Hey boys and girls, we're in Reno and we're at Redwood and we're going to be talking at JB Savo in a very very short period of time. I am thrilled to be here and let's get right to it. We will first go down and look at our battery receiving and storage. Okay. So, we keep, as I mentioned before, we keep our live cells stored outside. Holy doodle. Is that it? The big white thing. This is it. Oh hey, you know what? Can I I'm pretty sure that Eric wants to take pictures. I'm probably the wrong guy to sit in this chair. You're fine. Holy mackerel.
Yeah. So, this is quite active. You know, we're processing this material constantly and you'll see pickups going up to our recycling operations. We have trucks incoming. And again, this is just live material. We don't store finished goods or other things out here. It's really to manage the fire risk and human safety.
Wow. How many acres is this or square miles?
This particular site, this is maybe 20, 25 acres. So, what you see out here is kind of a mix. We have things in wooden crates that are often modules or packs. We have whole EV packs like some of these in front of us here that are actually in their original enclosure and we have them for different reasons. We also have some steel drums or plastic drums that are full of smaller format batteries. They're not full of any liquid. They're just to contain the battery and hold them safely. But a lot of these wooden crates are all batteries. Every single one of them different makes and models.
And we do have thousands and thousands. It's kind of... So what does problem solving mean on that sign right there? It maybe doesn't have the proper packaging or it maybe doesn't have the proper coding. We may not know exactly what it was. These are some huge packs. These are a couple hundred kilowatt hours per battery pack. You know, these are smaller ones. All different types of EVs. This is something I wasn't expecting. And you see every one of these EV packs, these are, I believe, a truck. So, these are all something that we would like to be able to repair and reuse in a stationary setting. And we work with the OEMs involved in each case. And of course, we have to make sure that there's the right level of function, but there's the opportunity. Some things are truly end of life. They may have been in a flood or a fire or something like that. We get those materials, too.
Wow. This is... you show me the overhead view. This looks a lot more dramatic in person. It's, I mean, it does give an impression when you're here in person.
Yeah, it definitely does. And yeah, you know, and this is still the early days of batteries coming back from the field, but because we see sort of the good, the bad, and the ugly of this, it's a chance for us to really learn and... good is this is all reusable. These are... well, not all of it, but some of it's reusable, and that's better than recycling any old time. Get a second life out. And ultimately, all of these different materials are reusable. The elements inside can all get reused.
You know, there were some old Roadster modules I saw over there. Wow. So, how long did it take to collect all of this?
Oh, this is pretty dynamic. I mean, we'll process through almost all of this over the course of less than a year. Yeah. So, this is a few months of working inventory. We're receiving dozens of truckloads every single day. So, all of these batteries that we receive... we receive batteries here, the live material, inert material, we receive inside, it doesn't go outside. But after being unloaded there, we will do some kind of sorting, grouping of different materials together in the way that we want to process them and then we will take it up to what we call our calcination machine or calcination production line. And that's the first step for actually physically recycling the end of life batteries.
Yeah. So you mentioned that I can't remember the word you used but inert I think but that would be like offal or what we'd call swarf, right. So it's the stuff that never made it into a battery. So the outside edges, the swarf, the scrap off all these things come to you and they go directly into these recycling warehouses.
That's correct. Factories and we can store them at higher density inside. We can rack them. We can put them on... Hold on a second. It never fails. I always forget to turn this damn thing off, but it's somebody who's probably trying to sell me insurance or something. Sorry about that. There you go. So, the inert scrap we can store indoors and we can store it at higher density. You know, we can put it on racking. We can close pack it together. Because it doesn't have the same kind of fire risk that an actual battery does. So, this is all part of our campus here. These are different operations. We'll come back through here and take a look at some of them. And the reason is because there's no electrolyte in these swarf.
Yeah, correct. There's no electrolyte. So therefore, they're not really active. They haven't ever been charged. Because the battery is generally built in a discharge state. So it's kind of at a lower energy storage state.
