[ad_1]
Tesla Inc. Chief Executive Elon Musk joined Texas Gov. Greg Abbott on Monday to break ground on the EV maker’s new lithium refinery.
The facility, which would be the largest of its kind in North America, is expected to produce enough battery-grade lithium to build 1 million electric vehicles by 2025.
Speaking at the groundbreaking near Corpus Christi, Texas, Musk said construction should be completed next year, with production beginning about a year later.
Australia, Chile and China are the top three lithium producers, but China leads in lithium refining by a large margin. Having its own refinery should help ease Tesla’s supply chain. No other North American auto maker refines its own lithium.
Auto makers are scrambling to secure lithium and other metals used in the production of electric-vehicle batteries amid a renewed push to make them cheaper and mainstream. California last year put rules in place to ban the sales of new gas-powered vehicles by 2035.
“It’s not that there’s a shortage of lithium ore to mine, but there is a shortage of really heavy industry refinement of lithium to battery-grade,” Musk said Monday, adding that Tesla will continue to buy lithium from other suppliers.
In March, mining giant Albemarle Corp.
ALB,
— which is currently one of Tesla’s lithium suppliers — announced it plans to build a $1.3 billion lithium refinery in South Carolina that would support the manufacturing of about 2.4 million electric vehicles annually.
Abbott touted Tesla’s project as good for the future of his state. “Texas wants to be able to be self-reliant, not dependent on any foreign hostile nation for what we need,” he said. “We need lithium for the phone you have in your hands, for the batteries that be in Tesla trucks, and for other purposes.”
Tesla first filed paperwork for the facility in September. Musk has, in the past, compared lithium mining to “printing money.”
Tesla shares
TSLA,
have rallied about 40% year to date, though are still down 35% over the past 12 months, while the S&P 500
SPX,
has gained 8% in 2023 and 3.7% over the past year.
MarketWatch reporter Claudia Assis contributed to this report.
[ad_2]
Source link
