China controls nearly every gram of battery-grade graphite the world’s EVs run on. After 70 years without mining its own, the U.S. just locked in a Lake Erie site to change that

By Luis Reyes – Autonocion.com

When people talk about the EV battery supply chain, the conversation almost always lands on lithium. Lithium mines, lithium prices, lithium refineries, the occasional brawl over a salt flat in Nevada or Chile. But the single battery material the United States is most exposed on isn’t lithium, and it isn’t cobalt or nickel either. It’s graphite, the stuff that makes up the anode in basically every lithium-ion cell on the road today, and America produces exactly none of it. A company called Graphite One wants to fix that, and on May 19 it locked in a site on the shores of Lake Erie to start trying.

The announcement is modest on paper: a real-estate agreement and a plan to build a processing plant. What it’s actually pointed at is the most lopsided dependency in the entire American battery story, and a Chinese export-control clock that starts ticking again this November.