World News | As EVs boom, locals fear Chinese battery factories will devastate drought-stricken Hungary

DEBRESEN (Hungary), May 26 (AP) — Just outside the bucolic gardens and traditional homes of a village in eastern Hungary, a giant project of Chinese industry is taking shape.

Bulldozers and excavators are already preparing for construction of the nearly 550-acre electric vehicle (EV) battery plant. The 7.3 billion euro ($7.9 billion) factory will be one of Hungary’s largest ever foreign investments, which the government hopes will come as the government increasingly seeks to limit greenhouse gas emissions by switching to electric vehicles.

Read also | How Kidnapping Funds Separatists in Cameroon.

But residents, environmentalists and opposition politicians fear the sprawling plant, built by China-based CATL, will exacerbate existing environmental problems and affect the country’s precious water supply, And further damage its economy to China.

“When you walk through the area they’re building, you get a visceral bad feeling. Eva Kozma, 47, a local mother, said she and other residents of a village near the construction site Together against the project.

Read also | Rishi Sunak evacuated after car hits front door in Downing Street, London, driver arrested (watch video).

“This is progress, this is the future? Pour concrete on nature when we know how polluted factories are?” she said.

Kozma and others on the outskirts of Debrecen, Hungary’s second-largest city, said they were caught off guard by the news that the factory would be built on valuable farmland. They fear that their water supply will be threatened by the flood of water diverted to the factory to cool equipment, and that chemicals from the factory could seep into the soil and water, damaging the area’s natural resources.

The region, the Hungarian Great Plain, is threatened by desertification, the process by which vegetation degrades due to high temperatures and reduced rainfall. Droughts and record heat waves caused by climate change in the region have exacerbated the depletion of agricultural water and groundwater, leading to reduced crop yields.

Last year, Hungary experienced its hottest summer on record, drying out nearly 2.5 million acres, or 20% of the country’s farmland. Experts say that unless a comprehensive water storage plan is in place, large parts of the region will soon be unsuitable for agricultural production.

However, despite these environmental struggles, the Hungarian government believes that the EU’s ambition to phase out the manufacture of internal combustion engine vehicles by 2035 offers the country a unique opportunity to become a leader in battery production for electric vehicles, and has embarked on a major push to attract such investments.

And there may be buyers: Transport accounts for nearly a quarter of Europe’s greenhouse gas emissions, with more than 70 percent of these emissions being caused by road transport. Electric vehicles will play a key role if the EU is to achieve its net-zero emissions target by 2050.

CATL’s 100 GWh battery factory in Debrecen is expected to create around 9,000 jobs and is the largest of many electric vehicle battery factories to spring up across the country, part of a government initiative to support foreign automakers such as German automakers in Hungary. manufacturers) Audi, BMW and Mercedes-Benz — which are transitioning to battery-powered vehicles — are part of their service delivery strategies.

Hungarian Foreign Minister Peter Szijjarto said in Beijing earlier this month that the presence of these German automakers had “inspired” China’s recent large investment in electric vehicle battery factories and that “Chinese suppliers to these German companies continue to look to Hungary as a The intersection of East and West investment.”

Gabor Varkonyi, an automotive industry expert, agrees that efforts to attract battery manufacturers make sense for Hungary’s economy — especially given that more than 20 percent of the country’s exports come from the auto industry.

“It is very much in Hungary’s interest that these investments be here, especially alongside German technology,” Varkonyi said. “That way, both can be tied here in the medium term, so that neither side can work successfully. In that sense, it’s in the absolute national interest.”

But Dalma Dedak, an environmental policy expert at WWF-Hungary, said that despite the intention to reduce greenhouse gas emissions through electric vehicles, there is a lack of environmental impact research on the long-term impact on Hungary’s air, soil and water.

She said details of the first phase of the CATL plant’s multi-stage construction had only just been released, so its environmental impact once fully operational remained unknown – undermining trust between affected populations and the government.

“It is concerning that the approval process for the first stage of the plant did not show what water usage and emissions the full plant was expected to produce when it was completed,” she said. “That is, are Hungary’s resources sufficient to implement these ambitious plans?”

Water use in the industrial park where the factory is located is expected to exceed 40,000 cubic meters (10.5 million gallons) per day – doubling Debrecen’s drinking water consumption and placing a significant burden on a region in the Middle Ages crisis, Dedak said.

“In the long run, it’s a question of how to supply water to such a water-scarce city,” she said.

CATL says 70 percent of its water use will come from gray water — purified household wastewater — though the plan was not included in an environmental impact study for the plant’s first phase. Hungary’s Economic Development Ministry did not respond to a request for comment.

Other critics of the investment point to the Hungarian economy’s reliance on foreign auto companies and see it as a deepening of the foothold Hungary offers China in central Europe.

Laszlo Lorant Keresztes, chairman of the Hungarian parliament’s sustainable development committee, said Hungary’s economy is “very vulnerable to the auto industry and this (factory) adds to that vulnerability.”

Speaking at this week’s protests against the Debrecen factory, Keresztes said the roughly 800 million euros ($861 million) in infrastructure and tax incentives that the Hungarian government would give CATL to CATL was “an unrealistic amount per job.” ’, and – as far as German automakers are concerned – most of the capital generated will be exported.

“These are basically assembly plants and they take the profits from here. They don’t work for Hungarians, they don’t work for locals, they work for foreign guest workers, which is also typical,” he said.

Some residents on the outskirts of Debrecen fear the traffic and noise the sprawling factory will bring will ruin the idyllic neighborhood they’ve come to raise their children. But mostly, they fear it could have irreversible effects on their natural world.

“They took the land, they destroyed the soil, they destroyed the air and the water,” said Eniko Pasztor, a 65-year-old local activist who plans to leave the area when the factory is finished as planned.

“No amount of money can fix what we destroy. We have to make sure what we have still exists,” she said. “We’ve done a lot of damage. I don’t see why we need more, more, more.” (Associated Press)

(This is an unedited and auto-generated story from a Syndicated News feed, the content body may not have been modified or edited by LatestLY staff)