That’s a lot of money, and a lot of components. But the most expensive part of any EV – the battery, including the critical minerals that go inside it – is currently made almost entirely outside Britain. More than 90% of the global supply of refined cathode and anode materials comes from China, with cobalt mined in Africa and lithium pulled from the ground in Australia and South America before being shipped halfway around the world for processing.
Altilium, a Devon start-up, wants to change that. The company has just secured £18.5m from the government’s Drive35 fund to build Act3, the UK’s first commercial refinery for recovering critical minerals from end-of-life EV batteries. Located in Plymouth, the facility will process around 24,000 batteries a year, produce battery-grade materials with up to 74% lower carbon emissions than mined equivalents, and create about 70 new jobs when it begins production at the end of next year.
“Act3 is a stepping stone to fulfilling our ambition, which is to onshore critical minerals supply in order to build a supply chain of critical minerals to feed our gigafactories,” says David Cartwright, managing director at Altilium. The company is already supplying samples to its principal OEM partners, Nissan and Jaguar Land Rover – both of which are building or expanding gigafactories in the UK to manufacture batteries for new vehicles.
The way the UK currently treats its used EV batteries is, according to Cartwright, absurd. A handful of firms shred old batteries to produce a powder known as ‘black mass’, a feedstock containing lithium, cobalt, nickel, manganese and graphite, then export it to China for refining. The refined materials are then bought back – far more expensive than when they left – to feed British gigafactories. “You’re losing significant value,” says Cartwright. “You’re exporting it, you're adding carbon footprint, only to re-import it once it’s refined.”
A life cycle analysis Altilium commissioned with engineering consultancy Minviro suggests its EcoCathode process produces lower greenhouse gas emissions, translating to a 25% reduction in the embedded carbon of a new EV.
A shorter supply chain also makes drivers less reliant on the whims of other countries. Cobalt, lithium and nickel are on most governments’ critical minerals list, and the UK relies on China to refine its supply – putting the £4.6bn opportunity the SMMT identified at risk.
After Act3 comes online, Altilium is planning Act4, which Cartwright describes as a “world-scale” refinery. He claims Act4 is the largest project of its kind planned in Europe, and could eventually process 50,000 tonnes of black mass a year, equivalent to roughly 150,000 EV batteries.
That plant alone would produce about 30,000 tonnes of cathode active material and 20,000 tonnes of anode active material annually, worth between £1.3-1.7bn at current prices. “I don’t think the full value of that is factored into the £4.6bn onshoring that SMMT have estimated,” Cartwright says.
For now, Act4 is an ambition rather than a reality, and Cartwright admits the capital expenditure required to build refineries at this scale is “pretty significant”. But the company has scaled up before: Altilium moved from a 10-tonne R&D plant in Tavistock (Act1) to a 100-tonne pilot (Act2), then to Act3’s 8,000 tonnes.
The company is also trying to build an ecosystem around itself: a subsidiary platform called Recell.Store, which Cartwright says has signed up more than 120 participants including car manufacturers, insurers, dismantlers and garages to broker the reuse, repurposing and eventual recycling of EV batteries before they reach the refinery gates. As Cartwright puts it, the model is “reuse, repurpose, repair, recycle, refine, and then reuse again”.
Testing that model could provide both an environmental and a financial reward. Every EV battery that slots into the country’s vehicles contains materials the UK will need, while every exported tonne of black mass is value lost to another country’s supply chain.
“There is no energy transition without batteries,” says Cartwright, arguing the case for onshoring expertise. “Can recycling move the needle on the UK supply chain? Obviously we feel that the answer is yes.”
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