By Tim Higgins | Photographs by Max Whittaker for The Wall Street Journal
Almost every day old iPhones and other used personal electronics
arrive by the truckload at a warehouse in Carson City, Nev., where
workers crack them open, pull out their batteries and strip them
for raw materials.
To JB Straubel, one of the brains behind Tesla Inc., that refuse
holds the key to driving the electric car revolution forward -- and
making the vehicles affordable enough for everyone to own one.
Mr. Straubel, Tesla's longtime chief technology officer,
pioneered the lithium-ion battery powertrain design that helped
propel the Silicon Valley company to what is now the highest
valuation in the car industry. Since leaving Tesla about a year
ago, he has been trying to solve a problem created by that success:
Where to find all the nickel, cobalt and lithium needed to make the
batteries that power Tesla's cars and their growing list of
rivals.
Extracting those materials from nature, through mining and other
processes, is costly and difficult, and production is lagging far
behind expected demand. Mr. Straubel's company, Redwood Materials,
is taking a different tack, quietly aiming to build the biggest car
battery-recycling operation in the U.S. The 44-year-old is betting
that he can perfect a fast and efficient way of collecting and
repurposing those materials to disrupt the centuries-old mining
industry.
"Forever the entire market has been dictated by the commodity
price of these metals," Mr. Straubel said in his first in-depth
interview about his new venture since it was formed in 2017 while
still at Tesla. "This is a chance to change that whole equation and
to realize material cost savings in a way that short circuits that
industry."
He and Tesla Chief Executive Elon Musk share an obsession with
electric vehicles but in other aspects are mirror opposites -- Mr.
Musk a swaggering showman, Mr. Straubel a behind-the-scenes
engineer whose former employees tell stories of him swapping out
lightbulbs at hotels that he found inefficient. Mr. Straubel has
been interested in chemistry and batteries since childhood in
Wisconsin where a lab accident left a scar down his left cheek and
a story to tell when he went on to earn degrees at Stanford
University. At school, he gained a reputation in the burgeoning
electric car crowd, for converting an old Porsche into an electric
car and drag racing it for fun.
Now he is engaged in difficult and sometimes hazardous work on a
grand scale. The ovens involved in the recycling run at
temperatures of 2,700 degrees Fahrenheit to reduce the materials to
brightly colored powders. Lithium-ion cells are prone to catching
fire if not properly handled, and the packs housing them often
weigh thousands of pounds and come in different sizes and
configurations. It isn't clear yet what kind of market there will
be for the recycled car batteries and who the competition will be
as an assortment of longtime recyclers, mining companies and
startups are eyeing the market. Few are willing to make huge
investments yet required for the machinery and tools needed for
such work.
It is work that is essential, Mr. Straubel says, if the industry
is going to continue to increase production of electric cars at the
pace companies are planning. Regulatory pressures to lower
emissions and falling battery prices have led almost every major
car manufacturer to include electric vehicles in their product
lineup. That is expected to drive a surge in global demand for
lithium-ion batteries in the next five years to almost 800 gigawatt
hours from 177 gwh last year, or about 22 times the amount of cells
produced at Tesla's giant factory outside of Reno in 2019,
according to Simon Moores, managing director of researcher
Benchmark Mineral Intelligence.
The cost of batteries has long been the biggest obstacle to
making electric cars affordable for the masses. As a result,
electric vehicles still carry a hefty price premium compared with
gas engine cars. McKinsey & Co. estimates that premium at
$12,000 on average. Hyundai Motor Co., one of the few to offer the
same vehicle in an all-electric and gas version, charges $17,000
more for the plug-in Kona sport-utility vehicle.
Tesla has made great strides in reducing battery costs and is
expected to detail further advances during its Battery Day event on
Sept. 22. In its early days the biggest cost of the batteries lay
in the complex processes to assemble them. As those processes have
been perfected, Mr. Straubel says 50% to 75% of the cost of a
battery for the industry now lies with its raw materials -- where
he sees potential for recycling to lower costs.
At the same time, the supply of used batteries is exploding.
Half-a-million electric vehicles are expected to be scrapped in
2025, according to environmental engineer Maria Kelleher, who
specializes in recycling and renewable energy. The figure should
jump to more than one million vehicles in 2030, she projects.
