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Nov 07, 2024

ExPost Lithium Battery Restoration Finding Public, Private Support - San Diego Business Journal

CLEAN TECH: DOE, General Motors Help Co. Advance Battery Recycling Platform LA JOLLA – Researchers at UC San Diego want a better way to recycle lithium batteries. For several years, a team of

CLEAN TECH: DOE, General Motors Help Co. Advance Battery Recycling Platform

LA JOLLA – Researchers at UC San Diego want a better way to recycle lithium batteries.

For several years, a team of scientists that include academics from UCSD, Arizona State University, the University of Chicago, General Motors and Argonne National Laboratory have studied how to reduce the economic and environmental cost of lithium battery recycling, which mainly involves extracting a battery’s expensive metals.

That research led to the formation of ExPost Technology Inc., which was spun out of UCSD in 2022 in part to attract state and federal grant funding before the company began staffed up in earnest this year.

Instead of essentially mining spent batteries for metals like cobalt, nickel and lithium, ExPost utilizes a process of targeted treatment on the degraded parts of a battery to restore them to their pristine state and replenish a battery’s supply of lithium.

“They’ve been able to take the cathode out of the used batteries or even scrap batteries and treat it chemically and basically transform these cathodes back to their pristine state, so that when you put it in new batteries, you can’t tell the difference,” ExPost CEO Benson Lam said.

While Lam joined the company as its chief executive earlier this year, researchers at UCSD have been developing the recycling process used by ExPost since 2016.

The company was spun out of the university in 2022 when that research outgrew what resources the university could provide. That year, the research team including UCSD and the other academics received a $10 million grant from the U.S. Department of Energy for battery recycling research, one of 10 battery recycling programs funded at that time by the DOE.

The research team also received a $1.2 million grant from the California Energy Commission at that time.

“Our vision is to address key challenges of energy security and environmental sustainability by leveraging the unique skills and experiences in our lab and the broad fundamental knowledge in physics and chemistry we have developed,” UCSD nanoengineering professor Zheng Chen said in a 2022 news release announcing the funding awards.

In April, the Department of Energy awarded ExPost with an $8 million grant to continue its efforts to expand the circular market for batteries.

“That has been very supportive of what we’re doing because it covers a lot of the labor costs as well as equipment costs,” Lam said of the grants.

Lam added that ExPost is currently in the middle of its seed funding round, though when that round will close has yet to be determined, and the company intends to begin a Series A funding round in the second half of 2025.

While the number of spent batteries from electric vehicles is expected to rise as more consumers switch away from gasoline-powered vehicles, Lam said the market for manufacturing scrap batteries is also expected to rise significantly as car companies continue expanding into the electric vehicle market.

“Every time they change the chemistry, every time they put a new (model) line or make any small changes, the rejection rate is pretty high, a lot of scraps are generated,” he said. “So the initial volume of batteries that will be ready for recycling will be these manufacturing scraps.”

ExPost already works with General Motors to recycle its electric vehicle batteries and expects to begin working with additional manufacturers in the near future.

As a result, the company plans to expand its facility footprint from its current 4,700 square feet to 30,000 square feet by 2026. That facility may or may not be located in San Diego, according to Lam, and will largely depend on funding and local government support.

“It’s going to be a combination of that dilutive funding as well as the grants that would support our further building,” Lam said.

Lam said ExPost will continue to work closely with researchers at UCSD even as the company expands its own staff.

“What the UCSD (researchers) have done is, everything they do is around not just solving the problem of being able to recycle the batteries, but doing it economically in such a way that it’s scalable and it’s sustainable,” he said.

ExPost Technology Inc.FOUNDED: Registered 2022, staffed 2024CEO: Benson LamHEADQUARTERS: La JollaBUSINESS: Lithium battery recyclingFUNDING: $19.2 million in federal, state grantsEMPLOYEES: FiveWEBSITE: exposttechnology.comNOTABLE: ExPost says its end-to-end processing time is 60 percent shorter than standard lithium battery recycling techniques