Tesla Shakes Up Market for Lithium, Other Metals
wsj.com
wsj.com
The article completely misses the fact that lithium is not the most important metal in a lithium-ion battery. More pounds of cobalt are required than are of lithium (remember, lithium weighs almost nothing).
Lithium traditionally comes from briny lakes and salt deserts like those in Chile, along with other valuable commodities like Iodine and Nitrate.
Lithium occurs throughout the US in ores like Lepidolite, but it's never been considered cost-effective to extract it. I've found a way.
Need help?
wow. If you're not bullshitting, and your method is scalable,reliable,and cost-effective congratulations on changing the world.
Trouble is, the market price for lithium is closer to $5/lb, so good luck selling any.
(Prices in this post are examples, and from memory)
Sure, aganst ten times the value of other msterials per weight of battery, it's not a bank breaker, but what is that price compared to the profit margin? If the margin on a $100 cell is $15, and the value of lithium in the cell is $5, you've broken the bank by costing the entire margin and then some.
There was also an episode of the Discovery documentary Forgotten Planet which covers it
Current production of lithium is low because demand for lithium is low. Lithium @ 17 ppm is actually more common than Lead @ 10ppm in the earths crust. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abundance_of_elements_in_Earth...
PS: 37,000 tonns of Lithium are produced in 2012 vs 5,200,000 of lead.
However, even when adjusting for heaver Lead atoms we produce far more Lead.
I know next to nothing about geology, but a little browsing suggests that it is easy to find galena and that it is a much more productive ore than the typical lithium ores.
My point was, it's not really a question of how much can be produced, but at what price you can produce it. Right now the market is paying ~6,000$ per tonne which has been fairly steady if slowly growing over time. With battery's making up about ~1/3 of the market. At say ~12,000$ per tonne production could double in well under 5 years.
So, as long as Tesla is happy to pay 12k/tonne they can get more or less as much lithium as they could ever want. More importantly the price need not spike anywhere near that much as long as demand is predictable. In 5 years the price for most commodities is often more or less a function of the delta between expected demand and actual demand.
If you can get into production at say 4k/ tonne it's no question the market is growing so at the price is unlikely to crash any time soon. At ~6k/tonne cost cutting is going to be really important fairly quickly, but it's a reasonable investment. At 7+k/tonne it's a huge risk which is only worth it IMO if you can line up a long term contract at a fixed and profitable price or if you can tightly control costs and only ramp up in case demand spikes (ex: your mining something else, but you could also exact lithium from your tailing).
So how you doin'?
Good luck! (Genuine) Hope it makes it to reality and scales well. If lithium can be generated at scale in the US, the cost of electric cars domestically would drop like a rock, while keeping the money in the country. For the US, the benefits would be immense. That would be so great.
(Not that trading abroad is a bad thing, but we need all the "Made in America" we can get these days, where everything is Made in China.)
I'm sure a reduction in lithium costs would be welcomed by everyone involved, but it certainly wouldn't cause price to plummet.
One thing to consider, though, is that lithium coming from Chile is going to have a significant mark-up owing to transportation and tariff costs. Do your numbers take that into account, or were you looking at the raw material value?
That's an unusual claim. Lithium is actively being extracted by Albemarle in the US, in Nevada. They essentially have a monopoly on US lithium production via the Silver Peak mine. About 3.4% of the world's Lithium production comes out of that one mine. They're likely going to be able to expand their US production significantly without requiring any big breakthroughs.
http://fortune.com/2016/03/29/lithium-tesla-mine-nevada/
Further, Tesla has already agreed to purchase lithium supply from another Nevada mining project underway:
http://fortune.com/2015/09/16/tesla-lithium-gigafactory-neva...
As I said, Lithium is extracted from briny lakes and salt deserts, which is what both of those US-based mines you provided links to are going after.
Nobody's going after ore for their Lithium. Almost nobody, anyway.
I'm surely not alone in a desire to escape the life of sitting behind a desk, and would love to help such a project, in particular to get in early at the prospecting stage. But it is hard to tell from a generic statement like that if you are really working towards something or not.
It's a little like being a 17th century French lawyer and writing an allusion to a proof in the margins of a book.
Yes, but then you should also say something about the relative availability of lithium and cobalt.
That is very different that the entire world's lithium production.
It could happen, however given how Tesla has already made moves to create a giga-factory to avoid "Peak Battery" pricing they likely already have a supply solution in mind.
So a pointless hype bubble?
As long as there's demand and money to back up that demand, we'll find a way to make more of whatever you want.
Lots and lots and lots of companies end up at some point representing 50% of all sales, products, or activity in their market.
