Nth Cycle

Nth Cycle is a critical minerals refining company headquartered in Burlington, MA (formerly Salem) that is tackling one of the most urgent gaps in the US energy supply chain: domestic metal refining. China currently controls over 85% of the world's critical mineral refining capacity - a chokehold more concentrated than OPEC ever had on oil. Without domestic refining infrastructure, even abundant US ore deposits and recycled e-waste scrap remain commercially useless. Nth Cycle's answer is its patented OYSTER® electroextraction platform, a modular refining system that uses electricity - not fossil fuels - to recover production-grade nickel, cobalt, lithium, copper, rare earth elements, and more from end-of-life batteries (black mass), industrial scrap, mining tailings, and low-grade ore. The process integrates electrochemistry, filtration, and precipitation in a single architecture, bypassing the expensive, polluting, and time-consuming methods of traditional pyrometallurgy and hydrometallurgy.

The OYSTER® system's modular design is its defining competitive advantage: it can be co-located inside existing buildings alongside recyclers, miners, or manufacturers, reducing capital intensity by up to 70%, cutting deployment time to under two years (including permitting), and reducing waste by up to 75% compared to conventional centralized refineries. In September 2024, Nth Cycle became the first company in the United States to produce commercial-scale nickel and cobalt mixed hydroxide precipitate (MHP) from scrap at its Fairfield, Ohio facility - a landmark milestone for domestic supply chain resilience. The company was also awarded a $7.2M federal 48C Advanced Energy Project Tax Credit for the Ohio site.

Nth Cycle's momentum has accelerated rapidly. In March 2026, it signed a landmark $1.1 billion, 10-year offtake agreement with global commodities giant Trafigura - the largest multi-metal commercial agreement between a recycled feedstock supplier and a critical mineral refiner - covering 2,000 tonnes of nickel MHP and 1,500 tonnes of lithium carbonate annually. New facilities are planned in South Carolina (dubbed "Project SHIELD") and the Netherlands (backed by a €7.5M EU National Growth Fund grant). Nth Cycle has been named to the Global Cleantech 100 list for three consecutive years and is a critical enabler of IRA compliance, defense supply chains, EV battery manufacturing, AI data center infrastructure, and grid storage across the Western world.