BATT Coalition Asks Congress to Strengthen Tax Provisions to Ensure Resilience of Domestic Battery Supply Chain
The BATT Coalition held its first lobby day on Nov. 21, meeting with bipartisan lawmakers and congressional staff to advocate for tax reforms that secure and grow the domestic battery supply chain for defense systems, energy storage, transportation, and other applications that are critical to ensuring U.S. economic competitiveness and national security.
Executives from Clarios, EnergySource Minerals, Factorial Energy, NanoGraf Corporation, Novalith, Orbia, Princeton NuEnergy, Sparkz Inc., and Xerion Advanced Battery Corporation met with key congressional committees and offices that will oversee tax legislation.
The BATT Coalition, launched in August 2024, serves as the collective voice of foremost innovators across the lithium-based battery supply chain — from upstream producers of raw materials to makers of discrete battery components and battery recycling.
With a new administration and new Congress taking office in January, the Coalition is focused on informing decision-makers with its unsurpassed industry expertise and policy knowledge to determine the best way forward in growing our domestic industrial base for technologies and decoupling from China and other foreign sources.
“The first time that we started talking about critical minerals was under the first Trump administration,” said Carmen Rene, the chief financial officer for lithium company EnergySource Minerals. “They liked it. Then the Biden administration liked it and put some money behind it. I find strong reason to believe that the Trump administration will continue to like it, but I think with a focus on national security, really on the race to be the first, the best, the strongest,” she told a media roundtable hosted by BATT.
“On both sides of the aisle, we saw staff members that understood the national security implications of not having a domestic battery supply chain,” added Ross Kirschner, general counsel at Mitra Chem.
The lithium-based battery supply chain is currently dominated by China through unfair trade practices, large investments with state-sponsored control, and price-fixing behavior, exposing the U.S. to economic and national security vulnerabilities.
The BATT Coalition is calling for a series of legislative actions and tax incentives that target producers of critical materials and battery parts, including:
Tax Credit Repositioning and Alignment: Increase the Advanced Manufacturing Production Credit (45X) tax credit for electrode active materials from 10% to 25% and align 45X and the Commercial Clean Vehicle Credit (45W) tax credits to require the same Foreign Entity of Concern (FEOC) restrictions and North American/Free Trade Agreement country sourcing requirements as the Section 30D New Clean Vehicle Consumer Tax Credit;
FEOC Enforcement: Congressional oversight to ensure FEOC Regulations are enforced, and that Original Equipment Manufacturers (OEMs) are strongly incentivized to use domestic battery materials;
Tariff Alignment: Inclusion, and specification, of all lithium-based battery materials, components, and parts under Section 301 tariffs.
Sustainable Funding: Coordinate industry to advance strategic funding solutions to support the upstream battery materials supply chain.
“We are engaging in activities using the power of the collective voice to help ‘all boats rise’ and increase the probability of success for the U.S. battery industry,” said BATT Strategy Director Dave Howell. “Our next actions are to meet with members of President-elect Trump’s transition team to advocate for continued and additional federal policy and funding support for domestic battery materials manufacturing.”
The Battery Advocacy for Technology Transformation (BATT) Coalition is an industry coalition dedicated to increasing domestic production of raw materials and components for electric batteries. Follow us on LinkedIn.