The required scale to hit profit

He tells the Herald a demo plant has already been created: “It’s dealing with 500kg batches of material, which is not commercial, but enables you to design the kind of massive energy balances, all of the protocols, for a full-scale that is profitable.”

What sort of scale are we talking?

“About 20,000 tonnes of batteries. Car batteries are somewhere in the order of half a tonne, so that’s about 40,000 cars.”

In global industrial terms, that’s modest scale.

“The intention is that we build these smaller-scale plants that are able to be deployed everywhere where these waste streams exist, and create a circularity solution for every country that’s demanding these critical metals,” Barker says.

Mint Innovation is secret squirrel about its extraction process, but Barker says it’s brand-agnostic.

Under the £8.1m pilot, it will be used to extract materials that can be remanufactured into battery cells that go into new Jaguar Land Rover vehicles.

But Barkers adds, “We can drop into anyone’s supply chain. We’re super-excited to be working with one of the best-known car manufacturers in the world – and a super-attractive brand that really enables us to supercharge this project. But in reality, to get impact, we’ve got to solve a global problem.”

While a number of start-ups are vying for the nascent EV battery recycling market, Mint has already proved its chops in other areas.

The EV battery project represents a branching-out for the Kiwi firm, which at first focused on extracting valuable materials such as gold and copper from e-waste such as old cellphones and laptops.

Mint built its first e-waste plant in Sydney, where commercial operation began last year.

The Australian plant is currently being retooled so tin and silver can also be extracted. A second plant is on the way in the US, at a site in Texas.

The expansion into EV batteries had its genesis in the pandemic, Barker says.

“All of my scientists were locked out of the lab for an extended period. So to keep the creative juices flowing, I asked them to focus on alternative waste streams – and one of those was lithium-ion batteries.

“As soon as we were allowed back in the lab, we split off a small team to start working on it and they quickly gained a lot of traction. So it was a fortuitous outcome from a pretty challenging time.”

E-offshore

Why does Mint not have a plant in its own country, especially given it’s had Government backing in the form of $5m from Callaghan Innovation?

It was drawn across the Tasman by larger clean-energy grants, e-waste recycling mandates and the larger market.

In New Zealand there are plans to regulate e-waste but it has so far been five years in the making despite a spate of recent lithium-ion battery fires.

Environment Minister Penny Simmonds recently said the plan to regulate e-waste (and the likes of farm plastics and agrichemicals) was not stalled, but neither were there set dates for its implementation.

”I intend to progress schemes in a measured way to ensure they are well-considered and cost-of-living impacts are limited,” Simmonds said.

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Barker says his firm will likely process e-waste in New Zealand eventually, it just makes economic and practical sense to open its first plants overseas.

Meanwhile, his firm’s R&D operations remain in Auckland, where that Callaghan money has helped create 20 high-skill jobs and a business that’s generating export receipts.

The electric car battery recycling plants will only be built where there’s manufacturing demand and where, such as in the UK and EU, there are mandates for new EV batteries to have minimum amounts of recycled materials.

Mint, founded by LanzaTech alumnus Barker in 2016, raised $60m in a 2023 Series C venture capital round, which came on top of a $20m Series B in 2020 and an earlier $6m Series A.

Local backers include Icehouse Ventures, Movac, the Crown (through NZ Growth Capital Partners’ Inspire fund), WNT Ventures, the ubiquitous Sir Stephen Tindall and Ngāi Tahu Investments.

Barker says there is likely to be a Series D raise next year, “somewhere north of US$50m [$83m]”.

He cites a 2023 McKinsey report that found lithium-ion battery demand is expected to grow by about 27% annually to reach around 4700 gigawatt hours by 2030, or the equivalent of around 117 million batteries from small to mid-sized electric cars.

McKinsey predicted a US$40m EV battery recycling industry by 2040, with a US$6b profit pool.

Chris Keall is an Auckland-based member of the Herald’s business team. He joined the Herald in 2018 and is the technology editor and a senior business writer.