LTR Weekly, page-40

"Now to look up what weight of lithium carbonate is in a Tesla."

A million electric cars produced in North America means 45,454,000 kg/ 100,000,000 pounds or 45,454 tonnes /50,000 tons of lithium carbonate equivalent (LCE) has to be mined just for Tesla’s North American electric vehicle production. And it's not just about the US. China is also building lithium-ion megafactories, and by 2020 these are expected to grow global production capacity by six times. Think about those global 32,730,000 lithium battery packs. If each used the same amount of lithium carbonate as Tesla’s electric vehicles, that’s 1.487 billion kilograms/ 3.273 billion pounds or 1,487,727 tonnes /1,636,500 tons of new lithium carbonate demand. Current annual production of lithium carbonate equivalent (LCE), for all purposes, stands at about 230,000 metric tonnes.

Consider; in 2014 the Benchmark Mineral Intelligence lithium battery megafactory tracker listed only three planned plants. Today 26 battery cell plants that are either in production and due to expand capacity or new operations due to be in production by 2021 are being tracked!

How on earth are we going to fill the gap between supply and demand?
LTR : )