US electric vehicle (EV) maker Tesla Inc. (Tesla) broke ground on its in-house lithium refinery located in the greater Corpus Christi area of Texas, the company announced in a blog post on its website on May 8.
Tesla said it has earmarked investments of more than $1 billion for the said facility. “This investment is critical to our mission to accelerate the world’s transition to sustainable energy and represents our efforts to aggressively increase the supply of battery-grade lithium hydroxide available in North America,” the EV maker said in a statement May 8.
Tesla said that the construction of the lithium refinery is expected to create nearly 1,000 construction jobs. In addition, the facility is expected to employ more than 250 full-time employees, including production technicians, operations managers and engineering roles to support ongoing plant maintenance and optimization.
Tesla plans to complete the construction work of its planned lithium refinery by 2024, followed by optimizing the production to full capacity in 2025. With the facility expected to commence operations in 2024–25, Tesla will become the only EV maker in North America to refine its own lithium.
Significance: According to the company, the lithium refinery, which will be spread over an area of over 1,200 acres, will be the location of the first industrial deployment of an acid-free lithium refining route. “This process eliminates the use of hazardous reagents and byproducts in favor of more inert options,” it said, adding that the byproduct from this facility, a mixture of sand and limestone, will be useful in the production of construction materials, making beneficial use of traditional waste streams.
Further, Tesla expects that in the future this planned refinery will also process other intermediate lithium feedstocks, including recycled batteries and manufacturing scrap.
Citing Elon Musk, a Reuters news report published May 8 said that the planned lithium refinery will be able to produce enough battery metal that can power about 1 million EVs by 2025. This will make the said facility the largest North American battery material processing facility in the future, it added.
It further added that with the planned lithium refinery in Texas, Tesla is stepping out of its core focus area of building EVs. However, justifying the investments in lithium processing, Musk had said that stepping into lithium processing is necessary to secure Tesla’s ambitious EV sales targets.
“As we look ahead a few years, a fundamental choke point in the advancement of EVs is the availability of battery grade lithium,” the Reuters report quoted Musk, who spoke to the media on the sidelines of the ground-breaking ceremony May 8.
