Redwood reports progress on copper facility

Carson City, Nevada-based Redwood Materials says “in a matter of months” its copper anode foil facility at the Tahoe-Reno Industrial Center in Nevada will begin producing and delivering product to customers.

The company, in a Jan. 19 website post, says the plant will be complete and “supplying battery cell manufacturing partners with anode copper foil and cathode active materials” later in the first half of this year.

Last year, Redwood announced it would produce battery materials in the U.S. after receiving a $700 investment. “Over the next few years, Redwood will ramp copper foil production to 100 gigawatt hours (GWh) of battery demand, or 250,000 kilometers (155,000 miles) of product annually,” states the firm. Redwood calls that “enough copper foil to build more than 1 million electric vehicles (EVs) per year or wrap copper foil around the entire world six times.”

The same site in Nevada will house hydrometallurgy recycling operations planned by Redwood, “which will allow us to feed copper from recycled lithium-ion batteries directly into copper foil production in a closed-loop,” states the company.

Redwood says initially its production of copper foil will outweigh its supply of copper recovered from battery recycling operations, so it also will source other domestic recycled copper. States the company, “Today, the U.S. exports several hundred thousand tons of copper [scrap] per year to Asia, so Redwood’s utilization of this secondary supply will ensure this critical metal stays in the U.S.”

In the first seven months of 2021, U.S. Census Bureau figures for the export of alloyed copper-bearing scrap show Malaysia brought in 58,800 metric tons of alloyed red metal scrap, followed by China, which brought in 26,900 metric tons of the material from the U.S. during those seven months.

In those same seven months, China brought in some 97,000 metric tons of unalloyed copper scrap from the U.S., followed by Malaysia which brought in about 54,000 metric tons of such material.

Overall, the Census Bureau says the U.S. exported some 520,000 metric tons of red metal scrap to Asia and buyers in other nations.

In the meantime, says Redwood Materials, “nearly all anode copper foil (and cathode) production globally happens in Asia.” That, says the firm, contributes “significantly to the environmental impact and cost of battery production.”

Panasonic will be the first company that expects to source Redwood’s copper foil, says the firm. “Our partnership with Panasonic began in 2019 and since, we’ve been recycling all Panasonic’s manufacturing scrap from the Tesla Gigafactory. That very same material will now be recycled, and the copper contained will be remanufactured into anode foil and returned to Panasonic at the Gigafactory, just a few miles down the road. This will mark the first time batteries will be recycled, remanufactured and then returned to the same factory in a fully closed loop.”

Redwood Materials says it expects to invest some $1 billion into its copper foil facility and expanded recycling operations. The company also says it is “still actively searching for another battery materials campus, focused on cathode production, which we plan to announce this year. At that site, we will spend upwards of $2 billion and scale cathode production to 500 GWh or [enough for] 5 million EVs by 2030.”