American Battery Factory’s grand plan to build a bunch of, er, U.S. battery factories was shaken Tuesday when Tucson, Arizona, the company go ahead to locate the first plant near the city airport.
Over the course of a decade, ABF says it will pump about $1.2 billion into the facility, claiming it will be “the nation’s largest gigafactory” for lithium iron phosphate (LFP) battery cells when complete, with a footprint of approximately 2 million square meters. ABF estimates that it will eventually bring 1,000 additional jobs to the city.
The company says its batteries will be used for both commercial and residential energy storage, as well as powering electric vehicles. The plans come amidst one crunch for battery materials as electric vehicles gain ground in the US (cars and SUVs are currently a 57% of transportation-related emissions in the country, according to the EPA.)
ABF is a spin-off of Leo energy, an eight-year-old energy storage company based in American Fork, Utah. The company’s attempt to launch a “network” of LFP plants in the US is one of many attempts to seek government funding through the Inflation Reduction Act. The law provides billions in tax credits to boost domestic production of batteries and electric vehicles, incentivizing companies like Toyota, Honda and Chinese battery maker Gotion to build in the United States.
In a statement to businessroundups.org, ABF chief executive Paul Charles called the Inflation Reduction Act “a real game changer,” saying the act would initially translate “into approximately $100,000,000 per year in such tax credits for our first module or pod of production output.”
The company added that it has signed strategic supply agreements with Japanese chemical giant Asahi Kasei and synthetic graphite company Anovion.