Mr. Straubel already has won over some big name investors. In
his first fundraising round this year, he raised around $40 million
from investors led by Capricorn Investment Group and Breakthrough
Energy Ventures, an environmental investment fund that includes
Amazon.com Inc. founder Jeff Bezos and Microsoft Corp. co-founder
Bill Gates. Dipender Saluja, a managing director at Capricorn, said
what Mr. Straubel is proposing represents a shift in thinking.
"It's about rebuilding what I just finished using exactly the same
material," he said.
Tesla and Mr. Musk aren't part of this venture, though Mr.
Straubel remains on friendly terms with his former employer.
Instead, Mr. Straubel aims to work with the entire automotive
industry, developing recycling processes that work for any battery
and car design.
Mr. Straubel first became enamored of lithium-ion batteries for
cars around 2003. That year he hung around a Los Angeles area car
shop that experimented with the idea of stringing together cells to
power a car dubbed the Tzero. Mr. Straubel, then 27, wanted to
create his own car with 10,000 cells that he estimated capable of
crossing the U.S. in a single charge and sought money from Mr.
Musk, who was sitting on a fortune from his share of PayPal and
investing in a rocket startup called Space Exploration Technologies
Corp.
During a 2003 lunch to talk about an unmanned, hydrogen-powered
airplane, Mr. Straubel raised his other passion, noting his car
project and the work at the shop called AC Propulsion.
Mr. Musk wanted an electric sports car of his own but the shop
wasn't interested in converting one for him. He turned instead to a
tiny startup in Menlo Park called Tesla Motors that had just got
off the ground in hopes of making its own sports car to be dubbed
the Roadster and was looking for investors.
Through a string of events Mr. Musk became Tesla's largest
investor and the public face of Tesla, turning the startup into a
household name in part through his showmanship and swagger. Mr.
Straubel was hired as an early employee where his contribution was
so great that Mr. Musk considers him a co-founder of Tesla.
The partnership has made Mr. Straubel a rich man. The small
stake that he held in Tesla when he departed last year would be
worth more than $600 million today if he didn't sell any shares,
according to FactSet data. His time at Tesla also introduced him to
his future wife, Boryana, whom he married in 2013. She's a
self-described nerd who shares her husband's affinity for data.
They have a home outside of Carson City and in Silicon Valley.
Despite having helped create some of the quickest cars in the
world, his true love is batteries and not cars. He is also a pilot
who spends most of his time in the air in a German-made Stemme S10
glider, which, he said, is "one of the few airplanes much more
efficient than a car."
Mr. Straubel is well versed in the frustrating history of the
electric car. Auto makers before had experimented with expensive
batteries that were heavy and held comparatively little charge, so
electric vehicles were pricey and impractical, and sales failed to
take off.
Mr. Straubel and Mr. Musk changed that when they began
delivering Tesla's Roadster sports car in 2008. It featured almost
7,000 battery cells tightly packed together in a box in the rear of
the vehicle. The typical laptop computer battery has just a handful
of such cells. The design delivered a car that could go more than
200 miles on a single charge, and go from zero to 60 miles-per-hour
in 3.9 seconds.
The Roadster and the Model S luxury sedan that followed in 2012
still appealed mainly to a niche audience of wealthy enthusiasts.
By 2013, Mr. Musk set his sights on turning Tesla into a
mass-market car maker. He and Mr. Straubel plotted the first mega
battery factory to produce the many billions of cells they would
need in coming years for the Model 3 compact car, the company's
biggest bet electric vehicles could go mainstream.
The two planned big. The so-called Gigafactory that Tesla set
out to build with Japanese partner Panasonic Corp. was designed to
initially produce about 35 gigawatt hours of cells annually at the
plant in Sparks, Nev., for 500,000 vehicles, or roughly what the
entire battery industry combined was making in 2013.
The electric car industry has exploded since then. Tesla built
about 35,000 vehicles in 2014. The company, before the coronavirus
pandemic, had planned to sell around half a million this year, and
rivals such as General Motors Co., Nissan Motor Co., and South
Korea's Hyundai add to the total as the industry goes global.
To meet that demand, a building boom is occurring around the
world to copy Tesla's Gigafactory model. China is building a
mega-battery factory every week while in the U.S. one is opening
every four months, Mr. Moores said.
But production is constrained by the lack of raw materials.
Commodity prices for such key ingredients as lithium and cobalt
have taken a roller-coaster ride in recent years amid excitement
and skepticism for electric cars. Ingredients, such as cobalt,
often are sourced in politically fraught places leaving suppliers
eager to find dependable sources. Cobalt comes from mines around
the world, including the Democratic Republic of the Congo.
