Bechtel (Reston, Va.) was awarded the front-end engineering design (FEED) for Mitra Chem’s commercial cathode manufacturing facility. The new facility will produce Lithium Iron Phosphate (LFP) cathodes on commercial scale by 2025, enabling broad use of iron-based batteries in EVs and energy storage capacity produced in the United States.
As part of the first phase of the LFP manufacturing plant project, Bechtel will adopt Mitra Chem’s cathode making process to design the manufacturing facility and perform planning for the commercial facility. Bechtel will leverage its extensive global supply chain to support Mitra Chem’s procurement strategy for facility construction.
“Bechtel is proud to partner with Mitra Chem to bring innovative solutions to the U.S. battery supply chain,” said Justin Britt, general manager of Bechtel’s electric vehicle business. “Bechtel’s proven processes and innovations will ensure Mitra Chem continues accelerating its time-to-market timeline to deliver batteries critical to the expansion of EVs and electric storage capacity in the United States.”
“We are aggressively advancing our mission to lead the innovation driving and commercialization of iron-based cathode materials to enable mass-market electrification for electric vehicles, energy storage solutions and beyond. Leveraging our proprietary machine learning algorithms, we are able to dramatically accelerate the lab to market timeline,” said Vivas Kumar, CEO of Mitra Chem. “Working with top-tier partners like Bechtel enables us to continue to rapidly scale our operations, deliver for our current and future customers and prepare for mass-market manufacturing and deployment.”
In September 2022, Mitra Chem announced that it had begun shipments of its commercial-grade LFP materials to a tier 1 global battery cell manufacturer for customer approval and qualification. The passage of the U.S. Inflation Reduction Act has supercharged demand for U.S.-made battery materials by offering consumer tax credits tied to domestically manufactured material usage. The company has additional requests for samples to cover the next seven months including nearly every global Tier 1 battery cell maker and multiple household name automotive original equipment manufacturers (OEMs).