Hell, even Starbucks was opening coffee shops so fast they were targeting owning half of all coffee shops on the planet.
If he said he needed to quadruple the world output, I might furrow a brow. If he said he needed 8 times the world supply, I'd think he was nuts.
Double? That's just a really big growth market.
I think the last possibility is probably silly because available Lithium resources will likely behave similarly to other extracted commodities such as oil - with the difference that you can likely recycle lithium out of expended batteries.
Gasoline itself was once seen as a useless byproduct of kerosene production.
stop trying to make “fetch” happen
Well the next thing you know Elan's a billionaire.
The kinfolk said "hey move away from there!"
They said Californi' is the place you oughta be
So he loaded up the truck and he moved to Beverly
(found via the energy storage section in http://worrydream.com/ClimateChange/ )
It's just they don't want to mine it until the price is much higher.
Kind of like oil vs gas prices.
But I am curious to see what the next level beyond lithium is for compact power storage. Lithium can't be the end of the line.
You would have thought it would be a priority for Musk to research next-gen batteries in a really serious way.
It's not as flashy as some magical new tech that comes along and doubles battery capacities overnight, but on the flip side li-ion is already good enough for most applications. We'll need some pretty big improvements before we can have electric passenger jets, but other than that we're already in pretty good shape.
I wonder if the delay has as much or more to do with economics than actual research and development. It might not be in the best interest of a lot of players, whether that's battery manufacturers, or device manufacturers, to produce something that has improved longevity if that means fewer sales due to batteries wearing out.
I wish I could live in scientist land XD
Also a bunch of the developments don't pan out for various reasons, like not being able to get the yield high enough to be worth while, requires large amounts of unobtainium, have very restrictive operating requirements not mentioned in press release (such as a 140F auto-ignition temperature), etc.
http://www.pocket-lint.com/news/130380-future-batteries-comi...
The comment about protecting commercial interests isn't wrong, but there is indeed a threshold coming where that won't be a valid reason to hold the technology back.
http://www.amjtj.com/en/projekty/vysokokapacitni-li-akumulat...
http://spectrum.ieee.org/energywise/energy/renewables/a-firs...
Chains of hydrocarbons are a better storage form for compactness, but creating that chain and deconstructing that chain are hugely inefficient processes. We've only used them up until now because the planet had saved a huge amount of its previous solar energy in that form.
There are some interesting lithium flow batteries coming out that decouple the power of the battery from the amount of storage, so that should be fairly interesting to see.
Other flow batteries will also be quite interesting for stationary uses.
We'll need lots and lots of storage for both stationary and mobile applications. For mobile applications, I can't see anything beating lithium ion without a major breakthrough. That type of breakthrough is not what those seeming breakthroughs "every 5 years" are; those are university press releases. It's rare that the real breakthrough will get the press, because the disconnect between what's happening in the field and what's actually important is enormous (this goes for most forms of science, not just energy).
Coupled with more efficient electronics and what is cheap hardware today would have been difficult/impossible to even build in 2002.
My cell phone consumes more power and stays on longer than my first phone is that not progress?
I think it comes in slow increments and noticing a 5% year on year increase in battery life is lost in the noise of devices that can consume half or double the amount of energy.
As for how easy it is to lose the battery gains in noise. Many stock cell phones can have their battery life extended by half again by removing all the vendor bloatware.
Why do you think your cell phone consumes more power now? I remember my iPhone 3G getting really physically hot while web browsing.
We measure battery tech progress in energy density, not how long your device will last (since a ton of other tech goes into your device using less power, like transistor shrinking for example. Or a javascript jit).
Good question.
The ratings I read before I buy them. At the time of purchase I knew that exact mAh it consumed and compared to previous phones.
I blame the 7 inch screen, 3 different antennas and 3 extra processors that my older phone didn't have.
EDIT - Grammar and wording.
Also most prog-tech goes into not doing anything at all, if we can not avoid it. Send it to the server, sleep over it, reuse allready constructed objects of the same type- there is a whole world dancing to this tune.
Finding another hundred tons is a 100% increase in one case and about 0.0% in the other, because the other case has already gone through a lot of scaling-up.
Like oil and gas in the sense that if prices are low it stays in the ground.
I'm just worried costs will rise so much, the 35k for the Tesla model 3 will rise as well.
And if it reached a quadruple it would become cost effective to extract it from the ocean?
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2214993714...
tl;dr: its hard because lithium cells are complex materials mixed at a very fine scale (coatings and doping). It has to be chemically separated; smelting won't do it.
It must be cost, because I can't think of any other reason that we don't have micro-machine dis-assemblers for slowly picking apart our garbage in to neatly binned resources.