By early 2022, Redwood Materials will announce a site for a North American battery materials manufacturing facility, aiming to produce 100 GWh/year of cathode active materials and anode foil for one million electric vehicles by 2025. By 2030, we expect our production output to scale to 500 GWh/year of materials which would enable enough batteries to power five million electric vehicles or nearly half of the US’ annual vehicle production.
JB Straubel, Tesla cofounder and longtime CTO of Tesla, announced that his new company, Redwood Materials in 2019.
Redwood Materials is a major Tesla partner just like CATL. CATL is the world largest battery maker and a Chinese company. Tesla’s battery partners are able to get larger expansions funded because of long term purchase guarantees from Tesla.
Falling battery prices have now made the cathode and anode about half of the total cost of the battery power system.
Redwood will produce strategic battery materials in the US, first supplying battery cell manufacturing partners with anode copper foil and cathode active materials. We plan to transform the lithium-ion battery supply chain by offering large-scale sources of these domestic materials produced from as many recycled batteries as available and augmented with sustainably mined material. These two products will become a closed loop and re-use all of the critical lithium, copper, nickel and cobalt that we already recover from old batteries! These materials will be built from more and more recycled battery content every year but in the immediate future, we need to ramp EV production faster than the number of existing EVs will reach end of life and therefore, be available for recycling.
In July, 2021, Redwood had another $700M external investment from a carefully selected group of strategic investors. The round was led by funds and accounts advised by T. Rowe Price Associates, Inc. and includes Goldman Sachs Asset Management, Baillie Gifford, Canada Pension Plan Investment Board, and Fidelity. In addition, all Series B investors, Capricorn’s Technology Impact Fund, Breakthrough Energy Ventures and Amazon’s Climate Pledge Fund, returned for this round and Valor Equity Partners, Emerson Collective, and Franklin Templeton also participated.
SOURCES – Redwood Materials
Written By Brian Wang, Nextbigfuture.com
Brian Wang is a Futurist Thought Leader and a popular Science blogger with 1 million readers per month. His blog Nextbigfuture.com is ranked #1 Science News Blog. It covers many disruptive technology and trends including Space, Robotics, Artificial Intelligence, Medicine, Anti-aging Biotechnology, and Nanotechnology.
Known for identifying cutting edge technologies, he is currently a Co-Founder of a startup and fundraiser for high potential early-stage companies. He is the Head of Research for Allocations for deep technology investments and an Angel Investor at Space Angels.
A frequent speaker at corporations, he has been a TEDx speaker, a Singularity University speaker and guest at numerous interviews for radio and podcasts. He is open to public speaking and advising engagements.
Tesla has stated that they too intend to re-cycle batteries, but where is the Tesla recycle plants? Have they announced plans for a recycling factory?
Also, I wonder if Tesla intends to make their own cathode material? It would seem that they will make their own anode material, or at least partly, since they will make their own graphite with technical silicon. But what about cathodes? Will Tesla buy it or make it?
To achieve an optimal mix of renewables and backup generators requires 3 hours of battery life. That is the time it takes to bring the backups online.
Right now, the state of California has 1 minute.
Finally, my prediction that used Li ion batteries are as good an ore as you will ever find is proving out. It's really just a matter of having enough laying around to make the ore profitable to process.
Now, I'm waiting for defunct PV panels to be recognized as ore. There are lots of used ones floating around, but not yet that many defunct ones.
Too bad we did not start checking lunar craters for various materials in the '70s. I read where Bezos is buying into supply chains for these sort of materials. Where will he get them long term? Where will we as a civilization get materials long term? Mars?