If you’ve been paying attention to where batteries actually come from, you know the basic complaint by now: lithium gets dug up or pumped out of brine in one country, shipped to China for refining, turned into cathode powder somewhere else, and eventually crammed into a cell at a gigafactory hoping nothing in that long chain breaks. It looks fine on a PowerPoint and falls over the second a port closes. Two American companies just announced a plan to skip most of that on a single piece of Texas dirt.<\/p>\n
EnergyX and Wildcat Discovery Technologies say they’re forming a joint venture<\/a> to build a lithium iron phosphate cathode plant in Hooks, Texas, right next door to the lithium extraction facility EnergyX already runs there. The pitch is simple: pump lithium-rich brine out of the ground, refine it on site, walk it across the property line, and turn it into the black powder that goes inside an LFP cell. No boats, no Shanghai middlemen, no three-month lead times on cathode material.<\/p>\n The numbers are concrete and the location isn’t hypothetical. Phase 1 is a plant making roughly 15,000 metric tons a year of LFP cathode active material, with room to expand, on 330 acres EnergyX already controls at the TexAmericas Center. The partners put total project cost north of $230 million, much of it private, and pitch it as one of the first serious domestic LFP cathode operations in the country. The site has rail, utilities, cheap power, and, the part everyone keeps bringing up, an Army depot for a neighbor.<\/p>\n And the two aren’t starting from a blank sheet. Both say they’ve already run demonstration-scale production (Wildcat’s cathode in San Diego, EnergyX’s lithium carbonate in Hooks) and shipped samples to buyers in grid storage, mobility and defense.<\/p>\n This is the part that makes it more than a press release. EnergyX didn’t sketch a cathode plant next to a hypothetical mine. The lithium side is live. The company commissioned Project Lonestar<\/a> in Hooks on March 26, 2026, and the demonstration unit is running at about 250 metric tons a year of battery-grade lithium carbonate equivalent. That’s small at demo scale, but it’s a working plant pulling lithium from the Smackover, the brine-rich geology under East Texas, Arkansas and Louisiana.<\/p>\n And EnergyX owns the resource, not just the plant. It holds the lithium rights to roughly 50,000 acres sitting directly below the cathode site and the Lonestar plant, part of a Smackover trend that runs from Florida to Texas. So the cathode line isn’t waiting on someone else’s lithium to show up at the gate. The feedstock is sitting under the parking lot. The country spent years watching China refine the lithium it largely gave away, and EnergyX is one of a handful of names trying to claw a piece of that back, with the domestic resource base finally drawing attention<\/a>.<\/p>\n The commercial terms reflect that ownership. EnergyX is set to supply most, maybe all, of the cathode plant’s lithium carbonate on favorable terms: a discount to market, plus a floor and a ceiling on price. That matters more than almost any other line on the spreadsheet. By IDTechEx’s math, lithium precursor is 60 to 85 percent of what the materials cost to make LFP cathode, so a stable, capped lithium price is close to the whole game. Anyone who watched lithium spot prices behave like a meme stock between 2022 and 2024 gets why.<\/p>\n EnergyX calls the whole vision Battery Mecca, which is either confident or branding-team-on-a-deadline depending on your read. Founder and CEO Teague Egan frames the cathode plant as a critical step toward it, and the roadmap is straightforward: lithium brine to refined carbonate, already running, then carbonate to LFP cathode powder, the new venture, then lithium-metal anodes and, eventually, full cell manufacturing, all on or near the same patch of Texas.<\/p>\n EnergyX’s lithium line goes well past LFP feedstock: carbonate for LFP, hydroxide for NMC chemistries, lithium metal for solid-state anodes, even the lithium isotopes that feed the nuclear supply chain. Wildcat brings the cathode chemistry and the speed: a San Diego battery-materials shop built around high-throughput screening that makes and tests candidate materials about ten times faster than a conventional lab. Pair that screening with custom lithium piped in from the refinery next door and you get a closed development loop most US battery players can only dream about. Wildcat’s roadmap runs toward denser LFP and, further out, chemistries free of cobalt and nickel.<\/p>\n Every version of this announcement name-checks the Red River Army Depot, and it isn’t geographic filler. LFP cells go into grid storage and cheap EVs, but they also go into drones, ground vehicles and the kind of military electronics the Pentagon would rather not route through Chinese chemistry. The partners frame the plant as a way to shore up domestic defense and battery supply lines, trim US dependence on foreign cathode material, and add manufacturing jobs in Northeast Texas, an estimated 150 permanent roles plus 800 to 1,200 in construction and indirect work. It’s the same logic driving the Pentagon’s scramble to lock up non-Chinese material for EV motors and weapons alike<\/a>.<\/p>\n The defense angle also helps the funding case. The project is pitched above $230 million, and the partners are angling for a federal check: if it lands DOE support, that money would speed up building and scaling one of the first real domestic LFP cathode plants. Wildcat CEO Mark Gresser put it plainly: LFP cathode underpins grid storage, military electrification and cheap EVs, yet the US, in his words, “remains heavily dependent on foreign supply.” Most of that dependence is Chinese. Industry estimates put China’s share of global lithium chemical conversion at roughly 70 to 75 percent, and LFP cathode is even more concentrated than that.<\/p>\nWhat’s actually being built in Hooks<\/h2>\n
The lithium is already coming out of the ground next door<\/h2>\n
‘Battery Mecca’ is the actual name, apparently<\/h2>\n
Why Red River Army Depot keeps showing up<\/h2>\n
What still has to go right<\/h2>\n