China

“China recently announced they're going to be building at least a 150 new nuclear power plants.”

“In China's recent five-year strategy, they called out cultivated meat explicitly as something that, that is a priority area.”

“There, there's sufficient identified in reserves that we don't actually need new discoveries of it. It's just that most of that is in China or Vietnam.”

“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 …”

“At this point in China, you've got about a fifty-fifty blend of LFP cars, which tend to be the smaller cars and tend to be the plug-in hybrid cars. Versus ternary-based cars, which tend to be the larger or higher-end cars.”

“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.”

“So if you look at the U.S., we're at about a 120, 125 EVs per public fast charger, and China is at 15, and China has much, much higher penetration of EVs.”

“China is currently experiencing the worst drought on record. The Yangtze River is at its lowest level for this time of year since recorded history. And in the Sichuan province, which is home to a big hydropower resource, threats of power cuts are impacting man…”

“You know, it's interesting to see, since this crisis began, they're up to almost two million barrels a day on Of Russian oil now. And, you know, before they were kind of keeping it at a million barrels a day.”

“Well, that's gone. That is gone. It is now the era of great power competition, and that's the U.S. Versus China.”

“Being cut off from technology will show up over three or four years, and it will have lost its most important market, so I don't think it's going to be an energy superpower in the way that it's been in the past, and it's going to be very dependent on China. An…”

“So many of them flow through China because of its dominance of solar panel manufacturing, its dominance of lithium ion batteries, etc.,”

“We're back to China, where 42% of world copper is smelted.”

“We're gonna be importing a lot of batteries from China for stationary storage applications.”

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

“China had a massive build out of transmission. Going back to technology, most of our grid, almost all of our grid is alternating current. That's the AC I was referring to. And most grids around the world are AC. China did a massive DC build out over the past c…”

“It takes at least 18 months to build a factory for polysilicon, even in China, and a lot longer anywhere else.”

“The reason, one of the main reasons why Europe has been going through the past year is because of Xi Jinping and its zero COVID policy. Because Chinese gas demand has been muted, its LNG imports have declined massively, and China in 2021 was the largest LNG im…”

“It's one of the biggest climate problems in that food waste is like 10% of emissions. So like, if you ranked it by country, it'd be like China, United States, food waste, India.”

“China's little moves in coal consumption are like the size of top 10 country electricity consumption in any given year.”

“Renewable energy generation in China has now surpassed all of Europe put together. It has also surpassed U.S. Renewable energy generation. It's growing across all places, but it is growing by far the fastest in China.”

“If you are today shipping your spodumine to China to be made into lithium hydroxide then that's, if China does turn out to be a foreign entity of concern, that will disqualify that material for the tax credit. So right now, it is going to be qualified, but as …”

“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.”

“So roughly China consumes 12 to 15 to thirteen million tons of copper per year. The U.S. Around one point into two million tons. And then Germany, Japan, and developed nations consume roughly a million tons per year.”

“Roughly 50, between 45, 55% of the smelting capacity in the world, so companies that purchase the concentrate and smelt it, are in China.”

“Actually a lot of the competition is probably going to become more from Southeast Asia than it is from, directly from, I mean, China, of course, will be a huge part of the story because they're the ones who are driving the total scale and the whole pie getting…”

“China is the largest producer and consumer of hydrogen. The numbers vary a little bit, but roughly around a third of total hydrogen demand is consumed in China.”

“There have been a lot of deals being signed by a certain number of European countries, Japan, Korea, with potential exporters of hydrogen, but China has been relatively absent of all those deals.”

“It doesn't make sense to me that China would become a massive hydrogen importer. It feels like exactly the kind of thing hydrogen would self produce if they need a lot of clean hydrogen”

“China has also in the last five years made announcements towards putting gigawatt scale Space-based solar power systems into orbit by 20 50 with demonstrations planned later this decade.”

“Now, to be clear, I don't think there's a future wherein the U S produces as much Of any of these things as China does, but we don't need to if our point is to, you know, get high on our own supply, basically.”

