Aqua Metals Announces Yet Another Reinvention of Itself
The first step toward full-path lithium-ion recycling, or just another pivot to keep the lights on?
Over the years, Aqua Metals AQMS 0.00%↑ has struggled to find a market for their “electrified hydrometallurgical process,” which is really just marketing jargon that convolutes what their system actually does.
Stripped down, it is a basic sulfuric leach platform. Instead of precipitating metals out as powders, they use electrowinning for the transition metals and an electrochemical step for the lithium. That electrochemical component might also be on the back burner, given their pivot from a hydroxide to a carbonate.
They have gone from trying to produce pure battery metals and lithium hydroxide monohydrate, to aiming for lithium carbonate alongside a mixed hydroxide precipitate (MHP), to now simply wanting to start over as a black mass producer.
Aqua Metals is advancing a phased commercial strategy that begins with battery preprocessing and black mass production and is designed to progressively integrate AquaRefining
To pull this off, they are completely ditching their original rollout plans and working on a move to a 150,000-square-foot facility on over 50 acres out in the Midwest battery corridor. They plan to launch operations as a basic black mass and low-value material producer (e.g., copper and aluminum) right out the gate, pushing their core AquaRefining technology to later phases.
This is a strategy that many cradle-to-gate lithium-ion recyclers who plan to offer a complete recycling solution from collections to waste to battery grade are using, but in the US, it has seen very little success as of yet when it comes to a transition from demonstration or pre-commercial scale to profitable commercial-scale production of battery grade.
The entire PR is basically a story about how they need to reinvent themselves yet again just to move forward, this time with a focus on LFP. The heavy hedging in the release, which is laced with words like diligence, evaluating, planned, subject to, intended, expects, potential, and proposing, makes this look a lot like a last ditch effort to pivot from R&D to a commercial scale that can actually keep the lights on while they figure out how to monetize their AquaRefining platform.
As for the actual black mass production setup, it looks like they will be running a basic system that incorporates some form of early stage lithium recovery (ELSR).
Aqua Metals’ initial commercial strategy is focused on recycling LFP materials and recovering battery-grade lithium carbonate from black mass, with the potential to add additional chemistries and recovery pathways over time. Following the planned scaling of preprocessing operations and lithium carbonate production, Aqua Metals expects to add processing capabilities for nickel manganese cobalt, or NMC, and other lithium-ion battery chemistries by leveraging its patented AquaRefining™ technologies, which have been proven at demonstration plant scale.
Now, that part does perk my interest somewhat. Current bicarbonate pathways for ESLR struggle when it comes to LFP. You see a few workarounds out there, like using a highly selective solvent to pull the lithium away from the iron phosphate matrix before stripping it out with a diluted acid wash.
They could also go with a mechanochemical route, tossing some sodium carbonate into a ball mill and using pure kinetic energy to warp the LFP crystal structure and force out a lithium carbonate.
If they actually choose an innovative path like that, or plan to build a genuinely advanced black mass production platform, they might catch my attention. But as it stands right now, there just isn’t much here to look at.
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