Lithium Refinery Breaks Ground
Tesla has officially begun construction of their new Lithium refinery in Corpus Christi, Texas - after the groundbreaking ceremony this past Monday.
The May 8th event was attended by CEO Elon Musk, as well as local and state officials; and we were treated to not only some great drone and satellite shots of the enormous site - but also some new details about the facility.
The $375 million refinery is the first of its kind in North America - which explains why everyone is so excited for it. Battery-grade lithium is usually imported to North American companies - and while Tesla might not be willing to farm out this facility for other companies, it certainly opens the door for more refineries to be built here.
Aside from that, local officials are very happy about the amount of jobs this will bring. Tesla began hiring for this facility back in November 2022 - and while the exact number of jobs this plant is going to be creating haven’t been announced yet, early estimates were for at least 162 high-paying permanent jobs - as well as 250 construction jobs to actually build the place.
And it’s not just about the jobs, or the novelty of having North America’s first lithium plant - Tesla is also innovating the production process - and the May 8th presentation gave us a more detailed look at what the company plans to do.
The conventional process uses a lot of dangerous and toxic chemicals. Tesla’s idea is to use more stable reagents that don’t produce much waste at all. And what byproducts it does make - mostly sand and limestone according to Tesla’s engineers - can go towards other uses like construction.
The whole mantra of this new refining technique is clean efficiency. Normally, getting pure lithium hydroxide - the product needed for lithium batteries - is a multistep process. Refineries create the hydroxide, mix it with reagents to bind impurities, then turn it back into hydroxide again. Rinse and repeat until you have a pure enough product for battery manufacturing.
Tesla is in a great position to streamline that process, because this facility will only be catering to their needs. And so the goal is to not only skip this whole back-and-forth by producing an extremely pure hydroxide right out of the gate, but the reagents they will be using are very safe. Elon said during the presentation that:
“You could live right in the middle of the refinery and not suffer any ill effects.”
And that design goal extends to battery recycling, which was also a big consideration for Tesla’s engineers. The facility will be flexible enough to be able to process both raw materials AND recycled mass.
All told, Tesla’s new refining methods should consume 20% less energy and use materials that are 60 percent cheaper than older Lithium refining solutions - leading to what they’ve estimated to be a 30% lower cost on a per unit produced basis.
And all of that is given extra efficiency by the facility’s location - which is close to the deep-water port at Austin, and will be built directly on rail for easy movement of products.
As for the site itself, earth-moving equipment was spotted in the background of the presentation - no doubt just showing off for the assembled guests. But the site did look worked already. The actual groundbreaking had happened a couple of weeks ago, but that’s normal - the ground has to be prepared before an event can even take place.
The first thing that hit us was the size of this place. Judging from the site plan, we can see that the facility is going to extend across a couple of roads and the small river that runs across the site - which is located just south of Robstown. Using some rough measurements, it looks like this site will cover almost 3 square kilometers once it’s done - about the same size as GigaBerlin’s site.
But from the look of the site, things seem to be already underway. You can see the work roads already in place - those dirt and gravel paths that will be used for the build crew and may or may not be made into paved roadways later in the construction.
You can also see that the first pads are being laid out. Those earthmovers may have just been for show during the presentation, but they were very much used to compress the ground in those wide, dark patches we can see from the drone shots.
This is important to note because the next step is to build storage for the construction materials, and to build the contractor offices where the project leads will run the operation from. And we’ve all seen how quickly Tesla likes to build, so after those essential pieces have been built, we’ll likely see the foundations getting dug, and then steel will start to go up pretty soon afterwards.
During the event, Elon said that he believes the facility will be finished construction early next year, with production starting before the end of 2024 - and that sounds likely. The buildings themselves will probably come together very quickly, it’s the specialist equipment and chemical storage that will take the most time.
And in the meantime, we’ll have a front-row seat to the construction of the very first North American Lithium Refinery.