Princeton NuEnergy (PNE) will receive battery manufacturing scrap from SK On subsidiary SK Battery America (SKBA) under a planned expansion of the companies’ ongoing collaboration on closed-loop recycling. The scrap will come from SKBA’s EV battery plants in Commerce, Georgia, which have a combined annual production capacity of about 22 GWh.

PNE is exploring the possibility of building a recycling facility near SKBA’s manufacturing site. Designed to process battery manufacturing scrap, the facility would recover and rejuvenate cathode active material for potential return to battery manufacturing. The companies say they are continuing discussions on the technical and commercial framework of the collaboration.

Conventional recycling breaks battery materials down into their constituent elements. PNE says its direct recycling process, which it calls Cathode-to-Cathode, is instead designed to preserve and rejuvenate the engineered structure of the cathode material.

The US Department of Energy (DOE) has selected PNE to enter award negotiations for up to $50 million in support of a proposed $110-million project to build a Cathode-to-Cathode rejuvenation facility in the US. PNE’s announcement of that selection, which we covered, placed the facility in Commerce and sized it at 3,000 tonnes per year of nickel-based battery manufacturing scrap. That plant would use PNE’s low-temperature plasma-assisted separation (LPAS) technology. Neither PNE release says whether the facility it is exploring near SKBA’s site is that DOE-backed plant.

“By leveraging PNE’s Cathode-to-Cathode process, we aim to support a more localized and circular domestic battery materials supply chain,” said Chao Yan, co-founder and CEO of PNE.

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