It's still early days for the National Advanced Transportation Battery Cell Manufacture alliance. The group of fifteen companies has yet to fix its terms of membership, write a business plan and begin its campaign for funding.

The alliance is made up of mainly small and medium sized companies who make batteries or battery materials. Many are venture-funded startups with proprietary technology for lithium ion cells.

The alliance, first disclosed by a story in the Wall Street Journal aims to build a plant in the U.S. to make lithium ion cells, catching up with work in Japan, Korea and China. Individual companies would provide the cell designs, purchase the finished cells and have them assembled into finished batteries in a model parallel to that of TSMC or other chip foundries.

"Today we have no large-scale lithium ion manufacturing in U.S., so all cells with minor exceptions have to be imported from China, Korea or Japan where governments have subsidized these industries for many years," said Jim Greenberger, an attorney with a background in clean technology at Reed Smith LLP (Chicago) who is organizing the alliance. "The U.S. government has to step up and do the same," he added.

Such a facility could not only give the U.S. an edge in what is seen as a leading battery technology, "it could help resurrect the U.S. auto industry," he said.

The call for a U.S. manufacturing capability came out of a Chicago conference on battery technology Greenberger ran for prospective clients in June. "I thought rather than organize another conference, I should help organize the industry," he joked.

The group aims to move quickly. It had its first meeting November 21. It hopes to define its membership terms and draft a business plan within the next two weeks.

"We've been told Washington is very serious about using green tech as a basis for an economic stimulus package," said Greenberger. "If there is going to be an initiative something needs to be on the Hill in January," he added.

Sanford L. Kane, a former IBM executive and one of the founders of the Sematech, is acting as a consultant for the alliance. Kane was the chief executive of U.S. Memories, an alliance of chip and computer makers that tried to build a DRAM fab in the late 1980's to compete with Japanese vendors but failed to attract sufficient investments.

Kane said the battery alliance is taking a similar approach of building a for-profit factory shared by members. But the members of the current effort are generally small companies who can't afford the billion dollar price tag of the plant and need government support.

"Exactly what form the government assistance takes is still up in the air," said Kane who now acts as an industry consultant and sits on a variety of company boards.