The CEO of American Battery Technology Company Addressed the Consulate General of India in New York.
Ryan Melsert was invited to present at the Consulate General of India in New York on lithium and battery metals. This article includes the video and technical breakdowns of their projects.
On Tuesday, June 9th, 2026, the CEO of American Battery Technology Company, Ryan Melsert, gave a presentation at the Consulate General of India in New York. During the presentation he covered his background, the company’s lithium-ion recycling vertical, the Tonopah Flats Lithium project, a brief overview of the current US policy landscape around critical minerals, and the recently announced Quad Critical Minerals Initiative, the four-country partnership between the United States, India, Japan, and Australia. He then fielded a couple questions from the audience.
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.