The opening of a battery materials plant in Finland by BASF had to be put off earlier this year because environmental groups and the court agreed that the company did not have a good plan for how to deal with its trash.
As battery factories pop up all over the world, the fear of wastewater could stop their building. One company, on the other hand, says that recycling it is the better option.
The wastewater from these plants is full of sodium sulfate, which is made when sulfuric acid and caustic soda are broken down. These are chemicals that are used to make batteries, refine copper, and do other things.
Talked to Bilen Akuzum, co-founder and CTO of Aepnus Technology. “We can totally make a circular economy around these reagent chemicals.”
Akuzum and co-founder Lukas Hackl didn’t plan to make a small cycle economy. They just happened to find one while visiting lithium mines in California and Nevada. Both chemists were looking into possible business ideas. They had been friends since meeting in the diner of their dorm.
“We were thinking about getting lithium out of the ground or doing something else in the minerals space,” Akuzum said. When we talked to people in the business, they all said, “Well, there are actually ways to get lithium out of the ground.” But we don’t know what to do with this trash that comes from our work.
Akuzum and Hackl thought about the idea some more after they got back from their trip. In the end, they decided to improve an existing technology so that the trash could be turned into raw materials that the facilities could use in their work.
They started Aepnus to bring the chloralkali process, which breaks down salts like sodium sulfate back into the acids and bases that made them, up to date.
Electrolyzers are used by the company to zap the salts and get them to split. Another business might do the same thing, but to speed things up, they might use expensive metals. “Our electrolyzers don’t use any pricey catalysts,” Akuzum said.
At the moment, Aepnus is sending customers half-scale models of its tools so that they can test them on their own wastewater streams. The wastewater from each place is likely to have different contaminants, some of which need to be filtered first. The electrolyzers can get rid of the sodium sulfate once they’re out.
Customers should save money on disposal and material prices by fully recycling sodium sulfate waste. This also saves money on transportation for people who work in rural areas, like miners. Akuzum said, “Instead of mining companies buying these chemicals and having them trucked in from very far away, we can make them again from waste here on site.”
The new business has more than 15 customers at different stages, from studying the business’s viability to trying its pilot-scale equipment. Aepnus just got a $8 million seed round to ship more pilot-scale electrolyzers and work on making the commercial-scale version. The round was led by Clean Energy Ventures, and Gravity Climate Fund, Impact Science Ventures, Lowercarbon Capital, Muus Climate Partners, and Voyager Ventures all took part.
Also Read: The Good and Bad Things About Electric Cars
If Aepnus can make its electrolyzers available to the public, it will be a big step forward for the United States. According to Akuzum, there are only a few companies in the world that know how to make these kinds of electrolyzers. It’s too bad that not a single company in the US has that kind of know-how.
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