Beowulf (AIM: BEM; Spotlight: BEO), and its wholly owned Finnish subsidiary Grafintec Oy (“Grafintec”) or (“Company”), is pleased to announce that the Company has been granted €232,000 by Business Finland. The grant funding of €232,000 is equivalent to 50 per cent of the 3-year €464,000 budget for Grafintec’s ‘Management and Valorisation of Waste Streams in the Coated Spherical Graphite Production Process’ project.
The proposed work undertaken by Grafintec is part of the BATCircle3.0 (Finland-based Circular Ecosystem of Battery Metals) consortium led by Aalto University, with funding of €13.4 million for the next three years, and is a key project in Business Finland’s Hydrogen & Batteries – Dual Helix of Decarbonisation programme. This BATCircle3.0 funding follows the grant received by Grafintec of €530,000 under the BATCircle2.0 programme which was completed in October (announcement dated 31 October 2024).
The aim of the project is to:
- Investigate opportunities for utilisation and valorisation of wastewater and other waste streams from the Graphite Anode Materials Plant (“GAMP”) production process;
- Carry out a Life Cycle Analysis (“LCA”) & Technical and Economic Analysis (“TEA”) of the process; and
- Investigate the viability of the process.
This project is a continuation of the BATCircle2.0 ‘Spheronisation and Purification of Natural Graphite for the European Lithium-Ion Battery Market’ project. While the main focus of BATCircle2.0 was on developing a sustainable spheronisation and purification technology, this project aims to advance our understanding of the waste streams identified in the process and how we can reduce these waste streams to minimise the environmental impact, valorise them to reduce operational expenditure as well as increasing the revenue of the project from valorising waste streams.
The work undertaken in BATCircle2.0 already demonstrated that reagents such as sodium hydroxide can be effectively recovered from the wastewater and recycled back into the process to produce battery-grade graphite (>99.95 per cent purity). The previous work also demonstrated that calcium carbonate, which is needed for the neutralisation of the acidic wastewater stream, was produced in the process, thereby reducing the need for fresh calcium carbonate. The BATCircle3.0 project aims to optimise the waste management processes demonstrated and developed in BATCircle2.0 to further improve the robustness of the business model towards a zero-waste industrial plant.
Rasmus Blomqvist, Managing Director of Grafintec, commented:
“Business Finland continue to provide Grafintec with excellent support. These funds will be a valuable contribution to our ambition to develop GAMP into a leading sustainable European value chain for anode materials.”