President Joe Biden has vowed to convert the federal governments entire fleet of motor vehicles some 645,047 at last count to electric. That includes thousands of Ford F-150 pickups, the countrys perennial best-selling automobile since 1981 and a popular ride for everyone from federal police to national park rangers.

But a dispute between two South Korean battery manufacturers has spilled over into U.S. trade courts and could derail the new administrations plans. The feud could also take a political toll in Georgia, which in addition to helping secure Bidens victory and his partys Senate majority is the prospective home for the defendants major new manufacturing plant.

The U.S. International Trade Commission is set to rule this week on a complaint from battery giant LG Chem that alleges its rival SK Innovation hired away former employees who brought trade secrets with them and then shredded documents containing evidence.

If the ITC rules in LGs favor, SK Innovation could be barred from importing the raw materials needed to run the sprawling pair of facilities its building in Jackson County, Georgia, that would produce batteries for both the F-150 and Volkswagens signature crossover models.

LG has argued that if the ITC fails to enforce its intellectual property rights, the U.S. will lose credibility in its own cases against China, for example. But experts say the demand for electric vehicle batteries that Bidens policies will create far outstrips production capacity in the U.S. Ford and Volkswagen both told the ITC that reworking their plans without SK Innovation would take years. In other words, if SK Innovation doesnt get its new factory online, the U.S. battery boom might not happen.

Youre talking about mothballing a $2.6 billion investment, said Carol Browner, who served as Environmental Protection Agency administrator under President Bill Clinton and a climate adviser to President Barack Obama, and who testified as an expert witness on SK Innovations behalf. The electrification of vehicles like the F-150 and VW crossover are tipping points in this effort to address greenhouse gases and other pollutants from vehicles.

ITC spokeswoman Peg OLaughlin declined to comment but said the commission would announce its determination at 5 p.m. Eastern Time on Wednesday.

An Overseas Fight Spills Over

The conflict between the two companies started in 2017, when LG accused former employees who had joined SK Innovation of breaching its noncompete contracts. LG ultimately prevailed in the South Korean courts after more than a year of appeals, forcing SK Innovation to delay the start date for its new hires. The case, notably, did not accuse SK Innovation of trade secret theft.

But in 2019, LG, which supplies electric vehicle batteries to Tesla and General Motors, made a new complaint to the ITC, accusing SK Innovation of stealing trade secrets and seeking to block its rival from importing the materials needed to open and operate a battery plant in the U.S.

ITC Judge Cameron Elliot made a preliminary ruling in favor of LG in February 2020, finding that SK Innovation had destroyed documents in South Korea related to the case. SK Innovation said the countrys laws requiring companies to retain documents dont mirror those in the U.S., and insisted it has since recovered some of the files in question.

They alleged that the documents pertained to their secret sauce and if they had been turned over they would have shown that employees who left LG Chem took confidential information, said Sturgis Sobin, a lawyer at the firm Covington & Burling who is representing SK Innovation. What were confident we could demonstrate, if we had gotten a trial, is that SK Innovation batteries have a completely different formulation than the formulation LG Chem uses.