Battery cell production is one new industry Norway is keen to enter, hoping to benefit from access to green power and proximity to European customers keen to source batteries away from China.

Founded in 2020, Morrow Batteries will initially use existing lithium iron phosphate (LFP) technology and its plant in Arendal, southern Norway, is Europe's first gigawatt LFP factory.

"The important thing is for us to start selling batteries closer to the year end," CEO Lars Christian Bacher told Reuters.

The company has secured a delivery agreement for 5.5 gigawatt hours (GWh) over seven years with Nordic Batteries, which builds customised storage solutions.

The first months will be spent tweaking the process, improving quality and get to a stable production of battery cells, he added.

"I'd rather have problems when you are in the process of starting up than having problems two years down the road when you are into stable production," Bacher said.

Each of Morrow's cells has a capacity of 340 watt hours and weighs 2 kilograms, with the factory's 1 gigawatt hour annual output equating to some 3 million units.

This would be enough to equip 20,000 smaller electric cars, which typically have a battery capacity of 50 kilowatt hours (kWh), Andreas Maier, Morrow's chief operating officer, said.

However, offtake agreements with car manufacturers are not yet on the cards, with initial production volumes too small, CEO Bacher said.

"It will take years for us to qualify for selling batteries to an automotive company."

Still, Morrow plans to expand production step by step with three more facilities at the Arendal site by 2029, which will have an annual capacity of 14 GWh each.

Early investors in Morrow include local utility A Energi, engineering firms ABB and Siemens, Danish pension funds PKA and Norwegian state-owned green investment firm Nysnoe.

(This story has been corrected to fix the name of the CEO from Christian Bacher to Lars Christian Bacher, in paragraph 4)