Saturday 27 / April / 2024
Muscat: Oman Investment Authority (OIA) has announced taking a stake in Ascend Elements firm, a United States firm specialising in the recycling of lithium-ion batteries used in electric vehicles.
The step incarnates endeavours to enhance the ‘generations portfolio’ in a bid to achieve fiscal sustainability. It also comes in pursuance of OIA’s quest to access new investment sectors that respond to global trends in this field.
Ibrahim bin Said Al Eisri, OIA’s Director General of Private Equity, said that this new venture is in line with the OIA’s strategy to invest in companies operating in the converting industries sector. This competitive, rapidly growing sector enjoys support in the United States of America, the United Kingdom and Europe. It offers the OIA a motive to enter into partnerships with international partners and investors, with rewarding revenues in the pipeline.
The US company developed a new technique in electric vehicle battery recycling that focuses on the sustainable use of waste lithium-ion batteries and converts them into high-performance batteries for electric vehicles. This technique reduces the cost of recycling electric batteries by 50 per cent and cuts down carbon emissions by 87 per cent.
After OIA’s investment, the company received a $480 million subsidy from the US government, represented by the Department of Energy, as part of an initiative to support the electric vehicles’ battery sector. This augmented the firm’s market value and enabled it to enter into partnerships with several electric vehicle battery firms and automobile firms such as Jaguar, Land Rover, Ford and Tesla.