“China's, has the most nuclear under construction of any country. It has about, ah, I think, 22 reactors under construction right now. When those are Complete. Actually, just when a few more come online, they will surpass France as having the largest fleet of n…”

“We can say China's probably building at about 2500 dollars per kilowatt, so not quite as cheap as South Korea, but, you know, nowhere near the U.S., and again, that's probably because they're building a lot of the same design.”

“And that, that number is now 25%, so it can't be a Chinese ownership having, Chinese company having an ownership of 25% or more, or else it becomes a foreign entity of concern, and therefore disqualifies you for the tax credit.”

“There is a significant loophole, which is a de minimis ruling, which essentially says if there's a small amount of material come, that, that does get its way into, from China then that will, and specifically of materials that don't have high value, and that's …”

“If you are today shipping your spodumine to China to be made into lithium hydroxide then that's, if China does turn out to be a foreign entity of concern, that will disqualify that material for the tax credit. So right now, it is going to be qualified, but as …”

“So, so my company, Adionics, is building a factory in the U.S., and we need to use, we need to purchase Japanese and Korean equipment, but interestingly, there's specific language in here about control software that, for that equipment that the control softwar…”

“Based on my expectations, this is, it's significantly restrictive. My expectations was there were going to be a lot of loopholes and a lot of ways for this to snake around the FEOC label. But it's a pretty, it is a pretty solid bulletproof way of keeping the C…”

“And graphite is of course going to be one of the most severely challenged areas of battery materials, because today all graphite essentially is coming from China.”

“Because the U.S. In terms of absolute market Sales was second after China, which is awesome. But if you look at Europe, you're seeing more in that 25% to 30% for UK, Germany, France, the major markets in Europe.”

“If you were to take just China's installations last year, which is north of 200 gigawatts, in and of itself, it would have been the biggest year in any other year besides twenty-twenty-two.”

“And the instantaneous year-on-year or year-on-year gap up in peak demand in China from the thermal fleet was the size of Germany's peak capacity.”

“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…”

“In my experience, or at least in my conversations with Chinese recyclers in, in China, where there are fewer local restrictions on having pyro in certain provinces. Pyro is, as I understand it now the majority of recycling methods.”

“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…”

“China refines 90% of the world's graphite. And at the end of 2023, China restricted graphite exports in an effort to protect its own supply.”

“With critical mineral dominance that China has, most of that is about refining and processing. Those are manufacturing plants, and you can build those in lots and lots of places.”

“Zero chance. Not at all. Not in a million years.”

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

“60% of manganese comes from South Africa, China, and Australia, and China sources 80% of the world's graphite.”

“The processing is over 90% done in China, and magnet manufacturing over 95% done in China.”

“Supply is a challenge, and it still largely does come from China, which has just recently, actually, a few months ago, instituted a ban on the export of new technologies for extraction and separation of rare earth elements.”

“The interesting thing about both China and the Netherlands which are my most personal recent experiences with, you know, truly prevalent charging everywhere. They're really not doing this, even though they're charging everywhere.”

“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,…”

“We're getting to the point now where we're seeing weekly registrations of EVs, or they actually call it NEVs for new energy vehicles, which include the plug-in hybrids also. But we're seeing that number exceed the Internal combustion engine cars for the first …”

“They have thousands of them, and what's, what's kind of interesting recently is that they've been able to sign up a bunch of other automakers. I think there are up to eight other automakers now who have signed up to the NIO charge, like, battery swapping netwo…”

“One thing you find that's kind of interesting with all our charging station now is that they have their own solar panels on the top of the roof, and then they have their own energy storage systems along with it, so so that actually does help alleviate some of …”

“The Tesla sales have basically been flat in the recent, in the past year or so.”

“The only other one selling a lot of EVs in China among foreign automakers is Volkswagen.”

“It really got a jilt when Tesla's you know, opened up their factory in Shanghai, and that brought, like, a more of a premium feel to EVs in China, amongst the Chinese consumers.”

“When it comes to BYD, and I think other Chinese automakers are similar situated, I would say they get maybe 10 to 15% of their sales outside of China right now”

“They were able to lower the prices further, until this year, they started a campaign saying, electric cheaper than gas. So they lowered the compact sedan prices to 79.8 K RMB. And that is basically a little more than 10,000”

“For people like Volkswagen, they get one third of their sales in China. And I think it's similar ratio for BMW and the Audi and Benz.”

