- LG Chem is a South Korean company.
- The company plans to invest $3 billion in Montgomery County.
- Tennessee Governor Bill Lee called it “the largest foreign direct investment” in the state’s history.
A South Korean company is heading into Montgomery County in what Tennessee Gov. Bill Lee called Monday “The largest foreign direct investment in the history of the country.
Tennessee and LG Chem announced plans to develop a cathode materials plant for electric vehicle batteries, which Lee said would create about 1,000 jobs for the region with a $3.2 billion investment.
“What we announce today will change Tennessean lives,” he told me.
Hak Cheol Shin, CEO of LG Chem, said construction on the plant is scheduled to begin in the first quarter of 2023, and mass production is scheduled to begin in late 2025. The plant is expected to produce 120,000 tons of materials. cathode battery per year once fully operational which is enough to power the batteries in 1.2 million electric vehicles.
Tennessee Economic Development Commissioner Stuart McWhorter confirmed that Tennessee has offered incentives to the company to develop Clarksville, but he did not provide further details. The deal is still awaiting technical approval from the state’s funding board, which meets again in mid-December.
The announcement, the latest in a string of news that puts Tennessee at the forefront of the electric vehicle industry, follows weeks of speculation that an undisclosed company was mulling the Montgomery site for a potential multibillion-dollar production plant.
Farmland formerly owned by the Allensworth family, the 422-acre industrial site is now served by the railroad and a Tennessee Valley Authority substation. The community purchased the property last year for $18 million.
The site’s access to TVA power and existing infrastructure played a major role in the company’s decision to choose Clarksville, Shen said, though he declined to name the other sites the company considered.
The Clarksville-Montgomery County Economic Development Board has been silent about the prospects of a major development project at the site. But EDC is working to make it more attractive to a potential developer, including winning a variance that would enable the company to build higher structures than the former M-2 industrial zoning of the site allowed.
“We are grateful to LG Chem for expanding its investment in Clarksville, providing a historic level of capital investment along with hundreds of new high-paying jobs for families in our growing community,” said Clarksville Mayor Joe Bates. This announcement is more than good news for our community, and further proves that Clarksville-Montgomery County is on the right track in our economic development efforts.”
Contact Melissa Brown at mabrown@tennessean.com.