Battery Recycler "Redwood Materials loses COO amid layoffs, restructuring"

From TechCrunch, April 23: 

Redwood Materials chief operating officer Chris Lister is leaving the battery recycling company to retire, TechCrunch has learned — and he’s not the only executive that recently departed.

Lister, a former vice president who led operations at Tesla’s Nevada Gigafactory, has been with Redwood since late 2023. He started as the company’s chief supply chain officer and was quickly promoted to the COO role in 2024. The promotion put him closer in the org chart to Redwood founder and CEO JB Straubel, who was Tesla’s longtime chief technology officer and currently sits on the automaker’s board.

Redwood Materials recently informed employees that Lister was retiring, according to an employee who was granted anonymity to speak about the announcement. The company confirmed Lister’s departure to TechCrunch on Thursday. “We wish him the best in his retirement,” a spokesperson said via email.

News of Lister’s retirement comes just a few days after TechCrunch revealed Redwood Materials recently laid off around 10% of its workforce, or roughly 135 employees....

....MUCH MORE 

"tozero opens Europe’s first industrial-scale battery recycling plant to power Europe’s material independence"

I've mentioned that for years I thought a couple European companies would be major players in the western world but instead it's the business started by a Tesla co-founder that leads the way. Here's one of many mentions, this one's from 2023 when President Biden was splashin' 'Inflation Reduction Act' cash around:

Battery Recycling: "Redwood Materials says it wins $2 bln DOE loan for EV materials plant"
Umicore, Johnson Matthey, Veolia and the rest have to be wondering why they didn't set up arms-length American subs to garner some of that sweet, sweet Biden love....

Redwood eventually turned down the two billion because a) they didn't actually need the cash, the business was delivering above plan, and b) there were too many strings attached versus raising money in the market.

And the headline story from Tech.eu, March 27: 

As demand for lithium and graphite surges, tozero is building a battery recycling playbook for Europe — and aiming to compete with mining on cost. 

Europe is racing to secure the critical raw materials needed for its energy transition, yet remains heavily dependent on imports — particularly from China.

At the same time, a growing volume of end-of-life batteries is creating a domestic source of lithium, graphite, and other materials that has, until now, been difficult to recover at scale. Battery recycling startup tozero has launched its first industrial demonstration plant in Germany, marking a step toward turning end-of-life batteries into a domestic supply of critical raw materials at scale.

The plant will deliver recycled lithium and graphite to companies across sectors, including construction, ceramics, and lubricants, with further materials and industries to follow.

Located in Bavaria at Chemical Park Gendorf, the plant can process more than 1.500t of battery waste every year. From this waste, tozero can produce high-purity lithium carbonate – the equivalent of saving 6,000 electric vehicles' worth of batteries from landfill – and recover graphite and nickel-cobalt mix.

Founded in 2022 by Sarah Fleischer, a serial entrepreneur and mechanical engineer, and Dr Ksenija Milicevic Neumann, a leading metallurgy expert, tozero has scaled at pace.

In April 2024, nine months after opening its pilot facility, it became the first company in Europe to deliver recycled lithium to commercial customers. 

I spoke to Sarah Fleischer, Co-founder and CEO of tozero, to learn more about how the company is not only scaling its own operations, but effectively creating a playbook for an emerging industry. 

Europe’s critical materials paradox: reliant on imports, rich in waste 
Global demand for lithium is set to quadruple by 2030, while in the EU alone, graphite demand is expected to rise by up to 25 times by 2040, driven by EVs, grid-scale storage and industrial electrification. 

Yet Europe remains almost entirely reliant on imports – China controls global graphite supplies, and 99 per cent of Europe's lithium comes from abroad.  Ironically, Europe is sitting on a stockpile of the very materials it's scrambling to source from the growing number of end-of-life batteries, largely due to Europe’s growth in EVs 

With demand expected to exceed supply by over 33 per cent from 2035, battery recycling is becoming essential — and tozero is aiming to help bridge the gap.

“Yes, it works”: how tozero validated its recycling tech with OEMs 
tozero’s approach to battery recycling is fundamentally different from conventional methods. By deploying a proprietary acid-free, hydrometallurgy process, it focuses on low-temperature, water-based chemical processing rather than burning batteries.

Building on this, the company aims to close the battery materials loop and support Europe’s ambition to achieve greater independence in critical raw materials. This aligns with the EU Critical Raw Materials Act, which calls for 25 per cent of supply to come from recycling sources. 

tozero's recycling takes place in a single cycle, and the recovered materials are pure enough to feed directly back into manufacturing....

....MUCH MORE 

We'll keep tabs on tozero but like scaling up laboratory advances in battery chemistry itself, recycling is "a damn hard thing to do".

In the mean time here is one of 2025's most popular posts:

Battery Recycling: Best-in-Class Redwood Materials

MIT Technology Review's "10 Climate Tech Companies to Watch"

From Technology Review, October 6:

Every year, the MIT Technology Review newsroom produces this list of some of the most promising climate tech firms on the planet. It’s an exercise that we hope brings positive attention to companies working to decarbonize major sectors of our economy, whether by spinning up new, cleaner sources of energy or reinventing how we produce foods and distribute goods.

Though the political and funding landscape has shifted dramatically in the US since the last time we put out this list, nothing has altered the urgency....

....MUCH MORE 

A few of the names:

2025 Climate Tech Companies to Watch: Redwood Materials and its new AI microgrids 

2025 Climate Tech Companies to Watch: Ather Energy and its premium e-scooters 

2025 Climate Tech Companies to Watch: Pairwise and its climate-adapted crops 

Redwood Materials: "Tesla Co-Founder JB Straubel’s Redwood Chases EV Battery Future Amid A.I. Energy Rush"

From Observer, September 26:

Tesla veteran JB Straubel is betting his second act on closing the loop in EV batteries. 

“If someone can do it, it’s JB Straubel.” That’s how Edward Sanchez, a senior analyst at automotive consultancy TechInsights, describes the strategic vision of Tesla’s co-founder and former CTO. Straubel has set out to build the world’s largest electric vehicle (EV) battery recycling company. Founded in 2017, his startup Redwood Materials aims to create a circular supply chain for lithium-ion batteries, sourcing them from automakers, dealers, parts suppliers, dismantlers and waste management firms.

The company is currently recycling 20 GWh of batteries annually—enough to power 250,000 EVs—and is working to increase that capacity substantially over the coming years. To get there, Redwood is building a $3.5 billion battery materials and recycling facility in Ridgeville, S.C., which will produce cathode and anode components for future vehicles and employ 1,500 people in the U.S. “Battery Belt.”