“And especially for the hybrid duty trucks the main breakdown I would say is between The pure battery electric versus battery swapping ones, and you probably have like a sixty-forty kind of ratio between the two.”

“Geographically, half of all the steel in the world is made in China.”

“And I think, you know, comparing the US and China, part of the issue with the US is, you know, we really do kind of tilt towards this mindset of novelty and, you know, boldness and daring and restlessness, which are definitely huge assets and strengths for the…”

“At a system level, kind of for a turnkey system, you're looking at something like a 135 dollars per kilowatt hour. So again, kind of crazy low considering that 18 months ago, the average price of a cell was about 135 dollars per kilowatt hour.”

“We've got LFP prices from China down at kind of 50 bucks per kilowatt hour, which is... That, that's at the sell level, yeah. Exactly, that's at the sell level.”

“And that's that a lot of the companies in China and the supply chain, cell manufacturers, and material providers had stockpiled material over the last couple of years, particularly when raw material prices were very high. And so they then have that material si…”

“So the subsidies from the last decade They've helped to build up these big companies that we know, BYD, CATL, Eve Energy, etc. But they're not fundamental in this, you know, in the way that people think they are to the kind of low-cost structure that we're see…”

“If we go back to 20 20, kind of commissioned capacity in China was about 550 gigawatt hours. By the end of this year you know, if all the kind of projects that are under construction are completed, you'll be looking at about 4.5 TeraWatt hours of capacity. So,…”

“For a LFP cell produced in China, 35 gigawatt hour facility you're looking at around kind of 68 dollars per kilowatt hour. So this isn't kind of optimized for these super low prices that we we're seeing today, but Assumes a kind of LFP material costs of about …”

“There's essentially 18 stages that you're each with its own different types of equipment. And there's very few companies that make every one of those pieces of equipment. And especially there's very few Chinese, non-Chinese companies that, that have That, that…”

“The emergence of CATL, which was essentially a company that was really invented in the back rooms of the industrial governmental complex in, in China about 12 years ago that, and it essentially just, you know, it followed the plan perfectly and is now the larg…”

“China is, is the world's largest processor for many of these types of lithium. So we were talking about Australia and Chile earlier in the conversation. I mean, much of that lithium is, is shipped to mainland China where it's processed into a form that can be …”

“In terms of apparent demand, which is what the statistic is called, and it's basically looking at refinery runs in, in China, it's, looks like it's peaked at some point in 23 and the new data that was published as of yesterday morning shows that actually, stat…”

“China has, in quick succession, blown past Japan and the United States, especially because the U.S. Had been on a downward trajectory, and then past the EU in terms of oil imports, and it imports, like, more than thirteen million barrels a day as of twenty-twe…”

“China in 2023 was just a little bit under 40% of the globe's automaking production, not capacity, but actual production.”

“GM in in China used to sell, you know, Close to four million vehicles a year. Almost all of them were made locally for the record... And that was 2017. And now it's, you know, like less than a million in 20, 24 through, you know, almost through the end of the …”

“China exported 6.4 million vehicles last year five and a half million passenger cars. Two million of those were electric vehicles. This is far above any other country's export capability. You know, it's more than Japan exports. It's more than Germany exports. …”

“I think we need to do a big reset in terms of what we consider to be a plug-in hybrid. I think people's, people's versions in the United States is a Prius with a plug, as opposed to a vehicle with 200 plus kilometers of battery range. On its own, plus a small,…”

“China, despite processing the world's, majority of the world's lithium into lithium carbonate, doesn't actually have lithium reserves within its borders. I mean, that mostly is in Australia and the Northern Tri- the Northern Triangle in South America.”

“Over 93% of the world's batter-grade graphite comes out of China.”

“I mean, the supply chains for LFPs have been largely within China. You're seeing that now spread more broadly. So Indonesia, Morocco are all areas now where you're seeing a lot more investment going into it.”

