A north St. Louis $500 million development planned to create more than 150 jobs is now in doubt after Trump administration cuts to energy grants across the country.
The Department of Energy has rescinded a $197 million federal grant planned to help ICL Group Ltd., an Israeli company that also operates a battery plant in Carondelet, build a new plant near the north riverfront in St. Louis.
The company reported on the possibility of discontinuing the project in a Securities and Exchange Commission filing last week and estimated it could garner a $40 million investment write-off if it did. However, no final decision has been made, the report stated.
Company officials could not immediately be reached for comment Friday.
In the report to shareholders, ICL states the Department of Energy’s decision is a result of a comprehensive review of funding eligibility for a number of projects that had received grants in the renewable energy sector and elsewhere. The company originally received the grant through a 2021 infrastructure bill during the Biden administration.
ICL group planned to produce materials for lithium batteries at the plant at 460 E. Carrie Ave. The group touted it as the first large-scale plant of its kind in the country. ICL planned to complete the project next year.
The project’s grant is just one of many facing the ax under the Trump administration and Energy Secretary Chris Wright’s plans. Wright said the slashes to the grants will cut $7.5 billion in spending through the termination of 321 financial awards funding 223 projects across the country.
In a statement, Wright called cutting the projects a “critical task” for the Trump administration.
The development community touted the $500 million plant as a big win for St. Louis. Neil Richardson, CEO and chairman of the St. Louis Development Corporation at the time, called the project a testament to the city’s investment into workforce development.
“We are starting to see a renaissance of our advanced manufacturing industries in north St. Louis city that will drive growth across the entire region,” Richardson said in 2024.
On Friday, SLDC spokesman Deion Broxton said the corporation hadn’t received any official confirmation from ICL or the federal government on the plant’s future.
The project had critics. Some community members and environmental groups pushed back against the development over environmental concerns and complaints of environmental racism.
The Missouri Coalition for the Environment released a report on the project earlier this year calling it a compounding of environmental racism in north St. Louis. The report noted the battery plant’s location on the north riverfront would put it in the middle of neighborhoods experiencing a high asthma hospitalization rate.
They pointed to a 2019 report, Environmental Racism in St. Louis, that showed most of the city’s air pollution sources are in predominantly Black neighborhoods.
The group’s policy coordinator, Maxine Gill, said the coalition is concerned about Trump’s freezing of renewable energy project grants but called ICL’s proposed development an “environmental injustice.”
“ICL misused President Biden’s Justice40 Executive Order to place a polluting facility in an already overburdened neighborhood, rather than ensuring that pollution is diverted from marginalized communities as the executive order intended,” she said Friday. “If they choose to cancel their project, we are glad that ICL will not further pollute a neighborhood with some of the highest hospitalization rates for asthma in the city.”
Previously, the Planned Industrial Expansion Authority, a development board of the SLDC, awarded the project a 90%, 10-year property tax abatement and touted the program as part of the city’s Economic Justice Action Plan to invest in marginalized areas in St. Louis.
“We will continue to assess the situation,” Broxton said.
