JB Straubel On Redwood Materials — Electrify Everything, Recycle Endlessly
In a recent interview with MIT Technology Review, JB Straubel, the former chief technology officer at Tesla and founder of battery recycling company Redwood Materials, talked about why he decided to leave Tesla to strike out in a different direction.
“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’s even more clear today.
“The idea was pretty unconventional at the time. Even your question kind of hints at it—it’s 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’s often not very conventional.”
As to why battery recycling was the new area he chose to concentrate on, Straubel said, “Increasingly, the solution to [a] sustainability problem 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’t electrify everything, I think our climate goals are completely sunk. But at the same time, it’s a phenomenal amount of batteries. And I just think we really need to figure out a robust solution at the end of life.
“I think this entire new sustainable economy as we’re envisioning it, with everything electrified, simply can’t work unless you have a closed loop for the raw materials. There aren’t enough new raw materials to keep building and throwing them away; it would fundamentally be impossible.”
JB Straubel On Battery Recycling Technology
It’s all well and good to talk about battery recycling, but the process itself is complex. Redwood Materials is learning as it goes — blazing a trail, you might say. “It’s more complicated than I think many people appreciate,” Straubel says. “There’s 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’s not just a sorting or garbage management problem.
“There’s a lot of room for innovation and these things haven’t been well optimized, or even done at all in some cases. So that’s really the fun stuff as an engineer, where you get to invent and innovate things that haven’t been done two, three, four times already.”
“But something that isn’t 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’t go anywhere. They’re all still there. They don’t get degraded, they don’t get compromised. 99% of those metals (emphasis added), or perhaps more, can be reused again and again and again. Literally hundreds, perhaps thousands of times.”
This is an aspect of the EV revolution few fully appreciate. Sure, there are auto recycling yards that recapture some of the components of conventional cars, but there is nothing that approaches the 99+% recyclability rate that Straubel predicts. There are people running around loose who shriek about how EV owners are just driving their cars into a lake when the battery dies and that soon our landfills will be overflowing with toxic effluent leaking from mountains of discarded batteries. Those people are all about making a political statement, one that is completely divorced from reality.
Getting The Mix Right
One of the issues facing Redwood Materials is there are not yet a large enough supply of used EV batteries to meet the need for recycled materials, and so the company is using some freshly mined minerals to create its products. “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’re architecting the most efficient systems for the long term, where recycled material content is the majority of supply.
“But in the meantime,” Straubel says, “we’re taking a pragmatic view. We have to blend in a certain amount of virgin material — whatever we can get in the most environmentally friendly way — to augment the ramp-up while we need to transition away from fossil fuels. Our goal is to help decarbonize batteries and reduce the energy impact and the embedded CO2. And I think it’s better for the world to remove a fossil fuel vehicle than to say, ‘Well, we can’t build an electric vehicle because we don’t have enough recycled material.’”
Asked if his company is focusing on recycling only batteries with certain chemistries, Staubel said, “I’m 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. And I think it will be a mix. We’re going to see a bigger diversity of battery chemistries and technologies.
“So when we’re 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’s certainly not zero. There’s 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.
“Over the next year, we’re just in an incredibly rapid growth and deployment phase. We are innovating across a whole bunch of different areas simultaneously. It’s really exciting and fun, but it’s also just quite challenging to manage all of the parallel threads as we’re doing it. It’s like a huge multiplayer game of chess or something.
“In the longer term, it’s 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’d say, where our focus and challenges will be is making sure we’re hyper-efficient about scaling up to terawatt-hour scale literally.”
The Looming Climate Crisis
Straubel is clearly focused on the challenges of an overheating climate and feels the need to move forward with electrifying everything as soon as possible. “I generally don’t think we’re going fast enough. I don’t think anyone is. You know, I do have this sense of paranoia and urgency and almost — not exactly — panic. That’s not helpful. But I guess it really derives from a deep feeling that I don’t believe we’re appropriately internalizing how bad climate change is going to be (emphasis added). So I guess I have this anxiety and fear that it’s going to get a whole lot worse than I think most people are expecting.
“And there’s 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’re running flat out as fast as we can, with all that urgency that you felt and hopefully more, it’ll still take us decades.”
And yet, politicians in Wyoming and Virginia are looking to score political points by mocking the transition to electric vehicles, little realizing that this isn’t about politics, it’s about survival of the human species. In the final analysis, it won’t be battery recycling that saves the human race. It will be conquering the fear and ignorance that lead to exacerbating the climate crisis.
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