DANVILLE, Va. (WFXR) – A city and region that has focused heavily on economic development recently broke ground on one of its biggest projects.
After over a decade of planning, the City of Danville and Pittsylvania County officially welcomed Microporous LLC, a battery separator manufacturing company.
The new facility will be located at Danville’s new Berry Hill Mega Site. Microporous invested $1.35 billion into this project, which upon completion, will create over 2,000 new jobs.
“Right here in Danville, Pittsylvania County, the partnership that we’ve been having with Danville city council members and Pittsylvania County board of supervisors, this is what our economic development team works for,” Danville Mayor Alfonzo Jones said. “Two thousand jobs and over 1 billion dollars, you can’t ask for a better Christmas present than what we have here today.”
Governor Glenn Youngkin also attended the ceremony. He said he is very excited to get started and believes this facility can be a manufacturing epicenter for some of the most advanced products. He is also excited to welcome more happy people who may have to move to Virginia for job opportunities.
While Wednesday’s groundbreaking was an exciting event, Youngkin can see this as only the beginning of something much bigger.
“I fully expect that there will be Project Two and Project Three that are coming, and that’s what’s most exciting, but we have to make sure that Microporous is successful,” he said. “We want to be their best partner they’ve ever had, and we can do it right here in Pittsylvania County.”
A battery separator is a porous membrane that separates a car battery’s anode and cathode ends. If the separator wasn’t there, the two ends would touch, which could lead to the battery short-circuiting or even exploding.
Microporous Chief Executive Officer (CEO) John Reeves said Danville was the best place for the company to expand, and crank out more separators to meet the surging demand for lithium-ion batteries in electric cars.
“There’s been a lot of investment from Virginia in infrastructure, which enables us to move really quickly and build our factory much faster than a place where we’d have to build out that infrastructure, and then of course the people,” he said. “The talent accelerator that’s offered here enables us to hire a lot of people quickly.”
Because of those factors, Reeves wants the facility to be up and running by the end of 2026.