$11.4B For New Ford Electric Truck Assembly Plant And 3 Battery Plants

By 2025, Ford will have 3 new battery plants and an all-new assembly plant for electric trucks up and running in the United States. This will require an investment of $11.4 billion with $7 billion coming from Ford and the remainder from joint-venture partner SK Innovation. Two of the battery plants will be in Kentucky while the third will be part of a massive new complex in Stanton, Tennessee called Blue Oval City. 

The Tennessee factory will be Ford’s first new greenfield assembly plant since the Kentucky Truck Plant opened in 1969. The last new factory to go online for Ford is the Dearborn Truck Plant which is on the site of the Rouge complex. That plant went up next to the original Rouge assembly plant which was subsequently demolished and the site of that factory is where the Rouge Electric Vehicle Center was built over the past year. 

When the Tennessee plant opens in 2025, it will build the next-generation of Ford electric F-Series trucks. Those are expected to use the all-new electric truck platform that Ford announced last spring. At this stage, Ford isn’t saying what the capacity of the plant will be or precisely what it will build. However, since Ford is describing it as an F-series plant rather than an F-150 plant, the implication is that it will produce a range of electric trucks in different weight classes from F-150 to at least F-450. It may even produce battery powered versions of the Expedition and Lincoln Navigator SUVs. 

Blue Oval City will cover more than 3,600 acres and also include a battery plant and recycling facilities. That will incorporate technologies from Ford’s recently announced partnership with Redwood materials to recover battery raw materials as well as recycling of other materials from the vehicle manufacturing process. Ford has also committed to building an on-site wastewater treatment plant so that it doesn’t have to do any freshwater withdrawal. 

According to a Ford spokesperson, the Tennessee plant will not replace any of the capacity at the Dearborn Truck, Kansas City or Louisville Kentucky plants. Instead it will be additive capacity. As usual with new assembly plants, the Blue Oval City site will also include space for a supplier park to enable just in time manufacturing. Based on the provided renderings, it appears that Ford is also planning to cover the plants and parking areas in solar panels to enable charging of the all the new EVs and power the plants. 

The three battery plants are all part of the BlueOvalSK joint venture that was announced earlier this year with SK Innovation. The three factories will have a combined capacity of 129 GWh per year, more than double the 60 GWh that was stated when the venture was announced in May 2021. Each of the plants will have a capacity of 43 GWh each. The Tennessee plant and one of the Kentucky plants are planned to begin production in 2025 with the second Kentucky plant coming on line in 2026.

The BlueOvalSK battery park in Glendale, Kentucky is about 53 miles south of Louisville, and reasonably centrally located to most of Ford’s existing assembly plants in Michigan, Kentucky, Missouri and elsewhere. The size of the sites chosen for the two facilities will enable integration of battery raw material processing facilities in order to shorten overall battery supply lines.

Combined, the plants will produce enough batteries for about 1 million electric vehicles annually. At the current 3 million annual sales for Ford in North America and Ford’s target of selling at least 40% electric vehicles by 2030, Ford expects to add more battery plants and convert additional assembly plants to EVs by the end of the decade.

Between the two new sites, approximately 11,000 new jobs are planned. 6,000 of those will be in Tennessee and the other 5,000 in Kentucky. At least for now, this will put Ford in the lead in announced capacity for building batteries in the US. GM already has two 35 GWh battery plants under construction in Ohio and Tennessee and has announced plans for two more although it hasn’t announced locations or exact timing for those. Stellantis also plans at least two battery plants in North America, but has yet to provide specifics. Tesla

TSLA
has a 35 GWh battery plant in Nevada and plans to add another at its new assembly plant in Austin, TX. 

In addition to all of these investments, Ford and its competitors are also investing in companies developing solid state batteries. Ford is partnering with Colorado-based Solid Power but it’s not clear how that technology may be incorporated once it has been validated. One key to Solid Power’s technology is that it can leverage existing cell manufacturing equipment. Ford has previously stated that it is aiming to reuse as much of its capital equipment as possible if and when it transitions to solid state cells.