The White House has confirmed $3 billion in infrastructure funding to fund battery manufacturing for electric vehicles.
The funds, part of the $1 trillion infrastructure bill signed by Joe Biden, will be provided by the Department of Energy.
The step will be important in the processing of minerals for use in large-capacity batteries and recycling those batteries.
While the funds will help to build and retrofit battery factories, the Government’s Infrastructure Act will help the country take decisive steps to facilitate the full transition to electric vehicle use, including the purchase of electric buses and the installation of EV chargers.
However, the funds will not be used to develop new domestic mines to produce lithium, nickel, cobalt and other minerals needed to make EV batteries.
“These resources are about battery supply chain, which includes producing, recycling critical minerals without new extraction or mining. So that’s why we’re all pretty excited about this,” said Gina McCarthy, Biden’s national climate adviser.
U.S. President Joe Biden is pushing for half of the vehicles sold in the U.S. to be electric by 2030, which will help create unionized jobs in key campaign battleground states, suppress Chinese competition in a fast-growing market, and reduce climate-change-related carbon dioxide emissions.
The sources for this piece include an article in Reuters.
