RALEIGH, N.C. — A leading manufacturer of sodium-ion batteries received a state incentive package to build a $1.4 billion factory on a long-dormant megasite in Edgecombe County.

The future facility from California-based Natron Energy is expected to sit on Kingsboro Business Park, a 2,187-acre site east of Rocky Mount, multiple sources familiar with the matter told The News & Observer. The company promises to hire 1,062 workers at its factory between 2028 and 2032, at an average wage of at least $64,700.

Founded in 2012, Natron opened its first commercial battery factory this spring in Holland, Michigan. The company says its incoming North Carolina plant will be 40 times larger — making it the world’s first sodium-ion “gigafatory.” Edgecombe County is about 65 miles east of Raleigh.

“This is the best place for our new home,” Colin Wessell, Natron’s founder and co-CEO, said during a celebratory event Thursday afternoon at Edgecombe Community College in Tarboro. “We choose to build here, we choose to grow here for decades to come.”

Sodium-ion is an emerging battery material, and Natron has received nearly $20 million from the U.S. Department of Energy to fund its initial commercial efforts. This money was part of a broader Biden administration initiative to help scale “high-risk and potentially disruptive new technologies” in the energy sector.

Natron has private backers as well. In January, the company reported raising more than $300 million from investors, and in 2022, United Airlines made a “strategic equity investment” as it looks to electrify its airport ground equipment.

North Carolina’s Economic Investment Committee met Thursday to award Natron a job development investment grant, or JDIG, worth up to $21.7 million. As with all JDIGs, this money will be distributed through payroll tax benefits only after the company reaches yearly hiring and investment targets stipulated in the agreement.

The state also allocated $30 million through the North Carolina Megasite Fund, which was established in the latest state budget to ready sites for major employers. Additional state funding for the Natron project includes $4.2 million in workforce training and $350,000 from the Department of Transportation.

The total state package is worth up to $56.3 million. Additional incentives from Edgecombe County could add another $129.6 million in public benefits.

What are sodium-ion batteries?

Compared to lithium-ion, another alternative battery material, sodium-ion is more abundant and charges faster. Natron has patented a type of blue electrodes that it says produce longer-lasting batteries when combined with sodium ions. (North Carolina gave the incoming project the code name “Neptune” in an apparent nod to the blue planet.)

The batteries Natron currently makes in Michigan are used to provide backup power to data centers, though the company says future uses will expand.

Sodium is heavier than lithium and therefore “is more promising for stationary rather than portable applications,” said Katerina Aifantis, a University of Florida researcher who studies nanomaterials and energy storage. She added that sodium ion is also more environmentally friendly than its lithium counterpart.

Lithium-ion batteries are the more widely produced option today noted Feng Lin, a Virginia Tech chemistry professor. “Sodium-ion battery technology is still in the development phase,” he said. “Fewer manufacturers are producing them at scale, and there are fewer products on the market using sodium-ion technology.”

Wendell Brooks, Natron’s co-CEO, said the future 1.2-million-square-foot facility will be capable of building 60 million sodium ion cells every year. That’s about 24 gigawatts of power annually, Brooks said.

Brooks touted the safety of sodium-ion batteries, saying they don’t catch fire or explode under stress. Additionally, he said, the entire supply chain is domestic.

“We’re going to revolutionize the market for batteries going forward,” Brooks said, adding Natron’s product will serve as a backup power supply for data centers and will help stabilize the power grid.

NC incentivizes the ‘battery belt’

As Gov. Roy Cooper formally announced the project Thursday, the screen behind him changed from “Edgecombe County Welcomes Neptune” to “Edgecombe County Welcomes Natron Energy.” With the crowd cheering, Cooper turned to Natron’s two CEOs on the stage and pumped his left fist.

With Natron, North Carolina has further pinned its economic future to environmentally sustainable alternative batteries. Since 2021, the state has awarded incentives to several lithium-ion battery projects — including a 5,000-worker Toyota factory in Randolph County as well as smaller plants near Charlotte, Wilmington and Raleigh.

“I know that we’re walking through a door that will transform this amazing place that I call home in a positive way,” Cooper said. “North Carolina is becoming the heart of the booming ‘battery belt.’”

Other Southeastern states, like Tennessee, Georgia, and South Carolina, also have announced electric vehicle battery plants in recent years, joining traditional Midwestern auto industry hotbeds Michigan, Ohio and Indiana to form the so-called “battery belt.”

Natron told North Carolina it selected the Tar Heel State after considering other finalist sites in Tennessee and South Carolina. State economists estimate that Natron will result in a $3.4 billion benefit to North Carolina’s economy over the next decade.

“We feel good about this company, this technology, they’re very confident about it. They have robust funding and they capitalized this so they’re ready to invest $1.4 billion and hire more than 1,000 employees. They just didn’t have room in their factory in Michigan to make these batteries on the scale that they’re going to be making them here,” Cooper said.

Cooper presented a blue piece of pottery with the state’s motto on it — from Seagrove master potter Ben Owen — to Natron’s CEOs. Then Wessell gave Cooper a model of the battery cells that the company will make at the Edgecombe County facility.

Thursday’s event also featured a promotional video in which someone fired a gun at both a sodium-ion battery and a lithium-ion battery. The lithium-ion battery exploded, the sodium-ion battery did not. The same happened when both batteries were struck with a nail.

“Clearly there’s competition on the market, and the more clean energy batteries we can put into the market the better off we’re going to be,” Cooper said to reporters after the event.

A win for Edgecombe County

The state says Natron has yet to make its final site selection within Edgecombe County, though the community contains a prominent space. For more than a decade, state and local economic leaders have tried to fill the Kingsboro Business Park megasite.

This land had a previous potential occupant. In the 2010s, a few hundred acres in the center of the site were graded and cleared in preparation for the anticipated arrival of Triangle Tyre, a Chinese tiremaker that announced it would build its first U.S. factory in the county. However, as frequently occurs with state-backed economic projects, the Triangle Tyre deal eventually fell through.

Last year, a state-commissioned report identified Kingsboro as the most “pad-ready” megasite in North Carolina, meaning a company could reasonably begin to build on it right away. To qualify as a megasite, a location must have at least 1,000 contiguous acres.

Edgecombe County is one of the poorer counties in the state. Several major employers have exited in recent decades, including Glenoit Fabrics in the county seat of Tarboro and Texfi Industries in Rocky Mount. In late 2021, a fatal fire destroyed the QVC distribution center in Rocky Mount, and the company moved out rather than rebuild in the city of 54,000.

These exoduses have left a gap as Edgecombe is tied for the third-highest unemployment rate among North Carolina counties, at 6.1%. Among North Carolina counties, it has routinely ranked near the bottom of positive categories like health outcomes and wages while parked closer to the top of undesired metrics like obesity and injury death rates.

“I’m sick and tired of being at the top and bottom of every bad list,” county manager Eric Evans told the N&O last September. “We’ve got the highest this and the lowest that. We need to do something about that.”

The arrival of Natron could reset Edgecombe’s future — if the company fulfills its commitment.

A major economic project “can be a game-changer that puts a county on a different economic trajectory,” said Jonathan Morgan, a professor at the UNC School of Government who coauthored a 2020 report on workforce entry barriers in Edgecombe County. “There can be considerable ripple effects — additional suppliers and related industries coming to a community.”

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