ReOre Technologies, an Altilium group company, announced on November 12, 2026, that it will lead a two-year project to develop domestic supplies of nickel, cobalt and copper for the UK battery materials supply chain. The CASCADE project has secured £1.4 million in grant funding through the UK government’s Battery Innovation Programme, delivered by Innovate UK.
The project brings together ReOre, Aberdeen Minerals and Camborne School of Mines. It will use ReOre’s patent-pending EcoMineral process to recover nickel, cobalt and copper from sulfide mineral concentrates extracted from Aberdeen Minerals’ Arthrath Nickel-Copper-Cobalt Project in Aberdeenshire. According to the announcement, the site contains the UK’s largest-scale nickel prospect.
EcoMineral is a hydrometallurgical process that uses biodegradable, non-toxic chemistry and operates at ambient pressure and low temperatures. ReOre said these operating conditions could reduce energy consumption, environmental impact and processing costs compared with conventional extraction technologies. The process can also treat feedstocks including mine waste and end-of-life products.
Camborne School of Mines will contribute mineral processing expertise, conduct sample characterization and test processing routes for nickel and cobalt. It will also investigate mine waste and other secondary UK feedstocks as potential sources of battery metals. Altilium will validate the recovered nickel and cobalt products and assess their suitability for the UK battery materials supply chain.
The UK currently has no primary extraction of nickel and cobalt and lacks domestic processing capacity to convert these materials into products for battery manufacturing, according to the announcement. Successful delivery of CASCADE is expected to establish a pathway for scaling the process from laboratory to pilot level and support options for integrated nickel, cobalt and copper production in Aberdeenshire.
The Advanced Propulsion Centre forecasts that UK electric vehicle production will require approximately 38,000 tonnes of nickel and 4,900 tonnes of cobalt annually by 2035. The project also aligns with UK targets for domestic production to meet at least 10% of annual critical mineral demand and recycling to supply 20% by 2035.
Source: Altilium
