Tesla To Use All North American Resources For Gigafactory Tesla To Use All North American Resources For Planned Gigafactory
Tesla’s Gigafactory Will DOUBLE The World’s Production Of Lithium Ion Units
When Tesla announced that it would be building a $5 billion dollar facility in conjunction with other battery manufacturers as a partners, one of the first question was – where will Tesla source its raw materials?
Would the graphite, cobalt and lithium come from places like South America, China, the Congo? Or perhaps even some resources from the USA?
Nevada Is Currently Projected As The Front-Runner For Tesla’s Battery Facility
It turns out Tesla is going to stay at home and source everythingfrom North America, and the reason isn’t cost (as it is quite likely more expensive to acquire resources abroad), but rather the environment.
“It will enable us to establish a supply chain that is local and focused on minimizing environmental impact while significantly reducing battery cost,” Tesla spokesperson Liz Jarvis-Shean said in a statement to Bloomberg.
The topic “du jour” of late has been graphite mining around the world, a process which, if not done properly, puts out massive amount of pollution; so much so that countries like China are now actively shuttering many of their mines.
Tesla’s answer at this moment in acquiring graphite for their lithium batteries is to source the material in its synthetic variant from Japan and Europe.
Bloomberg talked to Sam Jaffe, an analyst at Navigant Research, and he predicts that the graphite for Tesla’s Gigafactory will most likely come from planned operations in Canada. If more is required than Canada can supply, resources in Idaho and Minnesota could also be tapped.