Ascend facility to boost US lithium carbonate production by 60 percent

Lithium-ion battery (LIB) recycler Ascend Elements, Westborough, Massachusetts, plans to begin producing lithium carbonate recovered from used LIBs at its facility in Covington, Georgia, in 2025. The company plans to produce up to 3,000 metric tons of domestic lithium carbonate, with about 99 percent purity, per year.

The company claims recycled lithium carbonate currently is not produced at a commercial scale anywhere in the United States. The only other domestic source comes from a mining operation in Nevada.

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“This is the first new, domestic source of lithium carbonate in the 21st Century,” says Eric Gratz, co-founder and chief technology officer of Ascend. “This new domestic supply of a critical battery material will help U.S. industries meet growing demand while avoiding the possibility of tariffs on imported materials.”

Ascend notes lithium carbonate is used to make advanced batteries for grid-scale energy storage applications as well as electric vehicles (EVs), boats and aircraft. According to Gratz, Ascend’s lithium recovery process produces a “remarkably low” level of CO₂ emissions compared with conventional methods such as mining and brine extraction.

The company says its lithium extraction process produces just 2.27 kilograms of CO₂ emissions per 1 kilogram of lithium carbonate produced. By comparison, the company says spodumene mining produces approximately 16.7kg of CO₂ emissions per 1kg of lithium carbonate. These preliminary comparisons are from a life cycle assessment that is not yet critically reviewed.

“To put this in perspective, our current process of lithium extraction from used lithium-ion batteries is about 86 percent less carbon-intensive compared to spodumene mining and 37 percent less carbon-intensive compared to Chilean brine extraction,” Gratz says.

Ascend’s Covington facility has been in operation since August 2022 and can recycle up to 30,000 metric tons of LIB materials per year, or approximately 70,000 EV battery packs.