Government funding will lower battery prices, expert says

In the future, “Made in America” may not mean higher prices, at least for batteries.

Earlier this month, the Department of Energy announced nearly $1 billion in funding opportunities for critical mineral mining and processing companies, in an effort to bring the supply chain back to the United States and no longer rely on “on foreign actors to supply and process the critical materials that are essential to modern life,” Secretary of Energy Chris Wright said in a news release.

US Critical Materials Executive Chairman Harvey Kaye told Tech Brew that reshoring these processes will bring down the price of batteries. US Critical Materials is a rare earth elements development company that owns deposits in Montana and Idaho.

“You don’t have to ship it, you don’t have to pay tariffs on it,” Kaye told Tech Brew of domestically processed critical minerals, which “over a period of time should effectuate substantial reductions in the cost of batteries and the cost of storing green-produced energy.”

The funding opportunities include grants for lithium extraction, domestic refinement of rare earth elements, “derivative battery manufacturing and recycling,” and harvesting the critical minerals that already exist in industrial wastewater.

Kaye told us the DOE’s announcement is just the latest policy push from the Trump Administration that speeds up the processing of critical minerals in the US, which historically can take up to 15 years. In accordance with policy changes, Kaye said that American critical mineral companies plan to work together by sharing technology to overcome China’s dominance of mineral processing.

“While we’re friendly rivals, we are working together to solve this problem,” Kaye said.