Benzinga | Jul 21, 2021 07:05AM EDT

Comstock's LiNiCo to Recycle 100,000 Tons of Lithium-ion Batteries Per Year

Comstock Mining Inc. (the "Company") (NYSE:LODE) today announced the filing of a Written Determination of Hazardous Waste Recycling ("Application") by LINICO Corporation ("LiNiCo"), and its lithium-ion battery ("LIB") recycling facility located in the Tahoe Reno Industrial ("TRI") Center in Storey County, Nevada ("TRI Facility").

The Application and LiNiCo's final engineering plans are based on the first phase of LiNiCo's proprietary LIB recycling technologies, which have been designed for extraordinary capacity and yield at a fraction of the capital and operating costs of all known methods. Those technologies are the direct result of Comstock's recently announced and planned additional technology development, engineering, and materials science acquisitions and other transactions, including Renewable Process Solution ("RPS") and its CEO and Comstock's new Chief Process Engineer, Rahul Bobbili.

Construction of the first phase of LiNiCo's new processes will commence at the TRI Facility upon approval of the Application, with an anticipated completion and start-up during the first half of 2022. Once complete, the TRI Facility is conservatively expected to scale up to its initial nameplate capacity exceeding 100,000 tons per year of LIBs over a period of three years, with annualized revenues exceeding $250,000,000, $410,000,000, and $505,000,000 per year during the TRI Facility's first, second, and third full years of operations, respectively, as shown in the following excerpt from LiNiCo's internal projections:

2022 2023 2024 2025Throughput (tons per year) 26,880 53,760 80,640 87,091Revenue ($000s per year) $ 90,339 $ 250,814 $ 410,450 $ 505,094

Extraordinary Growth

Spent LIBs are widely expected to contain more than $12 billion in recoverable strategic metals by 2025 and $26 billion by 2040, as global mobile device use increases to about 18 billion by 2025, and electric vehicle ("EV") sales increase to about 138 million units by 2030 from 7.6 million in 2020, according to the International Energy Agency. ARK Invest also recently concluded that EV sales will increase to about 40% of global auto sales within five to six years. Tesla CEO Elon Musk provided a similar estimate, tweeting his view that the industry could produce 30 million EVs per year by 2027. Peter Rawlinson, CEO of Lucid, said in June 2021 that he believes that there is a growing recognition that EVs represent the future of the auto industry. And General Motors recently announced that it will increase spending on electric and autonomous vehicles to $35 billion through 2025, with a target of selling 1,000,000 EVs annually by 2025.

Meeting the increased demand will require about 1.8 million tons per year of lithium carbonate equivalent ("LCE"), or about five times more than the entire lithium mining industry produces today, and more than fifteen times the total LCE used in producing new EVs in 2020. The mining and battery manufacturing industries can scale up to meet that demand, but there are only about 80 million tons of identified lithium resources worldwide, and EV batteries are typically landfilled after eight to ten years of use.