Mr. Musk went so far on a recent earnings call as to put out a
public plea. "Please mine more nickel," he said. "Tesla will give
you a giant contract for a long period of time if you mine nickel
efficiently and in an environmentally sensitive way."
Mr. Straubel saw the crunch coming for years. When visiting a
nickel mine in Canada a few years ago as Tesla's chief technology
officer, he surveyed the massive operations. Its scale and
complexity illustrated to him that simply opening more mines wasn't
really an option. Why not recycle the cells already out there now
or in the near future, he thought.
Mr. Straubel also knew one of the electric-car industry's dirty
secrets: For all its aspirations of environmental benefits, the
industry is wasteful. He saw first hand how wasteful the process
could be when overseeing development of Tesla's Reno Gigafactory.
When the car maker in 2018 struggled to increase production of the
Model 3 car, one of the pinch points was the battery factory, where
a former employee has alleged that the company was wasting as much
as $200 million in scrapped material. Tesla has said the amount was
overly stated.
Mr. Straubel won't say how much waste his old factory generated,
but said it reinforced his idea that a market for recycling those
costly and difficult to dispose of materials would exist.
"We need to really appreciate that we need to build a
Gigafactory in reverse," he said.
Like at Tesla, Mr. Straubel has grand ambitions but is ready to
start small as he takes on incumbents, in this case centuries old
mining companies. Redwood is honing its processes by working on
batteries from consumer electronics such as cellphones, which are
smaller and easier to handle compared with the large packs that
come from cars.
While the number of electric cars hitting end of life is
comparably small, the more lucrative market for Mr. Straubel is
recycling the scrapped battery materials from the cell making
process for electric cars.
Factories making cells will scrap an average of about 10% of
those batteries, according to Benchmark Mineral's Mr. Moores. In
2025, that could mean about 80 gigawatt hours of cells will be
trashed, or the equivalent to the size of the entire battery market
in 2016, he projects.
Within that scrap, he said, lie 64,000 tons of lithium or the
equivalent of what more than two mines might produce in a year with
a market value of $500 million to $1.5 billion depending upon
shifting market prices. The waste also includes other precious
components such as cobalt, nickel and other materials, representing
billions of dollars of potential value in total.
"Those that crack this technology to turn it into a battery
quality material will have a huge business," Mr. Moores said.
Mr. Straubel says that within 10 years, he hopes his recycling
will bring the price of raw materials down to about half compared
with mines. That, he said, could help make electric vehicles --
from trucks to trains -- ubiquitous.
Mr. Straubel's vision is already winning converts, including
Panasonic, his old partner for the Gigafactory. The company late
last year began a trial with Redwood to reclaim more than 400
pounds of the scrap it generates in making battery cells and now
has upped that to 2 tons. All of the scrap coming from its side of
the Nevada battery facility is now shipped to Redwood.
"His process looks like it's way more sustainable from an
environmental perspective," said Celina Mikolajczak, a vice
president of Panasonic Energy of North America and a former Tesla
battery expert who advised on the original battery issues for the
Roadster. "He doesn't have to landfill anything and if you look at
the typical process at this point a lot of the less valuable
materials get landfilled."
The materials that are recycled are being used to produce new
products. Panasonic, she said, is working with Mr. Straubel to see
if his recycled materials can be refined well enough to be reused
in its batteries, noting that old cellphone batteries could be a
good source of cobalt for new ones.
Mr. Straubel envisions a process so efficient that batteries
coming from the mountain of electric cars being retired in coming
years could be quickly stripped down, recycled for their core
materials, and used to rebuild new power cells, creating a closed
loop where hardly any materials are lost.
The outside money is intended to accelerate research, build up
the operation and grow the workforce to as many as 200 staff by
year's end from about 50 this summer. He recently hired one of his
former top deputies from his Tesla days, Kevin Kassekert, who
helped oversee the construction of Tesla's giant battery factory in
Sparks.
Like Tesla, Redwood has global aspirations. Mr. Straubel already
has plans to scale up and build new facilities around other battery
factories. "I'm looking into the future and seeing this freight
train coming at us."
Write to Tim Higgins at Tim.Higgins@WSJ.com
(END) Dow Jones Newswires
August 29, 2020 00:15 ET (04:15 GMT)
Copyright (c) 2020 Dow Jones & Company, Inc.
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