Company building EV recycling plant in KY files for bankruptcy. Will it affect the plan?
Another Kentucky electric vehicle battery project is on the rocks.
Ascend Elements — the company that planned in 2022 to invest $1 billion in Hopkinsville for a recycling plant — voluntarily filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy in order to restructure its finances without stopping work, according to an April 9 statement from the company’s CEO.
The filing is the latest in a saga of companies across the country, especially in Kentucky, scrambling to decide what to do after they invested in clean energy projects that former President Joe Biden’s administration incentivized, but President Donald Trump’s administration does not.
“Restructuring is hard. It creates uncertainty. But it is also a chance to clarify who we are, what we stand for, and where we are going,” said Ascend Elements President and CEO Linh Austin in the statement. “We are here to build a more resilient, circular, and secure battery materials supply chain for the markets we serve, and to do it in a way that creates long‑term value for employees, customers, communities, and investors.”
Austin, who took over leading the company last March, acknowledged the company “had a long history of fiscal and operational mismanagement, and that its future was very much in question.”
Construction at the plant has been repeatedly delayed throughout a series of complaints from contractors over unpaid work and in response to shifting market conditions. Late last year, the Department of Energy pulled remaining federal funding for the Ascend Elements project.
Kentucky Gov. Andy Beshear’s office, which opposed the termination of federal grants for the state’s energy-related projects, said in a statement to the Herald-Leader it had been in contact with Ascend Elements about the filing decision and that the company had made it clear the step would not negatively impact progress being made in Hopkinsville.
Terms for incentives and tax credits are performance-based and as long as the project is completed, those still will be granted to Ascend Elements.
In September 2022, the Kentucky Economic Development Finance Authority approved the company for up to $2 million through its Enterprise Initiative Act, allowing Ascend Elements to recoup sales and use tax on construction costs.
Last fall, the authority approved a $13.5 million incentive from the Kentucky Business Investment program, based on project costs of almost $870 million and projections the facility would create 250 new jobs that would pay $27.89 an hour on average, according to its financial incentive database.
“The state’s only direct cash support was for site infrastructure — not the company — making it more marketable if there were a need for a future investor,” a Beshear spokesperson said. “However, the governor and his administration are confident that the existing plan will be seen through, creating hundreds of good jobs for Kentuckians.”
The Ascend Elements project is intended to be the company’s largest U.S. electric vehicle battery recycling and materials manufacturing facility, the first plant of which would have the capability to supply up to 250,000 electric vehicles annually.
When the first phase of investments and new jobs were announced in 2022, Ascend Elements said its facility would help supply companies it already had relationships with, including SK Battery America, part of the same company that partnered with Ford Motor Co. on a now-dissolved plan to build electric vehicle batteries just outside Elizabethtown.
The BlueOval SK joint venture ended in December after just four months of operations.
As the partnership dissolved, 1,600 Kentuckians were laid off and Ford made more promises, including another $2 billion spend, to repurpose the facility for making systems that store, manage and distribute energy. Acreage the partnership failed to build out is in the hands of the state, which is still determining what to do with it.
Despite the shift with BlueOval and other volatility with the electric vehicle supply chain in part due to policy changes from the White House, Beshear said last December, “Kentucky will remain the EV battery capital of the US.”
“... EV is — and will be — part of America’s future despite the President’s shortsighted attacks on the industry,” he said.
Ascend Elements previously anticipated its investment would surpass $1 billion and create 400 full-time jobs, though some of the grants it was relying on have been pulled. It’s not clear how much more the company may have to invest in the plant, or its workers, after it’s done going through bankruptcy proceedings.
Plans to complete construction on the facility in Christian County are likely still moving forward later this year.
Ascend Elements operates a facility in Georgia and is using lessons learned at that facility to “complete and ramp our state-of-the-art Hopkinsville, Kentucky facility.”
This story was originally published April 10, 2026 at 12:57 PM.
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