One of Tesla’s co-founders plans to establish a massive factory in the United States focusing on the production of components for electric vehicle batteries.
J.B. Straubel currently operates Redwood Materials, the largest lithium-ion battery recycler in the United States and while speaking with Bloomberg, revealed plans for Redwood to become a major U.S. producer of cathodes.
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Redwood already operates three facilities in Nevada and is looking for a new location where it will built a million-square-foot factory at a cost of well over $1 billion. This factory will produce material for 100-gigawatt hours of batteries each year by the end of 2025, enough for approximately 1.3 million long-range electric vehicles. The factory will ramp up to 500-gigawatt hours a year by 2030, the equivalent of $25 billion worth of cathodes each year at current prices.
J. B. Straubel speaks alongside Elon Musk
Redwood does its recycling at its headquarters in Carson City, Nevada and recently broke ground on a 100-acre site in Story County, Nevada where it will make copper foils for batteries.
Building electric vehicles currently produces more pollution that building gasoline-powered cars due to the high energy requirements for battery production. It takes about 16,000 miles of driving before an electric vehicle becomes a net positive for the environment in the U.S. Redwood wants to reduce the 50,000 mile supply chain that some materials travel before reaching car manufacturers as finished battery cells. As it stands, most cathodes are produced in Japan before being sent to the U.S.
The cathode is the biggest driver of battery costs and the most polluting part of battery production. BNEF analyst James Frith says that consolidating the supply chain in the U.S. will dramatically reduce emissions.
“It would be one of the biggest cathode facilities in the world,” Frith said. “If you’re getting rid of that long supply chain, and you’re not having to do as much virgin refining, you’re cutting a huge chunk out of those emissions.”
Redwood disassembles, shreds, burns, and mixes together materials from old batteries, allowing it to separate out the valuable nickle, lithium, cobalt, and copper. More than 95 per cent of core battery materials can be recycled and its U.S. made cathodes will use 50 per cent recycled material.
