How To “Grow” Nickel For EV Batteries

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The last primary nickel mine in the US is due to close in about 10 years, leaving the domestic supply chain for nickel-based EV batteries high and dry. Not to worry, though. Soil is naturally rich in nickel around many parts of the US, and the startup Metalplant has a plant — yes, a plant — that can extract it.

Metalplant Has A Plant-Based Plan For EV Batteries

Metalplant crossed the CleanTechnica radar just a few months ago when it burst out of stealth mode with a process for harvesting battery-grade nickel from plants. That may seem like a sort of hippy-dippy fever dream. However, certain plants are known to have a special knack for drawing naturally occurring metals from soil. The gift is called hyperaccumulation, and a body of knowledge called phytomining has formed around it.

For EV batteries, one key challenge is to make hyperaccumulators even more efficient at sucking up metals. Another challenge is to find a commercially viable pathway for making them give up their metals.

Metalplant is on track to jump both hurdles. The news organization Carbon Herald got the scoop on the US-based company last April, linking the process to a form of carbon removal called enhanced rock weathering. Under the right conditions, rock weathering can capture airborne carbon dioxide in the form of bicarbonate dissolved in water, and there it will stay for thousands of years.

Carbon Herald reporter Vasil Velv also described Metalplant’s farm operations in Northern Albania, chosen for the availability of suitable soil and rocks, on land that is not optimal for growing food crops. Velv also reported that Metalplant is deploying an iteration of a well known hyperaccumulator native to Albania related to Odontarrhena chalcidica, a shrublike plant with copious yellow flowers.

“These plants grow on high-pH, metalliferous soils and absorb over 100 times the amounts of nickel in their roots, stems and foliage, compared to non-hyperaccumulating plants, but without suffering any harmful effects,” Velv noted.

The modified iteration of Odontarrhena chalcidica is known as a hypernickelvore, meaning that it contains 1% nickel after processing. Metalplant states that its Odontarrhena chalcidica blows past the 1% mark, yielding concentrations up to 2%. That’s on par with the nickel concentration in conventional ores.

EV Batteries From Plants, With Carbon Capture

Metalplant is also banking that the carbon-capturing feature of its nickel-growing operation will help provide EV battery stakeholders and other industrial users with a cost-competitive source of nickel.

In an email update for CleanTechnica last spring, Metalplant co-founder Eric Matzner described how the harvested plants are dried and subjected to pyrolysis, which refers to a combustion process in the absence of oxygen.

“The remaining solution is precipitated to nickel sulfate salts, which can then be used in EV manufacturing, or be melted down nickel metalloids for use in steel making,” Matzner explained.

A byproduct of the process is biochar, which also helps to make the economic case for phytomining. Biochar is commonly used in other countries as a soil enhancer. Agricultural stakeholders here in the US are beginning to promote it as well.

“We can also extract elements from the biomass like potassium which can be spread back on the farm as natural nutrient fertilizers,” Matzner wrote.

ARPA-E Wants To Grow EV Batteries, Too

If you were thinking that ARPA-E was already had phytomining on its wish list for EV batteries, you were right. ARPA-E is a high-risk, high-reward funding office of the US Department of Energy, aimed at stepping in to help transformative technologies into the market when private sector investors shy away.

In May, ARPA-E announced a new $10 million funding program for phytomining innovators under the rather strained acronym PHYTOMINES, short for Plant HYperaccumulators TO MIne Nickel-Enriched Soils. The program is aimed specifically at teasing out feasibility studies for EV batteries and other products.

“ARPA-E envisions these projects as early-stage proof-of-concepts likely to take place in closed or open-air laboratories, greenhouses, or confined fields where light, humidity, and temperature regimes can be fully programmed,” the agency explained.

Nickel was selected for this exploratory funding round partly because there is a wide range of plants known to be nickel hyperaccumulators. Nickel is also classified as a critical material in need of a domestic supply chain makeover, particularly in regards to the skyrocketing demand for EV batteries.

Leveraging Solar Power For A High Grade, Plant-Based Nickel Supply Chain In The US

In the latest development, last month ARPA-E announced seven finalists to share the PHYTOMINES funding pot, including the leading genetics firm Verinomics in partnership with Metalplant.

Metalplant emailed CleanTechnica with the news, emphasizing that phytomining shares basic characteristics with the metallurgy industry, except that it deploys photosynthesis to drive the crucial step of rendering low-grade ore into a high-grade product.

“When the biomass is harvested and then processed with thermal treatment, the resulting ash can be as high as 20% nickel, comparable to some of the richest nickel ores in the world,” Metalplant enthused.

Sustainable EV Batteries And The Phytomining Supply Chain Of The Future

If you caught that thing about “native to Albania,” that touches on another key challenge for the phytomining field. Metalplant points out twenty years ago, researchers conducted successful phytomining trials on a relative of Odontarrhena chalcidica here in the US. However, the project stalled out after the species was classified as an invasive non-native.

The hookup with Verinomics is aimed at introducing a sterile, non-spreading version of Odontarrhena chalcidica to the US, in addition to modifying it to accumulate higher levels of nickel.

Six other PHYTOMINES awardees will also be working to develop a plant-based domestic supply chain for EV batteries:

— The University of Arizona is tasked with creating a new inventory of hyperaccumulators, including data on their growing conditions.

— The University of Wisconsin will develop tools for modifying wild Odontarrhena chalcidica, and its cousin Odontarrhena corsica, with a focus on preventing invasion and boosting nickel content.

— The University of Massachusetts is working on a twofer benefitting the supply chain for EV batteries and the food supply chain, too, with a focus on the oilseed crop camelina sativa. Make that a threefer, since camelina has also been investigated as a biofuel crop.

— Michigan Technological University and Stevens Institute of Technology are working the soil angle, including a pathway for using biodegradable compounds, called chelating agents, to bind with nickel for more efficient uptake.

— The Colorado firm Advanced Environmental Technologies is also taking aim at soil modification. The focus is on sustainably sourced nitrogen and carbonaceous additives, suggesting that a carbon sequestering element is involved.

— The University of Florida already seems to have a jump on things, with technology transfer plans already underway for the domestication of an un-named hyperaccumulator that can be cultivated on land unsuitable for food crops.

This is all very interesting, but for the here and now the Biden administration is not waiting around for plant-based EV batteries to materialize. On September 20, the Energy Department announced a new round of more than $3 billion in funding to ensure that the US auto industry can get its hands on enough EV batteries to keep their factories humming along.

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Image: A plant-based domestic supply chain for nickel-based EV batteries is emerging in the US, and the Department of Energy is here for it (cropped, courtesy of ARPA-E PHYTOMINES).