The Novonix Chattanooga facility rises over the Tennessee River like a monument to industrial reinvention. Once a manufacturing center for nuclear steam turbines, the 400,000-square-foot complex is being retooled to produce one of the most sought-after materials in the modern energy economy: synthetic graphite, the critical mineral that forms the anode of every lithium-ion battery.
Inside, the vast structure resembles a chemistry set built on the scale of a power plant. Stainless-steel ducts trace overhead like metallic arteries. Modular milling systems refine raw material, and in one corner of the high bay, a towering vertical furnace – described by Novonix engineers as the largest of its kind – heats carbon to 3,000 degrees Celsius, rearranging atoms into the crystalline structure battery makers demand.
For Novonix, a company with Australian roots and an increasingly Tennessee identity, the operation represents more than a technical milestone. It’s the centerpiece of an effort to build a domestic supply chain for a material the U.S. now imports almost entirely from China. With graphite high on the federal list of critical minerals, the Chattanooga facility is positioned to become North America’s first large-scale producer of battery-grade synthetic graphite.
Industrial scale production
Michael O’Kronley, who became CEO in May after decades in automotive engineering and battery materials, signals the company’s shift from research-driven innovation to industrial-scale production.
That shift is visible throughout the blue-sided plant just off Riverside Drive near downtown Chattanooga. High bays once used for turbine assembly now hold silos, hoppers and production lines. Overhead cranes that previously inched 100-ton rotors across the floor are being repurposed to lift prefabricated furnace modules into place. Utility tunnels and heavy power feeds installed by Alstom and later General Electric now support a different kind of infrastructure: a factory producing a material the U.S. considers essential to national security.
“We’ve been a materials development and technology company,” O’Kronley says. “Now we’re becoming a manufacturer of critical minerals.”
Novonix itself has followed that trajectory. It began in Australia as a battery testing venture, expanded by acquiring a Canadian firm in Halifax, Nova Scotia, and invested in a Chattanooga startup exploring synthetic graphite for lithium-ion batteries. Over time, its focus narrowed to one question: how to convert that expertise into a large, reliable supply of anode material made in North America.
Today, the company employs about 200 people worldwide, including about 130 in greater Chattanooga.
“This is where almost all of our investment is directed,” O’Kronley says. “We’re expanding capacity here to meet the needs of the wider U.S. battery market.”
What synthetic graphite does
That market extends far beyond EVs. Every lithium-ion battery – whether in a phone, a soldier’s radio or a grid-scale storage system – has a cathode and an anode. The anode is made of graphite.
“In a battery, the negative side is made of graphite,” O’Kronley explains. “There are two kinds: natural and synthetic. What we produce here is synthetic graphite made from a petroleum-refining byproduct.”
That byproduct, petroleum coke, arrives by rail as carbon-rich, rocklike chunks. In about two days, Riverside transforms it into a fine engineered powder destined for batteries.
Inside the process
Harrison Kreafle, Novonix’s director of anode technology, oversees that transformation.
“You grind it down to size and then smooth it out,” he says near a cluster of crushers and mills. “We think of it like gravel versus river rocks. You’re rounding off the edges and making it denser so it fits better in the battery.”
From there, the material moves through modular shaping systems that produce particles tailored to each customer’s recipe. Some want small primary particles; others prefer larger secondary particles formed by “gluing” grains together. Novonix often uses two grades of coke from partner Phillips 66 to tune those properties.
“Something that’s not widely known is we don’t make just one type of synthetic graphite,” Kreafle says. “Each customer has its own specifications.”
The vertical furnace
The core of the plant is the towering continuous graphitization furnace – a sealed, vertical column rather than the open horizontal pits common in China.
“We’re converting from coke to finished graphite in this one unit,” Kreafle says. “It goes in cold at the top, hits about 3,000 Celsius in the middle, and by the time it reaches the bottom, it’s cooled and ready to bag. All of that happens in about 24 hours.”
From entry to exit, the journey takes about two days. Throughout, engineers monitor particle size, density, crystal structure and impurities.
“X-ray diffraction tells us the structure of the crystal and the degree of graphitization,” Kreafle says. “We can do that in about 10 minutes while the furnace is running.”
Purity guides production. In finishing, the graphite is coated if needed, screened and packaged in an enclosed environment.
Quality and environmental controls
Novonix technicians build coin-cell batteries to test graphite performance under realistic conditions. Trace impurities are measured down to parts per billion. Any batch that falls short is diverted and reprocessed. A small amount of ultrafine carbon generated during shaping is sold to the steel industry as a carbon raiser.
