Written by Jessica Holdman, SC Daily Gazette
Redwood Materials officially started stripping cobalt, lithium, nickel and copper from used batteries it gathered over the past year at its new South Carolina facility.
The 600-acre campus in Berkeley County is the second new battery plant opened by the company founded in 2017 by a former Tesla executive. It follows the company’s first plant and headquarters in Nevada, which opened in 2019.
The $3.5 billion investment marks the largest single economic development project in South Carolina’s history.
Over the next year, Redwood’s South Carolina-based employees will gather 20,000 metric tons of lithium and other metals, eventually refining and remaking them into renewed battery components to sell back to U.S. battery manufacturers. That’s enough to build batteries for 41,000 electric vehicles.
At full capacity, the factory is slated to produce enough to supply battery materials for more than a million electric vehicles, the company said when it first announced its plans in December 2022.
The company did not respond to questions from the SC Daily Gazette about how many people are working at the plant as part of this first phase or when it might ramp up its next round of hiring.
Current job openings advertised include chemical, mechanical and automation engineers and a financial analyst.
Over the next decade, Redwood plans to hire a total of 1,500 workers for jobs paying some of the highest wages in Berkeley County — between $27 and $75 per hour.
South Carolina legislators approved a $226 million incentive package in December 2022 to pay for improvements to the property in the Camp Hall industrial park.
Redwood’s other campus in Nevada produced more than 60,000 metric tons of materials last year, which the company said put it on par with the largest U.S. source of nickel and made it the only domestic source of cobalt.
By comparison, Eagle Mine on Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, the only operating nickel mine in the U.S., produced 17,000 tons of nickel in 2023, according to the U.S. Geological Survey. The country imported 159,000 tons of the metal that year, largely from Canada.
Redwood calls the materials it plans to recycle the “backbone of our modern economy, powering everything from computers and smartphones to energy storage, defense systems, and AI data centers.”
“Yet today, the United States imports nearly all of these minerals, often from unstable regions or adversarial nations,” the company’s statement said.
Redwood is valued at $6 billion, according to Business Insider.
The U.S. Department of Energy had earmarked the company for a $2 billion loan under the Biden administration’s hallmark clean energy legislation, but Redwood walked away from the funding in fall 2024 in favor of privately raised money.
SC Daily Gazette is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. SC Daily Gazette maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Seanna Adcox for questions: [email protected].