Nth Cycle announces public debut under NTH ticker, following $585 million SPAC merger
Nth Cycle’s commercial momentum includes operating the first U.S. refinery producing high-purity nickel-cobalt mixed hydroxide from recycle battery feedstock, a 10-year, $1.1 billion offtake agreement with Trafigura, and strategic development agreements with leading rare earth companies.
In May 2023, Tom Ballard, the founding editor of Teknovation, wrote a story titled: “Nth Cycle Poised for Hockey Stick Growth.” And when it comes to founder Megan O’Connor, Nth Cycle, and the trajectory of the past couple of years, it seems no truer statement was ever written.
Last week, Nth Cycle announced a $585 million SPAC merger with Kensington Capital Acquisition Corporation, a special purpose acquisition company, that will take the critical minerals refiner public on the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) under the ticker “NTH.” The deal is expected to close in the fourth quarter, pending shareholder and regulatory approval, according to a filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission.
A lot has happened in eight years
Eight years ago, O’Connor moved to Oak Ridge to spend two years developing her electrochemical metals recovery technology as part of Innovation Crossroads, the entrepreneurial fellowship program run by Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL). She was one of five innovators selected for the program’s second cohort in 2018, working alongside ORNL researchers and drawing on the lab’s equipment and expertise to turn her Duke University doctoral research into a business.
O’Connor co-founded Nth Cycle to commercialize an electro-extraction technology that uses electricity, rather than fossil fuels or high-pressure acid leaching, to recover nickel, cobalt, lithium, copper and rare earth elements from scrap metal, mined ore and old batteries. The goal, as O’Connor has described it in past Teknovation interviews, is to build a domestic alternative to overseas refining, much of which currently runs through China and Indonesia.
In Nth Cycle’s press release, O’Connor commented on the importance of onshoring the company’s capabilities.
Critical minerals are abundant across the West — but they have little to no commercial value until refined. That single chokepoint has left the United States, Europe, and allied nations entirely dependent on China, which has a tighter grip on these essential resources than OPEC ever had on oil. We’ve changed that with our modular refining system and are excited to partner with Kensington to scale our platform at the cost, speed, and efficiency Western markets demand.
Since completing the two-year Innovation Crossroads fellowship, Nth Cycle has:
- Opened a 21,000-square-foot refining facility in Fairfield, Ohio, in 2024.
- Secured $7.2 million under the Advanced Energy Project Tax Credit (48C) program created by the Inflation Reduction Act.
- Signed a 10-year, roughly $1.1 billion offtake agreement with commodities trader Trafigura in March, its largest deal to date, to supply nickel and lithium products from planned facilities in South Carolina and the Netherlands.
- Partnered with Ionic Rare Earths in May to build a refining pathway for rare earth elements independent of Chinese supply chains.
Why it matters for Tennessee
Nth Cycle is no longer based in Tennessee, but its origin story is a marquee example of what Innovation Crossroads, backed by the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) and the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA), was built to do, which is to take early-stage, lab-rooted technology and turn it into a scalable business.
Nth Cycle is a picture-perfect example of how that incubation can help deep-tech companies take flight.
Read more about Innovation Crossroads.
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