Analysis | Ford's EV deal with a Chinese company highlights … – The Washington Post

Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin said no to Ford’s EV battery plant. Michigan got it instead.

Ford Motor Co. announced Monday it will build a $3.5 billion electric vehicle battery factory in Michigan using technology licensed from a Chinese company, our colleague Jeanne Whalen reports.

The announcement came after Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin (R), a possible presidential contender in 2024, said he had rejected Ford’s efforts to locate the plant in Virginia, citing concerns that the automaker’s partnership with the Chinese firm CATL posed a national security risk.

By contrast, Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer (D) praised the thousands of “good-paying” jobs the Ford plant would create in a statement Monday. 

Youngkin and Whitmer’s differing approaches to the plant highlight pressing questions over whether the domestic presence of Chinese industry presents a security threat to the United States. 

In recent weeks, the city of Grand Forks, North Dakota turned down a proposal from a China-based agribusiness to build a corn milling plant after the Air Force called it a “significant threat to national security.”

Security questions loom especially large in the energy space as America’s clean tech sector plays catch-up with China, which produces three-quarters of all lithium-ion batteries and accounts for 85 percent of solar cell manufacturing capacity globally.

Bipartisan ire at Beijing

Republicans and Democrats on Capitol Hill agree on the need to curb America’s reliance on Chinese companies for EV batteries and other green technologies.

Democrats crafted their landmark climate law, dubbed the Inflation Reduction Act, with the explicit goal of helping America prevail in the clean-energy arms race against China.

Meanwhile, Senate Finance Committee Chair Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) recently asked eight automakers for information on their supply chains after a report found they could be using parts from the Xinjiang region of China, where there is forced labor that targets Uyghurs.

Wyden spokeswoman Nicole L’Esperance said in an email that the committee received responses from all of the automakers, including Ford, and is “reviewing them to consider next steps in our investigation.” L’Esperance and Ford spokeswoman Melissa Miller declined to share the company’s response.

But there are some critics of Youngkin’s rejection of the Ford plant over its relationship with CATL.

Some experts said the Chinese company will have little control over the plant’s day-to-day operations. And some Democrats noted that Virginia will lose out on thousands of jobs created by the project.

“The way they structured this deal, they are keeping CATL at arm’s length as much as possible,” Sam Abuelsamid, head of e-mobility research at Guidehouse Insights, told The Climate 202.

Abuelsamid noted that Ford will own 100 percent of the plant in Marshall, Mich., about 100 miles west of Detroit. CATL will continue to own the technology to create the EV battery cells.

In January, after delivering a speech to the Virginia General Assembly, Youngkin told reporters that “the right thing to do was to not recruit Ford as a front for China to America.” The governor added in an interview with Bloomberg TV that the planned battery plant was a “Trojan horse” for the Chinese Communist Party.

Chris Berry, an independent energy analyst who tracks mineral markets, pushed back on these claims.

While major Chinese firms are often closely connected to the political leadership in Beijing, Berry said, “it’s a stretch to say that CATL is a front for the CCP. I don’t think Governor Youngkin presented any evidence. I think he was just throwing some red meat to his base.”

Meanwhile, Virginia Del. David A. Reid (D-Loudoun), who serves on the Virginia Manufacturing Development Commission, lamented that the state could have benefited from an estimated 2,500 jobs created by the plant.

Ford had been eyeing a site in Southside Virginia near Danville and Martinsville, a part of the state that has lost thousands of manufacturing jobs in recent years as textile and furniture factories relocated overseas. 

“This is another missed opportunity for the Youngkin administration to actually bring high-paying jobs to Virginia,” Reid told The Climate 202. “Now that he has aspirations beyond being governor and he needs to develop some sort of foreign policy portfolio, he’s playing politics with the livelihood of an entire region.”

A Youngkin spokeswoman defended the governor’s stance, saying his concerns were validated by the Chinese spy balloon that the U.S. military recently shot down over the Atlantic.

“Given the Chinese government’s recent public attempts to spy on Americans, Governor Youngkin’s concerns remain about providing an economic boost to companies linked to their government going forward,” spokeswoman Macaulay Porter said in an email. 

Rep. Cathy McMorris Rodgers (R-Wash.), who chairs the House Energy and Commerce Committee, similarly tweeted last week that the Chinese spy balloon demonstrated the importance of boosting domestic mining for the critical minerals used in clean tech.

McMorris Rodgers said in a statement to The Climate 202 that she’s also worried about Ford working with a Chinese firm.

