🏭 The Column: July 11, 2025

Good morning. I hope everyone had a nice long 4th of July weekend! Today we’re talking about a start-up in the chemical sector that is looking to valorize a waste stream in the lithium-ion battery value chain with an electrochemical process.

Aepnus wants to address the sulfate problem

For many manufacturers, production is as straightforward as assembly: combine the right parts the right way and you’ll get your finished product. The chemical process industries, however, face a far more complex reality—in most cases, by-products are an inherent and unavoidable part of production.

The value chain behind lithium-ion batteries is no exception—in fact, for every one ton of cathode active material (CAM) produced (e.g. NMC or LFP), the value chain produces roughly two tons of sodium sulfate. Miners make it when they leach lithium-containing spodumene with sulfuric acid, pre-cursor CAM (pCAM) producers make it when they add caustic to metal sulfates, and battery recyclers make it when they treat black mass with sulfuric acid. And since sodium sulfate isn’t particularly useful, this stuff is usually treated as waste (i.e. it’s dumped into a large body of water).

Chemical engineers typically handle chronic by-product problems via mass integration (i.e. figuring out a way to recycle this stuff back into the process), or by going further, and using the by-product as a feedstock to make some other higher-value chemical. Aepnus is approaching the problem via mass integration: they are scaling an electrochemical process that splits sodium sulfate into sodium hydroxide (caustic) and sulfuric acid, which can then be recycled into mining, pCAM producing, or battery recycling processes.

This looks like a perfect storm to me. In some cases I see strong market pull due to regulatory pressure (e.g. battery projects like BASF’s up in Finland could avoid delays), and in other cases I just see straight up product market fit (caustic is so cheap that freight becomes a large cost contributor, giving on-site producers a leg up). Plus, electrochemical processes scale with less risk from 10 to 100 than thermochemical and biological processes, which makes it much easier to license out the technology after reaching demonstration scale (and licensing is a far more profitable endeavor than attempting to be a world-dominating sodium sulfate splitting production company).

In short: even though Aepnus is super early-stage (they’ve only raised an $8M pre-seed and are just operating pilot-scale units), they are definitely worth keeping an eye on. [LINK]

Other Things Happened:

The U.S. Department of Defense will become the largest shareholder of MP Materials, who operates the largest rare earths mine in the U.S., and is building a rare earth magnet facility in Texas. Dow Chemical is going to shut down 3 units in Europe. Nobian and Veolia just signed a JDA for a lithium chloride conversion technology. Röhm has officially closed its Westwego, Louisiana MMA production facility. Eneos and Mitsubishi started up their plastic pyrolysis plant. Orion is looking at shutting down three to five of its carbon black production lines within the next year. The Aditya Birla Group acquired a US-based specialty alumina producer. BASF finalized the sale of their extruded polystyrene business. Vynova is shutting down its PVC production site in the Netherlands.