Redwood Materials, a battery recycler created by Tesla cofounder JB Straubel, says it’s more than tripling the size of its operations in Nevada and will spend “hundreds of millions” to scale up recovery of lithium, cobalt, nickel and other commodity metals it sells to makers of lithium-ion batteries for electric vehicles.
Straubel, speaking in an Energy Department roundtable on Monday, told U.S. Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm, that his Carson City, Nevada-based company is “hiring about 500 people here in just the next one or two years and investing several hundred million dollars into this particular area into those recycling facilities and scaling that up right now.”
Redwood said in an email message that it has purchased 100 acres near Tesla’s Gigafactory in Sparks, Nevada, and intends to expand its current 150,000-square-foot facility in the state by more than 400,000-square-feet. Additionally, it will hire about 500 more workers over the next two years, up from 130 people currently.
Straubel said the expansion is being paid for with privately raised funds, but didn’t say how much the company has raised. Redwood Materials has been tight-lipped about its fundraising activities, disclosing only a July 2020 investment round that brought in $40 million from Amazon, Breakthrough Energy Ventures and Palo Alto-based Capricorn Investment Group. Straubel has likely invested millions more from his own fortune which Forbes estimates is at least $900 million.
As of May, the company was scaled to recover enough material for 45,000 electric car battery packs annually. That could generate as much as $90 million of revenue, based on Benchmark Mineral Intelligence’s estimate that the commodity metal content per pack is worth about $2,000. Buyers of Redwood’s reclaimed alloys include Panasonic, which makes cells at Tesla’s Nevada Gigafactory, and EV battery specialist Envision AESC–which also supply it with lithium-ion scraps. pg slot
(For more on Redwood Materials, see Tesla Tech Whiz Is Mining Riches From Your Old Batteries)
Straubel and executives from U.S. battery manufacturers were participating in the roundtable as part of efforts by the Biden Administration to accelerate domestic production of lithium-ion batteries, the materials needed to make them and recycling of battery packs.