Straubel has raised alarms about A.I.’s soaring energy demands, warning they could strain future power supplies. In June, he launched Redwood Energy to help tackle the issue by repurposing second-life battery packs—still with half their useful life left—to power data centers and stabilize the electric grid.

To jumpstart that effort, Redwood Energy struck a deal with Crusoe, a company focused on sustainable energy for A.I., to power a new data center in Abilene, Texas. The project will run on a 63-MWh microgrid designed to operate independently from the main electricity network.

Redwood is part of the energy sector’s scramble to keep pace with the U.S.’s rapid A.I. infrastructure boom, which will consume 12 percent of the nation’s electricity within five years, up from 4.4 percent today, according to the International Energy Agency.

That growth won’t come without hurdles. Analysts warn that Redwood faces steep logistical challenges, rising capital costs and a potential shortage of used batteries as it tries to scale. The company reported $200 million in revenue in 2024, but it remains unclear whether it’s profitable.

How A.I. simplifies battery recycling
Experts say machine learning could help companies like Redwood build a closed-loop battery supply chain, reducing U.S. dependence on China-controlled components such as cobalt, which is increasingly in short supply, as well as lithium and nickel.

A growing number of institutions are exploring how A.I. could drive economies of scale in three areas critical to recycling: battery diagnostics, disassembly and refining.... 

....MUCH MORE 

We have quite a few posts on Redwood, if interested see for more links:

• Battery Recycling: Best-in-Class Redwood Materials
• "Trump’s second term is creating ‘a limbo moment’ for US battery recyclers"
• Battery Recycler Redwood Materials Has A New Business: Microgrids

Bloomberg New Energy Finance: " ....Grid must double in size in 15 years"

From Bloomberg, September 18/19:

Five Takeaways From the BNEF Barrel of Tomorrow Summit 

A few key forces — President Donald Trump, the rise of artificial intelligence and global electrification — have compelled companies across the energy spectrum to adjust their sustainability goals and investment priorities.

That was the message from executives, investors and industry leaders at BloombergNEF’s Barrel of Tomorrow in the Age of AI Summit in Houston on Thursday.

The meeting took place against the backdrop of Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill, which preserved incentives for some sectors while clawing them back for others. Meanwhile, the nation’s shakeup of clean energy policy has prompted some companies to look for opportunity elsewhere, and the AI boom is forcing grids to expand.

Here are five takeaways from the summit about the state of the energy transition in the age of Trump and AI....

....Grid must double in size in 15 years

The US grid took more than 100 years to build out and now has to double in size to meet demand. And it has to do it in the next 15 years, according to industry executives.

Connecting the three power main grids is one of the “most cost effective things to do,” said Michael Skelly, co-founder and CEO of transmission developer Grid United. A national policy to develop high voltage power lines would facilitate that, he said.

Frank Kreikebaum, engineering chief for Smart Wires, said his company was able to help data centers connect in half the time of alternate solutions with the aid of hardware to better manage flow across power lines, substations and other equipment.

Read: JB Straubel Says Batteries Can Make Gas Plants More Efficient

The data center build-out is costly

The bitter battle brewing over how to accelerate the AI data-center build-out without unduly burdening consumers was a key point of discussion, with NRG Energy Inc. CEO Larry Coben asking “Who pays for this expansion?”

Coben also noted that this new wave of infrastructure-building isn’t creating the jobs generated by past build-outs. “Data centers are extremely important, both business wise and to national security, but the long term job creation generally isn’t there,” he said.

Terawatt Infrastructure CEO Neha Palmer, meanwhile, emphasized the need for new power generation as electric vehicles proliferate. Like data centers, EVs need power “as fast as possible but the cost is also incredibly important” especially for heavy duty truck fleets that are comparing the cost per mile versus diesel, she said.

Redwood Materials Inc. Chief Executive Officer JB Straubel said batteries have a role to play in stabilizing the load for data centers, which see oscillating rather than steady power demand....

....MUCH MORE

Battery Recycler Redwood Materials Has A New Business: Microgrids

From Fast Company, June 27:

This massive new data center is powered by used EV batteries
A new project from battery recycling startup Redwood Materials and data center builder Crusoe shows that it’s possible to build data centers cheaper and faster while also slashing emissions.

Over the last two months, a first-of-a-kind project has taken shape at an industrial site in Nevada: the world’s largest microgrid built with used EV batteries, designed to power an adjacent data center.

It’s the first of a series of microgrids planned by Redwood Materials, the battery recycling company now valued at more than $5 billion. The company is taking in a quickly-growing volume of used EV batteries—tens of thousands over the last year, and perhaps hundreds of thousands over the next 12 months. Most of those batteries still have enough capacity to have a second life before the materials are recycled. And they could help deal with a major energy challenge: how new data centers can come online quickly and cheaply without straining the grid and significantly adding to climate emissions.

“The amount of batteries coming back that have usable life and that are relatively more cost-efficient to deploy has ramped up dramatically in just the last year or two,” says JB Straubel, CEO of Redwood Materials. The company announced its new energy business arm at an event on June 26.

Straubel, one of Tesla’s cofounders, left the automaker in 2019 to help build a new U.S. supply chain of critical battery materials using the growing pile of battery waste. Last year, the company started commercial production of cathode active material, one key component in batteries, from recycled materials. Its recycling business is already profitable; it generated $200 million in revenue last year. But it also recognized the huge opportunity to put some batteries to work again. 

How EV batteries can find a second life
When a battery is in a car or a truck, “it’s a pretty demanding application,” Straubel says. “You need a lot of power capability. You really want to charge quickly, usually, so you can go to fast charge stations. And you also need a pretty high percent of your overall initial range that you purchased in the car.”

But even when a battery has lost so much capacity that it no longer makes sense for driving, it can still be used to store energy. In that application, charging and discharging can happen slowly. A battery might only have half of its original capacity, but can still reliably support the grid or a microgrid. In some cases, it could be used for years before it’s eventually recycled.

In the new microgrid, on Redwood’s campus near Reno, more than 800 used EV batteries are connected to 20 acres of solar panels. It has enough power to run a new AI data center on the site, built by Crusoe, a company that designs and deploys low-carbon compute infrastructure.

The data center operates fully off the grid, without an external backup. “We still expect [the microgrid] to be very, very reliable,” Straubel says. “In some cases, it might be more reliable, because we have less failure points.” To make it possible to avoid the grid completely, the team built a relatively large amount of solar power and large battery capacity....