“The details surrounding Ford’s arrangement with CATL — a China-based battery company — raise a lot of questions,” she said. “Creating American jobs and strengthening our energy security is vital, and the U.S. should be able to do this while minimizing China’s involvement.”

Ultimately, Miller, the Ford spokeswoman, said Youngkin’s comments had little bearing on the company’s plans for the plant, which will start making batteries in 2026.

“We don’t know why he chose to share inaccurate information with the media regarding the nature of our possible plans, but his actions did not change Ford’s business decisions with respect to this plant,” Miller said in an email. “We considered multiple locations across North America and picked the top one.”

Senate eyes revival of Big Oil climate probe

Senate Budget Committee Chair Sheldon Whitehouse (D-R.I.) might revive an investigation that House Democrats launched last year into Big Oil’s alleged efforts to mislead the public about the role of burning fossil fuels in causing global warming, Corbin Hiar, Lesley Clark, and Emma Dumain report for E&E News. 

“We are interested in trying to make sure their work is not lost and that the tasks that are left undone can still be pursued,” Whitehouse told E&E News.

However, his committee cannot restart the probe until the massive tranche of internal industry documents obtained by Democrats on the House Oversight Committee last year are handed over to the Senate. Those documents have been in limbo since Republicans took control of the House in January, with Austin Hacker, a spokesman for Republicans on the panel, saying that current Chair James Comer (R-Ky.) has little interest in continuing the probe.

“I do think it would be a shame if it just died — that it wasn’t followed up on — because of the Republican leadership in the House,” Whitehouse said. 

Marie Baldassarre, a spokeswoman for Rep. Ro Khanna (D-Calif.), the former chair of the House Oversight Subcommittee on Environment, told The Climate 202 that only the chair of the full committee has the authority to send the documents to the Senate.

It is unclear why Rep. Carolyn B. Maloney (D-N.Y.), who chaired the Oversight Committee before losing her reelection bid to Rep. Jerrold Nadler (D-N.Y.), did not send over the documents.

Nelly Decker, a spokeswoman for Democrats on the committee, did not directly address questions about Maloney’s motivation in an email to The Climate 202, saying only that “we continue to welcome the interest and efforts of our Senate partners to hold Big Oil accountable and look forward to working together to take meaningful action on climate change.”

Abandoned mine cleanup costs millions, government watchdog says

The federal government’s efforts to clean up abandoned hard-rock mines cost taxpayers $119 million from 2017 to 2021, according to a report released Monday by the Government Accountability Office. 

While the nation has 22,500 known abandoned hard-rock mines on public lands, there are probably hundreds of thousands of idled mines that have not yet been documented, so future cleanup costs could be even higher.

The GAO recommended that the Interior and Agriculture departments take several steps to improve the reporting of total cleanup costs for idled mines, especially as Interior implements the abandoned hard-rock mine program in the bipartisan infrastructure law.

Last year, then-House Natural Resources Committee Chair Raúl Grijalva (D-Ariz) and then-Subcommittee on Energy and Mineral Resources Chair Alan Lowenthal (D-Calif.) requested that the GAO conduct such an analysis. Grijalva said the findings demonstrate the need to update the nation’s 150-year-old mining law.

“When foreign-owned mining companies dig up our public lands, take what they want, and then walk away scot-free from their mess, American taxpayers end up footing the massive bill to clean it up,” he said in a statement. 

Treasury, Energy issue guidance on key tax credits

The Treasury and Energy departments on Monday released guidance on key tax credits in the Inflation Reduction Act aimed at bolstering projects in underserved communities and areas where coal mines or coal plants have been shuttered.

In a notice, Treasury said it was restarting the Qualifying Advanced Energy Project Credit program, which will provide a tax credit of up to 30 percent for qualifying projects — including carbon capture, grid modernization and clean hydrogen projects — starting at the end of May. 

The climate law provided $10 billion for the program, which originated as part of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009. Of the $10 billion, $4 billion must be reserved for projects in coal communities under provisions secured by Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee Chair Joe Manchin III (D-W.Va.).

In a second notice, the administration said it was establishing the Low-Income Communities Bonus Credit program, which will boost the tax credit for solar and wind energy projects in low-income communities by up to 20 percentage points.

“Thanks to President Biden’s leadership, the Inflation Reduction Act ensures all Americans benefit from the growth of the clean energy economy by driving investment in communities that have often been overlooked and left behind,” Deputy Treasury Secretary Wally Adeyemo said in a statement.

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