One of the projects funded in the Biden administration’s $2.8 billion in grants to increase domestic manufacturing of batteries for electric vehicles is in St. Louis, Missouri and a subsidiary of a firm headquartered in Israel.
ICL-IP America Inc. is one of 20 firms that received grants for project to extract and process lithium, graphite and other battery materials. The firm received a $197,338,492 grant and it will have to match the federal investment. Its cost share, according to the Energy Department and the White House announcement will total $232,262,211.
Companies selected for the grants will be required to match the federal investment, leveraging an estimated $9 billion to boost clean energy technology, create good-paying jobs and support Biden’s goal for electric vehicles to make up half of all new vehicle sales by 2030, the White House said.
The federal grants announced Wednesday are funded by last year’s $1 trillion infrastructure law and are separate from an executive order Biden issued last spring invoking the Defense Production Act to boost production of lithium and other critical minerals used to power electric vehicles.
The grants will fund projects in at least 12 states: Alabama, Georgia, Kentucky, Louisiana, Missouri, Nevada, New York, North Carolina, North Dakota, Ohio, Tennessee and Washington state.
ICL-IP America, a subsidiary of Israeli-based ICL Industrial Products Ltd., plans to construction the plant to produce high quality lithium iron phosphate cathode power for the global lithium battery industry using primarily a domestic supply chain.
Using its own process technology and by acquiring licenses for certain other commercially proven processes, the plant will have two production lines built in dual phases under a single roof. Each
production line will be capable of producing 15,000 tons per year of LFP powder. The plant will be an expansion of its existing facility in St. Louis, MO. Production will start in 33 months.
The plant will employ approximately 150 people once fully operational.
