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The Lithium Mine Buildup Is Outpacing the Electric-Car Boom

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Re: The Lithium Mine Buildup Is Outpacing the Electric-Car Boom

#51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you try and time the market at horizons greater than five years when that’s your startup time from planning to production sometimes you’ll win big and sometimes you’ll discover you’ve made a genuinely awful investment. With a ten year turnaround time you could easily have the technical, social or economic environment just destroy the viability of your investment. Imagine you’re investing in a new city somewhere in…

The point is more to not try timing the market. There are all sorts of things one could reasonably say about what would be right or wrong for these unstable areas, but fundamentally the most long term good would be if they could engage in slow but steady development of both their natural resources and their infrastructure. I'm quite confident lithium will continue to be quite valuable for at least a generation. Remem…

NiMH and NiCad batteries do have some useful properties. We still use Lead Acid too, despite it begin a truly awful battery in terms of energy density and based on fairly ancient designs because it's incredibly robust against environmental changes, can delivery incredibly high currents and don't care about how to charge them; you can comfortable load them up by plugging them into a 14.4V supply.

NiCad for example is great for low temperature environments and they can deliver almost 100% of their capacity at the maximum rated discharge. They are essentially lead-acid with a tad more energy density and being very sensitive about how they're charged.

NiMH don't have that great of a capacity at maximum rated discharge but they do have a very very low internal resistance while still (almost) matching Lithium batteries in energy density. Additionally, they are almost perfectly constant voltage until discharged, making them suitable for applications where you might not want a complicated voltage controller.

Lithium is actually a fairly difficult cell. Drawing maximum discharge will reduce capacity, they don't like shocks or extreme temperatures and their voltage stability is meh at best. They also heat up a lot when charging or discharging, making cooling circuits required in some scenarios. They do have extraordinary energy density though.

Don't discount other battery types; battery chemistry dictates the behaviour of the battery under load scenarios, Lithium batteries aren't always the answer.

Re: The Lithium Mine Buildup Is Outpacing the Electric-Car Boom

#52
post #8

The electric car boom is in such early days now, I don’t know that anyone can even discern the shape of the curve yet.

>I don’t know that anyone can even discern the shape of the curve yet.

Now, you have: https://assets.weforum.org/editor/large_opfwi0Tq43oLA-yv3bAv...

One a country tells its population to go electric and put the infrastructure in place to support that, people adopt EVs at a pretty fast pace and end up pretty happy about it.

Re: The Lithium Mine Buildup Is Outpacing the Electric-Car Boom

#53
post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How exclusive is the Tesla charging network? Is it available to use for other brands of electric car?

I have a Nissan leaf. When I talk to people about it, it amazes me how many people think anyone can use the Tesla network. Noone other than Tesla cars can!

And Teslas can use non-Tesla charging networks. Tesla should standardize on CCS plugs where it makes sense to (like they've done in Europe) and open their chargers up to other EVs.

Tesla was recently denied a government subsidy in New York because they're not offering CCS charging, which is fair enough. If they're not going to make it available to all EVs then the utility of the infrastructure is limited and they shouldn't get any discounts funded with public money:

https://electrek.co/2019/07/23/new-york-pressures-tesla-to-o...

Re: The Lithium Mine Buildup Is Outpacing the Electric-Car Boom

#54
post #14

The electric car industry hasn't remotely boomed. Electric cars are still deeply strangled by two key factors: industry inertia and the cost/supply of lithium batteries. Once those two factors are solved (and a build-up of lithium mines is key to that) electric cars will go from being a niche within a niche to utterly dominating the market very, very quickly. Within the next decade we might see companies like Hyundai…

2 million of the 70 million cars produced annually in the world are electric. It went from fringe to industrial, talking about a boom is acceptable IMO. It still have a 35x potential growth, so it can "boom" again, but the EV industry now is huge

> It still have a 35x potential growth, so it can "boom" again, but the EV industry now is huge

One of the hyped upsides of electric cars is decreased maintenance costs leading to a decrease in per-km capital costs of driving. If this is true, unless induced demand from this causes people to drive more, EVs effectively will shrink the total car industry pie, leaving something less than 35x potential growth.

Re: The Lithium Mine Buildup Is Outpacing the Electric-Car Boom

#55

Do people really build mines with a 5-year horizon? Of course it's going to outpace demand... initially. The great thing about mines is that you can just leave the lithium in the ground if the current prices aren't right.

Yeah we always do. Mining is incredibly cyclical boom/bust In Australia for this reason.

