It took Xerion Advanced Battery Corp. over a decade to pinpoint its process for developing lithium-ion batteries using molten salts, which are hard to work with because of their highly caustic nature. And the whole time, the Ohio-based manufacturer obtained refined cobalt as a byproduct.
Up until recently, however, John Busbee, Xerion’s co-founder and CEO, didn’t think much of that resulting cobalt. The price of the critical mineral was volatile — so much so that the U.S.’ only cobalt mine shut down in 2023, shortly after holding an opening ceremony. And in fact, many battery makers were trying to do without.
“[Cobalt] was something we thought that we’d address in the future,” he told Latitude Media.
But in the past year, things have shifted. Funding for battery development has been retrenched in light of overcapacity and highly publicized failures like Northvolt’s, and these market changes shifted the way Xerion looks at its refined cobalt. “It was only when we started looking at the national situation where there was a specter of China cutting off the supply of critical minerals, that we said, ‘Maybe we should focus on this,’” Busbee said.
Xerion set to work to optimize its process to maximize the production of refined cobalt, with the intention of selling it and giving it “its own life outside of the batteries, which also helps solve some of the critical materials issues,” Busbee said. Last month, the company announced it is developing a pilot scale facility with the capacity to produce about 2,000 metric tons of 99% purity refined cobalt metal. In recent years, the total annual consumption of cobalt in the U.S. has hovered between 7,000 and 10,000 metric tons.
Xerion’s pivot is just one example of a company reconsidering how to use the cobalt that’s available to them. As the industry tries to stave off a critical mineral crunch that could be exacerbated by the Trump administration’s steep tariff policy, there’s a growing awareness that there might be a market for what was once just a byproduct.
Global cobalt demand is expected to double by 2040. As a crucial element for the production of lithium-ion batteries, cobalt is essential for the energy transition, and is also used for turbine blades for jet engines and medical implants, among other things.
And just a handful of countries — notably excluding the U.S. — are expected to have the vast majority of the mining and refining capabilities to meet that growing demand, according to the International Energy Agency. In 2030, for example, IEA projects that 66% of the global cobalt mining will come from the Democratic Republic of the Congo, and China will hold 74% of the global cobalt refining capacity.
Making the most of what we have
At the moment, Xerion is refining imported cobalt, but its refining process would also work for domestic sources of cobalt if mining were to restart, as well as recycled batteries.
“Though we don’t have a large natural abundance of cobalt in the United States, we’re the largest user of batteries, so we can keep what we have here,” Busbee said. “And we have a pretty high natural abundance of nickel mines with low levels of cobalt, which we believe we can economically extract to increase the amount of new cobalt in the U.S. and North America.”
Other companies are also looking to harvest critical minerals from previously untapped places. Last week, New Zealand company Aspiring Materials announced its expansion to the U.S.; its process extracts critical minerals including cobalt from olivine, an abundant rock that has had little economic importance so far.
Chris Oze, Aspiring Materials co-founder and chief science officer, told Latitude Media that the company’s technology stems from the desire to make the most out of limited resources.
“We were thinking about humans getting to Mars someday, and needing to construct buildings, and pads for rockets to land, with the materials on Mars,” he said. “That provided us an opportunity to think differently. We had to scrap the old ways of thinking about how to process rocks and make everything we did on Mars count.”
The result is a process that takes apart the olivine and turns it into an “elemental soup,” from which Aspiring Materials then extracts a lot of magnesium, but also cobalt, nickel, and manganese.
The company opened a pilot facility in New Zealand in March 2025, and it hopes to set up a U.S. commercial facility in the next couple of years.
For both Xerion and Aspiring Materials, the Trump administration’s focus on the development of a domestic supply of critical minerals could provide an opportunity. Last month, President Trump signed an executive order to increase U.S. mineral production and reduce the country’s reliance on foreign nations. As noted in brief from the Center for Strategic and International Studies, the order “positions critical minerals as a national security imperative” and “sends a strong signal to the private sector that the Trump administration is prioritizing minerals security and willing to support the private sector by lowering barriers to entry and mobilizing existing funding expeditiously.”
That said, policy uncertainties are still difficult to navigate.
“It’s early, it’s turbulent, we don’t know yet,” Busbee said of the impact of the policies on the market for critical minerals. He added that the focus on critical minerals is a “really good thing that we’ve needed for a long time,” but that “we’re so intertwined with China that the decoupling process is going to be difficult no matter what.”
Oze agreed that the industry is “waiting to figure out where everything stands when the dust settles on these policies.”
“There’s a lot of excitement with regards to critical minerals and materials produced locally in the U.S., but we haven’t seen the details of those yet to make sure how good of an opportunity it is for us,” he added. “But we have to be prepared to move quickly on those if it works out well for us.”
