Princeton NuEnergy (PNE), a New Jersey-based startup that offers battery recycling solutions, has received USD 12 million in grant funding from the US Department of Energy (DOE) through DE-FOA-0002680: Bipartisan Infrastructure Law (BIL) Electric Drive Vehicle Battery Recycling and Second Life Applications initiative.

This grant comprises USD 10 million federal cost share and USD 2 million recipient cost share and is intended to reduce the nation's dependence on foreign materials, expand domestic manufacturing capabilities, and create well-paying clean energy jobs.

The funds will be used to improve and optimize the approach to automated lithium-ion battery (LIB) pack disassembly, cathode-to-cathode upcycling, anode-to-anode recycling/upcycling, electrolyte component recovery, and polyvinylidene fluoride (PVDF) binder recovery, in collaboration with Argonne National Laboratory (ANL), National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL), Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL), and the University of California, Irvine (UCI).

Analyst Quick Take: This funding follows the company’s launch of the United States' first end-to-end direct LIB recycling pilot production line jointly with Wistron GreenTech in McKinney, Texas in October 2022 , that employs PNE’s cost-effective and sustainable, direct recycling low-temperature plasma-assisted separation process (LPAS™). This adds up to the list of grant funding PNE has received from DOE including The Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) totaling USD 1.4 million. In May 2022, PNE closed a USD 7 million seed funding round led by Wistron Corporation and will soon close a Series A round.