Today Ryan Melsert, CEO of American Battery Technology Company, was invited to join President Joe Biden and U.S. Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm in awarding American Battery Technology Company (ABTC) with a portion of the $2.8 billion in grants for projects to expand U.S. manufacturing of batteries for electric vehicles and domestic mineral production. 

Funded under President Biden’s Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, the grant will provide funding for ABTC to construct a $115M first-of-kind commercial scale facility to manufacture battery grade lithium hydroxide from Nevada-based sedimentary resources.  

“We are very honored and excited to have been selected as an awardee of this program enabled by President Biden’s Bipartisan Infrastructure Law. This funding directly supports the much-needed acceleration and ramp up of secure domestic manufacturing and refining capacity of Nevada-based battery metals, and we greatly appreciate the confidence the administration has placed in us by making this investment towards our sustainable future,” says American Battery Technology Company CEO Ryan Melsert. 

Ryan explained to President Biden and Secretary Granholm that less than 1% of all lithium products made globally are made within the U.S. and part of that is because we don’t have large amounts of those conventional types of resources. With the funding provided through this grant, ABTC can expand on the R&D developments we’ve been actively working on to develop a ground-up, new type of process that can make this type of battery grade lithium hydroxide from this new type of abundant, domestic U.S. resource. Building our first commercial-scale lithium refinery in central Nevada that will expand the type of resource-base the U.S. has access to and will help get the U.S. back into the game of providing domestic battery materials – a crucial step in ensuring the security of our domestic critical materials as we move towards our electrified closed-loop future. 

When asked by President Biden why he’s confident for the outlook in the U.S. battery market, Ryan explained there are multibillions of dollars already invested into electric battery facilities and vehicle factories in the U.S., yet nearly 100% of materials from these facilities are sourced from outside the U.S., making the industry vulnerable to outside sources and the demand for domestically produced materials already built in.  

“There has been a need for much greater innovation to put the effort in to really go for the first kind of system development and the willingness to take risk to bring a new type of resource to market. I think that’s always been one of America’s strengths – to really take that risk and build these first of kind systems,” said Melsert.  

More information about the project can be found here: https://americanbatterytechnology.com/projects/tonopah-flats/.