{"id":598725,"date":"2023-01-18T06:49:33","date_gmt":"2023-01-18T12:49:33","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/news.sellorbuyhomefast.com\/index.php\/2023\/01\/18\/this-is-where-teslas-former-cto-thinks-battery-recycling-is-headed\/"},"modified":"2023-01-18T06:49:33","modified_gmt":"2023-01-18T12:49:33","slug":"this-is-where-teslas-former-cto-thinks-battery-recycling-is-headed","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/2023\/01\/18\/this-is-where-teslas-former-cto-thinks-battery-recycling-is-headed\/","title":{"rendered":"This is where Tesla\u2019s former CTO thinks battery recycling is headed"},"content":{"rendered":"
\n
\n

Battery recycling is one of MIT Technology Review\u2019s 10 Breakthrough Technologies of 2023. Explore\u00a0the rest of the list here.<\/a><\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n

As Tesla\u2019s former chief technology officer, JB Straubel has been a major player in bringing electric vehicles to the world. He\u2019s often credited with inventing key pieces of Tesla\u2019s battery technology and establishing the company\u2019s charging network. After leaving Tesla in 2019, Straubel began a new venture: Redwood Materials, a battery recycling company.\u00a0<\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\n

\n

Redwood has raised nearly $800 million in venture funding. It\u2019s building a billion-dollar facility in Nevada and recently announced plans for a second campus outside Charleston, South Carolina. In these plants, Redwood plans to extract valuable metals such as cobalt, lithium, and nickel from used batteries and produce cathodes and anodes for new ones.\u00a0<\/p>\n

I spoke to Straubel about the role he sees battery recycling playing in the transition to renewable energy, his plans for Redwood, and what\u2019s next. You can read my full piece about battery recycling here<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Our conversation has been edited for clarity and length. (Note:<\/em> I worked as an intern at Tesla in 2016, while Straubel was still CTO, though we didn\u2019t work directly together.<\/em>)\u00a0<\/p>\n

Why did you decide to leave Tesla, and why did you pick battery recycling as your next step?\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n

Certainly Tesla was an amazing adventure, but as it was succeeding, I think it was becoming more obvious that battery scaling would present the need to get so many more raw materials, components, and batteries themselves. That was this looming bottleneck and challenge for the whole industry, even way back then. And I think it\u2019s even more clear today.\u00a0<\/p>\n

The idea was pretty unconventional at the time. Even your question kind of hints at it\u2014it\u2019s like, why did you leave this glamorous, exciting high-performance car company to go work on garbage? I think entrepreneurship involves being a little bit contrarian. And I think to really make meaningful innovation, it\u2019s often not very conventional.<\/p>\n

Why do you see battery recycling as an important part of the energy transition?\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n

Increasingly, the<\/em> solution to some of these sustainability problems is to electrify it and to add a battery to it, which is great, and I spent the majority of my career championing that and helping accelerate that. And if we don\u2019t electrify everything, I think our climate goals are completely sunk. But at the same time, it\u2019s a phenomenal amount of batteries. And I just think we really need to figure out a robust solution at the end of life.\u00a0<\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\n

\n

I think this entire new sustainable economy as we\u2019re envisioning it, with everything electrified, simply can\u2019t work unless you have a closed loop for the raw materials. There aren\u2019t enough new raw materials to keep building and throwing them away; it would fundamentally be impossible.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Battery recycling is an intuitive solution to those two issues, but tell me more about the technical challenge of pulling it off, and how it would work.<\/strong><\/p>\n

It\u2019s more complicated than I think many people appreciate. There\u2019s just a whole ton of chemistry, chemical engineering, and production engineering that has to happen to make and refine all of the components that go into a battery. It\u2019s not just a sorting or garbage management problem.\u00a0<\/p>\n

There\u2019s a lot of room for innovation, and these things haven\u2019t been well optimized, or even done at all in some cases. So that\u2019s really the fun stuff as an engineer, where you get to invent and innovate things that haven\u2019t been done two, three, four times already.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n

But something that isn\u2019t intuitive is just what a high level of reusability the metals inside of a battery have. All of those materials we put into a battery and into an EV don\u2019t go anywhere. They\u2019re all still there. They don\u2019t get degraded, they don\u2019t get compromised\u201499% of those metals, or perhaps more, can be reused again and again and again. Literally hundreds, perhaps thousands of times.<\/p>\n

