Redwood Materials, a battery recycler created by Tesla cofounder JB Straubel, says it’s more than tripling the size of its operations in Nevada and will spend “hundreds of millions” to scale up recovery of lithium, cobalt, nickel and other commodity metals it sells to makers of lithium-ion batteries for electric vehicles.

Straubel, speaking in an Energy Department roundtable told U.S. Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm, that his Carson City, Nevada-based company is “hiring about 500 people here in just the next one or two years and investing several hundred million dollars into this particular area into those recycling facilities and scaling that up right now.”

Redwood said in an email message that it has purchased 100 acres near Tesla’s Gigafactory in Sparks, Nevada, and intends to expand its current 150,000-square-foot facility in the state by more than 400,000-square-feet. Additionally, it will hire about 500 more workers over the next two years, up from 130 people currently.

Straubel said the expansion is being paid for with privately raised funds, but didn’t say how much the company has raised. Redwood Materials has been tight-lipped about its fundraising activities, disclosing only a July 2020 investment round that brought in $40 million from Amazon, Breakthrough Energy Ventures and Palo Alto-based Capricorn Investment Group. Straubel has likely invested millions more from his own fortune which Forbes estimates is at least $900 million.

Straubel, who was Tesla’s long-time chief technology officer, helped design its original battery packs and motors and oversaw development and operations of its Gigafactory in Nevada. He left the electric vehicle company led by Elon Musk in 2019 to focus on Redwood. His years of making batteries for electric vehicles, which need cobalt, lithium, nickel and copper sourced from around the globe, gave rise to concerns about their long-term availability and environmental impact. He also saw an opportunity for a business that could recover those materials in a closed-loop system and sell them back to battery- and electronics manufacturers.

As of May, Redwood Materials was scaled to recover enough material for 45,000 electric car battery packs annually. That could generate as much as $90 million of revenue, based on Benchmark Mineral Intelligence’s estimate that the commodity metal content per pack is worth about $2,000. Buyers of Redwood’s reclaimed alloys include Panasonic, which makes cells at Tesla’s Nevada Gigafactory, and EV battery specialist Envision AESC–which also supply it with lithium-ion scraps.

Straubel and executives from U.S. battery manufacturers were participating in the roundtable as part of efforts by the Biden Administration to accelerate domestic production of lithium-ion batteries, the materials needed to make them and recycling of battery packs.

While the U.S. is scaling up battery production, most lithium-ion cells and critical materials are sourced from abroad. “And if we remain reliant on imports, we just will not be able to compete in the global market for clean energy technologies,” Granholm said. “That market, as many of you know, is going to hit at a minimum of $23 trillion by the end of this decade. We just can’t afford to miss out. Our economic competitors are certainly gunning to be able to corner that market. And we cannot stand idly by while that happens.”

Straubel sees battery recycling as essential to creating the domestic supply base Granholm is advocating. What’s more, closely-held Redwood Materials claims to have invented recycling techniques that make it “economically competitive already today,” Straubel said. “We can compete with the prices of mined materials today.”