The Electric

Meet the 12 Tesla Diaspora Members Building Battery Supply Chains That Carmakers Won’t

Left to right, Redwood Materials' JB Straubel, Northvolt's Paolo Cerruti and Peter Carlsson, American Battery's Ryan Melsert, and QuantumScape's Celina Mikolajczak. Photos: Bloomberg, Northvolt, ABTC, QuantumScape. Art by Mike Sullivan.
By
Steve LeVine

Welcome back to The Electric! 

For months, I’ve been discussing the shortage and price spike in battery metals, and how it puts the U.S. and Europe at a sharp competitive disadvantage to China. But I have not mentioned a particular group of companies that’s attempting to tackle this problem. Today I profile these three companies and the common thread that both defines and binds them.  

As they scramble to catch up in the electric vehicle race, major U.S. and European automakers are dogged by a protracted blunder: their failure to mobilize a local metals supply for their EV battery factories—the equivalent of setting out to make combustion vehicles without a guaranteed supply of steel.

But not everyone has slipped up: In the U.S., the American Battery Technology Co., a Nevada startup, is building plants to refine cobalt, nickel and manganese into battery chemical precursors. Another Nevada company, Redwood Materials, is building facilities to use such chemicals, in addition to raw ore and recycled metals, to produce the cathodes that are the heart of lithium-ion batteries. And in Sweden, Northvolt, a battery manufacturing startup, last month cranked up Europe’s first battery gigafactory, with plans for a vertically integrated supply chain consisting of lithium from Portugal and nickel and cobalt from Finland.

A pattern runs through these battery manufacturing and metals refining companies: The founders of all three, along with many staff members, are former employees of Tesla. Just as Tesla bet on EVs early and stuck with the gamble against persistent derision, the company’s veterans who are running American Battery, Redwood and Northvolt are now seeding a new industry with tremendous pent-up demand: By 2030, the U.S. and Europe will have about 1,250 gigawatt-hours of combined lithium-ion battery-making capacity, up from about 70 today, according to Benchmark Mineral Intelligence, a battery research firm. That’s enough to equip about 21 million EVs per year.