Tesla Shakes Up Market for Lithium, Other Metals
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Re: Tesla Shakes Up Market for Lithium, Other Metals
#2Musk further said, "This is totally not related to why we want to mine asteroids."
Re: Tesla Shakes Up Market for Lithium, Other Metals
#3There is no shortage of lithium, even the USA has lots of it (owned by Canadian companies).
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.
Re: Tesla Shakes Up Market for Lithium, Other Metals
#4How viable is lithium recycling?
Re: Tesla Shakes Up Market for Lithium, Other Metals
#5The headline is a misquote. The actual quote, from Musk in the article, is "In order to produce half a million cars a year…we would basically need to absorb the entire world’s lithium-ion production."
That is very different that the entire world's lithium production.
Re: Tesla Shakes Up Market for Lithium, Other Metals
#6How viable is lithium recycling?
This article says a lot about it:
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.
Re: Tesla Shakes Up Market for Lithium, Other Metals
#7The headline is a misquote. The actual quote, from Musk in the article, is "In order to produce half a million cars a year…we would basically need to absorb the entire world’s lithium-ion production." That is very different that the entire world's lithium production.
Which is just another variation of something he's said since he announced the Gigafactory - "We'll produce more than the entire world's capacity of batteries."
Re: Tesla Shakes Up Market for Lithium, Other Metals
#8The headline is a misquote. The actual quote, from Musk in the article, is "In order to produce half a million cars a year…we would basically need to absorb the entire world’s lithium-ion production." That is very different that the entire world's lithium production.
Which is just another variation of something he's said since he announced the Gigafactory - "We'll produce more than the entire world's capacity of batteries."
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Re: Tesla Shakes Up Market for Lithium, Other Metals
#9There is no shortage of lithium, even the USA has lots of it (owned by Canadian companies). 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.
Where are we with the next-gen battery tech? It's like every 5 years we see some research lab announce a breakthrough but as if yet no real progress.
You would have thought it would be a priority for Musk to research next-gen batteries in a really serious way.
Re: Tesla Shakes Up Market for Lithium, Other Metals
#10There is no shortage of lithium, even the USA has lots of it (owned by Canadian companies). 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.
Where are we with the next-gen battery tech? It's like every 5 years we see some research lab announce a breakthrough but as if yet no real progress. You would have thought it would be a priority for Musk to research next-gen batteries in a really serious way.
Lithium-ion cells have been slowly, steadily improving by a few percent a year for a long time now. A few percent is not a lot, but if these incremental improvements keep happening then that adds up to some pretty good progress. Cost is also decreasing quite rapidly as economies of scale continue to ramp up.
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.