\n

I don\u2019t believe we\u2019re appropriately internalizing how bad climate change is going to be.<\/p>\n

JB Straubel<\/cite><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

There are not going to be a lot of electric vehicles coming off the roads for a long time<\/a>. How are you thinking about navigating that and facing shortages in your supply of used batteries?\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n

I really see our position as a sustainable battery materials company. One of our key objectives and goals is to look at the very long term and to make sure we\u2019re architecting the most efficient systems for the long term, where recycled material content is the majority of supply.\u00a0<\/p>\n

But in the meantime, we\u2019re taking a pragmatic view. We have to blend in a certain amount of virgin material\u2014whatever we can get in the most environmentally friendly way\u2014to augment the ramp-up while we need to transition away from fossil fuels.\u00a0<\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\n

\n

Was that a clear decision to you, to supplement with mined material versus sticking to only using recycled material?\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n

I\u2019d say it\u2019s a very natural decision to make. Our goal is to help decarbonize batteries and reduce the energy impact and the embedded CO2. And I think it\u2019s better for the world to remove a fossil-fuel vehicle than to say, \u201cWell, we can\u2019t build an electric vehicle because we don\u2019t have enough recycled material.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

When I visited<\/a>, I definitely felt a sense of urgency. Do you feel like you\u2019re moving fast enough, and do you feel like this industry is moving fast enough?\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n

I generally don\u2019t think we\u2019re going fast enough. I don\u2019t think anyone is. You know, I do have this sense of paranoia and urgency and almost\u2014not exactly\u2014panic. That\u2019s not helpful.\u00a0<\/p>\n

But I guess it really derives from a deep feeling that I don\u2019t believe we\u2019re appropriately internalizing how bad climate change is going to be. So I guess I have this anxiety and fear that it\u2019s going to get a whole lot worse than I think most people are expecting.\u00a0<\/p>\n

And there\u2019s such inertia to it, so now is our only time to really prepare and react. And the scale of all this is so big that even when we\u2019re running flat out as fast as we can, with all that urgency that you felt and hopefully more, it\u2019ll still take us decades.<\/p>\n

Do you feel you can handle any battery chemistry that industry comes up with? What if everybody goes to cheaper chemistries like iron phosphate, or if everybody starts moving to really different technologies, like solid state<\/a>?<\/strong><\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\n

\n

I\u2019m really genuinely pretty agnostic on this. I want to make sure that we are focused on the bigger picture, which is figuring out how we enable a transition to sustainability overall. And therefore, we really are rooting for whatever battery technology ends up having the best performance.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n

And I think it will be a mix. We\u2019re going to see a bigger diversity of battery chemistries and technologies.\u00a0<\/p>\n

So when we\u2019re designing this circular system, we need to think about all the different technologies, and they have pros and cons. Some are more challenging in different ways. Obviously, iron phosphate has a lower total commodity metal value, but it\u2019s certainly not zero. There\u2019s a great opportunity to recycle lithium and copper from those. So I think each one has its own set of characteristics that we have to manage.<\/p>\n

What do you see as Redwood\u2019s biggest challenge in the next year, and then in the long term?<\/strong><\/p>\n

Over the next year, we\u2019re just in an incredibly rapid growth and deployment phase. We are innovating across a whole bunch of different areas simultaneously. It\u2019s really exciting and fun, but it\u2019s also just quite challenging to manage all of the parallel threads as we\u2019re doing it. It\u2019s like a huge multiplayer game of chess or something.\u00a0<\/p>\n

In the longer term, it\u2019s increasingly going to be about scale and efficiency of scaling. This is just a huge, huge industry. The physical size of these facilities is massive, the amount of materials is massive, and the capital requirements are really massive as well. So I think over decades into the future, I\u2019d say, where our focus and challenges will be is making sure we\u2019re hyper-efficient about scaling up to terawatt-hour scale, literally.<\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\n<\/div>\n

Read More<\/a>
\n Casey Crownhart<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Battery recycling is one of MIT Technology Review\u2019s 10 Breakthrough Technologies of 2023. Explore\u00a0the rest of the list here. As Tesla\u2019s former chief technology officer, JB Straubel has been a major player in bringing electric vehicles to the world. He\u2019s often credited with inventing key pieces of Tesla\u2019s battery technology and establishing the company\u2019s charging<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":598726,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[148,46,37],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-598725","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-former","category-technology","category-teslas"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/598725","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=598725"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/598725\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/598726"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=598725"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=598725"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=598725"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}