Firstly what is interesting in Toyota CEO Akido Toyoda's comments is the fact that the lithium supply will be in short and there will be a big deficit in comparison to demand. That point is the fact which what i am interested in. Mr. Toyoda is in big trouble I guess.
"Toyoda also believes there will be “tremendous shortages” of lithium..."
Look Mr Toyoda, no one is going to wait for you to make enough EVs to supply the market. You may face the destiny of Kodak if you sit on your butt and make these nonsense comments. (I am also a Toyota fan, All my car have been Toyota so far, but the next one might be a Tesla).
Secondly I believe Toyota CEO Akido Toyoda is misleading the market because Toyota actually was the first of all OEMs which invested in a lithium mine. (Still there is no car manufacturer OEM invested in a lithium mine other than Toyota as far as I remember).
Now Toyota is in trouble and is scared of making proper offtake agreement with lithium miners. (They already missed the offtakes from LTR)
Toyota bought 15% stake for AU$292m in Orocobre (now AKE after merging with Galaxy) in Jan. 2018."
Toyota Tsusho Corporation (Toyota Tsusho) hereby announces it has signed a Share Subscription Agreement with Orocobre Limited (Orocobre) to become a 15% shareholder"
That was a wrong investment because it was done for a lithium brine project which was not the best one in South America.
First of all Toyota didn't make a good research and didn't make its investment on a hard rock resource.
(see my post long time ago
Post #:38565222. "What makes Australian hard rock resources so important"
Then, it was understood that Orocobre's cost for producing lithium hydroxide from brine resource is too high (nearly $6500//t) because they have to produce lithium carbonate from brine first then have to send it to Japan for producing lithium hydroxide.
Also Orocobre's resource was not the best lithium brine deposit in South America.
The fact about the lithium brine deposits are actually not very well known yet.
It's not so easy to produce a low cost lithium carbonate from all resource in south America. The impurities are huge in many salt lakes. When impurities are high you need the by product grade high as well. It's potassium chloride (Potash as fertilizer, and sodium chloride as salt). Then you can sell the by product to lower the cost of removing impurities which mainly magnesium.
The only area which makes the operation profitable is the Atacama Operations of Albemarle and SQM. The lithium grade is very high there. As you can see on the table below the lithium grade (ppm) is 1,840 mg/l in Atacama while it's only 690 mg/l at Olaroz.
You can see on the table that the potassium grade is very high in Atacama too, while it is 1/4 of it in Olaroz.
That is why the Atacama operations are much more profitable than the other regions.
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(20min delay)