from the perspective of someone who is a tool of the fossil fuel industry. Much of that screed focused on how the batteries for electric cars require large amounts of raw materials that have to be wrested from the Earth and refined — things like lithium, cobalt, and nickel. The author seemed to think those materials are only used to build electric cars, as if no other consumer products use them.
Straubel himself told Randall that Redwood is attempting to break China’s stranglehold on battery materials by creating a domestic loop using recycled critical metals. “The responsibility weighs on me,” he said. “I remember feeling it in the early days at Tesla, when the other manufacturers hadn’t done crap yet, and we had a very palpable sense of holding the flag and running out into the field and saying ‘EVs are the future!’ We felt that if we failed, well, nobody’s going to follow.
Most importantly, RC1 doesn’t use any oxygen. There’s no combustion and therefore no emissions. It simply reduces the glues, plastics, and unwanted fluids into charcoal. The high grade black carbon left over can be sold for use in black paints and industrial lubrication. Redwood currently has a single foil-making machine that can supply enough copper for more than 13,000 long range electric cars each year. A perfectly smooth titanium drum, roughly the size of a small car, spins half-submerged in a bright blue bath of liquid copper sulfate. As it gets zapped with tens of thousands of amps of electricity, a silky sheet of copper forms from the bath and is subsequently wrapped onto a long roll.
So much rides on cathode performance that once a product is approved for use by a major battery manufacturer, the commercial relationship tends to be permanent. “It’s almost the definition of high risk, high reward,” said Andy Leach, an analyst at. The cathode line that Redwood commissioned in March will produce just 50 megawatts worth of cathode a year. Its primary purpose is to perform additional testing with customers before Redwood turns on the giant 20 gigawatt-hour versions late next year.