Parthian Battery Solutions is jump-starting second-life battery production.
AUGGIE CHICO WAS A FINANCE MAJOR AT WEST VIRGINIA UNIVERSITY. But when a Wall Street internship didn’t spark his imagination, he came home to Morgantown, entered and won the 2019–20 West Virginia Statewide Collegiate Business Plan Competition, and launched a business that truly energizes him—and others.
“Battery production and end-of-life management are huge problems,” says Chico of the motivation behind Parthian Battery Solutions. The batteries that power household devices—flashlights, remote controls—are typically used until they don’t work at all anymore. “But for applications like electric vehicles or the aerospace industry, the uses for those lithium-ion batteries are so demanding that, once their capacity degrades by 10 or 20%, they’re retired.”
At the same time, making new batteries comes at a financial and environmental cost. Parthian Battery Solutions addresses both problems at once: “We take post-consumer batteries and make new batteries out of them.” The repurposed batteries can serve valuable second lives storing backup electricity for commercial facilities and for solar and wind farms.
The team at Parthian has developed technology that tests battery health far faster and in greater detail than anything currently available, Chico says—down from days to under 2 minutes. A patent application is in the works, and new resources are flowing in. In September 2023, the start-up won a highly competitive National Science Foundation Phase I Small Business Technology Transfer, or STTR, grant of $275,000, plus another $100,000 from the state of West Virginia—and successful Phase I completion opens up a further $1.75 million.
The technology is coming just in time, Chico says. “Electric vehicle batteries are relatively new, and the batteries can last 10 to 15 years, so we’re in the infancy of this issue of end-of-life battery management,” he says. “We haven’t had a giant influx of batteries being retired yet—but that tidal wave is just beyond the horizon.”
Chico envisions Parthian Battery Solutions as the clearinghouse for battery management, where retired batteries would be received, tested, and remanufactured to their next-highest use or disposed of properly—and he plans for that to happen in Morgantown.
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