Redwood Materials, a battery recycling startup founded by Tesla co-founder and former CTO Jeffrey Brian Straubel, recently launched an electric vehicle battery recycling program: Redwood will cooperate with car dealers and battery dismantlers in California, USA. Recycle batteries that have been scrapped in hybrid and pure electric vehicles.
It is understood that the service will be provided free of charge to the waste battery supplier, and the cost of the battery back and the cost of shipping the battery back to Nevada, where the company's headquarters is located, will be borne jointly by the company and partners Volvo and Ford. Redwood will receive all lithium-ion and nickel-metal hydride batteries in California, regardless of the car's make and model.
Straubel admits that the current battery recycling situation is still relatively chaotic, and there is no clear solution. But Straubel believes that "this is exactly what we want to change, so that the United States and everyone in the world can recycle batteries very simply and make sure that these materials have a high recycling rate." ”
What kind of company is Redwood?
Open the company's official website, what comes into view is a green, look closely will find that this is a mountain pasture, the grass is full of cattle and sheep, the owner rides a horse patrol, the picture is a big white character:
"Imagine a world where renewable energy, electric vehicles and sustainable materials will power the future."
Redwood's main business is to develop new processes for material recycling focused on electric vehicle batteries, invent sustainable materials by creating circular supply chains, reuse waste, and reduce the environmental impact of used batteries.
Notably, the company's founder was one of Tesla's five co-founders and worked with Musk for nearly 15 years as Tesla's chief technology officer. In 2017, Straubel, who was also the chief technology officer at Tesla, took some of his energy out of founding Redwood in Nevada, and in 2019, Straubel left Tesla to focus on battery recycling projects.
According to Redwood, its recycling technology is currently capable of recycling 95% of nickel, cobalt, aluminum and graphite in used batteries, as well as more than 80% of lithium, higher than the industry average.
The company's obvious technical advantages, coupled with the founder's gilded resume, Redwood's financing road is unusually smooth. The company has completed three rounds of funding, with old owners Tesla, Amazon, Goldman Sachs, the Canadian Pension Plan Investment Board and Fidelity betting, and the C round of financing is even as high as $700 million. According to media reports, some insiders said that as of July 2021, the company's valuation has reached $3.7 billion.
Its customers are also very famous, in addition to Volvo, Ford, Panasonic, Nissan, Amazon have reached cooperation with Redwood.
Straubel estimates that over the next decade, the old battery recycling project is expected to drive the cost of battery raw materials down to half of today's prices. Redwood also previously revealed that its facility in Carson City will triple in size to increase capacity.
The power battery recycling business is no longer hidden
In the previous new energy industry chain, battery recycling has always been in a corner. With the continuous improvement of the popularity of electric vehicles, there are many heavyweight players in the field, in addition to Straubel, there are not a few lithium battery giants who look at this business, LG Energy, Samsung SDI and so on have been laid out early.
Looking at the domestic market alone, the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology has successively released a white list of battery comprehensive utilization in 2018 and 2021, with a total of 27 companies in two batches, in addition to battery manufacturers such as Ningde Times, BYD, Guoxuan Hi-Tech, etc., which have laid out battery recycling, as well as vehicle manufacturers such as Weilai, third-party recycling enterprises such as Guanghua Technology and Grimme are also among them. In addition, lithium battery material suppliers such as Huayou Cobalt, Zhongwei Co., Ltd., Ganfeng Lithium and Ganzhou Haopeng of Xiamen Tungsten Holdings are actively participating.
Redwood has enough competitors, but fortunately the power battery recycling market is also big enough.
Under normal circumstances, when the remaining capacity of the new energy vehicle power battery is reduced to 70% to 80% of the initial capacity, it is impossible to meet the requirements of on-board use. If the comprehensive recovery rate of 97% of power batteries is calculated according to the conditions of constant metal prices, it is expected that the entire global market will reach 12.2 billion US dollars (about 78.8 billion yuan) from 2021 to 2025.
As the world's largest new energy vehicle market, China is bound to become the largest power battery recycling market. From the data point of view, in 2020, the decommissioning volume of continental power batteries will reach 200,000 tons (about 25GWh), and it is expected that after 2025, the annual number of decommissioned batteries will increase by more than one million.