Lithium

“I've worked hard for years to get a permit for one of the largest deposits of lithium, Spongamine, in North America, which is only about 45 minutes outside of Charlotte. We got permits there. What we don't have are prices that make sense to go ahead and drive …”

“So the price of cobalt sodium Combinates, it's one-tenth of the lithium components.”

“And so we've seen lithium prices, for instance, just in the past few months, be up more than 50%. And that's going to translate into higher battery costs, all things being equal.”

“Lithium, you know, needs to four X in the next, in terms of production capacity in the next 10 years, roughly, in order for the, ah, batteries that we want to build to be built.”

“Lithium is like exactly in this position right now. And that's why we're focused on lithium.”

“The scarce resource is not lithium or copper metal in the ground. It's actually information. The scarce resource are not the ore deposits. And the scarce resource is the information about where the ore deposits are located.”

“You know, the big lithium deposits in production today, at least the hard rock lithium deposits were found like people looking for tantalum, for capacitors, for the electronics industry, you know, in the 19 eighties.”

“To, you know, to get to a high penetration of battery powered devices that we need a tenfold increase in lithium production relative to today.”

“Sodium carbonate, soda ash, is basically like 200 dollars per ton as opposed to where lithium mine sits right now, 10,000 dollars per ton. But in the height of twenty-twenty-two, lithium was at basically 60 to maybe some cases 80,000 dollars per ton.”

“Lithium is only about seven percent, right, of by mass of lithium-ion cell.”

“It's a much smaller market than any of the others I just mentioned, I should note, but the demand growth trajectory is also steeper, and it's got all the makings of a super volatile commodity landscape.”

“Chile, as I mentioned, is the world's, one of the world's largest lithium producers and the world's largest brine producer. Australia is the world's largest lithium producer because of its large spodumine or hard rock mines.”

“I mean, right now, there's definitely more lithium production in the world from hard rock than there is from brine.”

“So we've got lithium kind of, not at an all-time low, but, you know, very depressed, below kind of 20,000 dollars per metric ton.”

“It's not like the refineries are in China because the technology to refine lithium is in China. Like, that's definitely not the case at all. It's purely been, like, the capital investment to build the refinery is the lowest in China. And it's not labor either,…”

“So, 80% of lithium comes from Australia, China, and Chile, where 70% of cobalt comes from the Democratic Republic of Congo.”

“On the refining side, China controls 80% of manganese refining, more than 70% of cobalt and nickel refining, more than 60% of lithium refining. And then you get to the most valuable components, the cathodes, the anodes, right? China controls more than 75% of c…”

“So the top producers of oil in the world, the US, Saudi Arabia, and Russia, each produce roughly 10% of global crude oil supply. The top producer Of lithium, of cobalt, of rare earths. Each of those, the top producers, each of those produces more than half, an…”

“In the period between twenty-twenty and twenty-twenty-two, you had prices skyrocket on the back of this accelerating EV adoption curve, where lithium prices went all the way up to 80,000 dollars per metric ton. Since then, they've crashed all the way back down…”

“If we look at this year, I mentioned the growth outlooks for most reasonable market forecasters is 20%. Supply for lithium again for this year is supposed to be 30 to 40%. So we have supply that's outpacing the demand increases.”

“The thermodynamic limit of graphite, which is made entirely out of carbon atoms, is you need six carbon atoms to store a single atom of lithium. Whereas with silicon, you can take a single atom of silicon and store four lithium atoms. So that means instead of …”

“That really is high temperature, fossil fuels based and it doesn't recover all the materials. For example, in lithium recycling you burn the lithium or you lose what lithium you don't burn into what's called slag, which is a solid waste stream that you can't r…”

“So yeah, the prices went up by like a factor of about 10 over the course of two and a half years in January, 20 20 to like the middle of 2022, late 20 22. And then collapsed.”

“When we're looking at companies that are making a commodity product, I want to look back 10 or 15 years at the commodity price. I don't want to invest against a two-year spike in something. You know, that's what a lot of people did in the polysilicon boom in 2…”

“For most of these electric vehicle batteries of all of the minerals is going to be nickel. And then lithium and cobalt probably fall in second, but the single biggest number to shoot for is the nickel itself, and that's a problem because most nickel is coming …”

“The Resell Center is a battery recycling consortium led by the U.S. Department of Energy. They did some research that says you can get a ton of battery grade lithium out of 750 tons of lithium brine, 250 tons of lithium ore, or 28 tons of recycled lithium ion …”

“Few people know that between Bolivia, Argentina, and Chile, that's 60% of the world's lithium. I mean, that's, Bolivia alone is one-third of the world's lithium.”

“But just to contextualize the scale of the challenge here, we mine around five times as much copper as we do those other three minerals, lithium, nickel, and cobalt combined.”

“So China refines 65% of the lithium worldwide, and it may come from other places. A lot of it comes from Australia, but it's refined in China, and that means that if there are trade tensions, they have control over something that is important to the U.S.”

