Ford and SK Innovation will spend a combined $11.4 billion to create three new battery plants and an assembly plant geared toward the production of battery electric vehicles in the US, Kallanish learns from a company announcement. 

About $5.6 billion will be spent to create a site dubbed Blue Oval City in Stanton, Tennessee. Blue Oval City will be a vertically integrated Ford assembly plant for F-series vehicles - notably the top-selling F-150’s electric variant. Ford claims the site will be carbon neutral with zero landfill-bound waste once it comes fully online. It features a battery plant and an assembly plant.

An additional $5.8 billion will be spent to create BlueOvalSK Battery Park in Glendale, Kentucky. The Kentucky site will feature two battery plants “for powering next-generation electric Ford and Lincoln vehicles,” Ford says. 

The combined output of all three plants will be 129 gigawatt-hours/year. 

“This is a transformative moment where Ford will lead America’s transition to electric vehicles and usher in a new era of clean, carbon-neutral manufacturing,” says Ford executive chairman Bill Ford. “With this investment and a spirit of innovation, we can achieve goals once thought mutually exclusive – protect our planet, build great electric vehicles Americans will love and contribute to our nation’s prosperity.”  

Ford will also spend $525 million - $90m in Texas, alone - “to train skilled technicians to service connected, electric zero-emission vehicles.”

The vertical integration scheme recalls Ford’s River Rouge plant in Detroit, which became world famous for its ability to take pure raw materials - as far downstream as wood, iron ore, and sand - and produce a car by the end of the production process.