AFR article today, cut and paste - *mentioned something along...

AFR article today, cut and paste - *mentioned something along these lines some time ago

Indonesia’s bid for EV nickel supremacy is doomed to failure

Battery technology is moving so fast that the world may not need the nickel after all. Ambrose Evans-PritchardJan 21, 2024 – 2.27pm
When Indonesia launched its bid to corner the world’s nickel market and gain a stranglehold on electric vehicles, it overlooked one crucial detail. Battery technology is moving so fast that the world may not need the nickel after all. Indonesia is cutting down its rainforests and polluting the Coral Triangle for what looks increasingly like a commercial mirage.The Indonesia Morowali Industrial Park in Sulawesi, where Nickel Industries has processing operations. Cheap and safe LFP batteries (lithium iron phosphate) are already so good that they have conquered 70 per cent of the EV mass market in China. They use neither nickel nor cobalt.The latest twist is a hybrid using manganese as a cathode that leaps up the quality scale and radically alters the calculus of what minerals may be needed for the electrification of global road transport.This new “LMFP” technology approaches the energy density and range of standard high-nickel batteries used in almost every EV sold in Europe and the United States, but at two-thirds of the cost. “I can walk into a showroom in Shanghai today and for roughly $US50,000 [$75,750] I can buy a ZEEKR 001 that gets me 1000 kilometres range and can be recharged in eight minutes,” said Ken Hoffman, head of battery materials at McKinsey.