WORLD NEWS | Battery recycling company secures $2B loan from DOE

WASHINGTON, Feb. 9 (AP) — A Nevada company that recycles batteries for electric vehicles has won a $2 billion green energy loan from the Biden administration.

Redwood Materials, a recycling business founded by Tesla’s former chief technology officer, received a conditional loan from the Energy Department’s Advanced Technology Vehicle Manufacturing program, which helped Tesla more than a decade ago.

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Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm will tour Redwood’s Nevada plant with Nevada Governor Joe Lombardo on Thursday.

Redwood recently announced plans for a new $3.5 billion battery manufacturing and recycling facility in South Carolina. The Carson City, Nevada-based company plans to extract key components of batteries such as nickel, cobalt, lithium and copper and repurpose them to make electrodes for electric vehicles.

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DOE loan to build and expand a battery materials campus in McAllen, Nevada that will support the growing U.S. electric vehicle market Once fully operational, the project will be the first in the country to support anode copper foil and positive active materials Li-ion battery manufacturing process. The DOE said in a blog post that the process would recycle end-of-life batteries and production waste and remanufacture them into critical materials.

Redwood Materials is expected to create about 3,400 construction jobs and employ about 1,600 full-time employees, the DOE said.

In a statement, Redwood said it expects to produce 100 GWh of ultra-thin battery-grade copper foil and cathode active materials per year in the U.S. using virgin and recycled feedstock. This will provide enough battery material for the domestic production of more than 1 million electric vehicles a year, the company said.

Redwood Materials was founded in 2017 by former Tesla CTO Jeffrey “JB” Straubel. It now has more than 300 employees who recycle used batteries and has supply contracts with Ford and Panasonic, which makes batteries for Tesla.

Redwood CEO Straubel told The Associated Press last year that recycling battery materials would help the U.S. build its own electric vehicle supply chain.

“Redwood fills a critical gap in the entire field, and our goal is to close the loop on all the materials we’ve already mined and made into products, keeping them in the regions where they’re bought and used,” Straubel told The Associated Press.

“Every battery we can recycle is equivalent to a battery, and we don’t need to mine the material again. So our goal is to fill the recycled raw material gap and fill the supply chain gap.”

The Energy Department said the project will help meet President Joe Biden’s goal of boosting domestic recycling and manufacturing of critical materials. “Domestic production of these battery components is critical to our national security, building our supply chain, and strengthening our economy over the long term,” the department said in a statement.

The department said the use of recycled materials would help improve U.S. energy security and facilitate the growth of reliable, large-scale U.S. production of electric vehicle batteries.

The Energy Department said its conditional commitment showed the department’s intention to finance the project, but the project still needs to take several steps to reach key milestones and must meet certain conditions before officials can approve the final loan. (Associated Press)

(This is an unedited and auto-generated story from a Syndicated News feed, the content body may not have been modified or edited by LatestLY staff)