Nasdaq- and TSX-V-listed Electra Battery Materials will accelerate efforts to secure $60-million in funding required to complete its refinery project, north of Toronto, Ontario, CEO Trent Mell said on Thursday.
Once complete, the cobalt refinery will have a replacement value of about $260-million.
“An integrated facility will allow Electra to make mixed hydroxide precipitate (MHP) from battery scrap, and then upgrade the cobalt to a battery-grade sulphate for LG Energy Solutions and other battery manufacturers,” said Mell.
During the third quarter, Electra made the first customer shipment of nickel/cobalt MHP at the refinery from recycled battery material. To date, the firm has shipped about 20 t of nickel/cobalt MHP to customers.
“Against a backdrop of challenging market and economic conditions, we completed a number of milestones in Q3, sustaining the momentum we established over the past 18 months,” said Mell.
“Most notably, we closed an equity financing that generated gross proceeds of $21.5-million, extended our supply agreement with LG Energy Solution to five years from three, and signed an MoU with Three Fires to form a joint venture focused on battery waste recycling in Canada."
Electra has extended and expanded the terms of its battery-grade cobalt supply agreement with LG, whereby it will supply up to 19 000 t of contained cobalt in sulphate over a five-year period, beginning in 2025, up from 7 000 t over a three-year period when the supply agreement was first announced in September 2022.