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Tesla Shakes Up Market for Lithium, Other Metals

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Re: Tesla Shakes Up Market for Lithium, Other Metals

#61

Post by stcredzero »

codingdave wrote: post #59
mchannon wrote: post #14

Lithium doesn't weigh much of anything (even compared to oil), so a ton of Lithium is a LOT of lithium. Since as a commodity it's never traded in metallic form (too hazardous and energy-intensive to get it there, and not much market for straight metal, even as an input to battery production). It tends to be traded as carbonate, so a ton of lithium carbonate still has a very small amount of lithium in it. The article…

I'm a little perplexed by you just dropping the statement: "I've found a way." It seems to me that you should either discuss your findings and intentions, or not mention it until you want a public discussion of it. I'm surely not alone in a desire to escape the life of sitting behind a desk, and would love to help such a project, in particular to get in early at the prospecting stage. But it is hard to tell from a ge…

I'm a little perplexed by you just dropping the statement: "I've found a way."

It's a little like being a 17th century French lawyer and writing an allusion to a proof in the margins of a book.

Re: Tesla Shakes Up Market for Lithium, Other Metals

#62

Post by sqeaky »

acchow wrote: post #51
sqeaky wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> no real progress My cell phone consumes more power and stays on longer than my first phone is that not progress? I think it comes in slow increments and noticing a 5% year on year increase in battery life is lost in the noise of devices that can consume half or double the amount of energy. As for how easy it is to lose the battery gains in noise. Many stock cell phones can have their battery life extended by half a…

> My cell phone consumes more power and stays on longer than my first phone is that not progress? Why do you think your cell phone consumes more power now? I remember my iPhone 3G getting really physically hot while web browsing. We measure battery tech progress in energy density, not how long your device will last (since a ton of other tech goes into your device using less power, like transistor shrinking for exampl…

> Why do you think your cell phone consumes more power now?

Good question.

The ratings I read before I buy them. At the time of purchase I knew that exact mAh it consumed and compared to previous phones.

I blame the 7 inch screen, 3 different antennas and 3 extra processors that my older phone didn't have.

EDIT - Grammar and wording.

Re: Tesla Shakes Up Market for Lithium, Other Metals

#63

Post by extrapickles »

goda90 wrote: post #11
no1youknowz wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Heck, I'd say I see an article about new battery developments multiple times a year. I wonder if the delay has as much or more to do with economics than actual research and development. It might not be in the best interest of a lot of players, whether that's battery manufacturers, or device manufacturers, to produce something that has improved longevity if that means fewer sales due to batteries wearing out.

Its economics in the manor that its non-trivial and time consuming to produce a physical good. A existing factory can take 6+ months to retool, especially if you don't want to interrupt its existing output much.

Also a bunch of the developments don't pan out for various reasons, like not being able to get the yield high enough to be worth while, requires large amounts of unobtainium, have very restrictive operating requirements not mentioned in press release (such as a 140F auto-ignition temperature), etc.

Re: Tesla Shakes Up Market for Lithium, Other Metals

#64

Post by mjevans »

mizzao wrote: post #47
duaneb wrote: post #4

How viable is lithium recycling?

There are so many discarded batteries from old electronic devices. Even chemical separation must be more effective than digging it out of the earth, right?

You'd probably assume liability for all of the other stuff that's around that thin lithium lining.

It must be cost, because I can't think of any other reason that we don't have micro-machine dis-assemblers for slowly picking apart our garbage in to neatly binned resources.

Re: Tesla Shakes Up Market for Lithium, Other Metals

#65

Post by verisimilitude »

stcredzero wrote: post #61
codingdave wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm a little perplexed by you just dropping the statement: "I've found a way." It seems to me that you should either discuss your findings and intentions, or not mention it until you want a public discussion of it. I'm surely not alone in a desire to escape the life of sitting behind a desk, and would love to help such a project, in particular to get in early at the prospecting stage. But it is hard to tell from a ge…

I'm a little perplexed by you just dropping the statement: "I've found a way." It's a little like being a 17th century French lawyer and writing an allusion to a proof in the margins of a book.

To make an implied reference explicit: "[Fermat's] famous Last Theorem was first discovered by his son in the margin in his father's copy of an edition of Diophantus, and included the statement that the margin was too small to include the proof." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pierre_de_Fermat

Re: Tesla Shakes Up Market for Lithium, Other Metals

#66

Post by Retric »

maxerickson wrote: post #40
Retric wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

ED: Sounds interesting, I hope the economics work out. Current production of lithium is low because demand for lithium is low. Lithium @ 17 ppm is actually more common than Lead @ 10ppm in the earths crust. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abundance_of_elements_in_Earth... PS: 37,000 tonns of Lithium are produced in 2012 vs 5,200,000 of lead.

