AJM Price rise, page-180

Yup, blocked me too. I still read his commentary occasionally but I'm always weary of individuals who put themselves in a self imposed echo chamber.

* 5kg of cobalt per car X 10,000 = 50,000kg of cobalt or 50t. 120,000t / 50t = 2400 * 10000 = 24 million EVs. Made 2 million EVs in 2018. Likely 3.5 mil this year, 5.5 in 2020...starts to add up indeed.

* For lithium, according to GXY's Anthony Tse, the average Chinese EV battery size was 45kwh.
1kg LCE per kwh is roughly the accepted figure for lithium content, so 45kg LCE per car or 450t for 10,000 cars. Global output near 325,000t LCE in 2019. So a million pure EVs = 45,000t LCE. Expecting 3.5 mil EVs in 2019 at 50%+ growth rate, so you can see why a turn around should be coming.

Just for interest, going from rock to LCE (lithium carbonate) goes like this.

* AJM pull ore from the ground containing about 1% lithium oxide (Li2O). Spodumene is Li2O.Al2O3.4SiO2 which has an atomic mass of 372amu (Li=7, O=16,Al=27,Si=28, so 2x7+16 + 2x27+3x16 + 4x(27+2x16). The atomic mass of lithium oxide (Li2O) is 30amu, so pure spodumene has a theoretical highest grade of 30/372 = about 8% LiO2. So the ore AJM mine is only about 12% spodumene and their aims is to concentrate it to 6% Li2O or about 75% spodumene by removing the unwanted minerals like quartz and feldspar.

* Lithium oxide (Li2O) has a mass of 30amu, so the fraction of lithium in Li2O is 2x7/30 = 47%. So the fraction of lithium in SC6 is 47% X 0.06 = 2.8%.

* Lithium carbonate (Li2CO3) has a mass of 74amu and the fraction of lithium is 19%.

So roughly, going from SC6 lithium content (2.8%) to lithium carbonate (19%) is a factor of 6.8. There will be waste too but say 7 to 8t of SC6 to 1t of carbonate. So AJMs nameplate output of 220kt of SC6 is equivalent to roughly 30kt LCE or about 650,000 of the above EVs.