66 batteries a second, two billion a year,
5 1/2 million a day,
it is an incredible production.
Electric vehicles make up just 4%
of passenger vehicle sales today.
But the transition is coming,
with some estimates saying
that the number will be 50% by 2030.
The Tesla Model 3, which didn't exist until six years ago,
isn't just the world's top-selling EV
but also one of the top 10 most popular cars of any kind.
And with the demand for EVs spiking,
the demand for batteries is going to explode.
And in every Tesla is a Panasonic battery.
The good news about Panasonic is we are
the number one in the world for this technology.
We've been at it for 100 years.
Panasonic makes millions of these batteries every day.
Unfortunately, the road to get to this point,
the supply chain, kinda sucks.
But that's about to change.
Today, these materials might move 20, 30,000 miles
all around the planet before they're actually ending up
in a car that you would drive away from a showroom
or wherever you bought it.
Also, the materials needed
for EV batteries are finite,
not to mention a humanitarian and environmental disaster.
The key thing for the materials going forward
is that we don't have enough, quite frankly,
to mine and move forward in the electric vehicle business.
There are some deposits of these materials
in North America, but it might be a 10-year process
to permit and construct and bring online a new mine.
Recycling is a way to compress that time.
We can do that in maybe two or three years,
as we're doing on this site.
That site is Redwood Materials.
Led by this former Tesla employee,
he has set out to supply Tesla, among others,
with recycled batteries by building
one of the largest battery materials
and battery recycling companies in the world
and the first ever in America.
These materials are in enormous demand right now,
and we can't get enough of them.
The battery component and the supply chain
behind the battery is going to be one
of the most strategic parts
of how we transition to sustainability.
This is a critical part of the future economy
and the future industry,
and I'm excited to build it.
This is Tesla's Gigafactory.
To put it in technical terms, it's ginormous,
but with good reason.
This is a massive building.
What's housed under this building?
In this, it's almost a supply chain
in a building, quite frankly.
This is Allan Swan,
the president of Panasonic Energy North America,
Tesla's roommate in the Gigafactory.
This is the largest lithium battery factory
in the world right here, so the scale is just huge.
Well, we make the batteries for the Tesla team,
and we said basically make them from scratch.
We make 66 batteries a second,
so it's an incredible production.
And then we send the batteries over to Tesla,
they put them in a pack, send 'em to Fremont,
and they go in the cars.
66 batteries per second is a lotta batteries,
and the world will only demand more
as more time goes on.
But let's not get ahead of ourselves.
Before we get into the demand for these batteries,
let's figure out how they're made.
So the sign says this is the gowning room.
Yes, and here, you get suited up and protected,
for your own safety, as well as contamination,
which is the key ingredient we're trying to protect.
Is it essentially a clean room that we're going into?
Yes, it's a clean room environment.
That's exactly right.
All right, air shower.
Do we shower together?
We shower together,
yes we do. All right, great.
So in this phase,
we're using copper foil.
Each coil is two miles long.
All day, every day, over 24 hours,
it's 300 miles of copper.
Copper's really important for the anode.
It's a real critical part of the battery.
Most batteries contain four basic parts,
cathodes, anodes, an electrolyte, and a separator.
The cathode is where the electrical current
leaves the battery during discharge,
which is when the battery's being used to power something.
The anode is where the electrical current enters
the battery during discharge.
Between those is a liquid electrolyte
which combines with the anode and cathode
to make an electric current.
For Panasonic's batteries,
they use copper foil for the anode
and a combination of nickel cobalt aluminum
or lithium iron phosphate for the cathode.
So once we're created these coils
and we've got it to the right thickness,
then we do what's called slitting.
What we're doing is,
we're actually gonna cut the coil
to the size of the battery.
And that's the process that's happening right here
on this machine.
Right now, where's all this copper coming from?
So right now, it's coming from Korea and Japan.
So, all the way from over there,
it's gotta go on a ship,
come through the dock lines in California.
The supply chain for batteries is why it takes
driving an electric vehicle 13,500 miles
to become carbon neutral.
The different materials that go into a battery
are spread out all over the world.
Cathode production from Japan, refining from China,
lithium from Chile, and cobalt from Congo, to name a few.
This means a lot of money is spent corralling
all of the materials, not to mention the sheer volume
of CO2 emissions released for those materials
to travel 20 to 30,000 miles to their final location,
all before it ends up in your car.
