M-BAT: battery materials recovered from Europe's own secondary material streams, on European soil.
What Europe needs, Europe already has.
Europe can build an energy transition that sustains itself, with the knowledge and the people already here.
Here the circular economy becomes real. Europe recovers the materials of the transition from the streams the continent already produces.
Those streams can help supply Europe's battery value chain from within.
Four chemical processes turn four secondary material streams into battery-grade materials.
Recovers graphite and the battery metals from the black mass of spent lithium-ion batteries, returning them to cell production.
Produces battery-grade nickel and cobalt sulphates from the copper metallurgical sludges of KGHM's operations.
Extracts cobalt sulphate from copper sulphide mine tailings, turning the secondary materials of past mining into a deposit, and valorises the iron residue as a cement input.
Yields lithium carbonate from geothermal brines through Direct Lithium Extraction, pairing energy and raw-material recovery in one stream.
Six principles the project holds itself to.
Circularity
Every secondary material stream is a starting material: mine tailings, metallurgical sludges, geothermal brines and end-of-life batteries.
Collaboration
Eighteen partners across seven countries cover the full battery value chain and work as one technical and social system.
Rigour
We publish open methods and FAIR data, validate performance against commercial benchmarks, and open our results to peer scrutiny.
Social acceptance
Communities at the pilot sites are engaged from the start, and their knowledge feeds into the project. Responsible Research and Innovation is built into the workplan.
Responsible sovereignty
A contribution to Europe's strategic autonomy in battery materials, produced at home to European standards.
Replicable legacy
We design every outcome of M-BAT to outlive the project.
Close the loop where the material already exists.
M-BAT recovers battery-grade materials from what Europe already has: mine tailings, metallurgical sludges, geothermal brines and end-of-life batteries.
What the project sets out to do
- 01Recover five battery-grade materials (lithium, cobalt, nickel, manganese and graphite) through four processes.
- 02Scale them from the laboratory to an industrially relevant environment (TRL 6/7).
- 03Validate them in the battery sector, inside real cells.
- 04Design every process under the Safe and Sustainable by Design framework.
- 05Map the path to replication across Europe, with the communities that host the work.
All of it contributes to Europe's 2030 goals
Source · Critical Raw Materials Act (CRMA)
A consortium that spans the whole battery value chain, from secondary material streams to the finished cell.
The partners
Seven countries · Spain, Germany, Poland, Italy, Portugal, Ukraine and the United Kingdom.