While the furnace process is intense, O’Kronley calls it a leap forward for environmental control. Chinese producers typically use massive open pits that vent impurities straight into the atmosphere. Novonix’s vertical furnace is designed as a closed-loop system.
“In China, those emissions go straight into the atmosphere,” he says. “Here, we capture everything and treat it.”
That difference, he argues, delivers a regulatory edge. The Chinese-style pits “can’t even be put in the U.S.”
Far down the production floor, an American flag hangs above tall white silos and yellow railings.
“That’s ours,” Kreafle says. “It represents what we’re trying to do – devise a made-in-America solution to the graphite problem.”
A national priority
The problem is straightforward: roughly 95% of the world’s battery-grade graphite comes from China. Every American who plugs in a device relies on a supply chain half a world away.
“You’ve probably been reading a lot about critical minerals,” O’Kronley says. “They’re considered critical because most are mined or refined outside the U.S.”
That reality has drawn Washington’s attention. Novonix has secured a $100 million Department of Energy grant, a $750 million federal loan and roughly $100 million in investment tax credits.
“This is a national security issue,” O’Kronley says. “With Novonix here in Chattanooga, we’re at the forefront of the critical minerals challenge.”
Trade actions are also reshaping the market. U.S. regulators are investigating whether Chinese producers are dumping graphite at below-market prices. Preliminary findings say they are, and O’Kronley expects tariffs to follow.
“What that does is allow Novonix to realize a higher price,” he says. “That will help us grow and scale.”
Still, Novonix must prove its product matches the performance of China’s best. Its Halifax battery development division builds full batteries to validate results.
“Today, we’re essentially matching Chinese materials,” Kreafle says. “Customers want us to slot in at that level.”
Scaling up
That pitch has already resonated. The 20,000-ton annual capacity Novonix plans for Riverside is fully allocated under long-term agreements with Panasonic Energy and PowerCo, Volkswagen’s battery company. LG Energy Solution is an investor and partner. Phillips 66 supplies most of the coke.
At a smaller plant in Lookout Valley in Chattanooga, Novonix develops new graphite “recipes” on pilot furnaces. Once proven, those processes scale up at Riverside. Kreafle notes that Riverside’s advanced furnace began as a modest unit at that pilot site.
“I learned what I needed, then I went to a U.S. manufacturer and said, ‘Build this at scale.’”
Scaling is where the building’s turbine heritage pays off. Each of Riverside’s four bays is roughly 100,000 square feet, and Novonix plans to fill them with about 40 large furnaces.
The first furnace has already produced industrial material and will soon deliver its first battery-grade product to Panasonic for qualification.
When fully built out, Riverside will represent about 10% of the projected U.S. anode market in 2025. But Novonix is already planning a second facility at Enterprise South Industrial Park, initially about one-and-a-half times Riverside’s size and expandable to nearly four times its footprint.
Between both sites, Novonix expects to invest about $1.5 billion in the Chattanooga area and employ more than 500 people. For a community that watched GE shutter the turbine plant less than a decade ago, the revival carries emotional weight.
“This was originally an Alstom facility,” Kreafle says. “GE built four more turbines and shut it down in 2016. It sat vacant until we bought it.”
City and county officials maintained the property even as it sat empty.
“It was devastating when this plant shut down,” Kreafle continues. “But the city maintained it. The cranes, the doors – everything was move-in ready.”
A role in the battery age
Now those cranes lift furnace sections, not turbine blades. But the through line is manufacturing – the kind of capital-intensive work Chattanooga has done for generations. O’Kronley believes that tradition positions the city for an outsize role in the next era of energy.
“Batteries are used in everything,” he says. “We can’t equip our military without them. That’s why we need access to these materials.”
Demand will grow as utilities deploy large-scale energy storage systems to stabilize the grid and support renewable power.
“In the next few years, the largest market for lithium-ion batteries will likely be grid storage,” O’Kronley says.
And as AI growth drives more data centers, the need for long-life batteries will intensify.
Those systems put particular stress on anode material – Novonix’s sweet spot. Its synthetic graphite, O’Kronley says, “is almost exclusively used in energy storage systems and partially in EVs.”
From the outside, the Novonix facility still looks like the industrial fortress it once was: a long blue box between the river and the railroad tracks, framed by Lookout Mountain. Inside, though, the machinery and mission have changed. What was once a turbine plant serving the nuclear age is becoming a graphite plant serving the battery age.
And hanging above it all is an American flag – a reminder that this slice of the global battery supply chain now runs through Tennessee.