In the high desert 25 miles east of Reno, Gooseberry Mine is etched into the dusty Nevada hills.
Until 1990, gold was dug out of the ground here.
Now it’s mostly abandoned.
“Black gold,” he said, smiling.
Oil is the originalblack gold, of course.
This has powered automobiles for a century.
For this to really happen, we must recycle the big battery packs inside all these EVs.
Redwood Materials, run by Tesla cofounderJB Straubel, is building North America’s biggest battery recycling operation.
And CAM is the company’s next big bet.
Straubel has been hacking away at this problem for almost a decade.
Today, Redwood recycles more than 70% of all the lithium-ion batteries in North America.
The next step for the company is combining this into CAM, which is a lot more valuable.
Hence the name: new black gold.
Instead of digging it up, Redwood conjures it into being through chemistry at industrial scale.
It’s an expensive and technically complex bet for Redwood, Straubel, and his investors.
“Things like Redwood are multibillion-dollar capex, ambitious projects.
Unlike the original black gold, these materials don’t go up in smoke or wear out.
“That was the foresight on JB’s part,” Lankton said.
“That’s what differentiates this automotive transformation from previous ones the batteries themselves are infinitely recyclable.”
Redwood’s processes can now recover about 98% of the critical minerals from batteries.
That’s massively inefficient.
“Redwood Materials is essential for this,” Evdaimon added.
I wanted to snap photos, but Kirby said no up-close pics.
Some partners don’t want their old gear exposed to the public like this.
There, batteries are carefully heated up to release the minerals and metals.
Some volatile organic compounds are released by this part of the process.
It looked like a giant Rube Goldberg machine, sparkling in the desert sun.
“Redwood’s equipment was bought from other places, but they have made many adjustments.
This is truly novel,” said Baillie Gifford’s Evdaimon.
The company expects to be the first in North America.
In the coming years, Redwood aims to churn out 100 gigawatt hours worth of CAM per year.
That would enable production of enough batteries to power 1.3 million EVs annually.
These ingredients are already in demand,” said Evdaimon.
There are a lot of processes that Redwood is adding."
Actually making good CAM, though up to the high specifications of battery manufacturers is really hard.
“But the work that goes into making this is incredibly technical.”
Three stages
There are three stages of Redwood’s CAM journey.
The first is the lab that I was allowed into.
This is where the core chemical processes are devised and tested on a small scale.
Nearby is a demonstration plant that is a scaled-down version of Redwood’s ultimate facility.
“That’s why we have a high degree of confidence in our ability to achieve our targets.”
Copper foil and Northvolt
This endeavor is not just technically complex, though.
There are other risks when you’re competing with China’s manufacturing might.
Redwood used to make copper foil, too, which is the main ingredient for the anode in batteries.
However, Chinese companies began churning this out in massive quantities, and prices plummeted.
The Inflation Reduction Act from 2022 has big incentives for US battery production.
And this year, Donald Trump’s tariff barrage favors domestic manufacturing.
Being the first major CAM producer in the US is looking like a well-timed initiative right now.
But Lankton said Redwood isn’t resting on its laurels.
“Why should someone want to buy Redwood’s CAM?”
he asked me, rhetorically, in the company’s Nickel office.
Second, the company must have the technical prowess to pull this off.
“There’s hardcore particle engineering that goes into this CAM,” Lankton explained.
“It has to be consistent with anything else one of our customers can buy.
So we have to technically meet or exceed those specifications.”
