HC Starck Tungsten to receive €60M in funding for €340M material recovery plant in Germany

H.C. Starck Tungsten has been awarded approximately €60 million in public funding to implement its new process for recycling black mass from lithium-ion batteries at industrial scale. The announcement was made last week at Hannover Messe by Lower Saxony’s Minister for Economic Affairs, Olaf Lies, who presented the news on behalf of both the state and Germany’s Federal Ministry for Economic Affairs and Climate Action.

The funding will be split, with 70 percent coming from federal sources and 30 percent from the state of Lower Saxony. The company plans to build the facility in Goslar, likely at the Metallurgy Park Oker, as part of an investment project totalling around €340 million.

Once operational, the plant is expected to process approximately 20,000 tonnes of input material annually. With this move, H.C. Starck Tungsten — a company traditionally specialized in the production and recycling of tungsten — is expanding its expertise in raw material extraction to include other strategically important metals.

H.C. Starck Tungsten, which in 2024 was acquired by Mitsubishi Materials, has developed a "lithium-first" approach that allows lithium to be extracted at the very start of the process, resulting in a recovery rate of up to 95 percent for lithium, and similarly high yields for nickel, cobalt, and manganese.

The process is also designed to minimize the use of auxiliary materials such as soda, significantly reducing overall energy consumption. Acids and bases used during extraction are kept in a closed-loop system, which lowers their consumption by 50 and 90 percent, respectively, further improving the environmental footprint of the operation.

The approved funding falls under the EU directive aimed at boosting the resilience and sustainability of the battery cell manufacturing ecosystem. The program is designed to help expand battery production and recycling capacities across Germany and the European Union, secure jobs and industrial value creation, and enable climate-friendly large-scale battery production.

The project will also be supported by H.C. Starck Tungsten’s parent company, Mitsubishi Materials Corporation, which acquired the German tungsten specialist in December 2024.

According to the company, construction of the new facility could begin the first half of 2027.

Comment

The decision from the German and Lower Saxony governments is very positive for the European recycling industry as a number of material recovery projects recently have been suspended. However the support should be seen a stepping stone for the project to ultimately be kicked off subject to full financing.

At CES we have been pointing at several challenges in the European battery recycling industry with lack of downstream buyers and tied up feedstocks with overseas players as major hurdles. A recent example of the former is CNGR's recent withdrawal from a precursor plant in Finland leaving Europe only with Umicore's 20,000 tpa Finland plant with focus on cobalt, BASF's not yet commissioned plant in Finland and XTC/Orano's potential plant in France as the only serious downstream alternatives for sulphate producers. Without a stronger push for cell production, cathode and precursor production in Europe the economics for material recovery in Europe will always be challenging.