-- Mineral scarcity/cost of mining
-- Cost of processing, refining lithium
-- Cost of making battery chemical contents
-- Cost of assembling rest of complete battery
Any info on how much more advance there is to go on these aspects?
And, after all that is squeezed out, is lithium still going to be the thing for 30 years?
> -- Cost of making battery chemical contents
> -- Cost of assembling rest of complete battery
Mining, and refining is pretty efficient at this point, even when Chinese dominate the market. It's cathode materials which is the single biggest cost point. Cathode materials are dominated by Japanese companies, especially nickel based ones.
LFP is so cheap because making cathode powder for them is a fairly low-tech process with many Chinese garage scale chem companies jumping on it 10 years ago.
Nickel based cathodes are on other hand fairly hard to make with competitive capacities because control of particle size, structure, and shape is a tightly held chemical black magic.
For this reason, I don't expect the new generation of 200WH/kg+ LFP cathodes to be that cheap in comparison to nickel ones.
Hardly. Nickel goes through a rube-goldberg process of extraction, smelting into pure nickel, made into a sulfate, transported around the world, remade into a nickel carbonate, and finally input into cathode manufacture.
The supply chain simply isn't set up for batteries yet. Nickel metal powder is the best form to transport, and likely the best input for cathode manufacture as well. But the industry formed around the sulfate which was a mature market from other industrial use.
It's one of the more common elements on earth. There is no scarcity. Just cost of extraction.
> -- Cost of processing, refining lithium
Generally dropping. Also batteries can be recycled after their decades of useful life. It's not an expended resource, unlike anything oil based. Otherwise economies of scale apply. It's getting cheaper.
>-- Cost of making battery chemical contents
Non zero. But they last long (decades) and you can recycle. Maybe compare to a gallon of diesel which you extract, refine, and transport at great cost. Then you burn it and lose the ability to recycle it. It's almost obscene how inefficient that is in comparison. So the answer is infinitely better than anything ICE.
>-- Cost of assembling rest of complete battery
Seriously?! I refer you to the latest production statistics of the likes of Tesla, VW, LG and a few other manufacturers that have failed to collapse during the recent economic crisis by virtue of doing a generally great job of growing their business in the middle of a global pandemic. Unlike some ICE manufacturers.
Lithium might eventually be displaced by something better. Better as in even cheaper to harvest, manufacturer, package and leverage. The bar is pretty high at this point.
Let's pretend all of those things have awful trajectories, they don't, but let's pretend they do.
There's different battery tech such as organosilicon electrolytes, zinc magnesium, nanowire gels, sodium ion, there's lots of different ways of battery-ing and as long as you're getting the same electric profile, the devices honestly don't care in the slightest.
It's fundamentally a better approach
There will come a point where the economics of Lithium will require looking at, definitely in the scale-up phase. That is probably under 30 years. But there's a lot of lower hanging fruit before the industry collectively properly get onto looking into direct battery chemistry alternatives like Sodium-Air.
Prospectors have found even better new nickel sources since. One is right below a 64 square kilometer nature preserve. After Talvivaara it's quite hard to get people to think it won't have large environmental impact.
There's lots of materials around if you are willing to pay a price for the extraction. Does it make sense, to bet on high nickel prices for the next twenty years?
The biggest thing I'm aware of that seems to be going on right now is trying to make Lithium metal batteries work at scale
https://spectrum.ieee.org/energy/the-smarter-grid/the-return...
Non of the materials in the battery are really scares. Building up the capacity both in terms of mining and refining will likely be slower then demand growth however, so in the next 5-10 years its hard to say raw material input prices coming down a huge amount. This effectively generates a lower bound in the mid term for battery prices.
However, its not as bad as it sound. Depending on how you build your battery, the inputs are much cheaper. Iron Phosphate cathodes (LFP) are much, much cheaper. Manganese cathodes are also quite cheap and will be entering the market soonish. Cobalt has already been largely phased out, because it was to expensive.
Beyond that, localization of mining can add a lot of value. Currently a nickel atom travels a long time before it end up in your driveway. So without actually improving mining, a lot of cost can be removed.
There are however huge improvements to the chemical and the manufacturing aspects being made. Over the next decade the manufacturing of the cells will be so fast, that it will be a small part of the cost. Tesla I think is the most advanced in this right now, the assembly lines they presented are quite insane in terms of output per investment. And others are working on things like that too.
There are huge inefficiency still in the chemical processing, both in terms of how it is done, and how much its transported.
This video shows how the current cathode manufacturing works (from a company that wants to improve it but still): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4i1T6s_NdAQ
Once you get all of those cost out, reaching as low as 30-40$/kwh is achievable even for a high nickel cathode, and significantly less for a LFP battery or Manganese heavy cathodes. Tesla Battery Day target is for 56$/kwh (educated guessing by people) for high nickel but that is for the next 5 years.
There is significant further upside potential even then. Eliminating transition free metals from the cathode would cut cost significantly if it could be replaced with much cheaper materials. This is very active target of research right now, including by a Tesla funded high-reputation university lab.
Removing graphite and increasingly replacing it with silicon and eventually with nothing (using Lithium form the cathode to plate an anode) has a lot of potential as well to reduce cost.
Once we are talking 20 years, Lithium Sulfer is a great candidate both for automotive and long distance planes. These batteries would be incredibly cheap because Sulfer is waste material now.
Lithium is unlikely to go away anytime soon. There are potentially superior materials out there, but lithium has a lot of places to go still.
You might want to watch:
- The Limiting Factor (exactly about your question basically) https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCIFn7ONIJHyC-lMnb7Fm_jw
- EV Stock Channel (mostly about supply chain) https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCMfEjqHQS4u8W5etV0uAG_A
- Benchmark Minerals (lots of free contend and talks from companies in the supply chain) https://www.benchmarkminerals.com/
- Cell Ciders podcast (https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/cell-siders/id15584413...)
Also, consider watching Tesla Battery Day and pay attention to detail, they actually do a really great job explaining the costs and how to improve them in the next 2-7 years.
Weight and volume is really important for a car, but for a residential installation? Not so much.