dspp wrote:spasmodicus wrote:Hi dspp,
As your previous two posts suggest, the main bottleneck in building EVs and storage more generally is battery supply. As regards raw materials, there is maybe a short to medium term shortage of lithium, due to production constraints rather than shortages of minerals themselves. Consumption of nickel at 110,000 tons from a total world nickel production of about 2.5 million tons/annum would not seem to be a big problem. Cobalt at about 25000 tons/annum from about 140000 tons/annum total production is potentially more significant, especially as much of current production comes from a single country, the (ironically named) DRC.
Regarding battery production itself, the headline below is pretty interesting
https://www.thisismoney.co.uk/money/markets/article-9046779/Electric-car-battery-giant-Britishvolt-plans-float.htmlI wonder whether private investors will get a look in, if/when a floatation occurs, cf recent complaints by HL and AJBell that institutional investors get unfair priority.
regards,
S
That's useful & interesting.
Re nickel. Let's assume your 110k/yr is correct (I don't know, seems slightly high on a t/car basis) (but Inote that EVs are currently about 1/3 of global cell consumption, maybe 1/2 - I'm still digging).
Tesla take about 1/3 of EV batteries each year, so say 30,000 tons/yr. They aim to scale from 0.5mln cars/year to 20 mln cars/yr during this decade. So a straightforward pro rata scaling would take Tesla alone to 1.2 mln tons/yr of nickel vs existing supply of 2.5m t/yr. And that is just Tesla, multiply by 3x for all the other car mfg. You can see why Tesla have asked anyone with a) suggestions for increasing supply to step forwards, and b) any suggestions for reducing nickel content in batteries.
Here is the Tesla take of EV batteries, and their suppliers. This by the way ought to give some food for though for those folk wanting to invest in carpetbagging UK cell manufacturing shyster hypester projects,
regards, dspp
and
spasmodicus wrote:Hi dspp,
As your previous two posts suggest, the main bottleneck in building EVs and storage more generally is battery supply. As regards raw materials, there is maybe a short to medium term shortage of lithium, due to production constraints rather than shortages of minerals themselves. Consumption of nickel at 110,000 tons from a total world nickel production of about 2.5 million tons/annum would not seem to be a big problem.
I've briefly dug into the raw material stuff a bit further.
Using the Adamas "State Of Charge" report for 4th Biannual, 2020 H2
https://www.adamasintel.com/reports/ one can calculate the following average raw material use per average BEV battery per kWh,
Per kWh
Lithium (LCE) = 0.62 kg
Nickel = 0.58 kg
Cobalt = 0.14 kg
In 2020 there were 113 GWh of cells deployed into BEV + PHEV, and we know from Adamas that the plain HEV cell consumption is trivial (2% of total). So ignoring the HEVs we can say that all EVs used the following:
113 GWh x 0.58 kg/kWh = 65,540 tonnes nickel in 2020
mm......... something odd going on a Adamas also say "
In 2020 H2, 53,150 tonnes of nickel were deployed globally in the batteries of all newly sold passenger EVs combined, an increase of 69% versus the same period the year prior." That Adamas number of 53k tonnes in H2 2020 corresponds well with your number of 110k tonnes in 2020, better than my calculation from the ground up of 65k tonnes. There is something odd going on, but at least it is only a factor of 2x out, not a factor of 10x.
OK then turning to nickel we find 2.7 - 2.5 m tonnes /year is smelted
https://www.statista.com/statistics/693 ... -industry/ and most of it goes into steels leaving only 175k tonnes for all batteries (
https://www.statista.com/statistics/693 ... -industry/), so probably 100k tonnes into cars, and 65k tonnes into computers and consumer electronics.
Most of the nickel is in the core, leaving scattered deposits
https://www.usgs.gov/centers/nmic/nicke ... nformation . The best place to ramp up nickel production seems to be Indonesia, and surprise surprise the Chinese are all over it
https://www.reuters.com/article/china-n ... FL4N2HQ40ASo scaling nickel production for car use by 50x to get from 2m BEV/yr to 100m BEV/yr is going to be an interesting challenge.
Hmmmmm .........
Are there any good public reports that break all the various material supply chains down neatly ? My hunch is that the nickel and the cobalt ones will be more of an issue than the lithium one, but I am open to correction on that.
regards, dspp