....MUCH MORE 

We have a lot of posts on Redwood. One of the more interesting recent ones was:

Battery Recycling: Best-in-Class Redwood Materials 

"Trump’s second term is creating ‘a limbo moment’ for US battery recyclers"

This is fāke™  news on a couple levels, more after the jump.

From Grist, June 10:

The president hasn't directly targeted the nascent industry, but his clean energy rollbacks could hurt it.

In a recycling facility in Covington, Georgia, workers grind up dead batteries into a fine, dark powder. In the past, the factory shipped that powder, known in the battery recycling industry as black mass, overseas to refineries that extracted valuable metals like cobalt and nickel. But now it keeps the black mass on site and processes it to produce lithium carbonate, a critical ingredient for making new batteries to power electric vehicles and store energy on the grid.

From Nevada to Arkansas, companies are racing to dig more lithium out of the ground to meet the clean energy sector’s surging appetite. But this battery recycling facility, owned by Massachusetts-based Ascend Elements, is the first new lithium carbonate producer in the nation in years — and the only source of recycled lithium carbonate in North America. The company is finalizing upgrades to its Covington facility that will allow it to produce up to 3,000 metric tons of lithium carbonate per year beginning later this month. Right now, the only other domestic source of lithium carbonate is a small mine in Silver Peak, Nevada.

Since January, President Donald Trump has taken a sledgehammer to the Biden administration’s efforts to grow America’s clean energy industry. The Trump administration has frozen grants and loans, hollowed out key agencies, and used executive action to stall renewable energy projects and reverse climate policies — often in legally dubious ways. At the same time, citing economic and national security reasons, Trump has sought to advance efforts to produce more critical minerals like lithium in the United States. That is exactly what the emerging lithium-ion battery recycling industry seeks to do, which is why some industry insiders are optimistic about their future under Trump. 

Nevertheless, U.S. battery recyclers face uncertainty due to fast-changing tariff policies, the prospect that Biden-era tax credits could be repealed by Congress as it seeks to slash federal spending, and signs that the clean energy manufacturing boom is fading.

Battery recyclers are in “a limbo moment,” said Beatrice Browning, a recycling expert at Benchmark Mineral Intelligence, which conducts market research for companies in the lithium-ion battery supply chain. They’re “waiting to see what the next steps are.”....

....MUCH MORE 

The story doesn't even mention battery recycler Redwood Materials which is a huge omission.

Redwood is the largest battery recycler in the U.S. with a 70% market share. And Redwood turned down $2 billion in government money. Here's the latter story, our long-time readers are familiar with the former.*

From Axios Pro, May 25:

Why Redwood Materials canceled its DOE loan

Last fall, battery recycling and materials company Redwood Materials quietly walked away from a $2 billion loan offered by the Department of Energy, the company tells Axios.

Why it matters: Redwood was one of seven companies named in a story that says the DOE under the Trump administration plans to announce canceled loan and loan guarantee commitments.

• Most of the seven loan commitments named have already been abandoned in moves initiated by the companies.

Zoom in: "We were right at the finish line and had the opportunity to close, but made a unilateral decision after a careful consideration of Redwood's business priorities," says Alexis Georgeson, VP of government relations and communications.

• Redwood applied for the DOE loan in 2021 and was awarded a conditional commitment for $2 billion in 2023. The company stopped pursuing the loan in the fall of 2024, while the Biden administration was still in office.
• After applying for the loan in 2021, Redwood raised $2 billion in private funding and in 2024 generated nearly $200 million in revenue.
• "Given our financial strength, continuing with the loan just didn't provide benefit any longer," says Georgeson. "We've actually never received any federal funding."

The intrigue: In addition to Redwood, the other LPO awardees named include Sunnova, Aspen Aerogels, Kore Power and International Recycling Group. All of these companies have said they're stopping pursuit of the DOE loans for various reasons....

....MUCH MORE 

*Most recently April 2025: Battery Recycling: Best-in-Class Redwood Materials

Battery Recycling: Best-in-Class Redwood Materials

We are fans.*

From Business Insider, April 10:

In the Nevada desert, a Tesla cofounder digs deep for the new black gold 

In the high desert 25 miles east of Reno, Gooseberry Mine is etched into the dusty Nevada hills. Until 1990, gold was dug out of the ground here. Now it's mostly abandoned.

In late March, I stood a few hundred yards away in a makeshift chemistry lab few people have been allowed to enter. My tour guide, Adam Kirby, a project manager at Redwood Materials, held up a small capsule containing dark powder.

"Black gold," he said, smiling.

The substance is known as Cathode Active Material, or CAM, a combination of metals and minerals that makes up roughly 60% of the value of EV batteries and 15% of the entire price of an electric vehicle.

Oil is the original black gold, of course. This has powered automobiles for a century. Now, though, EVs are steadily replacing the internal combustion engine with what Tesla and the rest of the industry hope is a more sustainable alternative.

For this to really happen, we must recycle the big battery packs inside all these EVs. Redwood Materials, run by Tesla cofounder JB Straubel, is building North America's biggest battery recycling operation. And CAM is the company's next big bet.

Straubel has been hacking away at this problem for almost a decade. Since Redwood was founded in 2017, the startup has raised about $2 billion from big investors, including Fidelity, Goldman Sachs, Baillie Gifford, and Amazon. 

Today, Redwood recycles more than 70% of all the lithium-ion batteries in North America. If you've ever handed old laptops or smartphones to a recycling center in the US or Canada, it's likely they ended up on a giant lot in front of Redwood Materials' 300 acre desert campus.

The company carefully heats these old batteries to just the right temperature to tease out the base ingredients, which include nickel, manganese, cobalt, and lithium. By themselves, these metals are valuable and Redwood has generated hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue by selling this raw material into the EV supply chain. 

The next step for the company is combining this into CAM, which is a lot more valuable. Hence the name: new black gold. Instead of digging it up, Redwood conjures it into being through chemistry at industrial scale.

It's an expensive and technically complex bet for Redwood, Straubel, and his investors. While driving down from the lab with Kirby, the project manager, we passed a building under construction that was so huge it made the nearby earth-moving trucks look like toys. This will house most of the full-scale CAM production process, featuring a heated conveyor belt more than 150 feet long. 

"Things like Redwood are multibillion-dollar capex, ambitious projects. You must back people with experience and gravitas who can execute," said Chris Evdaimon, an investment manager at Baillie Gifford, who also visited the site recently.

"To raise equity and debt, while having the trust of governments," he added, "not many people can pull this off."

