Do people really build mines with a 5-year horizon? Of course it's going to outpace demand... initially.
The great thing about mines is that you can just leave the lithium in the ground if the current prices aren't right.
The great thing about mines is that you can just leave the lithium in the ground if the current prices aren't right.
Eventually you pay off the land and your costs go down. You can keep equipment running for a long time, but it wears out. You are risking all the time though that the mineral demand might drop and now you have a worthless mine (which you need to do environmental cleanup). With equipment you risk a new process making your old equipment unable to produce what the market demands so you have to replace it.
Of course everybody understands you plan on mining for longer than 5 years. However you have a 5 year plan to get the mine operating and prove it can make money.
I don't remember exact context, but I recall a long time ago someone was talking about shipping medicine and such to a particularly poor area of Africa, and the reply was basically "There are no roads here to ship the medicine on."
NiCad for example is great for low temperature environments and they can deliver almost 100% of their capacity at the maximum rated discharge. They are essentially lead-acid with a tad more energy density and being very sensitive about how they're charged.
NiMH don't have that great of a capacity at maximum rated discharge but they do have a very very low internal resistance while still (almost) matching Lithium batteries in energy density. Additionally, they are almost perfectly constant voltage until discharged, making them suitable for applications where you might not want a complicated voltage controller.
Lithium is actually a fairly difficult cell. Drawing maximum discharge will reduce capacity, they don't like shocks or extreme temperatures and their voltage stability is meh at best. They also heat up a lot when charging or discharging, making cooling circuits required in some scenarios. They do have extraordinary energy density though.
Don't discount other battery types; battery chemistry dictates the behaviour of the battery under load scenarios, Lithium batteries aren't always the answer.
Also it’s just as difficult to leave it in the ground. Any decent mining operation takes at minimum 2-3 from construction to production so you still need to take that into account (unless you lock down some offtake agreements to hedge the risk)
Of course great and not so great are by my definition of great. You can do should do your own investigation.