The lack of a US supply chain for electric vehicle battery materials is often spun as a tale of inconvenient geography. In many ways, this is true. There’s cobalt from the Congo. Indonesian nickel. Latin American lithium. But there’s one critical material for which this isn’t the case: graphite. The material, which is the biggest component of battery cells by weight, isn’t a rare metal. It’s an arrangement of six carbon atoms that can be dug up basically anywhere in the world, including from large deposits in the United States and Canada. And where it isn’t found naturally, it can be made synthetically, usually from waste petroleum products. For
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