Automakers like General Motors and Ford have wowed Wall Street with flashy EV designs, technical prowess and plans to invest tens of billions of dollars. Yet they’ve literally put the cart before the horse: the lithium batteries needed to power the electric vehicle revolution.
Now investors are starting to say: “Show me the metal.” Among many key materials, lithium is the most indispensable.
Traditional automakers have hastily announced plans to build 13 lithium-ion battery plants in the U.S. by mid-decade. The planned ramp of EV production will triple demand for the light, silvery white metal by 2025. Yet supplies of lithium have little chance of keeping up.
Growing doubts about aggressive EV targets have contributed to a dive in General Motors (GM) and Ford Motor (F), along with shares of upstarts like Rivian and Lucid. Meanwhile, unquenchable demand and soaring prices have sent EV materials stocks including Albemarle (ALB), Lithium Americas Corp. (LAC) , MP Materials (MP) and Sociedad Quimica y Minera de Chile (SQM) on a wild ride.
It may seem like an over simplification or even silly, but this push towards electric vehicles reminds me of when Coke came out with the New Coke thinking that was a brilliant idea and that everyone would love it.
it failed so miserably that they went back to the good old Coca Cola.
maybe this will create a push to get away from lithium…
India is investing in research in replacing lithium with sodium.
Still, low energy densities, long charge times and poor low temperature performance make EVs almost completely useless in Canada.
Chile alone has reserves of over 9 megatons of lithium.
That’s enough to build around 200 000 000 li-ion car batteries.
Hopefully, they’ll be in 18650 or similar sized cells, so the cells become as common as bic lighters or disposable ball-point pens.
Nothing succeeds like re-announcing the same “breakthrough”.
Again. And again. And again.
Pols love it, lazy MSM love it, “experts” love it.
The rest of us will yawn, point out the last time the Big Thing didn’t happen, and start the gardening.
Cold fusion and room-temperature superconductors any day now.
Anytime it’s ‘newfangled technology’…
It seems to bring me back to ‘The Flintstones’.
Trees by the TRILLIONS exist in Canada that we don’t touch or utilize.
Our idiot politicians don’t think they’ll ever grow back.
Import from other countries is so much a globalization and not by a common sense approach.
Uses far more fossil fuels than being more imaginative in our own resources usage.
But doesn’t it make you feeeeeeeellll good? And so superior to those angry white male STEM Republicans and their “physics”, “chemistry”, “math”, and “science”. We’re investing in the FUTURE !!! Yeayyyyyy … when the demand for electricity is so farking HUGE … we’ll be building COAL powered Power Plants faster than the ChiComs !!
Lithium is ony being used because the chinese control most of the mining of it. The true alternative, the only alternative that the world could use was of course, undermined by competing interests, and sabotaged by our own governments in favor of China.
What was it? Salt water batteries.
From Wiki
In 2008 Carnegie Mellon professor Jay Whitacre founded Aquion Energy and received venture funding from Kleiner Perkins Caufield and Byers. He won the 2015 Lemelson–MIT Prize, an award worth $500,000, for inventing the company’s salt water battery. They are the first and only battery manufacturer to have met all the stringent criteria to obtain Cradle-to-Cradle (Bronze) certification.[2] The company raised $190 million in equity and debt before going bankrupt in 2017, then being acquired by a Chinese company later that year for slightly under $10 million.[3]
The entire world is being played on this issue. They’re trying to sell you a flying Pinto while they gather all the necessary rights for the real leap forward.
Yeah and the petroleum companies bought and buried those engines that ran water / sarc
The electric cars that really satisfy come with a “trigger” and a seeing-eye slot.
https://hobbypatrol.com/slot-car-racing/
One of the solution is being able to swap batteries. Anyways, Toyota has recognized the myriad problems of all-EVs pipe dreams and advised against it. I trust Toyota more than their North Amerian counterpats when it comes to long-term planning. Even though I think their cars havee no personality (something the new Toyota dude admitted and want to change).
If you go for a walk, do you let your dog decide which path to take?
Or maybe you do, so how about, when you go grocery shopping do you let your 5 year old decide what food to buy?
Greentards are like dog-kids, but somehow we’re letting them decide our fates.
I don’t care about battery cars or the type of battery except that I may be forced to buy a car that can’t be purchased and isn’t practical.
Meanwhile I really just want cordless tools and WTF is going to happen to them?
A tool battery now costs almost as much as a corded tool. At Homo Depot they have the corded tools off to the side, kinda like the Island of Misfit Toys.
Hybrid cars and trucks make wayyyy more sense.
Yawn. I think carmakers are all going to crash quite memorably via this ridiculous groupthink and over-investment in EV’s. Customers aren’t calling for them, and pushing rope up a hill, well, I’ve never SEEN it work. It may be time to short all of them, except possibly Toyota. Oh, shit, I forgot they’re Too Big To Fail.
All this net zero garbage is based on an elaborate mass fantasy. It’s all floating on the warm, moist exhaled breath of good intentions, with next to nothing in the way of developments.
It doesn’t matter that they can’t manufacture a billion slabular giant batteries for cars because the electrical infrastructure can’t charge them anyway , and it doesn’t matter that the infrastructure can’t charge them because we can’t afford to double the capacity of the existing grid because the phoney benefits of converting to green technology are not only failing to materialize, but are impoverishing us.
Government intervention in economies to this degree always leads to catastrophe because they’re too arrogant and stupid to realize what’s happening. We will spend ungodly amounts of tax dollars in the next fifty years to prop up a fantasy that is becoming harder to believe with every dollar of carbon tax more we have to pay and every insanely cold winter we have to endure.