Cobalt is one of the world’s best battery materials, but geopolitically, it’s less than ideal. The world’s largest reserves are in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, where mining has long been laced with human rights abuses, and 72% of the metal is refined in China.
Cobalt may be used in a lot of electric vehicles, but the material isn’t just an EV problem. The U.S. military is dependent on cobalt for lithium-ion batteries that power drones and other devices, and for the alloys inside jet engines and magnets for missile-guidance systems.
There aren’t any cobalt refineries in the U.S. today, upping the stakes for the metal’s consumers.
“Everybody’s been worried about [China’s leverage], but now they’ve actually shown that they’ll cut off critical minerals,” John Busbee, co-founder and CEO of Xerion Advanced Battery Corp., told TechCrunch. “Everybody’s like, what do we do?”
Busbee thinks Xerion has a solution. His company has a new technique to produce highly refined cobalt in a single step using electricity and a little bit of heat.
The company had been working for years to perfect its technology to produce electrodes for batteries, but it was different enough from existing techniques that battery manufacturers, who have already invested hundreds of billions of dollars to build massive factories, were hesitant to adopt it.
Xerion’s process plates metals onto electrodes, using electricity to draw them out of a bath of molten salt. On one electrode, the company was producing its battery material. On the other, it was producing incredibly pure cobalt metal.
“We always knew it was out there,” Busbee said. “We always knew it was [a] critical mineral, and it’s something we thought about addressing later.”
But now, with a global trade war raging, the company decided to refocus its efforts on cobalt. Xerion is opening a pilot-scale production facility in Dayton, Ohio, the company exclusively told TechCrunch. It will be able to produce five metric tons of cobalt.
That’s a drop in the bucket for global cobalt demand. But military needs in the U.S. tend to be smaller. Only about 5,000 to 10,000 metric tons of cobalt are needed to make aerospace alloys, for example. Busbee said Xerion’s next-generation plant will produce 2,000 metric tons per year.
At the pilot scale, Busbee said the company is cost-competitive. “Even at that scale, we’re already on even heel with China,” he said.
