Geothermal Engineering Limited (GEL) announces bank backing of £10mln, while battery consortium secures government funding.
GEL has secured financing from Dutch bank ABN AMRO. This will help fund expansion of lithium production at the GEL plant at its United Downs site and allow for preparation of further sites in Cornwall where the company already has planning permission.
The backing of a major bank also enables GEL to start the process of raising significant capital for further expansion in the UK.
The geothermal fluid at United Downs contains over 340ppm of lithium, making it one of the highest concentrations found in any well to date in the world. The team at GEL intends to expand its direct lithium extraction (DLE) production from 100t of lithium carbonate per annum to close to 2,000tpa by 2028/9. GEL is targeting production of over 18,000tpa over the next decade from multiple sites in the UK.
GEL is also working on new and larger geothermal power projects across the county, and has set its sights on producing a minimum of 25MWe of renewable electricity across GEL’s portfolio over the next 10 years.
GEL has further sites in Cornwall which have already received planning permission and are each anticipated to deliver at least 5MWe of baseload power, which is enough to power around 70,000 UK homes. The financing from ABN AMRO will also be used to start preparing these sites for drilling.
The United Downs deep geothermal power plant started power production in February 2026 and represents the UK’s first integrated deep geothermal power and commercial-scale lithium production project. The first plant will deliver 3MWe of baseload electricity, which is being sold via Octopus Energy to power around 10,000 UK homes.
This financing in GEL adds to the current funding from Thrive Renewables plc, Kerogen Capital, the European Regional Development Fund and Cornwall Council.
Meanwhile, a UK consortium has been awarded funding through Innovate UK Battery Innovation Programme. The project will develop ‘ReCAM’, a system converting lithium-ion battery waste into high-value cathode materials.
It brings together the UK Battery Industrialisation Centre, Watercycle Technologies, Recyclus Group Ltd, and Polaron to tackle the pressing challenge of a growing volume of end-of-life lithium-ion batteries and leveraging the black mass produced in the disposal and recycling process.
ReCAM introduces a patented, short-loop refining process that converts black mass directly into cathode active material for reuse in new batteries. Unlike current technologies that break materials down into individual metals through a multi-stage chemical process, ReCAM uconverts the mass in a single streamlined step.
The process operates as zero-waste system and is designed as a modular, onsite solution for recyclers, capable of processing 250kg of material per hour.
Extracted from IOM3 website, read more here