Carbon Black Firm Brings $1B Plant to South Carolina
Carbon solutions manufacturer and supplier Birla Carbon has selected Orangeburg County to establish the company’s first South Carolina facility.
It will construct a 435,000-square-foot manufacturing building at the Tri-County industrial site in Orangeburg as part of a $1 billion investment that will create 124 jobs. The plant is expected to be online in 2026, and jobs will be posted in 2025.
The new operation will supply anode active materials enough to support more than 40 gigawatt hours battery plants.
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Birla Carbon’s planned development will be a next-generation, continuous synthetic graphite production facility. Its products are designed to improve the performance of tires, specialty blacks and mechanical rubber goods.
The first phase will produce 25,000 tons of synthetic graphite annually to meet the anticipated demand in the electric vehicle, energy storage and defense sectors.
A leading auto manufacturing hub
“South Carolina’s manufacturing industry has blossomed over the past few years with heightened inbound migration from the automotive and transportation sector due to easy port access, favorable tax incentives and strong labor pools,” Alex Irwin, Avison Young’s senior vice president of industrial & investment services in Charleston, told Commercial Property Executive.
Birla Carbon currently operates 17 manufacturing facilities in 14 countries.
“Birla Carbon’s foray into the South Carolina market will allow them to provide product support for the 65+ automotive OEM companies with operations in the region, including Volvo, Mercedes-Benz, Bosch and Cummins.”
Avison Young reported in the second quarter that Charleston’s manufacturing labor pool has expanded by 30.8 percent during the past seven years, with approximately 34,600 employees. As a result, the industrial property subtype has thrived. It is notably one of the top-growing manufacturing markets in the U.S., with the automotive & transportation industry as the driving sector.
Since 2022, nearly 80 percent of the new inventory delivered has been big boxes, with sizes exceeding 250,000 square feet, and a mere 2 percent has been small bays, measuring between 20,000 and 99,000 square feet. These smaller spaces have a total vacancy rate of 3.4 percent, while the market’s overall vacancy rate is 13.8 percent, Avison Young reported.
The market continues to grow. In the second quarter of 2024, Charleston added the largest amount of new industrial deliveries since the fourth quarter of 2022. About 1.3 million of the 3.3 million square feet of newly delivered space consists of the largest speculative build in market history.
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