Tesla CEO Elon Musk and Texas Governor Greg Abbott laid the groundbreaking for the company’s lithium refinery in Corpus Christi on Monday.
Tesla plans to invest $375 million in the plant on the Gulf Coast to help secure its domestic supply of lithium hydroxide in the United States. Lithium hydroxide is an important raw material for the production of electric vehicle power batteries and home and utility-grade energy storage batteries.
Elon Musk said Tesla plans to produce enough battery-grade lithium at the plant to supply capacity for 1 million electric vehicles a year and hopes its lithium production will exceed the combined capacity of other North American refineries.
Mining company Arbor (Albemarle) announced in March that it would invest $1.3 billion in a new lithium processing plant in South Carolina, USA.
According to documents received by the Texas Comptroller’s Office, Tesla plans to build a “battery-grade lithium hydroxide refinery” in the state, as well as other “facilities to support other types of battery material processing, refining and manufacturing and ancillary manufacturing operations to support Tesla’s sustainable product line “.
In its filing, the company promises that “Tesla will use innovative processes and aim to consume fewer hazardous reagents and produce usable by-products than traditional processes.”
Musk claimed on Monday that the refinery “will not emit toxic or other substances, and you can live in the refinery without any adverse effects.”
Turner Caldwell, head of Tesla’s battery raw materials and recycling business, said at Monday’s groundbreaking ceremony that the company will look for “beneficial use opportunities” for lithium byproducts, which are expected to be mainly sand and limestone.
Typically, refining ore into battery-grade lithium involves crushing the raw material into a crumb, then heating it at high temperatures and mixing it with acid in a suspension. Hydrochloric acid is one of the acids typically used in lithium processing. And under the U.S. Clean Air Act, hydrochloric acid is a dangerous air pollutant.
Neither Caldwell nor Elon Musk disclosed the specific chemicals the company will use in the process.
Elon Musk said last April that Tesla might need to enter the lithium refining industry because the cost of the metal is “reaching insane levels. But since he made those comments, lithium prices have fallen sharply.
However, the U.S. share of global lithium processing and refining capacity is only 1 percent. Elon Musk said the supply of battery-grade lithium is a “fundamental bottleneck” for electric vehicles and other industries.
