Tesla inks deal to get key battery component outside China

Graphite stores lithium inside a battery until it’s needed to generate electricity by splitting into charged ions and electrons.It comes as every major automaker is racing to get into electric vehicles amid concerns about climate change.Tesla is making almost a million electric cars per year, and sourcing enough batteries is its biggest constraint, he said.“They’ve upped their own battery manufacturing capacity,” Moores said, but still “they can’t get enough batteries.”A new battery factory that the company is building in its new hometown of Austin, Texas, will allow it to get closer to self-sufficiency, but Moores said it is still buying batteries from other manufacturers, “and that won’t change this decade.”For instance, Tesla has a deal with Panasonic to make battery cells at the automaker's battery factory near Reno, Nevada.The deal with Syrah is part of a broader effort by automakers to secure relatively scarce raw materials for batteries as demand for electric vehicles is expected to grow, said Sam Abuelsamid, principal e-mobility analyst for Guidehouse Insights.The deal also brings the graphite processed in Louisiana much closer to Tesla's U.S. factories.“The pandemic pointed out to us that we've got these long, long, long supply chains, and it doesn’t take much to disrupt a supply chain,” said Donald Sadoway, a professor of materials chemistry at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.