US President Joe Biden on Tuesday highlighted his efforts to counter China’s dominance of the electric battery market, as he touted domestic efforts to mine and process lithium and rare metals necessary to create the technology that powers vehicles, electronics, wind turbines and more.
Biden announced that his administration is giving US$35 million to MP Materials Corp, which mines rare earth metals near the Nevada border in Southern California.
The funding would boost MP’s ability to process the materials domestically for use in US manufacturing.
Photo: AP
He also announced efforts to extract lithium from geothermal brine found near California’s Salton Sea.
Biden said that US demand for such materials would grow 400 to 600 percent over the next several decades.
“We can’t build a future that’s made in America if we ourselves are dependent on China for the materials that power the products of today and tomorrow,” Biden said. “And this is not anti-China, or anti-anything else. It’s pro-America.”
Biden spoke virtually from Washington with a group of business and government leaders in the state, including California Governor Gavin Newsom.
Las Vegas-based MP runs the Mountain Pass mine and processing facility that is the only one of its kind in North America.
It extracts rare earth metals and produces a concentrate that is exported for use in other countries.
Such metals are used to produce magnets necessary for batteries in electric vehicles and many other items.
The federal money would help the company create a processing facility for “heavy” rare earth metals and follows a US$10 million award last year for “light” rare earth metals.
The company is spending US$700 million of its own money for improving processing and creating a manufacturing facility in Texas to produce magnets.
The company has a deal with General Motors Co, MP senior vice president for policy and communications Matt Sloustcher said.
“My team is committed to bringing this supply chain home,” MP chief executive officer Jim Litinsky told Biden on the call.
Newsom has called the state the Saudi Arabia of lithium, a reference to that country’s abundance of oil.
Newsom said lithium extraction in California has the potential to boost US national security by improving domestic supply chains and accelerating the transition away from fossil fuels in the transportation sector.
Biden earlier said that the nation could produce about 500,000 electric vehicles per year by 2025.
“If it’s as big as it appears to be, this is a game changer in terms of our efforts to transition to low-carbon green growth, and to radically change the way we produce and consume energy,” Newsom said.
Berkshire Hathaway Energy Co is among several companies working on extracting lithium from geothermal brine found near the Salton Sea, California’s largest lake.
Berkshire Hathaway has run geothermal plants around the lake for decades, but the lithium has historically been pumped back underground with the brine after it was used to generate power.
With investment of about US$20 million from the state and federal governments, the company is working on projects to demonstrate that it can extract the lithium and convert it to battery-grade in a way that is commercially viable, BHE Renewables LLC president Alicia Knapp said.
The Newsom administration said it wants to ensure economic benefits from lithium extraction go back to the areas around the Salton Sea, which have been hit by economic hardship and environmental degradation as the lake dries up because of dwindling supplies from the Colorado River.
Silvia Paz, chairwoman of the state-created Lithium Valley Commission, told Biden that communities in the region have seen “unfilled promises” before.
She called for investments in career development and education for people in the region, as well as improvements to basic services and environmental cleanup.
“We want to be at the table and help you understand what it means for us to have a prosperous economy,” she said.
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