Critical materials company went global after a push from ORNL’s Innovation Crossroads
It was a pivotal few weeks for Megan O’Connor. The doctoral student and her academic advisor attended a conference session about a way to recover copper from wastewater… and the next week she abandoned three years of research to pursue the technology.
At the time, O’Connor had no idea that she would later start a company with that conference speaker and her doctoral advisor. She had no idea that an Oak Ridge National Laboratory program would help commercialize their technology for refining critical materials from industrial waste and primary ores. She had no idea that within a decade their company, called Nth Cycle, would sign $1.1 billion in contracted future purchases and begin building towards production on two continents.
But the idea she did have drove O’Connor forward: She and her mentors might have a solution to the major bottleneck that would continue to limit secure supply of critical materials that are essential to defense, the electric grid, transportation, and electronics– yet are refined in only a few places on earth.
“I wanted to build something that mattered and solved a critical industry pain point,” said O’Connor. “Switching my PhD topic more than halfway through was a risk. But in my mind, it was an easy decision.”
Putting the pieces together
Nth Cycle’s concept emerged from the combined insights of O’Connor, her advisor Desiree Plata and the conference speaker Chad Vecitis, a Harvard professor, now Chief Scientist at Nth Cycle. Plata heard Vecitis explain his electroextraction method for water treatment. Plata wondered if it could be applied to refining and recycling metals, something she and O’Connor had been contemplating. Vecitis had considered the idea but hadn’t found a student to work on it.
“It was all coming together for me,” O’Connor said. She had just heard industry experts at an electronics summit express worry about the supply of critical materials like cobalt, lithium and rare earths for making batteries, computers, phones and more. They expected scarcity to worsen due to the rapid growth of industries that used these materials.
“I felt so strongly that critical minerals were going to be a key resource moving forward, and that innovative technology was needed to fix the supply chain dependencies,” O’Connor said. Plata had always emphasized practical industrial solutions, and this industry was hungry for them. “That’s part of where I got the inspiration to take the leap” said O’Connor, who quickly changed her dissertation topic to work with Vecitis on adapting electro-extraction for critical material refining.
The electro-extraction cells use electricity to produce the chemicals needed to separate valuable minerals — such as cobalt, lithium, and rare earth elements — taking an expensive batch process to an efficient continuous one. This reduces the overall capital intensity by up to 70 percent and emissions by up to 92 percent and creates one of the first modular refining solutions that can be built at 80 to 90 percent smaller scale than traditional technology.
But it didn’t work for a year and a half.
“For a long time, it was wildly frustrating,” O’Connor said. “Then it just clicked. It finally started to work. I was in the lab the day after Christmas – it was doing so well that I didn’t want to stop.” She slept there for a week. “The system had a cycle that ran for 36 minutes, so I would sleep for 36 minutes a time,” she recalls.
The push paid off. O’Connor graduated – on time – in 2017. The day after defending her dissertation, she filed paperwork founding Nth Cycle with Vecitis and Plata.
Innovation Crossroads bridges the gap
The next hurdles for any energy startup are attracting investment and proving cost-effective performance at industrial scale. O’Connor found support through the Department of Energy’s Lab-Embedded Entrepreneurship Program (LEEP), which places entrepreneurs at one of four DOE national labs to help address the hurdles to bringing their technologies to market. To O’Connor, ORNL’s Innovation Crossroads LEEP program stood out for its focus on energy and manufacturing. She was selected for the two-year fellowship in 2018.
Innovation Crossroads covers living expenses, provides access to ORNL expertise and laboratories and offers mentoring and training on building a business model.
O’Connor worked across three ORNL labs to scale electro-extraction and design a system compatible with existing industrial processes.
“The concepts aren’t entirely new — the innovation is in how we assemble and operate the system,” she said. “I spent a lot of time at ORNL looking at other types of electrochemical systems to see what could best be adapted to our technology.” Access to advanced lab space and equipment proved vital.
During the fellowship, O’Connor created the modular system dubbed the OYSTER®. Unusually flexible, it can be rapidly deployed within existing facilities to extract metals from industrial scrap or ore, refining them for different uses.
Innovation Crossroads helped O’Connor refine a market strategy and raise seed funding, despite reaching this key stage during the 2020 pandemic.
“I think of the Department of Energy as one of our earliest investors,” O’Connor said. “ORNL and the Department of Energy have so much credibility that their support was tremendously important to fundraising, and I think it’s a major part of why we were successful.”
Turning waste into gold… and cobalt, lithium, rare earths and more
In 2024, Nth Cycle opened a facility in Ohio, becoming the first U.S. company to refine a high-grade nickel mixed hydroxide product from shredded lithium-ion batteries at scale.
The company continues to collaborate with ORNL, turning to ORNL’s Battery Manufacturing Facility for continued long-term development of the technology in other applications.
Recently, Nth Cycle signed a 10-year offtake agreement with leading commodities trading firm Trafigura at the Indo-Pacific Energy Security Ministerial and Business Forum. Under this agreement, Trafigura will buy the nickel mixed hydroxide product and battery-grade lithium carbonate from facilities Nth Cycle is building in South Carolina and the Netherlands.
The next milestone was a joint development and licensing agreement with Ionic Rare Earths Limited to establish end-to-end rare earth refining operations in the U.S. and globally. The agreement calls for integrating Nth Cycle’s technology into Ionic’s Belfast facility this year.
O’Connor describes herself as someone who is not afraid to take big risks and never saw a downside in pursuing the energy startup.
She remembers telling Plata, “Even if we try to scale this and it fails, at least we’ll have built an amazing team and tried — and hopefully we’ll have inspired others to do the same.”
Innovation Crossroads is supported by DOE’s Office of Technology Commercialization with additional support from the DOE’s Advanced Materials and Manufacturing Technologies Office, Building Technologies Office, Office of Electricity, Office of Science (the Advanced Scientific Computing Research program and Basic Energy Sciences program) and by the Tennessee Valley Authority.
UT-Battelle manages ORNL for the Department of Energy’s Office of Science, the single largest supporter of basic research in the physical sciences in the United States. The Office of Science is working to address some of the most pressing challenges of our time. For more information, please visit energy.gov/science. —Heather Duncan