Early this month in the Texan port city of Corpus Christi, Tesla CEO Elon Musk and a phalanx of local officials shoveled dirt onto the site of the first commercial-scale factory of its kind: a $375 million lithium refinery using equipment that slashes operating costs by a third while processing enough of the metal to power 1 million electric vehicles a year.
But the start of the factory’s construction, part of Musk’s strategy to halve the cost of his batteries, raises a question: Amid intensifying competition from China, why are the world’s other EV and battery developers in the U.S., Europe, South Korea and Japan not doing the same thing?
