If his advisers are looking at EV growth in Europe then smart move to take a position in low-cost producer in Greenbushes.
This article highlights the billions being spent on battery cell production, with what has occurred with Covid 19 would expect the last link in the chain and that is lithium hydroxide plants to operate in Europe.
AVZ including lithium sulfate export from Manono must have buyers lined up from Europe to have included this potential direction in the DFS.
https://www.mining-journal.com/project-finance/news/1367501/zero-hour-for-lithium-in-europe
The significance of the project lies partly in the
fact that Europe is dependent on China for its supplies of battery-grade lithium hydroxide, needed to make the batteries that go into electric vehicles and other modern carbon-neutral technologies. But with the ongoing US-China trade war causing geopolitical uncertainty, that is looking increasingly politically undesirable.
The scale of investment at stake has also raised the profile of the issue.
Volkswagen has invested US$91 billion in EVs and plans to build 22 million of them over the next decade. Other car manufacturers are also investing in the sector.
Meanwhile in Sweden, Northvolt, a company founded in 2016 by two former Tesla employees, is planning to build the world's largest ‘gigafactory' by 2020 to produce lithium batteries, and has already raised $1 billion of equity capital, with support from Volkswagen and Goldman Sachs.
The European Commission has named lithium operations as "important projects of common European interest", and set out its support for a Europe-wide electromobility initiative, Green eMotion, worth €41.8 million, in partnership with 42 partners from industry, and set aside €24.2 million to finance part of the initiative's activities. In May, France and Germany established a European cross-border battery cell consortium to foster the development of batteries for EVs in Europe. The two countries committed an initial investment of more than €5 billion in the initiative.
ALL IMO
