Elon Musk And Greg Abbott Celebrate New Lithium Production Facility

Tesla founder, Elon Musk, and Texas Governor, Greg Abbott, celebrated the beginning of construction of a Lithium battery producing facility for electric cars on Monday. This comes shortly after Musk announced that the Tesla headquarters will be moving out of California, and into Texas.

“Welcome to South Texas, @Tesla! Today, we broke ground on their new lithium refinery in Robstown. Securing Texas’ own lithium refining production will power our future for generations to come. Thank you @elonmusk for investing in South Texas” Abbott said in a tweet.

“This is not just good for jobs, but it’s good for the entire future of the state,” Abbott added. “Texas wants to be able to be self-reliant, not dependent on any foreign hostile nation for what we need. We need lithium for the phone you have in your hands, for the batteries that be in Tesla trucks, and for other purposes.”

This new facility could produce enough Lithium to power 1 million vehicles and is one of the largest Lithium production facilities in the world.

“We thought it’s important to address what we think, as we look ahead a few years, of fundamental choke points in the advancement of electric vehicles is the availability of battery-grade lithium,” Musk said. “And lithium ore itself for mining is actually quite common… So it’s not that there’s a shortage of lithium ore to mine, but there is a shortage of really heavy industry refinement of lithium to battery-grade.”

“As you can see, we’ve got the earth-moving equipment already here. So we’re going to begin construction immediately. We’re aiming to finish construction next year and then hopefully full production in about a year later,” Musk added. “This is extremely fast by, you know, normal standards, but that’s how we do things.”

This is a huge win for the state of Texas, as the borders are about to be flooded with more illegal immigrants than ever before with the end of Title 42 coming this Thursday.