Mercedes-Benz invests €18.8M in hydrometallurgical plant from Primobius

Mercedes-Benz, through its wholly-owned battery recycling company Licular, has ordered a hydrometallurgcial plant with a capacity of 2,500 tonnes of cell equivalent infeed capacity from Primobius, a joint venture between Neometals and SMS Group. The deal was announced by Neometals.

The order covers fabrication, installation and commissioning of the plant which will refine intermediate products from the 2,500tpa pre-processing plant which Primobius already is building at the site.

The plant which according to previous announcements will be able to recover 96% of the infeed materials will produce sulphates and sulphate solutions from all key materials including lithium.

Licular was in 2022 awarded a grant from The Federal Ministry for Economic Affairs and Climate Protection (BMWK) of €16.66M for the whole recycling project and did announce its plans to build a fully circlar plant already in March 2023.

Mercedes-Benz will use the plant for recalls, R&D batteries and other smaller streams of batteries automomotive producers have to deal with when scaling their EV production. The company is also expecting to learn from the process and will presumably use the experiences in future circular strategy when the scale allows.

Mercedes-Benz also operate a reuse operation through Mercedes-Benz Energy which successfully has commissioned large amounts of used batteries into energy storage systems and has also signed sales agreements with other reuse companies such as Batteryloop and Moment Energy.

We have updated the material recovery infeed capacity of Licular to 2,500 tonnes from 2025 as the constrcution of the whole plant is ongoing and the size is fairly small.