Redwood Materials, a US battery recycling and components company, said it is to make cathodes for Panasonic Energy’s new battery plant in Kansas in a deal worth billions of dollars.
Redwood is building a plant near its Carson City, Nevada, headquarters, and reported to be costing $3.5 billion. It is to make anode materials and cathodes for electric vehicle (EV) batteries. It said it plans to start shipping cathodes made with some recycled material to Panasonic’s DeSoto, Kansas, plant in 2025.
Panasonic said it would use Redwood’s recycled cathode active materials in lithium batteries to be manufactured in Kansas from 2025. Recycled copper foil will be used in lithium batteries to be manufactured at Panasonic Energy of North America (PENA)’s facility in Sparks, Nevada, starting in 2024.
The parties did not disclose how much material will be shipped to Panasonic annually, but Forbes reported “the value of this contract is in the multiple billions of dollars.”
Redwood said it will spend “billions of dollars” to scale its technology and facilities in the next few years to bring cathode online and ramp production to 100GWh, enough for a million EVs by 2025.
By 2030 it expects production of both anode and cathode to scale to 500GWh/year of materials.
It said this will be the first time cathode has been produced in North America at Gigafactory scale for use in US battery cell manufacturing. This is a key objective of the Biden administration’s Inflation Reduction Act.
Redwood’s links with Panasonic Energy of North America began in 2019 and since then the cell production scrap from the Gigafactory in Nevada (in which Panasonic is the battery cell manufacturer) has been recycled by Redwood. Panasonic will also be the first long-term buyer of Redwood’s anode copper foil, according to Redwood.
In February, BEST reported that Redwood was set to expand into Europe by increasing the collection of end-of-life batteries for the recycling of materials to make anode and cathode products.
Last month, Argonne National Laboratory completed verification of the performance of high-nickel cathodes (NMC-811) using cathode precursors from Redwood’s recycling process, according to Redwood.
