American Battery Technology Company is working with industry partners to develop EV and battery workforce.

Public and private industry partners from every sector of the electric vehicle supply chain have been selected to establish a real-world training environment to foster the next generation of battery and EV personnel in a new U.S. energy manufacturing workforce.

At the top of their industry representing battery recycling is American Battery Technology Company (ABTC), headquartered in Reno, Nevada, which is working alongside Argonne National Laboratory, Stellantis, Samsung SDI America, the Volta Foundation, and the U.S. Department of Energy.

ABTC has pioneered several technological firsts to provide domestically manufactured and recycled battery metals to meet demand from the EV, stationary storage, and consumer electronics industries and is committed to a strong circular supply chain for battery metals.

The battery materials production and recycling company has entered into the DOE's Battery Workforce Challenge with the launch of an ABTC-developed Design for Recyclability category for this three-year collegiate and vocational engineering competition.

The competition supports twelve North American university and vocational teams, each designing, building, testing, and integrating a next-generation advanced lithium-ion battery pack and electric powertrain into a 2024 Ram ProMaster EV donated by Stellantis.

ABTC's participation brings an additional dimension to performance evaluation, challenging students to design battery packs for recyclability, allowing for complex batteries to be strategically disassembled and recycled at the end of their lives.

Battery components are then able to be recovered into the North American supply chain to create a closed-loop circular infrastructure, increasing the residual value of the battery pack and lowering the overall costs of EVs.

"We work directly with many of the premier automotive OEMs and receive large amounts of current and next generation prototype battery packs, and these pack designs are becoming increasingly complex with the proliferation of cell-to-pack, advanced passive propagation resistance, and hybrid cell chemistry designs," said ABTC CEO Ryan Melsert.

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EV and battery industry representatives are contributing to DOE workforce development projects and competitions.

"When we speak with leadership at these automotive OEMs, they often detail the engineering methods to increase gravimetric and volumetric energy density to increase performance and lower overall cost. However, one of the most impactful tools for decreasing cost is to increase the residual value of the battery at its end-of-life, and embedding from the early design stages a strategic plan for how to demanufacture a battery can significantly lower recycling costs and increase recovery rates within a recycling process."

This closed-loop circular mindset and design methodology is a necessary factor in engineering environmentally and economically sustainable battery systems that can be strategically demanufactured and recycled at their end of life, returning expensive and critical materials to the battery manufacturing supply chain.

The Battery Workforce Challenge provides future engineers and technicians with real-world experience and practical opportunities to shape new energy-efficient mobility solutions. The Design for Recyclability category focuses on areas such as 3D modeling, dynamic simulations, and lifecycle modeling and economic impact and introduces students to Argonne National Laboratory's extensive evaluation models for calculating lifecycle greenhouse gas emissions, economic impacts, and more.

The challenge is sponsored by Stellantis and DOE, and managed by Argonne National Laboratory.

ABTC leadership plans to support other initiatives within the Battery Workforce Challenge Program, with efforts to establish workforce training hubs nationwide that will step into critical skill gaps and identify areas to reskill and upskill workers for in-demand manufacturing and recycling jobs.