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Innovating to Power an Independent and Sustainable Energy Future
Team
Lonnie Garris
Co-Founder & CEO
Tom Madden
CTO & Co-Founder
Cool Amps
Company details
The US is facing a frightening shortfall in the critical minerals needed for energy storage & batteries to enable the shift to electrification. There are limitations in our ability to mine these locally; however we can find these critical minerals in post-manufacturing, off spec batteries, as well as in growing reserves of post-use, spent batteries from EV’s and other uses. But current approaches to battery recycling face a number of challenges, including complexity, cost, and energy usage to carry out reverse logistics and centralize the supply of spent materials, as well as energy intensity of the recycling processes themselves, which use high temperatures (pyrometallurgy) or toxic chemicals (hydrometallurgy) in order to separate the key ingredients within a battery back to their fundamental metal or metal salt forms, only to then utilize further energy to re-create usable cathode-active-materials. These factors combine to mean that battery recycling processes to date have struggled to chart a path to profitability, as battery acquisition & transport represent 30% of recycling costs. All of this means that we currently have sorely inadequate recovery of e-waste, with only 17% of e-waste being recovered, leaving $57 billion in unrecovered raw materials. Cool Amps has developed technology to completely disrupt this landscape, with a process that delivers greatly enhanced sustainability and profitability. This low capex process enables distributed and localized deployment on-site alongside gigafactories to capture and regenerate any off-spec product, as well as at e-waste handlers to directly recycle spent batteries into usable cathode active materials, while at the same time recovering graphite and copper materials for re-use. To do this Cool Amps has developed an electrochemical, in-situ process that utilizes benign solvents at ambient conditions to directly extract the valuable materials, without taking them down to their component materials and having to rebuild them into usable inputs for the battery industry.