"2000 us a ton lol you will be waiting a while lol"
Possibly, possibly not. The dynamics of lithium demand are that many battery gigafactories are being built with lithium being a key ingredient the plants require. Without Lithium, the battery they are designed produce can't be made. During commissioning and the startup periods, scrap rates are high. New factories use lithium but don't make the quantity of useable batteries you would expect. Some (most?) of this waste lithium is recycled but that takes time.
How useful is pump from a dam if the dam's run dry? Useless? How useful is a lithium-ion gigafactory without a source of lithium for the batteries. Its useless. This means these factories need to buy lithium to make batteries. If lithium prices go up, they just have to pay more. This feature can and will take prices up quickly if demand exceeds supply. A lot of forecasts have been exceedingly wrong over the last few years.
History lessonCore released their DFS on 26 July 2021. The price chart presented in the 26 July presentation is below. Prices had rebounded from historical low's. They were now up over US$700/t. There was a spot price estimate of US$850/t. The scale Core used in its July 2021 DFS didn't go above US$1,000/t. Macquarie's forecasts didn't go over US$1,000/t across the period to December 2026. Roskill had a forecast that didn't go over US$1,000/t. Forecasts proved to be spectacularly wrong.
Three days after Core's DFS on 29 July PLS announced the result of its first BMX auction. The winning price was US$1,250/t FOB Port Hedland for a SC5.5 cargo. The price wasn't sub US$1,000/t any more. Core had a presentation pack in early August that included the chart below. In two weeks Platts had altered their spot price estimate by US$430/t across two weeks. Bloomberg had moved from sub 700 to over 800 in a couple of weeks.
Prices continued to climb quickly. The Firefinch release below notes that the early 2022 price range for SC6 was US$2,500 to US$2,700/t. The wait for a price shift from under US$1,000/t to over US$2,000/t was very short.
Where are we now?Until a few weeks ago prices were under US$1,000/t. I've seen references that were down to the low US$800's. References to sub US$1,000/t prices were extremely common. Over just the last couple of weeks, four companies (PLS, MinRes, Albemarle and Sigma) have done BMX style auctions and all have realised US$1,160 to US$1,300/t prices. There appears to be some strength returning to Spod prices and spot prices have gone back above US$1,000/t. How much above and for how long is still unclear.
(20min delay)