By Angela Anderson
The U.S. Department of Energy’s SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory will lead a Genesis Mission project to help secure the nation’s critical mineral supply by developing AI tools to improve recovery of valuable transition metals from spent lithium-ion batteries.
The project, a collaboration between researchers at the SLAC-Stanford Battery Center and the University of Southern California, will address a key national science and technology challenge set out by the DOE earlier this year.
In addition, SLAC will partner with other national labs, universities and industry leaders on 10 Genesis Mission projects announced today at the Genesis Mission Summit in Washington, D.C.
The Genesis Mission is a historic national initiative led by the DOE, which is building the world’s most powerful integrated science discovery platform. By uniting government, industry, academia, and philanthropy, it is accelerating breakthroughs in energy, scientific discovery, and national security through a new platform that combines AI, supercomputing, quantum systems, and advanced scientific instruments.
The funding awards announced at the summit represent the first of two phases of awards from the Genesis Mission: Transforming Science and Energy with AI Request for Application (RFA).
The goal of the Phase I RFA awards is to identify promising pathways toward transformative scientific capabilities and establish a foundation for future investment and scale. Project teams will design and demonstrate research workflows that integrate AI with scientific investigation, while rigorously evaluating whether those approaches can accelerate discovery, improve predictive capabilities, enhance experimentation, or generate new scientific insights.
Building a team of AI agents to improve metal purity
The SLAC-led project, “A Multi-agent AI Framework for Discovering Chemical Drivers of Selective Critical Metal Recovery from Complex Battery Waste,” focuses on improving recovery of metals such as cobalt, nickel and manganese from lithium-ion batteries that have reached the end of their useful life.
A single spent electric vehicle battery holds tens of pounds of such valuable metals, and recovering them could provide a domestic supply of materials, reducing today’s imports. But extracting these metals currently requires large amounts of chemicals, generates significant waste, and involves extensive trial and error.
The SLAC-led project will assemble multiple AI agents, each with a specialized role, to evaluate strategies across diverse fields, ranging from biochemistry to geology, to propose specific pathways for separating out the metals, testing new approaches and learning from experiments. “Over nine months, SLAC and the University of Southern California will run several AI-experiment cycles, aiming to recover target metals at 80 percent purity or better, while bench-marking this approach against conventional literature search and recovery methods,” Ahamed Irshad Maniyanganam, SLAC associate scientist and lead researcher on the project, said.
Coinvestigators on the project include Frank Abild-Pedersen, SLAC senior scientist and co-director of the SLAC-Stanford SUNCAT Center for Interface Science and Catalysis, Jagjit Nanda, distinguished scientist and executive director of the SLAC-Stanford Battery Center, and Jayakanth Ravichandran, professor at the USC Viterbi School of Engineering.
In addition to the metals recovery project, SLAC will contribute to 10 additional Genesis Mission Phase I projects in areas including biotechnology, fusion energy, electronics and sensors, cosmology, particle physics, and accelerator technology.
SLAC’s premier facilities produce vast and uniquely varied scientific datasets that illuminate our world from the grand scale of the cosmos to the smallest scales of the motions of electrons. These data – along with the SLAC-Stanford ecosystem’s expertise in algorithm development and its world-leading domain scientists – will fuel the AI revolution in science. The lab’s contributions to the Genesis Mission bring together advanced computing infrastructure, AI innovation and data from world-leading scientific facilities to power the next generation of discovery.
“SLAC’s role as a leading collaborator across a range of technologies positions us to advance AI’s transformative role in scientific discovery,” said SLAC Lab Director John Sarrao. “We appreciate the commitment of the Department of Energy in addressing these national challenges.”