“In the case of Australia, they dig up the rock called spodumene, and then they ship it to China to be processed into lithium hydroxide or lithium carbonate, and that processing part of the supply chain is actually done outside of a free trade partner country.”

“You know, look, I think lithium, we're clearly on track, whether it's the Salton Sea, or whether it's Nevada, or whether it's, you know, some of the other mines that we've already identified in the processing facilities that the Loan Programs Office will fund.…”

“Most of the conversion from lithium that gets extracted to lithium that is battery grade takes place in China.”

“And so, when I see geothermal in the media as a lithium play, really, I mean, if you look at it, if you back up and look at that, what you're thinking is, oh, ok, good, we'll use this clean, awesome, ubiquitous, baseload energy source to mine lithium to make b…”

“Lithium is up 900%. There is a severe supply squeeze of lithium. There's, the spot market in China for lithium is, is in the 70 dollars a kilogram for lithium carbonate equivalent, which is the feedstock material that goes into the batteries.”

“I do expect lithium pricing will decline. It's not going to stay in the stratosphere where it is now. And I think that it's going to Return. It, the, I think expensive lithium is going to be sticky. It's going to be with us for the next decade. In terms of whe…”

“The EV demand outside of China, because China is going to be less affected by this because the Chinese investment in lithium has been has kept track with future demand requirements in twenty-twenty-five. But outside of China, we think that we have pulled back …”

“Lithium prices have risen fivefold since April of last year. Nickel is also a particular concern because Russia supplies 10% of the world's nickel, and that's another key component in lithium ion batteries.”

“But with our current battery technology, it would just be way too expensive To back up the entire electric grid. Plus, it would require more materials like lithium and cobalt than we have sitting around right now.”

“Lithium prices have risen fivefold since April of last year.”

“There's rarer metals, lithium being the by far most obvious one. But also things like cobalt and zinc and nickel where You know, we see in most cases global supply being sufficient to meet the needs of the energy transition, but just an enormous concentration …”

“So there, the lit, ah, four atoms of lithium actually bond with a single atom of silicon. So you remember with carbon, it's six to one. Here it's one to four. So it's 24 X atomically better.”

“Now silicon's heavier. So it's only about 10 times better on a weight basis. And then the other thing that happens is the silicon expands about three X as you charge it with lithium. And so on a volume base, it's about three times better, right?”

“But on the entire list, the biggest price increase was for lithium, both lithium bicarbonate and lithium hydroxide, the two different formulations used in lithium ion batteries. Prices rose between 304 hundred percent in both cases last year, and they've only …”

“Now, it doesn't have to go up, but it has to go up to, by mid-century, something like two and a half megatons. So it has to grow by a, by over an order of magnitude, a factor of 30 or something like that, depending on your estimates, as opposed to doubling.”

“The drop from the best anode material is lithium by a long shot, for the reasons I just described, really fundamental physics The second best anode material is sodium. And it is way less good. Way less good. And it's easy to understand why. Because the molar m…”

“The new discoveries, about three trillion, or maybe four trillion, as opposed to five trillion. So it's actually on the same order, like the market opportunity for new lithium discoveries is about the same order of that as copper”

“We are confident the lithium price will stay, you know, elevated in the long run, not related to the current spike, but just in the long run, elevated, because there will be constant demand pressure, and in fact, I'm, you know, sort of concerned about it. I th…”

“The clays are not really a source of lithium today. There are people speculate about them becoming a major source. There's a lots of lithium in clays for sure. But there, but it's very expensive to process it, so it's not obvious that, it's not obvious when th…”

“There's not another element out there that happens to be the lightest metal and the electropositive, most electropositive metal, which also happens to complex very effectively with transition metals. Instable layered oxide crystal structures. Like, there isn't…”

“We'd order it as nickel followed by lithium followed by cobalt followed by copper.”

“Suffice to say, I would imagine that portfolios that continue to be structurally turned towards commodity and resources are going to do well, because I think we're probably on the front edge of a sustained period of commodities nationalism, which serves to bro…”

“In twenty-twenty-one, prices surged over 400%.”

“600,000 tons of lithium could be extracted from the valley every year, enough to completely transform the global supply chain.”

“In twenty-twenty-one, prices surged over 400%.”

“The vast majority is mined in Australia and South America and processed in China.”

“600,000 tons of lithium could be extracted from the valley every year, enough to completely transform the global supply chain.”

“I think, you know, the Biden administration recognizes rightfully so that the country is at a particular geopolitical disadvantage if it can't produce lithium or other metals necessary for the energy transition from domestic sources.”

“China has done a masterful job. They control, you know, a lot of the lithium, a lot of the nickel, a lot of the cobalt, a lot of the graphite. They control a lot of the rare earths that go into the permanent magnets.”

“And so the cost of Tesla's are going to go up by 20 or 30%.”

“It turns out that if we use the existing battery chemistries, which is a lithium ion battery, the most scarce raw material is not going to be lithium itself, but cobalt.”