Also it’s just as difficult to leave it in the ground. Any decent mining operation takes at minimum 2-3 from construction to production so you still need to take that into account (unless you lock down some offtake agreements to hedge the risk)

Re: The Lithium Mine Buildup Is Outpacing the Electric-Car Boom

#56
This was so evident 2-3 years ago it’s ridiculous.

I worked on a bunch of projects in 16/17 and what I told all my clients is get to production and lock down offtake agreements ASAP as the amount of projects coming online was huge for the short term (with regards to hard rock lithium) and even worse long term (salars etc).

Even the most optimistic of ev adoption rates showed oversupply by 2023.

Some other facts I remember just as points of interest:

* lithium market is opaque. No open market and all contract based so very difficult to price.

* one major unknown that will further add to supply is recycling, with some tech I remember showing cost effective recycling of up to 80% of lithium.

* major bottleneck in short to medium term are the converters ability to refine. Premium will be placed on higher % Li product to increase recovery rates.

So yeah no surprising at all. (Am a mining/mechanical engineer)

Re: The Lithium Mine Buildup Is Outpacing the Electric-Car Boom

#57

The electric car industry hasn't remotely boomed. Electric cars are still deeply strangled by two key factors: industry inertia and the cost/supply of lithium batteries. Once those two factors are solved (and a build-up of lithium mines is key to that) electric cars will go from being a niche within a niche to utterly dominating the market very, very quickly. Within the next decade we might see companies like Hyundai…

> In my opinion Tesla needs to prepare to be in the budget space. They need to partner with an external manufacturer to sell a product with normal door handles that competes with Hyundai and Toyota. Because once the cost of batteries falls, I predict a substantial slice of their market will simply disappear to the economy manufacturers. I suspect that many people who love Telsa really just love the idea of electric vehicles and they'll be buying something more like the Kia Niro EV.

In my opinion Apple needs to prepare to be in the budget space. They need to partner with an external manufacturer to sell a product with a physical keyboard that competes with Blackberry and Palm. Because once the cost of touchscreens falls, I predict a substantial slice of their market will simply disappear to the economy manufacturers. I suspect that many people who love Apple really just love the idea of smartphones and they'll be buying something more like the Blackberry Curve 8300.

-sjwright, maybe, circa 2008

Re: The Lithium Mine Buildup Is Outpacing the Electric-Car Boom

#58
post #56

This was so evident 2-3 years ago it’s ridiculous. I worked on a bunch of projects in 16/17 and what I told all my clients is get to production and lock down offtake agreements ASAP as the amount of projects coming online was huge for the short term (with regards to hard rock lithium) and even worse long term (salars etc). Even the most optimistic of ev adoption rates showed oversupply by 2023. Some other facts I rem…

If you had to guess what will be the price of lithium once those big mines come online? 5000/ton Li2CO3 (at 99%) or even lower? And do you think there will ever be an open market with future contracts?

Re: The Lithium Mine Buildup Is Outpacing the Electric-Car Boom

#59
post #56

This was so evident 2-3 years ago it’s ridiculous. I worked on a bunch of projects in 16/17 and what I told all my clients is get to production and lock down offtake agreements ASAP as the amount of projects coming online was huge for the short term (with regards to hard rock lithium) and even worse long term (salars etc). Even the most optimistic of ev adoption rates showed oversupply by 2023. Some other facts I rem…

> * lithium market is opaque. No open market and all contract based

Interesting, I didn't know this. Do you know why? Are other metals mostly open (like gold) or mostly like this?

Re: The Lithium Mine Buildup Is Outpacing the Electric-Car Boom

#60
post #58
post #56

This was so evident 2-3 years ago it’s ridiculous. I worked on a bunch of projects in 16/17 and what I told all my clients is get to production and lock down offtake agreements ASAP as the amount of projects coming online was huge for the short term (with regards to hard rock lithium) and even worse long term (salars etc). Even the most optimistic of ev adoption rates showed oversupply by 2023. Some other facts I rem…

If you had to guess what will be the price of lithium once those big mines come online? 5000/ton Li2CO3 (at 99%) or even lower? And do you think there will ever be an open market with future contracts?

On the first question it’s been a while so haven’t really followed too closely, but once the salars come online depending on the agreements they have in place they really will have the ability to set the price to whatever they want (as they have been doing for past 3-4 decades). These hard rock mines are making serious money on the fact that the big 3/4 missed the boat (somehow) on the lithium/ev boom. I reckon they will be they will set production/prices to a point just below the number where hard rock equivalents are commercial.

With regard to opening the market I personally don’t think so. If the market didn’t have big players in it then yes it probably would have by now. That being said there were/are a lot of mid stage converters coming online that are disrupting the old guard and taking whatever is out there and not being secretive on pricing so maybe?

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