ACE Green Recycling to open India’s largest battery recycling plant

Shortly before its planned IPO, US company ACE Green Recycling signed a lease agreement for a site to build India's largest battery recycling plant. The plant will be located in Mundra in the Indian state of Gujarat and will build on the company's existing Indian operations.

ACE has been recycling lithium-ion batteries, including lithium iron phosphate (LFP) batteries, at its existing facilities in India since 2023. As part of the expansion, ACE plans to create an annual processing capacity of 10,000 tonnes of LFP batteries at its recycling facilities in India by 2026 to meet the growing demand for LFP battery recycling.

The location of ACE’s new plant in Mundra is strategically chosen: It is close to major ports that handle more than 10 per cent of India’s maritime traffic. It simplifies the transport of battery recycling raw materials and off-take products, the company emphasises.

ACE plans to go public shortly through a merger with Athena Technology Acquisition Corp. II, a so-called SPAC, i.e. a shell company without its own business. The plans in India come at just the right time to draw investors’ attention to the company’s expansion plans.

The new recycling plant in Mundra will employ ACE’s modular ‘LithiumFirst’ technology to recycle LFP batteries at room temperature in a fully electrified hydrometallurgical process that produces no Scope 1 carbon emissions and no liquid or solid waste. During this process, the proprietary ACE technology can maintain commercial lithium recovery from LFP batteries at levels of approximately 75 per cent and produce lithium carbonate with a purity of over 99%, which is fed back into the battery materials value chain, the company says.

“LFP is expected to dominate the lithium battery market by 2030, and Ace is strategically scaling our LFP battery recycling capacity to meet demand and support our growing customer base,” said Nishchay Chadha, CEO of Ace. “We believe that Ace is unique in its ability to sustainably recycle LFP batteries, and we plan to continue our focus on this market to build on our first-mover advantage. Our team recently visited battery recycling facilities in China, and we believe our LFP battery recycling technology to be more advanced despite a more mature and larger scale lithium-ion recycling ecosystem there.”

In addition to recycling LFP batteries, ACE plans to utilise its GreenLead recovery technology to recycle lead-acid batteries at its recycling park in Mundra.

ACE expects the LFP battery recycling plant in Mundra to create up to 50 high-value jobs in the local economy once fully operational, bringing the company’s total number of jobs in India to over 100.

ACE is headquartered in Houston, Texas, and, after much delay in Texas, plans to open its first battery recycling plant in the US this year. The plant was announced in 2022 and was actually due to go into operation in 2023. Plants in Europe and Israel are set to follow soon. ACE has concluded a supply agreement with the globally active raw materials group Glencore for recycled lead based on battery metals from recycled lithium-ion batteries.

prnewswire.com (India), prnewswire.com (IPO)