The mining group Eramet and the environmental services group Suez have determined the location for a recycling plant for electric car batteries in France. This recycling plant will be built in two phases in Dunkirk in the so-called “Battery Valley” of France.
In the first phase, a dismantling facility is planned, which is expected to be operational in 2025 and have a processing capacity of 50,000 tons of battery modules per year. In the second planning phase, to be completed by 2027, a hydrometallurgical plant will be built to extract and refine the metals (nickel, cobalt, lithium) contained in the black mass.
A pilot plant will soon be commissioned on the site of the Eramet research center, where the refining process will be continuously tested and validated on a pre-industrial scale. For this pioneering project, the mining group has received a grant of 80 million euros from the European Union and the BPI to partially finance pre-industrial studies, plant construction and operating costs for the first 10 years of operation.
Source: https://www.eramet.com/en/group/eramet-and-suez-choose-dunkirk-for-their-electric-vehicle-battery-recycling-plant/