondence is focused on destination facility requirements and TSDF certification and has nothing at all about CCP tells you that approach did not gain traction with South Carolina regulators.

On the cost front again it was brought up by an agent of the South Carolina Department of Commerce in one of the correspondences, that North Carolina does not charge tonnage fees for a TSDF. If DES comes back with an unfavorable answer on storage fees, South Carolina becomes a more expensive regulatory environment than at least one neighboring state.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​

There is one item that is actually good news on the siting front. On setbacks and air permitting, DES was straightforward:

For a Title V Air Permit there are no set back requirements. As a part of the construction process, the department would want to see air dispersion modeling from the system itself. As long as you can show compliance with standards at the property boundary no additional set backs would be required.

That means ABAT has more options for where they can actually put the facility without running into regulatory distance requirements from neighboring properties or wetlands. While no locations were given, it was stated in one email that they were looking at three locations, so proximity of a suitable parcel for storage may be the only real factor.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​

When ABAT asked about formally establishing a destination facility in South Carolina, the response was:

[Redacted] will have to ask the hazwaste compliance staffing associated with this process to establish a Destination Facility within the state.

That tells us the destination facility pathway, which is the regulatory route that would allow ABAT to avoid the heavier TSDF permitting burden by processing all incoming material within 8-hours of receipt, is not yet an established process in South Carolina, at least for lithium-ion recycling. This is backed up by a separate correspondence about the national regulatory landscape for lithium-ion battery recycling from an employee of the South Carolina Department of Health and Environmental Control (DHEC).​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​

I read back through the chain of emails here from last year and am interested to know if there are any destination facilities that have received a RCRA Permit in any state yet?

It appears that the processing model ABAT is looking to use, a clone of the Nevada facility, is simply not something South Carolina regulators are familiar with. If that is the route the company wants to take, it means they are essentially helping to write the rulebook as they go, and that goes a long way toward explaining the absence of any timelines or progress updates from the company. They are still sorting it out.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​

There are a couple more topics to cover that are in the documents and I will get back to ABAT’s second lithium-ion recycling location, which they are calling Project Hidden Spring, at a later date.

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 and or persons mentioned to be included in the article.

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.

Subscribe now

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 i…

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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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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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