But anyway, let's see those finished batteries.
So we're taking you to the formation area.
That's our inspection process.
What you just showed us
was the copper foil room. Copper foil yep,
the anode, yeah.
From that place to this, what happens in between?
We actually wind the anode and cathode together
with a separator.
And then from there, that assembles the battery
and it goes through assembly.
Cathode is currently only made abroad?
Yep, nearly everything is imported.
That's why there's a big push to create a US supply chain,
which means the opportunity going forward
for America is absolutely gigantic.
That opportunity is this construction site.
These are all batteries.
So everything you're looking at out here
are all batteries that are waiting to be recycled.
So up here is where we have all of our construction offices.
This is JB Straubel,
the CEO of battery recycling company Redwood Materials,
and he's kind of a genius.
He was one of the co-founders of Tesla,
alongside this guy, but he left Tesla
to start Redwood to supply batteries
for any EV company that needs them.
Because he saw huge inefficiencies
over the global supply chain.
So today, the supply chain for battery materials comes
almost entirely from Asia.
Okay. Whether it's China,
Korea, or Japan, all of the components
that feed battery assembly factories in the United States
come from those countries.
If we electrify all the cars in the country,
but all those cars and the batteries are dependent
on a supply chain from Asia, Yeah.
We've kinda shot ourselves in the foot.
China alone accounts for nearly 80%
of global production of battery components and materials.
What doesn't exist here at all
is the supply chain that feeds battery assembly.
So Straubel and Redwood are looking
to shrink that supply chain from thousands of miles
to across the street.
That's a lot of stuff that goes into getting these items
from one place to another.
Once this closed loop is finished,
am I correct that this will all just happen here?
When you have a battery coming out
of a consumer's vehicle,
it doesn't have to move all the way around the world.
You know, what we're trying to invent is that entire
closed-loop supply chain for how we can take old,
end-of-life batteries, recycle them,
mix them with newly-mined material,
and then build all the components needed
to make more batteries.
The plan for Redwood is to produce material
for 100 gigawatt hours of batteries a year
by the end of 2025.
That's enough for about 1.3 million long-range vehicles
a year, on par with the biggest producers in Asia.
This closed-loop concept is really interesting,
because none of the materials leave a battery.
99-plus percent of those materials can be reused
again and again and again.
We go all the way from an end-of-life battery
that might come out of an old EV
back to disassembling it, recycling it,
refining the materials,
and then making them into the functional components
that can go into a battery, cathode material,
anode copper foil.
This is just one example of how batteries might come to us.
These are actually nickel metal hydride batteries.
But they contain a lot of nickel,
which is one of the core components, core elements,
that we re-manufacture and then build into cathode
for a lithium-ion battery.
We recycle all of these.
Redwood then uses various chemicals
to break down the recycled batteries
into raw materials and then dissolves,
separates, and purifies those materials
into something called hydrometallurgy.
So this building
is our first hydrometallurgy production facility,
and we're constructing it literally
around the clock right now.
You'll see hundreds of people working here.
This is where we purify and refine
those critical metals from all the batteries
that we just saw.
And amazingly, this is the first nickel refining facility
in the United States in at least the last 10 years,
and really, the only one that we're aware of
at any scale operating right now.
I mean, ultimately, on this site, you know,
we'll build enough materials to make around a million EVs
per year worth of batteries.
That's close to 100 gigawatt hours per year
of these materials. Yeah.
So all of those batteries that you saw out there,
you know, that's maybe a few gigawatt hours.
Yeah.
You know, that would really only be a few days
of feedstock for this entire campus when it's running fast.
Ultimately, Panasonic and Redwood's road
to disrupting the supply chain is going to be one
of the biggest keys to the future
of making EVs truly sustainable.
The battery component and the supply chain
behind the battery is going to be one
of the most strategic parts of how we transition
to sustainability, whether it's energy storage on the grid,
energy storage in cars or trucks.
All of these things, you know, really hinge
around enough batteries and having those batteries
be very low-impact environmentally, low-CO2.
If we care about our children and our grandchildren
and our great-grandchildren to come,
we've gotta do something different.
This is a critical part of the future economy
and the future industry,
and I'm excited to build it.
If you believe in what we're doing,
which is saving the planet,
then you should take that leap of faith.