Li-Cycle to get USD 375m state loan for battery recycling plant

Canadian electric-vehicle batteries recycler Li-Cycle Holdings Corp (NYSE:LICY) has agreed with the US Department of Energy (DOE) Loan Programs Office (LPO) a conditional commitment for a USD-375-million (EUR 354.1m) loan for the development of its facility based near Rochester, New York.

The conditional commitment marks a major step in the lending process and reflects the DOE’s intent to finance the project. It hinges on documentation of long-form agreements and certain conditions with the closing expected in the second quarter of 2023, a press release said on Monday.

The loan, which has a 12-year term, will come under the DEO’s Advanced Technology Vehicles Manufacturing (ATVM) programme and is the first to be provided for a sustainable pure-play battery materials recycling company.

The Rochester Hub is expected to be one of America’s largest suppliers of recycled materials for batteries. It is designed to have an annual processing capacity of up to 35,000 tonnes of black mass, including lithium carbonate, nickel sulphate and cobalt sulphate. This recycling volume is equivalent to about 90,000 tonnes of lithium-ion battery material or 18 GWh of lithium-ion batteries.

Li-Cycle expects to put the Rochester plant in operation in late 2023.

“This DOE investment in Li-Cycle will reduce our reliance on China and strengthen America’s battery supply chain,” Senator Charles Schumer noted in the press release.

The ATVM direct loan programme was established under the Energy Independence and Security Act of 2007. The financing facility has so far loaned USD 8 billion for projects that have supported the production of more than four million advanced technology vehicles. Companies that already benefitted from the programme include Ford, Nissan, Tesla and Ultium Cells.

Ontario, Canada-based Li-Cycle claims to be North America's largest lithium-ion battery recycling company, creating a secondary supply of critical battery materials. Its Spoke & Hub Technologies minimise the overall environmental footprint of the end-to-end resource recovery process and substantially reduce the intensity of greenhouse gas emissions that would otherwise be produced from mining these non-renewable resources. The firm was founded in 2016.

(USD 1 = EUR 0.944)

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