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Every electric car, home storage system and laptop eventually ends up with a battery that no longer holds a charge. What happens next is a bigger business question than most people realize. Between 2020 and 2025, lithium-ion battery deployment grew more than sixfold worldwide, according to the International Energy Agency, and that surge created a huge appetite for lithium, nickel, cobalt and graphite.
Recycling is supposed to help feed that appetite, but the industry is still early. Today, most recycled material comes from scrap created inside battery factories, not from worn out batteries collected from the road. The reason is timing. Most batteries sold in recent years are still working and are expected to keep running until the mid-2030s, which leaves a gap of roughly 15 years between rising demand and large volumes of used batteries. For now, recycling capacity worldwide is larger than the supply of material available to feed it, and China holds over 85% of that capacity.
The core product of this industry is called black mass, a dark powder made by shredding used batteries that contains the metals that were inside them. Recyclers sell it or refine it into materials that can go back into new cells. That works best for chemistries rich in cobalt and nickel. It works less well for lithium iron phosphate batteries, known as LFP, which contain no cobalt. LFP made up more than 55% of electric vehicle batteries deployed globally in 2025, so the shift matters. The International Energy Agency (IEA) says it challenges recyclers that depend on the value of recovered minerals, and it suggests models where recyclers are simply paid a fee for the service.
That backdrop explains a deal announced today. American Resources Corporation (NASDAQ: AREC) said its majority-owned subsidiary, Electrified Materials Corporation (known as EMCO), signed a binding letter of intent to buy all of Blackion LLC. The price is about $13.2 million, paid entirely in EMCO stock rather than cash. The stock is valued using an agreed $275 million pre-money valuation for EMCO. Half will be issued at closing, 25% after 12 months and the final 25% after 24 months, depending on continued strategic alignment and agreed integration goals. The deal still needs definitive agreements, customary closing conditions and required approvals.
Blackion is a lithium-ion battery lifecycle company. In plain terms, it helps locate used batteries and battery scrap, move them, track them and connect them with recyclers and processors. It works with battery makers, automakers and recyclers in the U.S. and abroad. EMCO chief executive Chris Dreska said the two companies have worked together for about a year, and that EMCO could have built these abilities itself but would have spent more time and taken more risk doing so.
The focus lands squarely on the problem the IEA describes. American Resources says LFP batteries hold smaller amounts of high-value metals, so making money from them depends on affordable logistics, careful preprocessing and scale. EMCO handles collection, dismantling and preparation of material. ReElement Technologies Corporation, an affiliated refiner, can then purify battery-derived material into products such as battery-grade lithium where it makes commercial sense. The combined business also plans to handle rare earth magnet materials, including those recovered from data-center hard disk drives.
It should be noted that a letter of intent is not a finished purchase, and the model still has to show it can earn steady returns on lower-value LFP material. Even so, the logic is easy to follow. If used batteries stay scarce and cheaper chemistries keep gaining share, companies that can find feedstock and move it efficiently may matter as much as the ones doing the refining. Blackion is a small purchase aimed at that gap.
