ABTC secures funding for 20K tpa lithium-ion battery recycling plant

American Battery Technology Company, or ABTC, which still goes under the official name American Battery Metals Corporation, today announced that they through a common stock purchase agreement with an existing institutional investor for up to $75 million worth of shares issuable over the next 24-months, based upon the market price of the stock at the time. This will enable the company to build a 20,000 tpa recycling plant for waste lithium-ion batteries and production scrap.

ABTC is originally a lithium exploration company with mining claims on 26,000 acres in the Western Nevada Basin in Nye County, Nevada. Lately the focus has been on setting up a mechanical and hydrometallurgical lithium-ion battery recycling plant with production of battery grade material. The plan is now to commence the mechanical processing operation in Q1 2022 and they final hydro metallurgical plant in Q4 2022. A plant which now should be fully financed according to the company. In the press release ABTC states

"We will face many challenges during this process, however as this equity investment agreement has the ability to completely satisfy all of our capital needs for this entire pilot plant, from facility construction and infrastructure build-out to purchasing equipment to integrating and commissioning all of our process equipment, we can now be assured that access to capital will not be a limiting factor".

In the press release ABTC also reveals that they in January 2021 raised $9.2M. Prior to that, during 2020, the company has communicated capital raises of around $6.3M.

ABTC is listed on the mid-tear OTC market in the US. In March the company was hit hard by a report issued by short sellers bringing the share down by over 60%. Still the company is today trading with a market cap of around $770M.

With ABTC's plant in full operation there would be at least 4 and potentially 5 battery recycling plants in Nevada and there are plans for additional facilities in neighbor state Arizona. In total CES Online list 22 companies in North America which either are active today or have plans to recycle lithium-ion batteries in the near future or which license technology to do so.