Princeton NuEnergy ($42M to recycle spent lithium batteries for sustainable battery materials)

Princeton NuEnergy, an American cleantech company founded in 2019, develops lithium-ion battery recycling technology based on low-temperature plasma-assisted separation (LPAS) process for making sustainable battery materials. The technology significantly reduces the cost, environmental waste, and carbon emissions commonly associated with lithium-ion battery recycling.

Challenges: lithium battery recycling

Lithium ion batteries have become the battery of choice for rapidly expanding electric vehicles markets. This increases the demand for lithium, graphite, cobalt, and nickel, which may exceed the availability of virgin materials.

Recycling spent batteries is a crucial step in addressing stringent environmental regulations and conserving resources, as well as minimizing the negative effects of mining/brine extractions for virgin metals, raw material transportation, and energy consumption. Therefore, there is a significant interest in the development of new technologies for recycling and recovering valuable materials from used lithium ion batteries.

Currently, industrial recycling of lithium ion batteries relies on high temperature pyrometallurgical or hydrometallurgical methods to recycle valuable elements such as Li, Ni, and Co. These methods involve high temperatures and intensive chemical processes, which result in substantial energy consumption, chemical waste, and expensive operating cost. Thus, there remains a need for new strategies that enable sorting, purification, and regeneration of cathode materials from used lithium ion batteries, as well as the addition of new functionality to improve cathode material performance.

Princeton NuEnergy Technology

Princeton NuEnergy developed a lithium ion battery recycling technology that combines a low-temperature plasma-assisted separation and purification process with a gas-phase material regeneration process. The technology enables sorting, plasma purification, and regeneration of aged cathode materials without completely destroying the compounds, and it drastically reduces energy and chemical consumption, recycling time, and costs in comparison to current industrial pyrometallurgical and hydrometallurgical processes.

Princeton NuEnergy battery recycling

The diagram below depicts the Princeton NuEnergy processes of lithium battery recycling.