American Manganese awarded South Korean patent for its ground-breaking battery recycling technology

American Manganese Inc (CVE:AMY) (OTCQB:AMYZF) (FRA:2AM) has expanded its patent portfolio for its ground-breaking battery recycling process into South Korea, it revealed Thursday. 

The company has received a ‘notice of allowance’ from the Korean intellectual property (IP) Office for the National Phase Patent Application of its RecycLiCo technology, which means the company now has a Korean patent. 

READ: American Manganese inks MoU with Italvolt for lithium-ion battery recycling project

American Manganese’s attorney will now complete documentation and submit fees for its formal issue. 

“We are excited to expand our patent portfolio to South Korea, which is well recognized in the global battery supply chain and home to many global leaders in battery manufacturing such as LG Chem, Samsung SDI, and SK Innovation,” said Larry Reaugh, CEO of American Manganese, in a statement.

“The company has also filed National Phase Patent Applications for China, Japan, Europe, Australia, India, and Canada,” he added.

American Manganese, a critical materials group, has been working with its research partner Kemetco since 2016 on advancing its RecycLiCo process, which sees key metals recovered from scrap lithium-ion batteries from electric vehicles (EVs).

The technology allows for high extraction of cathode metals, such as lithium, cobalt, nickel, manganese, and aluminum at high purity.

On March 12 this year, the company reported it had  awarded a C$2.7 million contract to Kemetco to build a 500 kilograms (kg) per day demonstration plant along with a 5 tonne/day commercial recycling plant using the ground-breaking technology.

The goal of the demonstration plant is to provide a tool for licensing or jointly developing RecycLiCo with potential industry partners,  American Manganese had said.

And with the engineering data collected from the demonstration plant, Kemetco will design the commercial lithium-ion battery cathode waste recycling plant.

In July last year, the group unveiled plans to spin out its mining assets in British Columbia (BC) but in today’s statement it said this has been put on hold to “determine shareholder benefits”.

It added that it has completed the preliminary work, permitting applications, and a NI 43-101 technical summary report on the Rocher Deboule property – an iron oxide copper gold ore (IOCG) target with past production, 10 kilometers from Hazelton.

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