As battery-powered electric vehicles become a mainstay on the nation’s highways — and a key piece of President Biden’s environmental policy — the U.S. is facing a formidable challenge in its efforts to compete in the global battery race.
“The problem is, we’re just pretty far behind here,” Ethan Elkind, director of the climate program at Berkeley Law’s Center for Law, Energy & the Environment, told The Hill.
“We should have been planning for this a decade ago,” he added. “But I think we can get things moving, now that there’s bipartisan support for it.”
Some of that support was evident in November’s passage of the bipartisan infrastructure bill, which allocated $7.5 billion toward a national network of electric vehicle (EV) chargers — and followed the Biden administration’s August declaration that half of new cars sold in the U.S. would be zero-emission by 2030.
Just last month, the U.S. Department of Energy announced that it would be allocating $3.16 billion in funding from the infrastructure bill to produce more batteries and associated components in America, while bolstering related supply chains.
Despite the fact that lithium-ion battery technology was invented in the U.S. in the 1970s, China has been able to control the supply chain thus far.
“The Chinese Communist Party for over 30 years has been thinking very strategically about, as we shift from a fossil fuel-based economy to a minerals, clean energy-based economy, how can they leapfrog ahead of the rest of the world, I think, and become sort of the global powerhouse in this new energy economy,” said Abigail Wulf, director of critical minerals strategy at the think tank Securing America’s Energy Future.
Wulf called the announcement of the $3 billion for batteries under the bipartisan infrastructure law a “huge” step toward addressing the imbalance.
“Is it going to solve all our problems? No,” she said. “But it’s the first time that our government has ever really gotten to this in any major way, which I think is really exciting.”
George Crabtree, a senior scientist at the Department of Energy’s Argonne National Laboratory, noted the U.S. is also “way behind” Europe in battery production. He said that China’s dominance went beyond the mining of materials.
“They traveled the world and made deals with the foreign suppliers. And they dominate a lot of the refining of the materials that they don’t mine themselves. So there’s really a two-level lock on the supply chain,” he said.
Read more here from Zack, Sharon Udasin and Caitlin McLean.