Once it has electrolyte and once it's been through the formation process and gotten its first charge, then we have to treat it more carefully. So up here, this production line we've driven up to is that first calcination unit. This is an in-house machine. We've pioneered this technology. This is about gen five of this technology for us. We've built most of the machine. The engineers inside of Redwood are doing the design of this and running it, writing the software for it.
Yeah. So, my guess is you'd have to because I don't know of anybody that says, you know, buy a big recycling machine from whatever company. You're the pioneer here. So everything here is an invention.
I would guess it really is. We've built the conveyor systems. We've built the loading. We've designed the heating mechanism itself. All the off gas treatment. And what we do in this operation is essentially making the battery inert. So before you can shred or mechanically disassemble a live lithium ion battery, you need to discharge it and make it inert, get the electrolyte out of the mix. And that's really the function of this process is to in bulk, in an automated way, discharge the batteries and remove the organic materials. And that's what we're doing here.
Okay. So, how do you do that? You boil it away or heat it until...
We do a little bit of heating in an inert atmosphere. So, we don't want to burn anything because we're trying to minimize CO2. That's one of our goals.
I just meant you'd vaporize it somehow.
Exactly. So, we basically put it through that rotary tube there. And that heats the batteries and all the material inside of it up to a few hundred degrees C. We don't want to melt anything because that's too much energy and it mixes everything together. So, we heat it up enough that organic materials like the electrolyte or adhesives and binders and some of the foams and plastics will kind of break down a little bit and almost turn into hard carbon. So they're more brittle and then we can... and also any residual charge that was left in the batteries or the modules will in this case turn into heat. So that heat is what powers the whole thing.
Okay. So the batteries go in kind of like raw and probably partially discharged. Then you roll them around in this thing which kind of excites them so you can get some heat and that heat then is used to vaporize whatever is inside or vaporize and turn into carbon.
Yeah. And we have a quite extensive control loop that our engineers write and constantly keep improving that runs this whole thing. And we manage the gas flows and we manage the material feed rates to keep the temperature in the right range. But this doesn't use any natural gas. We don't even have natural gas at this campus. So, we use a little bit of electric heating to kind of start it almost like the starter on your engine, right? But then we turn it off and it runs in a usual campaign, it'll run 24/7 for several weeks on end before we do a maintenance event. And when it's in a steady operation, we don't need to add any extra heat. So...
I see some pipes. I used to work for a company called Sentry Spray and we made pollution control equipment. So do you scrub to pull out the chemicals?
Yeah, we do. So after we heat the things up, we end up with a gas fraction. So the organic gases come off. And then we go and process all those organic gases. We clean them up. We handle that separately. And then all the solids are left behind. The solids contain all the metals. So all the lithium, all of the nickel and cobalt and copper, everything solid is kept behind. So we take the solids into a mechanical processing and separation line. The gases will drive around the other side of this. And I can show you the gases go into a pretty extensive system of filters and scrubbers to recover things like chlorine and any dust that might have been left. I'll drive up here just so we can see it, but then we've got to back up because we are doing a maintenance event right now. So, they're actually in the middle of redoing some of the processing equipment. We usually go down for a day or two to do these kind of planned maintenance events, but it actually gives us a chance to even get a little closer. And the nitrogen here we just use basically as part of that inert atmosphere. So, we want to keep the oxygen away and we'll purge with some of the inert nitrogen.
Well, Sandy, this is Paul. Hey, Paul. Nice to meet you, Sandy.
Nice meeting you. Yeah. So, I lead the engineering here on the recycling and refining side. So, pleasure to host you today and have a bit of a look around.
I'm looking forward to it. Yeah. Well, maybe we can take a look at module loading here.
Absolutely. So in our recycling process, one of the advantages we have is that we can take material of any state of charge and form factor. And what you're looking at here is actually the feed conveyor to our thermal recycling process step. So we can actually load the modules directly onto the feed conveyor and then into the process. And over here we've got a different type of module. You might recognize these things from different automotive but we don't try and sort of separate one or another. This can take up to maybe 20, 30 kilos at a time, maybe a little more, maybe even 30, 40 kilowatt hours up to that sort of energy level. And load directly in. We've designed this so that it can take fully charged modules.