I'm not real worried about resource availability limiting production of batteries, but the lead comparison doesn't seem to provide much information about how much lithium can be produced over short to medium terms. I know next to nothing about geology, but a little browsing suggests that it is easy to find galena and that it is a much more productive ore than the typical lithium ores.

I am really only approaching this as an investor so take this in that context.

My point was, it's not really a question of how much can be produced, but at what price you can produce it. Right now the market is paying ~6,000$ per tonne which has been fairly steady if slowly growing over time. With battery's making up about ~1/3 of the market. At say ~12,000$ per tonne production could double in well under 5 years.

So, as long as Tesla is happy to pay 12k/tonne they can get more or less as much lithium as they could ever want. More importantly the price need not spike anywhere near that much as long as demand is predictable. In 5 years the price for most commodities is often more or less a function of the delta between expected demand and actual demand.

If you can get into production at say 4k/ tonne it's no question the market is growing so at the price is unlikely to crash any time soon. At ~6k/tonne cost cutting is going to be really important fairly quickly, but it's a reasonable investment. At 7+k/tonne it's a huge risk which is only worth it IMO if you can line up a long term contract at a fixed and profitable price or if you can tightly control costs and only ramp up in case demand spikes (ex: your mining something else, but you could also exact lithium from your tailing).

Re: Tesla Shakes Up Market for Lithium, Other Metals

#67

Post by amelius »

mchannon wrote: post #14

Lithium doesn't weigh much of anything (even compared to oil), so a ton of Lithium is a LOT of lithium. Since as a commodity it's never traded in metallic form (too hazardous and energy-intensive to get it there, and not much market for straight metal, even as an input to battery production). It tends to be traded as carbonate, so a ton of lithium carbonate still has a very small amount of lithium in it. The article…

> The article completely misses the fact that lithium is not the most important metal in a lithium-ion battery. More pounds of cobalt are required

Yes, but then you should also say something about the relative availability of lithium and cobalt.

Re: Tesla Shakes Up Market for Lithium, Other Metals

#68

Post by epicmellon »

adwn wrote: post #13
epicmellon wrote: post #2

Musk further said, "This is totally not related to why we want to mine asteroids."

SpaceX isn't planning to mine asteroids, that's Planetary Resources. http://planetaryresources.com/

You're right. I should clarify that by "we" I mean "the people doing stuff".

Re: Tesla Shakes Up Market for Lithium, Other Metals

#69

Post by louithethrid »

acchow wrote: post #51
sqeaky wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> no real progress My cell phone consumes more power and stays on longer than my first phone is that not progress? I think it comes in slow increments and noticing a 5% year on year increase in battery life is lost in the noise of devices that can consume half or double the amount of energy. As for how easy it is to lose the battery gains in noise. Many stock cell phones can have their battery life extended by half a…

> My cell phone consumes more power and stays on longer than my first phone is that not progress? Why do you think your cell phone consumes more power now? I remember my iPhone 3G getting really physically hot while web browsing. We measure battery tech progress in energy density, not how long your device will last (since a ton of other tech goes into your device using less power, like transistor shrinking for exampl…

Well, ones mans history is another mens present. Returned from climbing to find that my android phone in the locker was hot like a brick from the furnace, every little bit of energy spend communicating through the em-cage that is the locker with the gyms- wifi-spot - for a upgrade.

Also most prog-tech goes into not doing anything at all, if we can not avoid it. Send it to the server, sleep over it, reuse allready constructed objects of the same type- there is a whole world dancing to this tune.

Re: Tesla Shakes Up Market for Lithium, Other Metals

#70

Post by xenadu02 »

hinkley wrote: post #24
mtgx wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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."

And I'm still trying to figure out why everyone thinks this is a big deal. Lots and lots and lots of companies end up at some point representing 50% of all sales, products, or activity in their market. Hell, even Starbucks was opening coffee shops so fast they were targeting owning half of all coffee shops on the planet. If he said he needed to quadruple the world output, I might furrow a brow. If he said he needed 8…

Indeed; at one point iPod production was consuming over half the world's flash memory. What happened? They built more factories. Prices of flash continued to drop aka "a functioning market".
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