Earlier this 12 months, BASF had to do just that delay opening building a battery materials factory in Finland when a court agreed with environmental groups that the company didn’t have a good plan for dealing with wastewater.
As battery factories are built around the world, the specter of wastewater threatens to halt their construction. However, one start-up claims that the solution is not disposal, but recycling.
Wastewater from these plants flows with sodium sulfate, a byproduct of sulfuric acid and caustic soda, two chemicals used in battery production, copper refining and other industries.
“We can create a completely circular economy around these chemicals” – Bilen Akuzum, co-founder and CTO of the company Aepnus technologyhe told TechCrunch.
Akuzum and co-founder Lukas Hackl didn’t set out to create a small circular economy, as an alternative they stumbled upon it while touring lithium mining facilities in California and Nevada. A pair of chemists who had been friends since they met in their college cafeteria were exploring possible startup ideas.
“We were thinking about lithium mining or something else in the minerals space,” Akuzum said. “Every time we talked to someone in the industry, they would say, ‘Well, there are actually solutions for lithium extraction. But our activities produce waste and we really don’t know what to do with it.”
After returning from their trip, Akuzum and Hackl thought about the idea and ultimately decided to improve existing technology to turn this waste into raw materials that the facilities could use in their operations.
The two founded Aepnus to modernize the century-old chloralkali process, which breaks down salts comparable to sodium sulfate back into the acids and bases that created them.
The company uses electrolyzers to destroy salt, causing it to decompose. Other corporations do the same thing, but may use expensive metals to speed up the reactions. “We don’t use any expensive catalysts in our electrolysers,” Akuzum said.
Aepnus currently ships half-scale models of its devices to customers, who can test the devices in their very own wastewater streams. Wastewater from each plant may contain various pollutants, some of which should be filtered beforehand. Once they are depleted, the electrolyzers can start removing sodium sulfate.
For customers, full recycling of sodium sulfate waste should reduce disposal and material costs. And for people with distant locations, comparable to miners, in addition they save on transportation. “Instead of mining companies purchasing these chemicals and trucking them very long distances, we can regenerate them on site from waste,” Akuzum said.
The startup has over 15 clients in various stages, from feasibility studies to testing equipment on a pilot scale. Aepnus recently raised an $8 million seed round to supply more electrolyzers on a pilot scale and develop a commercial-scale version. The round was led by Clean Energy Ventures with participation from Gravity Climate Fund, Impact Science Ventures, Lowercarbon Capital, Muus Climate Partners and Voyager Ventures.
If Aepnus can produce electrolyzers on a business scale, it is going to be a milestone for the United States. “There are only a few companies around the world that have the expertise to build this type of electrolyzers,” Akuzum said. “Unfortunately, there is not a single company in the United States that has this expertise.”