US-Based EV Battery Recycling Company Predicts Material For 1M EVs a Year

Last year Redwood Materials announced a new program recycling EV batteries (including partnerships with Ford and Volvo). Now Politico reports that America's Department of Energy tentatively awarded them a $2 billion loan, "which the company says will allow it to produce enough battery materials to enable the production of more than a million electric vehicles a year." The Nevada-based company said it plans to ultimately ramp up to producing 100 gigawatt-hours annually of ultra-thin battery-grade materials from both new and recycled sources in the United States for the first time." Redwood founder CEO JB Straubel, who previously worked at Tesla, said at an event announcing the loan that he had a "front row seat" while at the Elon Musk-helmed electric vehicle maker to "some of the bigger challenges the the entire industry would face as it scales," particularly around the battery materials supply chain. "It was somewhat clear even way back then, eight years ago, that this would be a really big bottleneck for the entire industry as it scaled," Straubel said.... Redwood plans to manufacture battery anodes, containing copper and graphite, and cathodes, containing all the critical metals in a battery — like lithium, nickel, and cobalt — amounting to nearly 80 percent of the materials cost of a lithium-ion battery. A Detroit newspaper reports Ford will also announce plans Monday to help build a $2.5 billion electric-vehicle battery plant in Michigan. In fact, this year in America some electric cars could become "as cheap as or cheaper than cars with internal combustion engines," reports the New York Times — specifically because of "increased competition, government incentives and falling prices for lithium and other battery materials."

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