Coreshell has a plan to slash the price of American-made batteries

The electric vehicle transition is really a story about China. There, subsidies have helped juice not just automakers, but the entire battery supply chain behind them. Those incentives, plus decades of industrial policy focused on controlled critical mineral supply chains, has left American and European automakers flat-footed. Take graphite, for example. Every lithium-ion battery today, regardless of the chemistry, requires some or all of the anode to be made of graphite, and Chinese companies make 99% of all graphite anode materials, according to Benchmark Mineral Intelligence. “If you try to make graphite here in the United States, it’s always going to be more expensive than Chinese graphite. You need a technical edge or material differentiation to be competitive in the U.S. or in Europe,” Jonathan Tan, co-founder and CEO of Coreshell, told TechCrunch. Tan thinks his company offers that. Rather than trying to beat Chinese companies, Coreshell is attempting an end run by swapping g ... Read full article.