Earlier this year, BASF was forced to do just that Opening delay Battery materials factory in Finland when a court agreed with environmental groups that the company did not have a good plan for dealing with wastewater.
As battery factories spring up around the world, the specter of wastewater threatens to halt their construction. However, one startup says the solution is not to throw them away, but to recycle them.
Wastewater from these plants comes out laden with sodium sulfate, a byproduct of sulfuric acid and caustic soda, two chemicals used in battery manufacturing, copper refining and other industries.
“We can create a completely circular economy around these reagent chemicals,” said Belen Akuzum, co-founder and CTO of the company Ebony technologyTechCrunch said.
Akosum and co-founder Lukas Hackl did not intend to create a small circular economy, instead they stumbled upon it while touring lithium mining operations in California and Nevada. The two chemists, who had become friends since they met in their dorm cafeteria, were looking for potential startup ideas.
“We were thinking about lithium extraction or something else in the minerals space,” Akuzum said. “Every time we talked to someone from industry, they said, ‘Well, there are already solutions for lithium extraction. But we have this waste coming out of our operations, and we don’t really know what to do with it.
After returning from the trip, Akuzum and Hackl turned the idea around in their heads, eventually deciding to improve existing technology to turn that waste into raw materials that facilities could use in their operations.
The two founded Aepnus to modernize the century-old chlor-alkali process, which splits salts like sodium sulfate back into the acids and bases they created.
The company uses electrolyzers to crush the salts and persuade them to split. Other companies do the same thing, but they may use expensive metals to help speed up the reactions. “We do not use any expensive catalysts in our electrolyzers,” Akuzum said.
Aepnus is currently shipping half-sized models of its equipment to customers, who can test the devices on their own wastewater streams. The wastewater at each site is likely to contain different contaminants, some of which will need to be filtered beforehand. Once it’s out, the electrolyser can get to work removing the sodium sulfate.
For customers, fully recycling sodium sulfate waste should reduce disposal and material costs. For those with remote locations, such as miners, they also save transportation costs. “Instead of mining operations purchasing these chemicals and trucking them over very long distances, we can regenerate those chemicals on-site from waste,” Akuzum said.
The startup has more than 15 clients in various stages ranging from feasibility studies to experimental equipment testing. Aepnus recently raised an $8 million seed round to ship more pilot-scale electrolyzers and develop the commercial version. The round was led by Clean Energy Ventures with participation from Gravity Climate Fund, Impact Science Ventures, Lowcarbon Capital, Muus Climate Partners, and Voyager Ventures.
If Aepnus can commercially produce its electrolyzers, it will be a major milestone for the United States. “There are only a few companies in the entire world that have the experience in building these types of electrolyzers,” Akuzum said. “Unfortunately, there is not a single company in the United States that has this knowledge.”