That’s exactly what he’s been doing for the last five years.
The company he built, Redwood Materials, is now the largest battery recycler in North America, and it’s using those recycled materials to manufacture complex battery components that have traditionally been imported from abroad, largely from China.
Straubel recently opened the doors for a first peek at the 300-acre industrial campus he’s built in the western Nevada desert. He said it hasn’t been easy.
“It feels like we’re going at breakneck speed, but we need to do a whole lot more,” he said. “It’s a damn hard thing to do.”
Straubel, 48, drives a Tesla Cybertruck emblazoned with his company’s green infinity logo, but he's careful to note that the flashy ride is a personal vehicle — “too expensive for Redwood.” Often seen as a countervailing force to Musk while they were building Tesla, Straubel returned last year to take a seat on the electric vehicle maker’s board. He wouldn’t talk about his oversight job there, other than his general motivation for doing it.
“I want it to succeed. I love the team there, it's close to my heart — always probably will be,” he said.
Straubel spoke to Bloomberg Green on March 22, the day Redwood commissioned its first commercial-scale line to produce cathode active material, a black powder that’s largely responsible for a battery’s range and longevity — and cost. He reflected on what it’s taken to build Redwood to this point, and his plans for what comes next. What follows is an edited transcript of the conversation.
Some EV manufacturers are tapping the breaks on expansion plans right now. What’s your reading of the EV market and how it looks five years from now?
Personally I think the EV transition is kind of a slow, steady, and inevitable future course that we are going to go through — and have to go through. When we started Redwood, I was really looking at the 10, 20, 30-year horizon and how we were going to affect sustainability and transportation. I don't see any change in my long-term thinking on this.
What will a mature recycling industry look like in the US? Will it be distributed like it is in China, or a few big players that dominate?
I don’t have a one-size-fits-all, monopolistic view on this. It’s really how we can best architect a solution for the country to get as much material recovered and recycled, as quickly as possible. There may be more smaller companies at different parts of the value chain. That would be great if they can compete, and we’re happy to work with a lot of small companies.
But there weren’t really any other companies that I saw doing what was needed, so that’s kind of why we jumped in with the scope we did. There was a little bit of a gold rush that went on, when people saw what we were doing and thought it would be easy. I wish them well, but this is a long road. It’s something we need to be building for many years, maybe decades.
How necessary are government subsidies for making the numbers work on recycling?
Today, we don’t have a single dollar from the federal government. Everything we’ve built to date has been funded by either our investors or from money that we’ve made recycling and selling. We’ve had to bootstrap and move things along as we go....
....MUCH MORE
Hurry up, come public would ya!
[we are fans: https://climateerinvest.blogspot.com/search?q=redwood+materials]
