Tesla cofounder digs for the new "black gold"

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Redwood Materials, run by Tesla cofounder JB Straubel, is building North America's biggest battery recycling operation. Tech Editor Alistair Barr visited the Nevada factory/plant in March to see how the company is creating the new "black gold."

Transcript

00:00I visited Redwood Materials in March. This is a company that's working on what's known as

00:05the new black gold. What is black gold these days? Well, oil used to be called black gold.

00:10Now it's a substance known as cathode active material or cam. This is a combination of metals

00:15and minerals that make up about 60% of the value of EV batteries and a whole 15% of the value of

00:22an entire electric vehicle. Redwood Materials, run by Tesla co-founder JB Straubel, is building

00:28the biggest battery recycling operation in North America. They carefully heat these old

00:33batteries to just the right temperature to tease out the base ingredients, which include things like

00:38nickel, manganese, cobalt and lithium. The next step is combining all this into cam, which is a lot more

00:44valuable. Redwood can now recover about 98% of all the critical minerals from old batteries. The

00:51problem is that once these base materials have been salvaged, they have to be shipped off to Asia,

00:56usually China, where they are a find into more useful products such as cam. That's really,

01:01really inefficient. And this is where Redwood comes in. Instead, the company will combine these

01:05metals and minerals into cam inside a giant new building right here in the US that should cut down

01:11on this ridiculous 50,000 mile supply chain. Redwood aims to churn out 100 gigawatt hours worth of cam

01:20per year. That should be enough to support the production of 1.3 million electric vehicles annually.

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