image: Karan Bhuwalka, a research engineer in the STEER initiative, leads a discussion at the initiative's Washington, D.C, meeting in May 2025.
Credit: Demetric/United Photography
A growing vulnerability is occurring in one of America's most pressing critical minerals: graphite, the unsung workhorse of rechargeable batteries for electric vehicles, consumer electronics, defense uses like drones, and large energy storage systems to support the electric grid. In addition to conducting electricity and storing lithium ions, graphite has many other uses, like making steel and lubricants, and controlling heat in many industrial processes.
STEER, an energy and economics research initiative within the Stanford Doerr School of Sustainability's Precourt Institute for Energy, has engaged with more than 150 executives and experts from U.S. graphite manufacturers, battery makers, automobile and oil companies, federal security and energy agencies, national labs, and universities to address this potential threat to economic and national security. Two large meetings with these experts last September and this May in Washington D.C. have produced an Executive Summary of the U.S. graphite challenges and possible solutions discussed in the meetings. The STEER team is finalizing an analysis of U.S. graphite’s technological and economic pathways for publication in a peer-reviewed journal this fall.
China controls more than 95% of the global supply of battery-grade graphite, the largest component by weight in lithium-ion batteries. China’s low export prices have kept $10 billion in announced U.S. production investments from reaching production at scale.
On July 16, 2025, the U.S. Department of Commerce set a preliminary 93.5% anti-dumping tariff on Chinese graphite for batteries, raising the total effective tariffs to 160%. Last year, China implemented export restrictions for critical minerals to the United States.
Getting competitive
The Stanford-led graphite roundtables as well as subsequent discussions before, during, and since – have focused on how U.S. manufacturers could produce graphite competitively. With Chinese graphite prices plummeting the past few years, manufacturing graphite in the United States costs more than twice as much as importing it from China. Before the May D.C. roundtable, STEER produced a detailed preliminary analysis for participants as a basis for the discussion.
Higher U.S. costs are primarily due to elevated capital expenditures on equipment and construction. Additionally, secondary markets for manufacturing byproducts help Chinese producers offset expenses, but the United States does not have such markets.
“The United States needs to work on lowering its graphite production costs and improving quality with supportive financing and technological innovation,” said Karan Bhuwalka, a research engineer in the STEER initiative leading its efforts to model and analyze energy supply chains.
“While carbon for graphite is abundant, manufacturing graphite with the properties needed for batteries requires many processing steps involving high energy consumption, chemical reactions, and large equipment,” said Bhuwalka.
The failure of large investments to substantially expand U.S. graphite manufacturing stems from more than just low Chinese prices. Exacting industry qualification and testing procedures for new producers slow the pace. Manufactured graphite must be over 99.95% pure crystallized carbon and meet strict particle size, shape, and exterior coating specifications to qualify for lithium-ion battery use.
"We're looking at a critical moment. The demand for graphite in batteries has quadrupled in the past five years, and it has no substitute," said William Chueh, director of the Precourt Institute and co-director of STEER.
“Adding to the challenge is the time required to qualify graphite produced in new factories, taking multiple years,” said Chueh, whose research focuses on new battery technologies. “We need to shorten that timeline.”
Potential answers
Many at the roundtables agreed that low-interest loans with long payback periods would be an effective lever for increasing U.S. competitiveness. Offtake contracts to purchase graphite from domestic manufacturers with a price floor would reduce investor risks to price fluctuations.
Technology innovations may also help U.S. production leverage abundant domestic resources competitively. Methane pyrolysis – heating natural gas without oxygen – converts natural gas into carbon and hydrogen. The trick is to design reactors so that the resulting form of carbon is graphite. Similarly, using catalysts like iron to create graphite from biomass feedstocks at relatively low temperatures could reduce costs, but engineers need to improve product purity. Expanding U.S. domestic battery recycling to recover graphite could also help.
At the May roundtable and since, U.S. battery suppliers to car companies expressed concern about the ability to rapidly scale US capacity given qualification timelines, cost pressures, and need to prove out process innovations. In a competitive market, there is a disincentive to pay higher prices and take performance risks on graphite from smaller domestic producers. Technology innovations likely will need five or more years to improve competitiveness in the United States and other countries developing graphite production, meeting participants said.
“Leveraging abundant carbon feedstocks in the United States to produce high-quality graphite is a priority for innovation and research, and we must ensure innovative new processes do not fall into the valley of death between successful demonstration and full commercialization," said Sally Benson, co-director of STEER with Chueh and a Stanford professor in the Department of Energy Science & Engineering in the Stanford Doerr School of Sustainability.
Looking ahead
The participants also said that universities and national laboratories could help by developing coherent testing standards and performance characteristics that can confidently map graphite's physical properties to long-term battery performance. This kind of work could accelerate new producers getting to market and enable stockpiling of materials that could respond to supply chain disruptions.
“At STEER, we bring our engineering and economic analysis to industry experts, ask them to tell us why we’re wrong, and we revise.” said Adrian Yao, who founded STEER and is a team lead there. “Through these tight feedback loops with the practitioners on the front lines, we assure relevance and impact. We aim to skate to where the puck is going to be, and look around corners to anticipate the challenges we might face tomorrow.”
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Chueh is also a professor in the departments of Materials Science & Engineering in the School of Engineering, of Energy Science & Engineering, and of Photon Science at SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory. Benson is also a fellow and former director of the Precourt Institute, and a fellow of the Stanford Woods Institute for the Environment. Yao, a Stanford doctoral candidate, was the founder and chief technology officer of battery maker EnPower.
STEER partners with SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory.
COI Statement
The authors declare no competing interests.