CONNEAUT – For months, the City of Conneaut’s administration has discussed the need for economic development. At the beginning of the year, the community was discussed as being a prime location for that development based on its infrastructure and resources.
A press release issued by Graphite One, based in Vancouver, British Columbia, on Tuesday, May 19, announced that it has secured a license of occupation agreement with Bessemer and Lake Erie Railroad Co., a subsidiary of Canadian National Railway, for the upper coal dock property with the anticipation it will construct its Active Anode Materials facility there.
“On behalf of the City of Conneaut and its residents, I am thrilled to welcome the landmark announcement by Graphite One’s leadership in selecting our city – a place where innovation in industry was refined by our people – as the home for their proposed Active Anode Materials facility, a decision that speaks volumes about what Conneaut has had to offer for generations,” City Manager Nick Sanford said.
The property has not yet been purchased, but the deal has meaning.
“They entered into a lease option with Canadian National for due diligence purposes,” Sanford said. “What’s exciting for me and, frankly for whoever has ever been in a leadership role in the City of Conneaut, is CN, which had typically been against these types of opportunities, has been very amenable to these new options. I’m very grateful to have CN as a partner in this. If CN had not answered the phone and engaged in this type of high-level conversation, you and I wouldn’t be having this conversation.”
Graphite One produces high-grade graphite materials for lithium-ion battery anodes. Its mining operations extract approximately 4 million tons of material annually (one million tons at 7 percent graphite), processing it into 60,000 tons of graphite concentrate at 95-percent carbon grade.
The company is advancing development plans for an Ohio finishing and blending facility, which is one of the three processing facilities that together comprise the AAM facility.
Completion of Phase One in Conneaut is targeted for the fourth quarter of 2027 with production capacity of 10,000 tons per year. This will include 4,000 tons of energy storage material, 3,000 tons of fast-charging material, and 3,000 tons of high-energy-density material. These materials are intended for use in lithium-ion battery applications supporting electric vehicles, grid-scale energy storage and emerging data center infrastructure demand.
“They have an aggressive schedule,” Sanford said. “It’s driven by markets, and they’re a Vancouver-based company. We’re connected to the St. Lawrence Seaway and Conneaut is the direct link that connects them to the Mahoning Valley in terms of production.”
“They appear to want to be up and running by Q4 of 2027 with the first phase, which is the most aggressive and forthright proposal I have yet to see,” Sanford continued.
Graphite One’s development strategy links its Graphite Creek resource in Alaska – identified by the U.S. Geological Survey as the largest graphite deposit in the United States and among the largest globally – with downstream processing capabilities in Ohio.
Construction and development activities for the Ohio facility remain subject to financing, permitting, power agreements, equipment procurement, regulatory approvals, and other customary development conditions.
The facility will be a significant investment in Conneaut.
“Based on what we presently know, this is an estimated $1.4 billion investment, which will bring 150-160 permanent jobs to Conneaut’s harbor area by 2028; part of broader efforts in a new market economy to bring good, meaningful jobs back to the United States and reclaim our Great Lakes port cities -responsibly – as the rightful assets our grandparents and great-grandparents built them to be,” Sanford said. “This also coincides with the building of a vertically integrated North American graphite and battery materials supply chain, which will only position Conneaut, as well as the greater Ashtabula County and northwestern Pennsylvania areas as a comprehensive region, at the center of America’s competitive, clean energy future.”
Sanford is pleased to welcome Graphite One to Conneaut.
“This is the next-best thing since U.S. Steel was going to come to Conneaut,” Sanford said. “To be part of a global venture where a global competitor in the economy is going to be a neighbor, I’ll take it. I’ll take it any day. My second day in office, I got a phone call notifying me we were going to be losing a multi-million-dollar federal grant. Since that day, it’s been a roller coaster of ups and downs and this is, certainly, the highest up we’ve had in that two-year span. This is great news.”
The investment in Conneaut could change the city’s future.
“Graphite One’s decision is supported by a gracious community diverse in landscape to facilitate supportive, responsible growth and a prolific tourism economy,” Sanford said. “This is generational transformation we are about to witness, and we look forward to working hand-in-hand with their teams every step of the way as they prepare their foray into the greater Conneaut community as a new chapter in our storied history.”
The announcement of the deal caught Sanford, who is in regular contact with the Lake to River Economic Development organization, by surprise.
“I didn’t even know about the cinching of the deal until I was listening to the news on WFMJ on Tuesday morning,” Sanford said. “It was a complete surprise to me. We rely on our economic partners, Lake to River, to keep us informed and we hadn’t been briefed in about a week or 10 days until I heard it on the news.”
Sanford, however, was aware Graphite One was interested in the upper coal dock property.
“They were scouting various properties with us and Growth Partnership for Ashtabula County back in March,” Sanford said. “Thankfully, we had some decent weather, and they were able to see everything. They were just blown away by the amenities that are in place. That upper coal-handling facility has been sitting dormant for several years now. There’s a switching facility that interchanges with the CSX railway. There is infrastructure that was put in during the 1960s. It’s not old by any means, but it’s massive. This was all put in for U.S. Steel. It’s the massive industry we’ve been waiting for since that time.”
Sanford noted that the site is, historically, important in Conneaut.
“This site is also significant in local history as a symbol of industrial strength and might as an initial startup of Andrew Carnegie in the 1890s which was once slated for the largest tube and rolling mill in the world by 1901; again in the 1970s with the proposal of a then-$3.5 billion, Ohio-Pennsylvania lakefront steel mill by US Steel,” Sanford said. “Neither of these came to fruition, except for the power infrastructure delivery which remains in place today out of the 1970s anticipatory expansion.”
The Active Anode Materials facility will bring a significant number of jobs to the community.
“Directly, this will lead to the creation of 150-160 jobs we didn’t have before,” Sanford said. “It’s also establishing a blueprint for adding commerce, rail commerce, lake commerce. I think it’s the start of things to come, frankly. As long as I’m here, it will definitely be the start of things to come.”
Sanford noted the city has ways to build the workforce needed to man the facility.
“We have ways to build a workforce here with A-Tech, Kent State University Ashtabula and other institutions in Northeast Ohio, northwest Pennsylvania and New York,” Sanford said. “That’s a direct response to the people who believe the workforce doesn’t exist here.”
Sanford said the full environmental impact the facility will have on the area is still being researched, but that the city will be keeping a close watch.
“We want to understand the full spectrum of the process,” Sanford said. “Industry on any level will have an impact on the environment. Conneaut, as a city with home-rule powers and with a fully-backed wastewater department, will have complete environmental control. We hold all the cards and there will be no pollutants of any concern that will be entering the waters of our state, but we do want to understand the process as development continues.”
It is currently not clear what the economic impact the facility will have on Conneaut.
“I don’t want to speculate, but I’m generally optimistic,” Sanford said. “We’ll look at an economic impact statement from them when the time comes. I think it’s going to be substantial. It’s a sheer investment of billions. Nothing on that level has been invested in the City of Conneaut in its history. People need to realize the sheer magnitude in value being added to this region is positive.”
The development should be a welcome sign for Conneaut’s residents.
“This gives hope to the residents who see an idle dock company that was home to 2,000 jobs in its heyday,” Sanford said. “This is a new-market economy and will allow us to expand industry here as well as to continue to promote tourism in Ohio’s wine region.”
The deal could also be the first domino in further economic development for the city.
“The question is why Conneaut,” Sanford said. “If you look at the ease of innovation, and a way to move resources, with the harbor, the railways and the highway, we have all of the ways to do it responsibly. I would ask (potential developers) why not Conneaut?”
