The Race to Refine Lithium

A Tesla manager at the company’s Lithium Refinery in Corpus Christi, Texas has confirmed that the site is expected to begin operations on the very first day of 2024.

Senior Manager of Operations at the refinery - Jason Bevan - said in a recent interview that the site is going to be having a very busy year - with production beginning on January 1st, and then continuing a steep ramp-up throughout the rest of 2024.

The Refinery, which broke ground back on May 8th, is the first of its kind in North America; and will be making use of an acid-free refining technique that will reportedly make the site celan and safe to operate in. Byproducts from the process will even be able to be used in other applications.

On top of that, Tesla was predicting that the site would initially be creating about 1,000 jobs, and upwards of 250 full time positions - and they’ve already started hiring people to fill some of those positions.

But Bevan’s comments seem to point to further expansion - and even as early as June we saw that Tesla is already proposing donating 3.8 million dollars to the local County for the use of improving the roads near their site - which they no doubt expect to be heavily trafficked.

And that definitely lines up with other projects in the company.

Cybertruck’s production ramp-up alone would require extra support for battery production  - so having the refinery improve at a parallel speed would take a lot of pressure off of Tesla’s battery production partners.

But with new versions of their older vehicles like the Model 3 Highland and the upcoming Project Juniper Model Y refresh - not to mention the new $25,000 vehicle platform that was just recently moved to GigaTexas - the company is going to need to have a lot of batteries.

It is pretty amazing that they can already make such solid declarations about the refinery before it’s even built. Hiring is generally only done when a company is sure of the project needs - and by the looks of things, it’s probable that, if anything, the refinery might grow too slowly to keep up.