"Infinitely recyclable"

When I got back down the hill, I was ushered into the main Redwood office building on campus and met Chief Commercial Officer Cal Lankton in the "Nickel" office (next to the "Manganese" and "Lithium" rooms, of course).

He recounted how Redwood got started through a surprising revelation: The ingredients of lithium-ion batteries can be reused over and over. Unlike the original black gold, these materials don't go up in smoke or wear out.

"That was the foresight on JB's part," Lankton said. "That's what differentiates this automotive transformation from previous ones — the batteries themselves are infinitely recyclable."

Redwood's processes can now recover about 98% of the critical minerals from batteries. The problem is that once this stuff has been salvaged, it must be shipped overseas, mainly to China, where it's refined and combined into useful products such as CAM.

By the time this material goes into a new battery cell in a US gigafactory, it has traveled roughly 50,000 miles from being shipped to Asia and then back again, according to Baillie Gifford's Evdaimon.

That's massively inefficient. If the US and Europe really want to meet lofty goals such as having half of cars being electric by 2030, a homegrown industry is needed. "Redwood Materials is essential for this," Evdaimon added....

....MUCH MORE, they go deep.

*The introduction to 2023's "Here Come the Unicorns of Clean Energy"

It's Redwood that we are interested in. The other three, Climeworks, Solugen and Sila Nanotechnologies may or may not make it but Redwood seems to be a possible fortune builder....

If interested see also:

"‘A Damn Hard Thing to Do’: Tesla Co-Founder JB Straubel Takes on Battery Recycling" (Redwood Materials) 

"Most electric-car batteries could soon be made by recycling old ones"

"A Porsche-backed startup is building a massive battery recycling plant to boost Europe’s EV industry"
There was a time when I thought Veolia, Umicore and maybe Johnson Matthey would be European champions of battery recycling but for whatever reason they never went big.

Battery Recycler Redwood Materials Plans To Enter Manufacturing Business

"Battery Recycling: Watch Out Redwood Materials"

Redwood Materials is a company I would like to own. Preferably in its entirety but if that is not possible a share of the business would be acceptable. Some links below....

• "EV Battery Recyclers Redwood Materials Raised Over $1 Billion"
• Battery Recycler Redwood Materials Will Have 5 Million Square Feet Under Roof At Its Nevada Campus
• Tech/Manufacturing/Business: "J.B. Straubel talks Tesla, Redwood Materials and keeping a startup mentality at any scale"

As we noted in a 2021 Redwood Materials post, "Watch Out Umicore: Ford partners with battery recycling and materials startup Redwood Materials":

Straubel was more than just Chief Technical Officer at Tesla. He was part of the company's founding team and more than anyone got the batteries and gigafactory into mass production. 

Which may explain the Go Big or Go Home approach to industrial facilities.

"Most electric-car batteries could soon be made by recycling old ones"

From the Economist, Sept 19:

Mining for raw materials may peak by the mid-2030s 

Despite a slowdown in electric-vehicle (EV) sales in some countries, demand for batteries was up by around 40% globally last year, and seems likely to continue at a similar pace. Consequently, the world’s appetite for lithium, the vital ingredient in the lithium-ion (Li-ion) batteries that dominate the EV market, is expected to exceed 2.4m tonnes in 2030, more than twice its present level.

Where all this lithium will come from is a thorny question. Although 70% of the world’s reserves of lithium carbonate (from which it is mined) are in Argentina, Australia and Chile, processing it into a form suitable for use in batteries is a business currently dominated by China. As China also commands the processing of other important battery materials, including manganese, cobalt and nearly all battery-grade graphite, there is concern about the vulnerability of supply chains should China begin restricting supplies of certain raw materials, as it has done in the past. As a result, legislators and carmakers in Europe and North America have been trying to establish local supplies for batteries.

These efforts are about to be given a big boost. Recent breakthroughs in recycling, together with a spate of technological improvements, mean that within a decade or so most of the global demand for raw materials to build new batteries could be met by recycling old ones.
Lithium, manganese and cobalt are widely used to make electrodes called cathodes, the most expensive part of a Li-ion battery. When the battery is recharging, electrons are stripped from lithium atoms on the cathode to create charged particles called ions. The ions then migrate through an electrolyte, typically a liquid medium, to a second electrode called an anode. This is made from graphite, a pure form of carbon. Meanwhile, the electrons created at the cathode travel along the wires of the charging circuit towards the anode, where they reunite with the ions and are stored there. When the battery discharges, the process reverses, with electrons in the circuit powering a device—which in the case of an EV is its electric motor. Although different chemistries can be employed, manganese and cobalt are particularly good at stabilising and boosting the performance of a Li-ion battery.

At present battery recycling is mostly confined to recovering raw materials from the scrap produced by gigafactories. A much richer vein will soon present itself, however, as the first wave of EVs reach the end of their lives. By 2040, according to PwC, a professional-services firm, up to 60% of the materials used to make batteries in Europe could come from recycling old ones, helped along by innovations in recovery processes.

Other analysts take a similar view. Globally, the mining of raw ingredients for battery manufacturing could peak by the mid 2030s, reckons RMI, an American think-tank. This will be caused by a combination of better recycling and continuing advances in battery chemistry, which boosts the energy density of cells so that batteries can be made with fewer raw materials. This, RMI believes, might see mineral extraction for batteries being avoided altogether by 2050.... 

....MUCH MORE

Possibly also of interest:
"A Porsche-backed startup is building a massive battery recycling plant to boost Europe’s EV industry"
There was a time when I thought Veolia, Umicore and maybe Johnson Matthey would be European champions of battery recycling but for whatever reason they never went big.

Battery Recycler Redwood Materials Plans To Enter Manufacturing Business

"A Porsche-backed startup is building a massive battery recycling plant to boost Europe’s EV industry"

There was a time when I thought Veolia, Umicore and maybe Johnson Matthey would be European champions of battery recycling but for whatever reason they never went big.

From CNBC, September 9:

• Cylib, a startup backed by luxury sports car firm Porsche and appliances maker Bosch, is building a massive battery recycling facility in Germany.
• The plant, located in the town of Dormagen in western Germany, will span 236,000 square feet.
• Cylib said the facility is focused on the electric vehicle industry and, upon completion, will have capacity to recycle 30,000 metric tons of end-of-life batteries every year.

A massive battery recycling plant is being built in Germany by Cylib, a startup looking to reduce waste from EV batteries that have reached the end of their life.

Cylib, which is backed by luxury sports car firm Porsche

and appliances maker Bosch, on Monday started work on the new site in the town of Dormagen, in the German federal state of North Rhine-Westphalia.