Fully charged. No kidding.
Particular care is taken right at the feed point into the kiln where we actually need to transfer it into the feed system because you can get reaction from time to time. And then into the kiln where you get a complex combination of deenergizing, arcing, short circuiting, and then obviously we're applying heat as well to start the recycling process. So it's all happening at once at the feed end of the kiln.
It is wood. Wow. So, your conveyor belt is made out of wooden slats.
No, this is a coated steel and that prevents the premature arcing against the steel. It's kind of a complex design even of simple things like a conveyor. We want the conveyor to be basically fireproof but also electrically insulating. So even simple things like that, we've iterated multiple times and learned, using a rubber belt or with typical metal slats, that doesn't work very well for batteries. Because things can short and catch fire. So we've learned a lot of lessons there and improved steadily.
Well, do we want to try and load one and show how this looks? It was going to be a safe place for us to stand. Not right there. No. Okay.
And this is obviously in various stages of iteration of automation as well. And you can imagine how we can fully automate this as well. It's using factory style automation end effectors and the ability to pick and move things. We've taken a lot of learnings from the production process because basically what we're doing is unmanufacturing at scale. So we have to think about it in kind of the same way.
Well, the only difference is you got so many different variables here. This would be very high variety.
Very high variety. And we have to plan for that and design accordingly. But it's a really interesting problem to solve for. Different than on the new build side. Yeah. You can see the conveyor. We've started the conveyor there. That's sort of... So it's on the way in. Yeah. So, this is about the speed that we'll run at. I'm not exactly sure which module this is. I think this might be a three or a Y module. So, this could be a quarter of an EV pack at a time.
So, it's a fairly large amount of energy. Yeah. Quite a huge... but getting to this scale was important to be able to achieve these processing rates. If you have to do sort of manual disassembly, it takes far too long and you end up spending more labor than... well, more than the metal.
We figured there was some kind of chewing that went on and we figured that there was going to be some method for discharging the energy inside and then electrolytes are a bit of an issue. So, this is to me like you got it all going here.
Yeah. This is that first step to discharge and manage electrolytes and then from there we can go safely and very efficiently also into the kind of mechanical separation.
Yeah. So are we going to get a chance to see that mechanical operation as well?
We can see kind of through a window but we don't really want to go in there because it's a bunch of PPE and things like that.
Oh, all right. I don't want to get in my little bunny suit. It's not on the list today. Okay, good. Can we walk inside? Check it out.
Yeah. And the... speaking to the electrolyte, we actually utilize the contained energy in the electrolyte to drive the process. So the kiln is indirect fired electrically, and then you're actually utilizing the contained energy in the electrolyte to minimize that energy input. So it's very efficient from that standpoint.
So what in the world would that be? I was just trying to figure that out. I haven't seen this one before. It's kind of a... looks like a bunch of air conditioners. Maybe it's a data center or rack. Energy storage for data.
But this is the beauty. We can take basically anything that's going to come our way without having to get into it, discharge, understand how to interface with it. So, we'll send something like this into the sort of, as is, with its metal enclosure into heating. Because then we can make the batteries inside of it inert so that we can safely mechanically shred it after that.
But to have someone unscrew every fastener and mechanically disassemble this, there's no money in that. You'd go broke and it's a bit dangerous if you don't have the proper instructions for every one. So, let me ask you a question. Could you take a complete battery enclosure? It's... everybody's got them in aluminum enclosures, right? The battery tray and whatnot. And it'll have a steel lid and then you've got a tremendous number of batteries inside. Could that be picked up and sent in?
Functionally, that's exactly where we're headed. And we can do that with certain sizes of packs. We keep scaling this up and right now we can take in battery packs that are this big or maybe two, three times this big. The next step is getting to full automotive scale so that we can put directly in a full automotive pack. And as the volume and our mix continues to shift, that's the very next step.
So, in here is where we have our controls center and also where we do the loading of the smaller batteries. This is kind of a time lapse that shows what we just saw sped up obviously, but you get a sense of how that works. And we just run this steady. Here's another picture of what this looks like when in operation, it looks basically the same. So this is the big tube we saw outside that turns around in a circle and excites the material inside of it. That's all part of the gas handling which we didn't quite drive around to see yet but we scrub all the gas phase of what comes off completely.
