A top Energy Department official Tuesday said the U.S. is poised to see a rapid build-out of processing for critical minerals like lithium and graphite needed to make EV batteries and compete with China.
“By 2030 we’ll have 85 times the amount of processing of lithium in our country … going forward, on the graphite front, it’s a 25 times increase,” Energy Department Deputy Secretary David Turk said at the Council on Foreign Relations summit in Washington.
“Those are numbers that may be striking to a lot of you, but that’s actually what’s happening when you have a strategy based on analytics,” he added.
Turk said a surge of grants, loans and tax incentives tied to laws the Biden administration passed — including the Inflation Reduction Act and bipartisan infrastructure law — required DOE to create a whole new office dedicated to supply chains.