More than 180 million euros ($200 million) is being pumped into the facility, which is expected to span 236,000 square feet and will produce recycled batteries for the electric vehicle industry in Europe.

Cylib says its facility will be the largest end-to-end lithium-ion battery recycling facility in Europe.

It plans to recycle roughly 30,000 metric tons of end-of-life batteries at the facility each year, making it larger in scale than the current biggest plant, Hydrovolt, a joint venture between Swedish EV battery maker Northvolt and Norway-based aluminum and renewable energy firm Hydro....

....MUCH MORE

Chinese industry is also starting to go large-by-large. If interested see "Battery Recycling: Watch Out Redwood Materials"

Progress On Direct Air Capture Of Carbon Dioxide: "Climeworks Captures Double the CO2 for Half the Energy"

Still a long way to go before this approach is anywhere near cost-effective. And even then there are activists and pressure groups that don't want any human-related CO₂ releases, from agriculture and hydrocarbons and maybe even exhaled breath. (not kidding: see voluntary human extinction movement, Club of Rome [not to one billion as some have claimed but much lower than current levels], Paul Ehrlich etc) and they look upon DAC as enabling continuing releases. All that being said, here's the intro to a 2021 post "Carbon Sucking in Iceland":

This story is an opportunity for me to throw an editorial wrapper around a short announcement.

The plant is small and the technology is expensive but this really is the wave of the future.

As to size, a few years ago Sweden's Lund University calculated that Bill Gates' 59 trips on his jets (I think he has four now, two big Airbus' and two big Gulfstreams) produced 1600 tonnes of CO2.

Here's the headline story and then a bit more editorializing. From The Chemical Engineer, September 21:

Climeworks starts up industrial-scale direct air capture facility

CLIMEWORKS has started operations at the world’s largest direct air capture and CO2 storage facility, in Iceland.

The construction of the facility, known as Orca, began in May 2020. It is constructed with advanced modular technology of container-sized units and has a capture capacity of 4,000 t/y of CO2. It is situated next to ON Power’s Hellisheiði Geothermal Power Plant so that it runs entirely on renewable electricity. The captured CO2 will be stored underground by partner Carbfix, which mixes the CO2 with water for rapid underground mineralisation in a process that takes less than two years....

....MORE

From IEEE Spectrum, June 5:

The world’s first megaton carbon capture site will join a growing field

The geoengineering debate—which, in part, concerns pulling back carbon that’s already in the atmosphere—has been hindered to date by the lack of scalable tech. The Swiss startup Climeworks is hoping to help turn the tide.

The Zurich-based company has just unveiled the latest generation of its direct-air capture (DAC) technology, which it says will help remove millions of tonnes of carbon dioxide a year by the end of the decade.

Climeworks has, in fact, already made a name for itself by building a series of large-scale carbon capture plants in Iceland. The company switched on a facility dubbed Mammoth last month, which is now the world’s largest DAC plant and will ultimately be able to pull 36,000 tonnes of CO₂ out of the air annually.

But speaking at the opening of the Climework’s annual Carbon Removal Summit in Zurich yesterday, co-CEO Jan Wurzbacher noted that according to projections from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the world will probably need to be removing between 6 billion and 16 billion tonnes of CO₂ a year by 2050.

“If we look at our scale-up curves—our growth rates that we need between now and 2050, to achieve those goals—those rates are very similar to the ones that solar PV and wind have shown over decades as well.” —Jan Wurzbacher, Climeworks

While that remains a distant goal, the company has taken a modest step in that direction with the announcement of the third generation of its DAC technology. The new system features a revamped cubelike design and a reengineered sorbent (the material used to absorb CO₂), which Wurzbacher said can capture twice as much carbon dioxide as the previous design. The new system also uses half the energy, while the materials are projected to last three times as long—all of which cuts overall costs by 50 percent....

....MUCH MORE

The 2021 rant continued:

....So this plant, currently the world's largest would remove the equivalent of one guy's travel emissions for 2 1/2 years..

Big whoop. However...

Carbon capture and storage is favored at some of the highest political levels and will be used by companies that are so big they see the expense required to get to negative emissions as a competitive advantage against smaller competitors who will be crushed by the costs. This is the same approach multinationals take toward regulation: bring it on and bury the little guys.

There are voices in the control-freak wing of the green coalition that are already howling that this technology will allow "business-as-usual" to continue which is a threat to their wannabe power over people and economies. They will probably be bought off.

One last note: the approach that Carbfix uses, solidifying the CO2 is absolutely the way to go versus pumping CO2 gas into disused caverns or oil and gas fields or under the sea.

Although more expensive initially, it eliminates the threat of carbon dioxide belches that could be, not just counterproductive to the storage effort, but physically dangerous to people in the vicinity. See Cameroon's Lake Nyos for an example.

If interested in a few more mentions of Climeworks see also April 2021's
Carbon Capture & Storage: The Current State of Play

December 2023's:
"Here Come the Unicorns of Clean Energy"

It's Redwood that we are interested in. The other three, Climeworks, Solugen and Sila Nanotechnologies may or may not make it but Redwood seems to be a possible fortune builder....

And a couple weeks ago:

Oxford Uni.: "The outlook for CO2 removal"

It is still far too expensive to be more than just demonstration projects, now and for another decade minimum.

And as with all such conversations the promoters never, ever, speak of degrees of warming avoided. If interested see after the jump....

"Redwood Materials is partnering with Ultium Cells to recycle GM’s EV battery scrap"

From TechCrunch, May 23:

Redwood Materials, the battery recycling startup founded by former Tesla co-founder JB Straubel, will be recycling production scrap for batteries going into General Motors electric vehicles. 

The company announced Thursday that it’s working with Ultium Cells, the joint battery manufacturing venture between GM and LG Energy Solution, to recycle cathode, anode and cell scrap from both their Warren, Ohio and Spring Hill, Tennessee facilities. 

Battery recycling is a hot industry as automakers and battery manufacturers seek to control their battery material supply, rather than rely on China, the global leader in the space. Incentives in the U.S. and in regions like Europe are piling up for recycled and domestically produced critical battery materials — like lithium, nickel, cobalt, manganese and graphite. 

President Joe Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act, signed in August 2022, provides a tax credit for battery manufacturing and critical mineral processing. Redwood benefited directly from that bill passing in February 2023, when the Department of Energy gave the startup a $2 billion loan to build out its battery recycling facility in Nevada. The DOE also gave Ultium Cells a $2.5 billion loan to develop its cell manufacturing facilities in the U.S....

