Piedmont Lithium announced Thursday that the company abandoned its plan to invest $582 million to establish a lithium hydroxide processing, refining, and manufacturing facility in Etowah and instead build the proposed plant in North Carolina.
The company currently operates a plant in Gaston County, North Carolina, called Carolina Lithium, which will be expanded with the addition of the facility originally expected to be built in Etowah.
Piedmont is a producer of battery-grade lithium hydroxide, a critical component in the supply chain for electric vehicle and battery storage markets.
The company said abandoning its proposed Tennessee plant was “in response to dynamic market conditions.”
“Following the receipt of our Carolina Lithium state mining permit in Q2’24, and in response to changing market conditions, we have consolidated our U.S. project development strategy to deploy capital and technical resources more efficiently and leverage the Company’s foundational North Carolina project. As part of our strategy, we plan to shift the proposed Tennessee Lithium conversion capacity to Carolina Lithium to include two lithium hydroxide trains constructed in a phased approach,” the company announced in its Q2 2024 Earnings Report released Thursday.
Piedmont Lithium’s stock has decreased 81 percent within the past year.
The company’s Tennessee facility was planned to be located at the North Etowah Industrial Park and utilize “more environmentally responsible and economic processing technology, supporting Piedmont’s objective of becoming a large, low-cost, sustainable producer of lithium products.”
The Tennessee Department of Economic and Community Development (TNECD) touted at the time that the facility would be America’s largest “lithium hydroxide processing” facility, which would produce 30,000 metric tons of battery-grade lithium annually.
The project was expected to create 117 new jobs in McMinn County.
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Kaitlin Housler is a reporter at The Tennessee Star and The Star News Network. Follow Kaitlin on X / Twitter.
How many taxpayer dollars were promised (and possibly already given) to this company? Glad they too their lithium disaster to North Carolina.
Folks are finally realizing this battery method dont work so well, replacement batteries are 20-30 grand for a nine thousand pound boat anchor with wheels …
yall go build that crap in LA or Oakland, who would care ?- cause we do not.
( and read what JB wrote also )
TN Engineering
THIS is NOT a bad thing. There should be SOME things that should be OFF of the ‘radar screens’ of the economic ‘hustlers’ in our State. (It often seems to me that these people {i.e., the economic recruiters/‘hustlers’} are paid on a percentage basis of the so-called monetary ‘investment’ made which these people are responsible for bringing into our State and into our communities—and THAT is ALL that they think about.)
Twenty, thirty, fifty years from now when our State is an environmental and economic wasteland from the all of the extremely hazardous waste that has been ruinously deposited upon the lands of Tennessee for forevermore by those companies recruited to come into our State, almost all will say then, “Why were we ever so foolish to allow this and to do this?” The companies that did this {but they ALL promised at the beginning, “Oh no, we would NEVER do such an irresponsible thing,”} will be then be long gone and financially of no help, such that the economic burden of ‘cleanup’ {if that is even a remote possibility} will have to borne by the people of Tennessee.
And our beautiful Tennessee will then be just another ‘armpit’ place of the United States. And if you don’t think THAT could ever happen in our State, just look at the other places in our country where it has already happened and consider why that ‘hot’ company that now wants to move into Tennessee to do its business here is leaving {or not going to} Ohio, or Michigan, or New Jersey, or wherever?