ABTC secures up to $50M investment

American Battery Technology Co. (ABTC), a battery materials technology company based in Reno, Nevada, has announced that after completion of a competitive diligence process to secure funding to facilitate the advancement of its commercial-scale construction projects, it has consummated a debt financing with a single institutional investor for up to $50 million in zero coupon, senior secured convertible notes.

According to ABTC, A.G.P./Alliance Global Partners acted as the sole placement agent for the financing.

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“This capital investment supports the continued development of our core projects as we evolve from pilot and demonstration-scale systems up to commercial-scale facilities in each of our business units,” ABTC CEO Ryan Melsert says. “We evaluated a wide range of financing alternatives over the past several months, and the use of this debt financing is very well aligned with our growth plans.”

The company says the funds will support the near-term expansion of its battery material processing operations, including lithium-ion battery recycling. ABTC says it currently has the first phase of its first commercial-scale recycling facility undergoing commissioning, which utilizes its internally developed technologies for the strategic demanufacturing and recycling of battery components. A second phase will subsequently be added that includes its targeted chemical extraction train for the manufacturing of battery-grade critical materials, and a third phase of these battery recycling operations will be integrated to further increase the material recovery rates and decrease operating costs.

ABTC notes it was recently selected for a U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) grant for a $20 million project to support the commercialization of this third phase, and the funds from this announced financing will directly support these efforts.

Funding also will support the current exploration program taking place at ABTC’s 10,340-acre lithium-bearing claystone deposit in Nevada, which it says has been identified as one of the largest known lithium deposits in the U.S., with an inferred resource of 15.8 million tons of lithium carbonate equivalent. Funding will aid the continued evolution of this domestic resource towards upgrading from the current “inferred” resource to “measured and indicated” resource classification, and also to proceed through the permitting operations to commercialize this domestic critical material resource.

Additionally, ABTC has developed its own technologies for the refining of its lithium-bearing claystone resource into battery-grade lithium hydroxide product. This set of integrated processes currently is being demonstrated in its pilot plant, the company says, which is supported by a U.S. DOE grant it was awarded in 2021, with processing capacity of up to 5 metric tons per day.

As a result of the early successes of these efforts, ABTC was selected by the U.S. DOE in the fall of 2022 for an additional grant award for a $115 million project to construct a commercial-scale lithium hydroxide refinery based on its technologies. ABTC says the funds from this announced investment will directly support these commercial-scale efforts as matching funds.