A Tesla Co-Founder Just Solved EVs’ Biggest Problem

Source: Medium, Will Lockett
Photo: Battery Cells — Redwood Materials

This might be more revolutionary than any Tesla vehicle.

Electric vehicles are awesome. Instant torque, no asphyxiating tailpipe pollution, and overall far lower emissions than combustion vehicles — even if you charge them up with electricity from a coal-fired power plant. However, this doesn’t mean they are beacons of sustainability. The battery packs that power them have a horrific environmental impact. The raw materials needed to make them, like nickel, manganese, copper, and lithium, all have abominable mining practises that cause habitat loss, carbon emissions, and heavy metal leaching that poison the surrounding ecosystem. But JB Straubel, former Tesla CTO and one of Tesla’s five co-founders, has just developed a brilliant solution to this pressing issue: battery recycling!

Now, you might think this is a fairly obvious solution. After all, there are literally millions of tonnes of dead lithium-ion cells currently sitting in e-waste sites around the world, all of which contain high concentrations of these precious raw materials. Surely it is easier to access them than digging up minerals from giant mines and refining out the metals we need? Well, sadly, no.

You see, battery recycling is incredibly complex. First of all, there is no standard form factor or size for a battery, so a recycling plant has to be able to deal with cylindrical, pouch, and prismatic batteries, all of which require different tools and processes to pry open safely. Cells also aren’t built to be recycled. This means that both the casing can be hard to open without damaging the internals, and the individual materials inside can be so strongly bonded together that separating out the metals can be nearly impossible. Then there is dealing with any residual charge inside the battery and the fact that the materials they use are incredibly reactive. This makes the recycling process a health and safety nightmare and highly unreliable. I mean, have you ever seen what happens to a lump of lithium when it hits the water? I will give you a clue: it goes BANG!

As such, it is instead easier and cheaper to source virgin raw materials and build a brand new battery than recycle old materials and have a more sustainable circular economy. That was, until recently, as JB’s Redwood Materials seems to have solved EV battery recycling!

Redwood has been developing battery recycling technology since 2017. However, over the past year, it has conducted a pilot programme to collect and recycle dead EVs and hybrid batteries from Volvo and Ford. These packs were of several form factors but also used two chemistries: NiMh and lithium-ion. The NiMh cells came from older hybrid vehicles, while the lithium-ion cells came from more modern hybrids and EVs. This variety of cells added a level of real-world complexity to the pilot programme, enabling both Redwood and its partner businesses, which now include the VW Group and Panasonic as well as Volvo and Ford, to assess the usefulness of their technology. The results didn’t disappoint.

Overall, Redwood managed a massive 95% material recovery while extracting lithium, cobalt, copper, nickel, and manganese, which is incredibly impressive considering how damaged many of the cells would have been. This high efficiency shows that their top-secret methodology is working. It also means that Redwood can offer a far cheaper overall recycling option than anyone else.

This is a damn good thing, as their business model is to take the extracted raw materials and sell them to battery manufacturers — or auto manufacturers making their own batteries — as anode material for a profit. A plethora of manufacturers are deeply interested in sourcing their anode material from Redwood, as it will reduce their overall environmental impact, have a far more stable supply chain than the open market, and give their batteries a unique selling point. What’s more, Redwood’s anode material has already been proven to work incredibly well. The U.S. Department of Energy’s Argonne National Laboratory tested them against ones built from virgin raw material and found that they had identical cycle-life performance, discharge capacity, and Coulombic efficiency.

Sadly, there is still a long way to go before Redwood can recycle EV batteries in this manner and turn a profit. These cells are larger, use more complex chemistries, and are built with more robust cases, making recycling them more expensive. But Redwood can recycle smaller batteries, like those in your laptop and phone, and turn a profit. Moreover, thanks to its partnership with Audi, Redwood has a steady supply of these cells.

Redwood is right on the cusp of scaling up and making Benjamins from recycling dead EV cells. But thanks to a $2 billion loan from the DoE and backing from its group of partners, Redwood can break past this threshold and start scaling up.

At this point, I should point out that, oddly, Tesla hasn’t partnered with Redwood. You’d think sharing a co-founder and being the largest EV maker in the US would be a no-brainer, but I think I know why they haven’t. Tesla’s flagship 4680 battery pack is structural, meaning it forms a rigid part of the car and takes load-bearing stress. This makes the vehicle lighter and more efficient, but to ensure the pack is strong enough and cheap enough to produce, the cells are set in a giant block of resin. It is nearly impossible to get these cells out of this resin block without breaking them, which makes recycling them an utter nightmare. However, as always, Musk promises this isn’t a problem. But on the face of it, it appears like Tesla’s batteries simply aren’t compatible with Redwood’s recycling processes.

Ultimately, it seems as though Redwood has solved EVs’ biggest problem and just needs to scale up to put it into action, and thanks to its abundance of backers and vast sums of government money, it can now do that! Which means that soon, the EV industry will become a lot more circular and sustainable, and we can take a significant leap forward in saving the precious planet we call home.

https://medium.com/predict/a-tesla-co-founder-just-solved-evs-biggest-problem