Earlier this 12 months BASF needed to postpone opening battery supplies plant in Finland when a courtroom agreed with environmental teams that the corporate didn’t have a superb plan to cope with wastewater.
How Battery factories are popping up all over the world, the specter of sewage threatens to cease their building. Nonetheless, one startup says the answer is to not eliminate it, however to recycle it.
The wastewater from these crops comprises sodium sulfate, a byproduct of sulfuric acid and caustic soda, two chemical substances utilized in battery manufacturing, copper refining and different industries.
“We will create a totally round financial system based mostly on these chemical substances,” Bilen Akuzum, co-founder and CTO of the corporate Aepnus Expertiseinformed TechCrunch.
Akuzum and co-founder Lukas Hackl did not got down to create a small round financial system, however stumbled upon it whereas visiting lithium mining operations in California and Nevada. The pair of chemists, who’ve been pals since they met of their dorm cafeteria, have been exploring attainable startup concepts.
“We have been desirous about lithium mining or one thing else within the minerals area,” Akuzum stated. “Each time we talked to somebody within the business, they stated, ‘Nicely, there are literally options for extracting lithium. However now we have waste generated in our factories and we actually don’t know what to do with it.”
After getting back from their journey, Akuzum and Hackl thought concerning the concept and finally determined to enhance the prevailing expertise to show this waste into uncooked supplies that companies might use of their operations.
They based Aepnus to modernize the age-old chlor-alkali course of, which breaks salts comparable to sodium sulfate again into the acids and bases that created them.
The corporate makes use of electrolysers to take away salts and break them down. Different firms do the identical factor, however they could use costly metals to hurry up the response. “We don’t use costly catalysts in our electrolysers,” Akuzum stated.
Aepnus at present provides half-scale fashions of its gear to clients who can check the gadgets on their very own wastewater streams. Wastewater from every facility could comprise quite a lot of contaminants, a few of which can have to be pre-filtered. As soon as they run out, the electrolyzers can work to take away the sodium sulfate.
For patrons, full recycling of sodium sulfate waste ought to scale back disposal and materials prices. And people who have distant websites, comparable to miners, additionally save on transport. “As an alternative of mines buying these chemical substances and trucking them very lengthy distances, we are able to recuperate these chemical substances on website from waste,” Akuzum stated.
The startup has greater than 15 purchasers at numerous levels – from feasibility research to testing pilot gear. Aepnus just lately raised an $8 million seed spherical to provide extra pilot-scale electrolysers and develop a commercial-scale model. The spherical was led by Clear Vitality Ventures with participation from Gravity Local weather Fund, Impression Science Ventures, Lowercarbon Capital, Muus Local weather Companions and Voyager Ventures.
If Aepnus can commercially produce its electrolyzers, will probably be a serious milestone for the USA. “There are only some firms all over the world which have expertise constructing any such electrolyser,” Akuzum stated. “Sadly, there is no such thing as a firm in the USA that has that type of know-how.”