Good find Mark. The paragraph before your cut and paste:

By moving battery production under one roof, Tesla management expects to achieve a 30 percent reduction in battery pack costs and approach the holy grail of a $100-per-kilowatt-hour pack.

As I and a few others have stated, the albany deposit is actually more valuable to an end user then to a miner. If an end user wnats it, there is no 'selling price' of graphite, it is simply to them the cost difference between mining Albany and what they currently have to buy.

For Tesla, there is simply no way they can buy graphite, even in NA, and still hope to substantially reduce thier battery costs. The article is 100% correct in this regard. Tesla's future is completely tied to being bale to produce a lower cost battery. If this does not happen they will never be more than a small niche car builder.

It may not work out that Tesla buys ZEN but it does look like this is their only option to meet their needs of (a) lower battery costs and (b) local supply (c) environmnetally safer supply (d) purtity (e) tonnage for long term.

I am not trying to be cocky or factious - what other options are there for them to meet these requirements? At the very least we would have to be a leader in thier set of options.