Redwood Materials joins electric vehicle, battery trek to South Carolina

Dec 14 (Reuters) – Redwood Supplies is the most up-to-date firm to set up shop in South Carolina’s growing group of electric powered motor vehicle and battery manufacturers, the Carson City, Nevada-based mostly company stated on Wednesday.

Redwood claimed it will create a $3.5 billion battery materials campus in Ridgefield, about 30 miles (48.28 km) northwest of Charleston, that will recycle, refine and remanufacture cathode and anode products these types of as nickel, cobalt, lithium and copper.

Anode and cathode components, which make up most of an EV battery’s cost, are not yet produced in North America.

But a number of businesses have announced programs to make those factors in North America by mid-ten years, to get advantage of incentives created into the U.S. Inflation Reduction Act. The IRS aims to lessen imports of batteries and materials from China, which controls the movement of refined minerals this kind of as nickel and cobalt.

The Ridgefield facility aims to get started recycling late upcoming 12 months and ramp up ingredient manufacturing potential to 100 gigawatt-hours by 2025 — ample to offer battery resources for much more than a million electrical cars, the corporation said.

The Redwood Resources campus, which is positioned in the vicinity of the U.S. assembly plant for Volvo (0175.HK) and Polestar electric motor vehicles, has the ability to broaden to 400 GWh, which would call for many billion dollars of added expenditure, a enterprise official mentioned.

The Ridgefield facility is predicted to provide battery supplies to Ford Motor (F.N) and SK On in Kentucky, Toyota Motor (7203.T) in North Carolina and Volvo and Visualize AESC in South Carolina.

South Carolina presently is dwelling to auto companies BMW (BMWG.DE) in Greer, Mercedes-Benz Vans in North Charleston, Arrival (47K.F) in Rock Hill and Proterra (PTRA.O) in Greenville and Greer.

Volvo is building a battery plant subsequent to its assembly facility in Ridgeville and BMW is partnering with Imagine AESC on a $700 million battery plant in Woodruff.

A next North American “battery belt” is springing up in Canada, in Becancour, Quebec, on the St. Lawrence River.

Amongst the firms setting up or taking into consideration investments in battery material refining and manufacturing facilities there are General Motors (GM.N), Ford and Volkswagen (VOWG_p.DE), as very well as suppliers SK, BASF (BASFn.DE) and Posco Chemical (003670.KS) and mining/refining companies Umicore (UMI.BR) and Nouveau Monde (NOU.V).

Reporting by Paul Lienert in Detroit Modifying by Josie Kao

Our Benchmarks: The Thomson Reuters Rely on Rules.