....MUCH MORE

We are firm believers in the concept of finding waterfalls of money and standing close enough to experience the refreshing splashes that will come your way. Or, here's a 2018 variant:  

Opportunity Knocks: The U.N Says It Need's $74 Trillion Between 2018 and 2030 For the Sustainable Development Goals

...One of the easiest ways to take advantage of the world is to find a firehose of money and go stand next to it. With enough moolah splashing around some of it is sure to land on you....

Most recently on Redwood (May 16):

Battery Recycling: Watch Out Redwood Materials
Redwood Materials is a company I would like to own. Preferably in its entirety bu if that is not possible a share of the business would be acceptable. Some links below....

Battery Recycling: Watch Out Redwood Materials

Redwood Materials is a company I would like to own. Preferably in its entirety bu if that is not possible a share of the business would be acceptable. Some links below.

And from Semafor, May 15:

How China is building the next big green industry

The News
In 2016, Taiyuan became the first Chinese city to begin converting its entire taxi fleet to electric vehicles. Now, it is leading the way again by scrapping them and, in the process, planting the seeds for what may be the world’s next big green industry.

Details about the scrappage program for the more than 8,000 cabs are scarce, but as with a number of other clean-tech sectors — solar panels, electric vehicles, and wind turbines, to name a few — a combination of early and aggressive state direction, mammoth scale, and pointed regulation leave China poised to dominate the nascent world of battery recycling.

Know More
National rules in China require that all taxis — electric or not — be scrapped after eight years or 600,000 kilometers (about 370,000 miles) on the road, to ensure safety and spur technological innovation. (Electric buses, by comparison, get 13 years and 400,000 kilometers.) Authorities in Taiyuan have chosen one company to recycle the cars’ bodies, and another to handle the used batteries, Beijing News reported.

The program in Taiyuan, capital of China’s coal hub province of Shanxi, is expected to be the first of a huge number nationwide in the coming years: The country had put an estimated 132,000 electric taxis on the road by the end of 2020, all of which will have to be replaced in the coming four years. The amount of spent EV batteries in China is projected to soar from 294,000 tons in 2021 to 1.2 million tons in 2025, according to the China Automotive Technology and Research Center. By 2030, the country is expected to have three million tons of them each year, which translates into a 150-billion-yuan ($21 billion) market, the center said.

China’s taxi recycling effort paves the way for an even bigger battery-recycle market going forward as the number of privately owned EVs surges: China is the world’s fastest-growing EV market, with the overall number of “new energy vehicles” — a category that includes hybrids and fuel-cell cars — exploding from 4.9 million in 2020 to 20.4 million last year. (There are no hard scrappage rules for private cars, but EV batteries are typically designed to last five to eight years, and their per-charge range drops as time goes by.)....

....MUCH MORE

Redwood gets a mention at the bottom of this article but for anyone who would like to know more we have on offer:

April 25, 2024: "‘A Damn Hard Thing to Do’: Tesla Co-Founder JB Straubel Takes on Battery Recycling" (Redwood Materials) 

January 24, 2024: Battery Recycler Redwood Materials Plans To Enter Manufacturing Business

If interested see also:

"Here Come the Unicorns of Clean Energy"
It's Redwood that we are interested in. The other three, Climeworks, Solugen and Sila Nanotechnologies may or may not make it but Redwood seems to be a possible fortune builder.

Tech/Manufacturing/Business: "J.B. Straubel talks Tesla, Redwood Materials and keeping a startup mentality at any scale"
And un-manufacturing in the case of Redwood's battery recycling super-mega-giga-plant:

Battery Recycler Redwood Materials Will Have 5 Million Square Feet Under Roof At Its Nevada Campus

That's 115 acres (46.5 hectares) under roof. 

[we are fans: https://climateerinvest.blogspot.com/search?q=redwood+materials]

"‘A Damn Hard Thing to Do’: Tesla Co-Founder JB Straubel Takes on Battery Recycling" (Redwood Materials)

From Bloomberg via Yahoo Finance, April 25:

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]

Battery Recycler Redwood Materials Plans To Enter Manufacturing Business

Catching up with Redwood.

First up, geographic expansion. From Recycling International, December 25:

US-German connection to recover over 95% of battery metals
US firm Redwood Materials has acquired German battery recycler Redux Recycling as part of its European growth strategy.

Redux’s facility in Bremerhaven handles around 10 000 tonnes of lithium-ion batteries per year and its location at the port, one of the largest and most important import harbours for vehicles, is a major advantage. Redwood will be gaining easy access to electric vehicle packs and batteries from across the continent....

Taking it to Umicore, Veolia, Johnson Matthey and the rest of the European players. 

Next up, from Charleston SC's Post and Courier, January 23:

SC battery-recycling plant owner breaks ground on $3.5B Lowcountry project

Redwood Materials broke ground Jan. 23 on its $3.5 billion battery recycling site in Berkeley County with the aim of starting to reclaim materials needed to power electric vehicles before the end of the year.

The Carson City, Nev.-based company plans to eventually hire 1,500 workers at its Ridgeville campus to extract minerals needed to make new EV power packs from old batteries that have outlived their usefulness in a range of consumer products....

And finally, the headline story, also January 23, from Teslarati:

Redwood Materials shares plans to localize battery production in the US

Redwood Materials recently posted about its plans to localize battery production in North America, particularly in the United States. 

In a post on X, Redwood Materials informed people that cathode material accounts for over 50% of a battery cell’s costs. The company highlighted that most cathode production facilities are located outside North America, and Redwood Materials aims to change that.

“We’re building a huge (Airbus A380 for scale) cathode plant with more than 1 million EVs/year of capacity at our Nevada Campus. We’re reducing both the construction cost and the build time through ambitious and detailed engineering, focusing on innovative practices in the plant’s very design and development,” announced Redwood Materials. 

The battery recycling company is determined to strengthen supply chains in North America and reduce its reliance on battery components from foreign nations. Redwood Materials’ goals perfectly align with the Biden Administration’s goals....

....MUCH MORE

If interested see also:

"Here Come the Unicorns of Clean Energy"
It's Redwood that we are interested in. The other three, Climeworks, Solugen and Sila Nanotechnologies may or may not make it but Redwood seems to be a possible fortune builder.

Tech/Manufacturing/Business: "J.B. Straubel talks Tesla, Redwood Materials and keeping a startup mentality at any scale"
And un-manufacturing in the case of Redwood's battery recycling super-mega-giga-plant:

Battery Recycler Redwood Materials Will Have 5 Million Square Feet Under Roof At Its Nevada Campus

That's 115 acres (46.5 hectares) under roof. 

