Tesla co founder-backed copper maker Red Metals secures seed funding for US refining plant
Canada-listed copper manufacturer Red Metals has secured $10-million in seed funding which will contribute to its planned $70-million facility in Charleston, South Carolina, to scale its novel copper refining process designed to reshore the manufacturing of finished copper products to the US.
The funding round was led by a company called Gigascale Capital, with participation from Future Ventures, MCJ and JB Straubel, who is the founder and CEO of Redwood Materials and co-founder of Tesla.
Red Metals has also secured economic incentives from South Carolina and Charleston Country to support development of its first production facility, which reduces the complexity of traditional copper refining methods.
The company’s first facility in Charleston will produce high-conductivity copper rod.
US copper demand is expected to increase by more than one-million tons a year through 2035, which will result in a domestic market value of more than $45-billion.
At the same mine, American copper production capacity has declined, with the US poised to face a refined copper supply gap of more than 2.5-million tons by 2035 - even if every major announced mining project comes online.
Red Metals explains that a key bottleneck in the industry is the refining process.
Conventional copper refining moves material through multiple intermediate products, including concentrate, matte, anode, cathode and rod. Designed for ore that is often less than 1% copper, the legacy process requires significant energy, time and working capital to move material across numerous facilities, operators, and often multiple countries before reaching a finished product pure enough for industrial use.
“America has the feedstocks, the demand, and the workforce to produce copper domestically at scale. What it has lacked is an economically viable refining process. To this end, Red Metals is building an integrated, modern model that converts copper feedstocks directly into finished products closer to where they’re needed, reducing supply chain complexity while strengthening domestic manufacturing," says Red Metals founder and CEO Jackson Switzer.
Red Metals will integrate physical processing, advanced sorting, and metallurgical refining into a single continuous operation, converting copper feedstocks directly into finished products while eliminating the intermediate steps that add cost, time, and emissions in conventional refining.
The process is designed to be feedstock-flexible, initially focused on domestic copper scrap, and to make domestic copper refining commercially viable without subsidies to help rebuild the industrial base and skilled manufacturing workforce needed for the twenty-first century. The company’s first commercial product will be high-conductivity copper rod, the industry-standard input used in wire, magnet wire, and other electrical applications.
Straubel comments that electricity and industry run on copper, and the US has spent decades offshoring the refining and manufacturing capacity needed to produce it. “Red Metals has the rare combination of technical depth and operational pragmatism needed to rebuild that capability. What Red Metals is building is exactly the kind of industrial infrastructure America needs more of.”
Gigascale Capital partner Victoria Beasley adds that the demand signal for domestically refined copper is undeniable, but the domestic infrastructure needed to support it barely exists today. "Red Metals is the first company we’ve seen combining genuine process innovation with the execution capability required to rebuild it.”
