NUMiX Materials Poised to Revolutionize Heavy Metal Harvesting

NUMiX Materials, the brainchild of CEO Katie Kollhoff Mouat and her team of multi-disciplinary engineers, has an ambitious vision. The company seeks to help stabilize the U.S. critical materials supply chain by harvesting metals from electric car batteries that otherwise would end up in landfills. Currently these metals are imported but the goal is to re-use them, making the U.S. less dependent upon overseas production.

NUMiX Materials aims to harvest valuable metals from spent electric car batteries.

Supply chain stability is critical to many products used by U.S. manufacturers and consumers. A reliable supply chain means materials needed for goods are readily and regularly available. When they’re not, it creates a bottleneck that negatively affects production, creates shortages, and drives up prices.

Some of the metals, like cobalt, that are used in electric vehicle (EV) batteries have been identified as particularly vulnerable to supply chain disruptions. In fact, they’ve been classified as ‘critical materials’ by the Department of the Interior because their supply is essential to the economic and national security of the U.S.

Electric Battery Recycling

By 2025, the global stockpile of spent EV batteries is expected to exceed 3.4 million, compared with 55,000 in 2019 according to the Institute for Energy Research. And by 2040, more than half of new car sales and a third of vehicles across the globe are projected to be electric.

With the expansion of the EV market came the question of what to do with spent batteries. “Currently, used EV batteries cannot be recycled economically at scale,” says Kollhoff Mouat. Instead, they may be landfilled, which is costly and has an adverse environmental impact. Once in the landfill, the critical metals—used once in the battery—are of no future use.

If these metals can be reclaimed, there is less dependence upon unstable supply chains. The challenge is that recycling EV batteries has traditionally been energy intensive and cost prohibitive. EV battery disposal is viewed as a waste management challenge.

“Our aim was to make harvesting critical materials from the recycling waste stream more cost effective, particularly for EV batteries. We want to circularize the domestic supply chain of metal resource consumption.” Katie Kollhoff Mouat, CEO, NUMiX Materials

NUMIX Materials’ Unique Process

This is the puzzle that NUMiX Materials is intent on solving.  The company currently focuses on cobalt and nickel recycling from EV batteries. If these rare metals can be harvested from spent batteries, it positively impacts the critical materials supply chain that depends upon overseas production for raw materials.

“Our aim was to make harvesting critical materials from the recycling waste stream more cost effective, particularly for EV batteries,” says Kollhoff Mouat. “We want to circularize the domestic supply chain of metal resource consumption.”

To do this, NUMiX developed a process that enables efficient separation of desirable metal ions from a commonly used acid solution at room temperature. The key is a proprietary absorbent that can be used with off-the-shelf equipment to reclaim valuable metals. Conventional technologies used to eliminate metals from waste streams have efficiencies of only a few percent on a mass basis and don’t work well long term, since the systems tend to generate mountains of waste.

NUMiX’s technology is fundamentally different. At the most basic level, it behaves like a ‘super sponge’ that only absorbs metal ions. Compared to conventional filtration media, their material takes up these metals, more than doubling its weight. The saturated material, now full of raw source metals, is shipped to producers of new battery materials, thus closing the supply chain circle.

Katie Kolllhoff Mouat, CEO of NUMiX Materials, developed a unique process using a proprietary absorbent, to efficiently and inexpensively harvest cobalt and nickel from spent EV batteries.

“The capacity of the compound is markedly better than current options,” notes Kollhoff Mouat.  NUMiX’s material results in a compound consisting of almost 50 percent target metals compared to other processes, which may harvest as little as one percent by mass. This means the NUMiX process is commercially viable. “The goal is to reduce the overall cost of battery recycling.”

Recently NUMiX has conducted a successful lab-scale trial at Argonne that showed high uptake into the NUMiX absorbent from a concentrated solution of cobalt and nickel. As a result, NUMiX is poised to begin scaling up. Where previous testing used synthetic metal solutions, the next phase will use real-world materials.

“Our ultimate objective is the efficient use and re-use of materials,” Kollhoff Mouat points out. NUMiX is well on its way to achieving that goal, not only securing the supply chain but also reducing waste and minimizing adverse environment impacts.

 

 

Katie Kollhoff Mouat is a member of cohort 3, the third class of innovators to participate in the Chain Reaction Innovations program at Argonne National Laboratory.

Chain Reaction Innovations provides innovators with laboratory tools and seed capital as well as the technical, business and manufacturing expertise needed to rapidly mature their early-stage technologies. The goal is to enable them to attract the long-term capital and commercial partners needed to scale and launch into the marketplace.

CRI is part of the Lab-Embedded Entrepreneurship Programs supported by the U.S. Department of Energy’s Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy (EERE). EERE created the Lab-Embedded Entrepreneurship Programs to provide an institutional home for innovative postdoctoral researchers to build their research into products and train to be entrepreneurs. The two-year program for each innovator is funded by EERE’s Advanced Manufacturing Office (AMO).

Latest News

See All
  • 2024 Startup Milestones

    About CRI Startup founders and the CRI team work together to advance cutting-edge technologies that offer science solutions that benefit America and the world. CRI support allows science startups to bring their deep tech to market more quickly. The combined total of follow-on funding raised… Read More

  • Pivot, not Panic: Chain Reaction Innovations is Driving Startup Success

    By focusing on the needs of founders, Argonne’s Chain Reaction Innovations program provides startups with funding, expertise and laboratory resources to turn innovative clean-energy technologies into market-changing companies. As a result of his work at Argonne, Gary Ong, founder and CEO of Celadyne Technologies, is… Read More

  • Director's Letter

    Dear Friends of CRI, Welcome to the Summer 2024 issue of the CRI newsletter. In it, you’ll see the breadth of our spring and summer activities. It gives me great pleasure to introduce you to CRI’s newest cohort. Welcoming a new cohort is… Read More

  • LEEP Demo Day 2024

    In May, the Lab-Embedded Entrepreneurship Program’s (LEEP) Demo Day featured graduating cohorts from the four LEEP nodes including Chain Reaction Innovations at Argonne National Laboratory, Innovation Crossroads at Oak Ridge National Laboratory, West Gate at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory, and Cyclotron Road at Lawrence… Read More

  • CRI Seeks Applicants for Next Cohort

    Chain Reaction Innovations (CRI), a Lab-Embedded Entrepreneurship Program (LEEP) at the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) Argonne National Laboratory, will begin accepting applications for Cohort 2025 on September 4th, the program’s ninth group of early-stage startups. Innovators with emerging science and energy… Read More