"Here Come the Unicorns of Clean Energy"

It's Redwood that we are interested in. The other three, Climeworks, Solugen and Sila Nanotechnologies may or may not make it but Redwood seems to be a possible fortune builder.

From Barron's, December 13:

It has been a disastrous year for clean-energy stocks, with higher interest rates battering profits. Share prices for almost every solar, wind, and hydrogen company—and several electric-vehicle makers—have fallen by double-digits.

But clean energy’s long-term trajectory is still angled sharply upward. A new generation of companies, undaunted by the current challenges, is moving toward the public markets just as the world begins pouring real money into the energy transition—more than $1.7 trillion this year alone. 

Because the transition represents a stark change with plenty of unproven technologies, these companies all come with high risks—but also potentially high returns. It isn’t often that investors can place bets on a sea change in the gargantuan world of energy. There are dozens of promising clean-energy companies, but only a handful with the necessary size for public markets.

“Just because your technology works, it’s meaningless in the energy industry,” says Gene Berdichevsky, CEO of Sila Nanotechnologies, an electric-vehicle battery company. “It’s amazing the scale that it takes just to get in the game.”

With that in mind, it’s worth considering the small group of companies—Sila among them—that have broken out of the pack and could go public in the next couple of years, most with valuations of more than $1 billion. They were born from lab work and garage-tinkering. Now they’re the new energy unicorns.

Redwood Materials
New battery manufacturing plants are popping up all over the U.S., helped by the Inflation Reduction Act. But the materials that go into batteries are in short supply domestically, and recycling scrapped products will be a key way to replenish those materials.

Redwood Materials, based in Carson City, Nev., is a significant player in the battery-recycling industry. Redwood was founded by JB Straubel, the former chief technology officer and co-founder of Tesla . It has already inked deals with Toyota Motor , Volkswagen , and Panasonic to recycle battery materials. It even recycles some lithium-powered Amazon.com products. By 2025, the company aims to produce enough anode and cathode material to power one million electric vehicles. By 2030, its goal is to make five times that much. 

Redwood is a leader in the nascent industry, because it has a factory already up and running, notes TD Cowen analyst Jeffrey Osborne. That facility recycles material from the Panasonic gigafactory, which builds batteries for Tesla, and other partners. The company got a loan from the Department of Energy to expand its Nevada operations and is building a new factory in South Carolina.

Redwood plans to build “circular” factories that take used material from electric-vehicle makers and process it into parts that can be used in new cars. Toyota announced a deal in November where it will pay Redwood to take material from old electric and hybrid vehicles like the Prius and turn them into cathodes and other items for Toyota’s new EV factories. Cathodes are the most valuable part of the battery, making up about half its value. Right now, there’s almost no cathode manufacturing in the U.S., so auto makers are scrambling to secure as much domestic content as possible. Localizing the supply chain is “central to our mission,” says Jason Thompson, Redwood’s CFO.

Redwood’s business plan isn’t without risk. Competitor Li-Cycle Holdings halted work on a factory in upstate New York in October, and its stock has tumbled 85% this year. Redwood faced some supply disruptions during Covid, but otherwise its capital plan is moving forward on schedule, Thompson says. It helps that top executives worked at Tesla, and are no strangers to obstacles: “We’re fortunate to have that kind of capability on our team.”

Climeworks
Replacing fossil-fuel energy with cleaner alternatives will reduce carbon dioxide emissions. But even a world where every car is an electric vehicle won’t be carbon-free. To reach climate goals, it will be necessary to remove existing carbon from the air. Climeworks is focusing on that goal. “You can think of us as sort of a last-mile provider to net zero,” Climeworks CFO Andreas Aepli tells Barron’s....

....MUCH MORE

Also at Barron's, December 15: "Electric-Vehicle Stocks Have Gotten Slammed. What Investors Should Do Now."

Recent posts on Redwood Materials:

• "EV Battery Recyclers Redwood Materials Raised Over $1 Billion"
• Battery Recycler Redwood Materials Will Have 5 Million Square Feet Under Roof At Its Nevada Campus
• Tech/Manufacturing/Business: "J.B. Straubel talks Tesla, Redwood Materials and keeping a startup mentality at any scale"

As we noted in a 2021 Redwood Materials post, "Watch Out Umicore: Ford partners with battery recycling and materials startup Redwood Materials":

Straubel was more than just Chief Technical Officer at Tesla. He was part of the company's founding team and more than anyone got the batteries and gigafactory into mass production. 

Which may explain the Go Big or Go Home approach to industrial facilities.

Tech/Manufacturing/Business: "J.B. Straubel talks Tesla, Redwood Materials and keeping a startup mentality at any scale"

And un-manufacturing in the case of Redwood's battery recycling super-mega-giga-plant:

Battery Recycler Redwood Materials Will Have 5 Million Square Feet Under Roof At Its Nevada Campus

That's 115 acres (46.5 hectares) under roof. 

As we noted in a 2021 Redwood Materials post, "Watch Out Umicore: Ford partners with battery recycling and materials startup Redwood Materials":

Straubel was more than just Chief Technical Officer at Tesla. He was part of the company's founding team and more than anyone got the batteries and gigafactory into mass production. 

Which may explain the Go Big or Go Home approach to industrial facilities. 

From TechCrunch, September 20:

J.B. Straubel has worn many hats in his career: co-founder of Tesla, Tesla Board Member, and more recently, founder and CEO of battery materials and recycling startup Redwood Materials.

But in his heart, he’s a engineer, he said during a fireside interview at TechCrunch Disrupt.

“I think of myself first and foremost as an engineer. That’s actually what I love doing the most, and I feel like all these other activities are derived out of that. I don’t usually go seeking an entrepreneurial challenge or even sometimes seeking a company.”

But of course, Straubel has helped build some of the most technically challenging, industry-leading companies in the world: Tesla, which he co-founded and led as chief technical officer, and Redwood Materials, which he started in 2017. Tesla, of course, has become the world’s leading electric vehicle brand. Redwood’s mission is slightly different: to recycle up somewhere between 300-500 gigawatt hours (GWh) of batteries every year.

The challenge is enormous and extraordinarily capital intensive. Indeed, Redwood has raised over $2 billion, including a Series D round of over $1 billion that closed late last month, bringing its post-money valuation to north of $5 billion. In addition, the company has swelled to a workforce of 700-800 people. It’s a level of funding that few startups have ever reached – but even still, Redwood is still a startup, Straubel said....