“And my strong belief is the process for export control will be utilized a bit more in the future. And this will basically signal again that China is not really reliable on sourcing of rare earth magnets in the future as we go forward because they will use it a…”

“99% of heavy rare earth elements, more specifically terbium and dysprosium, comes from China, within China, and goes into magnets. So those are not available in mines outside China.”

“So 90% of rare earth elements now are processed and refined in China. And then they go one step ahead again, and they bring in even more material to China, and they manufacture 93% of magnets in China.”

“63% of rare earth mining happens in China.”

“So today the shipment of the magnets is really disrupted. It's not being shipped today. Magnets, oxides, metals, alloys, all of them, all the above are delayed in shipments.”

“Now, back in December of 2023 they enforced a ban on the export of equipment and technology related to rare earth elements.”

“In fact, I am aware of Companies that they really relied on those Chinese technologies, and now they are having challenges with bringing those equipment into the U.S. And Europe. So they, their projects have been suffering from that.”

“China dominates rare earths more than basically any other area of critical minerals, which is saying something because China is pretty dominant in a bunch of areas.”

“China just, you know, banned the export of six major critical minerals. We make none of these in the United States so that seems like a real big problem.”

“Right now, coming off of the Holland, Michigan line, we're on schedule for early next year to be a hundred percent non-Chinese in terms of all of the components and subcomponents that are going into those ESS cells.”

“The European Union has spent a lot of money developing technology and equipment, so have the Chinese.”

“The anode right now is almost a hundred percent from China.”

“Right out of the gate, starting in twenty-twenty-six, you need 60% non-China components in your battery cells.”

“If you look across all of the areas of clean energy that we care about and everything that the IRA was focused on, you know, I think ingot and wafer manufacturing is actually Probably the most concentrated of all of those, like, supply chain steps in China sti…”

“For wind projects, it's not a huge impact because it's very easy to source components from, you Non-China sources. There's plenty of, you know, wind turbine component manufacturing in America and Europe, et cetera.”

“Almost all of it's in China. There's some sort of token projects and stuff elsewhere, but almost all of it's in China.”

“So if we wait for, Four or five years to get into this game, we're going to be in a similar place that we are today on LFP, but, ah, today at least, you're not facing such a huge, ah, economy of scale challenge.”

“From the quotes and what we're hearing from the suppliers, not just cells, but also materials, we see a really low-risk pathway to the crossover point on price with LFP coming somewhere between twenty-twenty-eight and twenty-thirty out of China.”

“You saw the first announcements kind of late last year, early this year with first sort of demonstrator projects, and those are in the, like, tens of megawatt hour scale. and we know there are multiple other in the pipeline.”

“Some of this is driven by some policy in China that, That provided projects that, that do non-lithium storage with some preference in, like, interconnect queue speed and stuff like that, or the equivalent of whatever the interconnect queue is in China. and …”

“You'd be pretty safe in saying there's at least 30 gigawatt hours, probably as much as a hundred gigawatt hours of sodium ion capacity worldwide for all different variants”

“Not, not the cells, right? Those have gotten really cheap, but the full systems need to get cheaper if they're going to be really cost-effective resources. That probably means some portion of the battery, like the cells, at least for a while longer, is coming …”

“But the reality is the only countries that have functioning civilian small modular reactors are Russia and China.”

“So long story short I don't think the same game that worked in solar works in green hydrogen.”

“It does import coal for kind of energy balance reasons, but it has an absolutely enormous indigenous coal supply that will last for centuries, right?”

“China is significantly more electrified, at least as measured by the share of final energy that comes from electricity than the United States. Like, substantially more so.”

“And it's also moving at a much more rapid pace than either North America or Europe. Which has sort of slowly ticked up over the course of five decades from 10% to a little bit north of 20%. China, meanwhile, has gone since 1970 from, like, three percent to 30%…”

“Electric, electric car sales as a share in China is well north of 50% at this point.”

“For the first three quarters of last year about 42% of all passenger vehicle manufacturing is in China last year. That's higher than the ratio for Japan ever was back in its heyday.”

“China had three A thousand electric, medium, and heavy-duty truck sales in the year, twenty-twenty. It had 81 and a half thousand in the first half of last year.”

“The transformers are generally made these days in, like, China, India, and Mexico. Very few of them are actually made in the US.”