But it's pretty... is there any recycling potential for the gases that are coming off, for the fluorine potentially?
We do capture... well, Paul, you can describe.
Yeah, I mean, we sequester the gas handling system sort of comprises a few parts. One to combust any volatile or toxic compounds that may... normally they don't evolve, but this is to make sure that we're protecting the environment. Dust removal. We'll do that through our bag houses, which is a final product because you can imagine valuable materials are carried through. And then the wet scrubber that's there to remove your fluorines, your chlorides, your bromides. And you can actually concentrate them up. The fluorine, the fluorides, you can actually precipitate and we're looking at how to recycle those. So yeah, there is an avenue there. It's just one step in part of our development processes.
Cool. So I got to ask, what the heck are those?
Oh, those are production records. So, when we do production records, we'll present those to our different crews that achieve them and it's a bit of an informal way to keep a bit of healthy competition and celebrate our wins. So, we got our gong over there as well. So, we'll hit the gong and it'll be accompanied with the transfer of the belt. We have a big glass thing that somebody gave me a long time ago and it's the high achievement award. You're allowed to park anywhere you aren't in the parking lot and coffee is free for everybody as well. So, it's kind of a... we don't have a real high achievement award, but I'd like to know the guy that's going to walk around with that thing. And it looks like you got to be a big boy for that one. So in here is where we're loading the smaller format things and smaller size batteries outside or the bigger modules. In here is smaller stuff. So watch our step. You can kind of get a sense of... these are... I don't even know what this is. A jump starter thing or power tool batteries, things like this. So this is all stuff that is also recyclable. It's lithium ion of different chemistries. But we work and recover the same nickel, cobalt, copper, lithium elements from these batteries as well.
So you got quite a watch over this here.
Yeah. It's quite a volume. This is only a few hours of material. We typically don't want to store too much inside.
So, one of the other types of production scrap or swarf that we see is also still a live battery.
Oh, really? So it was... it just didn't come up to charge or something?
Exactly. Maybe it came all the way to the end of line final inspection, then it was deemed to not work. So, some of these might be in that category, I think. These are basically cells that have for whatever reason came to an end of a production line and did not test out good. So maybe they had some internal defect or something like that. And it's usually a very small percent of manufacturing. Of course everyone is working hard to make that a small percent, but even if it's five or a few percent, that still adds up to a lot of material and someone has to safely deal with it. So this is also a big portion of what we process and deal with.
And I've never seen them boxed before ever. Normally they come in a 55-gallon drum. We'll take a look at what this one is. Now, that's what I was expecting to see. So, these look like they've been recovered from a swamp.
Yeah, these are kind of a mess. These either were flooded. Maybe that was the case or maybe they were... some people intentionally dunk them in salt water to try and... it kind of creates a bit of a mess for us to receive. But we recycle these too the same way. Recovery from fire events as well, from recycling collection centers. They look ugly, but they still have a lot of valuable materials inside of here. And this is not something you'd want to put in a landfill. So, what do we got here? These are just some of the products that we make out of this line. So, this one, for instance, is mixed ferrous material. So, it doesn't look that different, but this is a bag of basically scrap steel. So in that mechanical processing you saw, we will take aluminum, copper, ferrous, and the active powders. They all go into separate places. So we'll aggregate enough until we have a full truckload. We can mass out a full semi-truck and then this will go off straight to steel recycling, and then another batch will go off straight to aluminum melting and recovery, or copper. I think this row here is the powder line. So you see the bag is a little more full. This bag we can either sell direct or we also have our own internal refining operations to go further and to start to recover lithium and more direct elements out of the middle of this.
I see. But from here, there's no more batteries at this stage. Now we're into sort of chemicals and powders and components. So this operation that we're standing in was the first step going from battery to materials like this.
Then there are further steps to go into refining and into manufacturing.
I would just call this the money line because quite frankly that's the cash, right?