....MUCH MORE

Battery Recycler Redwood Materials Will Have 5 Million Square Feet Under Roof At Its Nevada Campus

Following on September 7's "EV Battery Recyclers Redwood Materials Raised Over $1 Billion". 

From the Nevada Appeal, September 7:

The Gigafactory may be the largest industrial building under roof at Tahoe Reno Industrial Center — and in the state of Nevada — but a neighboring company is rivaling that massive operation.

Redwood Material’s 300-acre campus at Tahoe Reno Industrial Center already includes about 1 million square feet under roof, and there’s currently an additional 2 million square feet of building space under construction, said Don Tatro, Redwood Material’s director of state and local policy.

At full buildout, Redwood Materials expects to have more than 5 million square feet of building space, along with an 815,000 square-foot industrial building at Victory Logistics District in Fernley and its company headquarters on Lockheed Way in Carson City.

Founded in 2017 by former Tesla Chief Technology Officer JB Straubel, Redwood Materials is creating a circular supply chain to recycle materials such as lithium, cobalt, nickel and copper from spent electric vehicle battery packs and consumer electronics powered by lithium-ion batteries.

“Our feedstock is anything from the batteries in laptops, Air pods, tablets and cell phones to EV batteries that we refine into anode and cathode materials,” Tatro said. “If you plug it in and it holds a charge, we will take it.”

Today, Redwood currently receives about 40 metric tons of lithium-ion batteries annually, enough to power more than 100,000 electric vehicles, said Sonja Koch, Redwood’s senior communications and consumer program manager. At full recycling capacity, however, the Northern Nevada facility could handle enough material to create more than 5 million EV batteries each year....

....MUCH MORE

As we noted in a 2021 Redwood Materials post, "Watch Out Umicore: Ford partners with battery recycling and materials startup Redwood Materials":

Straubel was more than just Chief Technical Officer at Tesla. He was part of the company's founding team and more than anyone got the batteries and gigafactory into mass production. 

Which may explain the Go Big or Go Home approach to industrial facilities. 

"EV Battery Recyclers Redwood Materials Raised Over $1 Billion"

From EVannex, September 5:

Tesla co-founder and board member JB Straubel started the electric vehicle battery recycling company Redwood Materials in 2017. Now, as the EV industry continues to expand, the recycling company has raised over $1 billion in a new funding round, officially pushing Redwood past a $5 billion valuation.

Straubel’s Redwood Materials raised over $1 billion in a recent funding round, as reported this week by Forbes. The company performs large-scale recycling for lithium materials, then turning that material into anode and cathode materials to be reused in EV batteries. The news comes after Redwood raised roughly $2 billion since 2019, and after it became eligible for a $2 billion low-interest federal loan. Together, this funding puts the valuation of the battery recycling company above $5 billion....

....MUCH MORE

Previously:
September 2021
Watch Out Umicore: Ford partners with battery recycling and materials startup Redwood Materials
Straubel was more than just Chief Technical Officer at Tesla. He was part of the company's founding team and more than anyone got the batteries and gigafactory into mass production
September 2022
"Battery Recycling Race Heats Up After Inflation Reduction Act"
I always though Umicore and Veolia would lead the way but it seems to be the upstarts that are getting the attention (and money)....
February 2023
Battery Recycling: "Redwood Materials says it wins $2 bln DOE loan for EV materials plant"
Umicore, Johnson Matthey, Veolia and the rest have to be wondering why they didn't set up arms-length American subs to garner some of that sweet, sweet Biden love.
May 2023
"New Tesla low-voltage system a 'big deal' for copper, says Musk" (TSLA)
Two items of import that came out of last week's Tesla Annual Meeting.
Probably the strategically more important is the return to Tesla of co-founder and former Chief Technical Officer JB Straubel as a member of the board of directors. Straubel had departed Tesla in 2019 to found battery recycler Redwood Materials, now up and running and valued at $4 billion or so.

"New Tesla low-voltage system a 'big deal' for copper, says Musk" (TSLA)

Two items of import that came out of last week's Tesla Annual Meeting.

Probably the strategically more important is the return to Tesla of co-founder and former Chief Technical Officer JB Straubel as a member of the board of directors. Straubel had departed Tesla in 2019 to found battery recycler Redwood Materials, now up and running and valued at $4 billion or so.

The other thing to note is the headliner from Mining.com:

In front of an audience of investors, Tesla CEO Elon Musk’s presentation was full of optimism during the 2023 Tesla Shareholder Meeting.

Musk said the company is progressing to achieve 20 million cars produced per year (In 2022, Tesla built 1.37 million), promised camera monitoring to ensure that children do not work in cobalt mines in Africa, and demanded more investment in lithium refineries.

In a moment that went almost unnoticed by the audience, however, Musk mentioned a change that could impact Tesla’s demand for copper.

He confirmed the automaker is switching its models’ low-voltage system from 12 volts to 48 volts.

Tesla says that starting with the Cybertruck (slated to be released this year), the Optimus robot, and all future electric vehicles, the 48V low-voltage system will be used.
“Cars have been operating with 12V batteries for basically about a century, so for the first time in I think over a hundred years we’re actually going to change from 12V outside of the drivetrain to a 48V architecture,” said Musk.

The automotive industry moved from 6V to 12V in the 1960s. Some smaller vehicles still use 6V, while larger vehicles use 24V.

In traditional 12V systems, wiring and components must be larger and heavier to handle high electrical loads. With a 48V system, Tesla expects a reduction in battery weight and cost savings. As a result, it could also result in less copper used in manufacturing.

“First approximation, that means we need only about a quarter as much copper in the car as would be needed for a 12V battery, so that’s a big deal because people often worry about whether there is enough copper,” Musk said. “Yes, there is.”....

....MUCH MORE

Our readers may recall January 25's post "Copper: Freeport-McMoRan (FCX) Earnings and Conference Call Slide Deck (plus Elon Musk does a fact check)" which used this as part of the outro:

No change in copper production is required for the transition to sustainable energy.

Lithium refinement needs to increase dramatically, but lithium ore itself is extremely common throughout Earth.

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) January 22, 2023

Damn, I just got fact checked by Elon Musk. 😢

— Wall Street Silver (@WallStreetSilv) January 22, 2023

Regarding Mr. Straubel, as we mentioned in 2021's "Watch Out Umicore: Ford partners with battery recycling and materials startup Redwood Materials":

Straubel was more than just Chief Technical Officer at Tesla. He was part of the company's 

founding team and more than anyone got the batteries and gigafactory into mass production.

Another of our other mentions:
Battery Recycling: "Redwood Materials says it wins $2 bln DOE loan for EV materials plant"