Former CTO of Tesla: That's why I left my job to "dispose of garbage."

As Tesla's former CTO, JB Straubel has been a major player in bringing electric vehicles to the world. He is often credited with inventing key parts of Tesla's battery technology and building the company's charging network.

After leaving Tesla in 2019, Straubel started a new business, his new company, Redwood Materials, a battery recycling company.

Redwood Materials has received more than $1 billion in venture capital. The company is building a $1 billion facility in Nevada, USA, and recently announced plans to build a second facility in South Carolina.

At these plants, Mahogany plans to extract valuable metals such as cobalt, lithium and nickel from used batteries and produce cathodes and anodes for new batteries.

I spoke with Straubel about the role he sees battery recycling in the transition to renewable energy, his plans for mahogany materials, and what's next.

Figure | JB Straubel (Credit: COURTESY PHOTO)

The interviews were edited for clarity and length. (Note: I interned at Tesla in 2016 when Straubel was Tesla's CTO, but we didn't work together.) ）

Q: Why did you decide to leave Tesla and why did you choose battery recycling as your next step?

JB Straubel: Tesla was a great adventure, but with its success, I think it's becoming increasingly clear that the expansion of the battery will mean more raw materials, components, and the battery itself. This is the imminent bottleneck and challenge facing the entire industry. I think there were already signs back then, and now it's clearer.

This idea was unconventional at the time. Even your question hints at this – why would you leave this fascinating and exciting high-performance car company to dispose of the trash? I think entrepreneurship requires a little contrarian investment. I think it's usually not very traditional to make really meaningful innovations.

Q: Why do you think battery recycling is an important part of the energy transition?

JB Straubel: Increasingly, the solution to these sustainability issues is electrification or the addition of batteries. That's great, and I've spent most of my career supporting and helping to accelerate the process. If we don't electrify everything as much as possible, I think our climate goals will be missed. But at the same time, the number of batteries required for this is also very staggering. I just think we really need to find a reliable solution for end-of-life batteries.

I don't think the new sustainable economy that we envision, which electrify everything, won't work unless you have this closed loop on raw materials. There are not enough raw materials to sustain us to constantly build and throw them away, which is fundamentally impossible.

Q: Battery recycling is an intuitive solution to both problems, but please tell me more about the technical challenges of achieving it, and how will it work?

J.B. Straubel: I think it's a lot more complicated than a lot of people think. A great deal of chemistry, chemical engineering and production engineering is used to manufacture and improve all components in the battery. It's not just a matter of sorting or waste management.

There's a lot of room for innovation, and a lot of things haven't been well optimized or even tried at all in some cases. So as an engineer, it's really fun to invent and innovate things that haven't been done yet, or are rarely done.

However, the metal inside the battery has a high degree of reuse. We put all these materials in batteries and electric cars and leave it alone.

They're always there, hard to degrade and undamaged, and more than 99% of the metal can be reused again and again, probably hundreds or thousands of times.

Q: We won't see a lot of electric vehicles scrapped for a long time. How to deal with the shortage of used battery supply?

JB Straubel: I see this company as a sustainable battery materials company. One of our main goals is to look at very long-term situations and ensure that we are building the most effective long-term systems where recyclable materials are an important link in the supply chain.

But at the same time, we have adopted a pragmatic approach. We must blend a certain amount of raw materials – in the most environmentally friendly way, no matter how much we can get – to help us make the transition from fossil fuels.

Q: Is this a clear decision for you to use mined raw materials instead of insisting on using only recycled scrap?

JB Straubel: I think it was a natural decision. Our goal is to help decarbonize batteries, reduce energy impact and "embedded" CO2. It's better for the world to actually reduce a car that uses fossil fuels than to "not make an electric car because there aren't enough recyclable materials."

Q: When I visited, I felt a sense of urgency. Do you feel like you're moving fast enough? Do you think the industry is moving fast enough?

JB Straubel: I don't think we're moving fast enough. You know, I do have this paranoia and urgency, and a little bit of panic, but it doesn't help.

But I think it really stems from a deep sense that I don't believe we're properly understanding how bad climate change is going to be. That's why I have this anxiety, worrying that the situation will be worse than most people think.

Now is the only point in time for us to prepare and react. The scale of all of this is so great that even if we run as fast as we can, and we have a sense of urgency, we still need decades.

Q: Do you think you can handle all the battery chemistries that may arise in this industry in the future? What if everyone used cheaper iron phosphate, or if everyone started switching to a different technology like solid-state?

JB Straubel: I really don't know. I just want to make sure we're focused on the bigger picture, which is figuring out how we can make the transition to sustainability holistically. That's why we want to support any battery technology with the best performance.

I think we're going to see a hybrid, which is the diversity of battery chemistry and technology.

So when we design this circular system, we need to consider all the different technologies, which have advantages and disadvantages. Different materials are challenging in different ways.

Obviously, the total value of the commodity metal of iron phosphate is lower, but it is certainly not zero. I also see great opportunities to recycle lithium and copper. So I think each material has its own properties, and we have to learn how to manage them.

Q: What do you see as the biggest challenge for mahogany in the coming year and in the long term?

JB Straubel: In the next year, we're going to be in an amazing phase of rapid growth and deployment. We innovate in many different areas at the same time. It's really exciting and fun, but when we do, it's also quite challenging to manage all the parallel work. It's like a massive multiplayer chess game.

In the long run, our goal will increasingly be focused on scaling and expanding efficiency. It's a huge industry. The scale of the facilities we build, the amount of materials, and the capital requirements are enormous. So I think in the coming decades, our focus and challenge will be to make sure that we stay efficient as we scale.

Support: Ren

Original:

https://www.technologyreview.com/2023/01/17/1066915/tesla-former-cto-battery-recycling/