BATTERY RECYCLING FIRM WINS $2B LOAN
Energy Dept. funds to provide components for a million EVs per year
A Nevada company that recycles batteries for electric vehicles has won a $2 billion green energy loan from the Biden administration.
Redwood Materials, a recycling venture founded by the former chief technology officer at Tesla secured a conditional loan from the Energy Department’s Advanced Technology Vehicles Manufacturing program, which helped Tesla more than a decade ago.
Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm announced the grant Thursday during a visit to Redwood’s facility in Nevada with Gov. Joe Lombardo.
“If finalized, this $2 billion loan is going to help Redwood complete this project to produce critical components for EV batteries,” Granholm said.
“It’s going to be a slam dunk for our domestic, burgeoning electric vehicle industry, providing these battery components for more than a million electric vehicles every year,” she added.
Battery recycling will help the U.S. establish its own electric-vehicle supply chain, a major goal of the Biden administration as it seeks to move away from gaspowered cars in the larger fight against climate change.
The Energy Department said its conditional commitment demonstrates its intent to finance the project, but several steps remain for the project to reach critical milestones and certain conditions must be satisfied before officials approve a final loan.
Redwood Materials was founded in 2017 by Jeffrey “JB” Straubel, Tesla’s former chief technology officer. It now has more than 300 employees who recycle used batteries and has supply contracts with Ford and with Panasonic, which makes batteries for Tesla.
CEO Straubel said the company already has more material than it can process from spent consumer batteries from lawnmowers, cellphones and toothbrushes, as well as production scraps from lithium-ion battery manufacturing.
The company says it can recover more than 95 percent of the elements in a spent battery, including lithium, nickel, cobalt, manganese, and copper. The metals are then used to make anode and cathode components for new battery cells.
Redwood Materials “is going to play this outsized role in bringing the batteries supply chain home — because you’re focused on the pieces that we don’t have in the United States,” Granholm told employees at Thursday’s event. “You guys are making history in this.”
Redwood recently announced plans to build a $3.5 billion battery manufacturing and recycling factory in South Carolina. The company plans to pull out key components of batteries and reuse them to make electrodes for electric vehicles.
The DOE loan is targeted for construction and expansion of a battery materials campus in McCarren, Nev., that will support the growing electric vehicle market in the U.S. Once fully operational, the project would be the first domestic facility to support production of anode copper foil and cathode active materials a lithium-ion battery manufacturing process. The process would recycle endof-life battery and production scrap and remanufacture it into critical materials, the Energy Department said.
Redwood Materials is expected to create about 3,400 construction jobs and employ about 1,600 full-time workers.
Redwood said that it expects to produce 100 gigawatt hours annually of ultra-thin battery-grade copper foil and cathode-active materials from both new and recycled material in the U.S. That’s enough to produce more than a million electric vehicles a year.