“The Chinese recently did an eleven-kilometer haul, and I'm switching units because they, it's been reporting those units. So, about eight miles deep. The first 10 kilometers took a year to drill, and the last one kilometer took another year to drill.”

“If you looked at the jobs figures for how much the U.S. Had versus how much China had, It was like, 250,000 jobs in the U.S. And three million in China. So they were installing twice as much, but they had 10 times as many jobs.”

“When you have a manufacturing basis, you have political power. You have Lots and lots of durable, really good jobs that you want to support, and that's one of the reasons I think China went from, you know, installing two times as much solar as the U.S. To 10 t…”

“Solar panel manufacturing, especially to the extent that it's clustered in China, is, you know, these products are incredible. They last for a long time, they're cheap, they're, they are we continue to have them get better, but they're really, really incredibl…”

“The problem is, if you go back to January one, nitrogen markets and phosphate markets were already dealing with supply tightness because of European production rates, because of a lack of Chinese exports, because the ongoing Russian-Ukraine war.”

“The income flow would be great, but it's a rounding error in the China GDP. It's more important to keep a quarter of your people happy, so they've continued to keep them.”

“And that meant that for only the fifth time in this century, and for the first time since twenty-twenty, we actually saw a small fall in fossil generation, particularly a fall from coal generation, which was both in India and China we had those falls.”

“China is actively reducing the lowest level that coal plants can run out. Now, this is not just a policy choice. It's also a technical requirement. So it means they want Coal plants to be able to throttle down in the middle of the day further than they had to …”

“China's by far the country that is leading nuclear generation build out currently, and it's not close to anyone else. So almost the entire increase in 20, 25 as well was in China directly.”

“Fossil generation in China has been flat now for a couple of years. It's not just a one-year anomaly. It basically flattened off and has stayed that way.”

“China is very much moving into an, into a time where they will, for most of the year, there will be significant overcapacity of coal coal generators as well. So yeah, a big change in the role that China is using coal. And that will be a feature for years to co…”

“Wind and solar generation per capita India's has now is already five times higher than China's was 15 years ago, and obviously that's only going to continue to grow.”

“And that means we think that India is going to top out or peak its coal generation, both in absolute terms and per capita at a level that's three to maybe even four times lower than where China's peak was.”

“In the meantime, that means that curtailment likely is significantly higher than what is being reported, or at least that's what we expect from when we look at how much capacity has been installed and how much generation is actually growing.”

“The U.S. Down at 20%. China down at 18%. The EU down at nine percent.”

“They've just been born in the last decade. Some of them are only five years old, and they've been founded by billionaires who made their fortunes originally in software, in the tech industry inside China.”

“So to put some numbers to it, this year, China has capacity to build about fifty five million cars. Their domestic demand is twenty five million. They'll export another ten million. That leaves 15 to twenty million in excess capacity idle, looking for new mark…”

“Electrics were five percent of the Chinese market in 2020. They're half now”

“The U.S. Leads in technological innovation, but China, once again, is quicker when it comes to commercialization. Not only inside China, but we're seeing the Chinese autonomous vehicle makers move into the Middle East, and in the U.K. And Germany now, moving q…”

“In terms of comparison to Europe and the United States, they're 30 to 40% less expensive.”

“This year, they're on track to export twelve million cars. Twelve million.”

“And for the last two years, Mexico's has been the single largest destination of Chinese exports.”

“Half of Tesla's global production is centered in China.”

“EVs, PHEVs, hybrids, gasoline, they have overcapacity in every powertrain, and we're seeing exports to last year, half of them were EVs, half of them were gasoline-powered vehicles.”

“So, for example, that same seagull that sold in China at 10,000 dollars, let's call it, sells in Mexico for 20,000 dollars.”

“China has enough capacity today to supply half the world's demand for cars, and it's not out of the question that one day China could be Capable of producing all the cars for everybody in the world.”

“So one of the crazy things, you probably saw this in Solar too, so there are dozens and dozens of Chinese car makers. At last count, there's more than 60 And more than a hundred individual brands.”

“I just think Fortress America and bring it all back home is unsustainable. It's also not strategic with respect to geopolitical considerations.”