Good point Safety First!
"I believe, what people aren't understanding, is quite how vast the demand for graphite is truly going to become. "
Whist working at home I have been listening to Tony Seba and other authorities about how and when electric cars will take over form petrol and diesel cars. Tony Seba believes this will happen around 2030. It is unstoppable and it will happen!
Whilst currently about 15 battery gigafactories are being built, the real number needed for electric car production of 150 million to 200 million vehicles per year by 2030, is between 150 and 200 battery gigafactories! The amount of Lithium, Cobalt and Graphite need to supply those factories is too large for us to comprehend, but it is super, super massive!!!
New car and light truck sales are currently about 90 million a year. By 2025 that figure is estimated to be about 120 million vehicles, going by the graph of sales for the last 10 years. Plus, add in the number of people who would be opting out of their petrol cars to buy an electric car, this adds a further demand. Perhaps 150 million new cars sales could occur in 2025, and may be up to 200 million EV sales a year by 2030?
Currently about 1.2 billion cars are on the road worldwide and this will increase to perhaps 1.6 billion by 2025!
Tesla's first gigafactory aims to produce 500,000 new vehicles a year by 2020. This is minuscule compared to the 90 million new car sales currently a year! Then after 2020 the gigafactory may be ramped up to 1 million vehicles a year. On this basis 90 gigafactories would be needed just to meet the current demand for new vehicles! By 2025, that may mean that up to 150 gigafactories would be required to build the 150 million new EVs needed, if they were to be all electric! These numbers are mind blowing!!! And most likely will not happen by 2025, perhaps by 2035?
Experts are saying that there may not be anywhere near enough Lithium and Cobalt to meet that sort of demand. And massive, massive amounts of Graphite would also be needed. As these resources become harder to source their prices would also go up!
High Quality, Jumbo Flake Graphite will be in exceptionally high demand from 2020 onwards! If VRC can deliver on funding and its promises, then it would have a very high chance of selling a reasonable amount of its Graphite to be used in the production lithium ion batteries, without even considering the demands for Battery Grid storage, Battery Home and Business storage, Graphene use and Graphite insulation!!! These demands are going to ramp up enormously too!
By 2020 to 2022, it is envisaged that Home and Business Battery Storage and Solar panels usage will be huge and reaching towards 80% of all homes in America, let alone Australia and other major countries! This would make the cost of Home and Business electricity very cheap! However huge amounts of Graphite would be needed for these batteries! They are also talking about supplying Solar, Battery Storage systems to the 1.2 billion people who don't have any electricity. Up to another 100 to 200 gigafactories may be needed to to do that as well! Although Musk has stated that 100 gigafactories could power the whole world?
The amount of Lithium, Cobalt and Graphite needed to supply 100 to 150 gigafactories is so high that it is impossible to comprehend at this point in time!
Just how many Gigafactories will be operational by 2025 is subject to conjecture. At least 15 are being built now, so maybe only 50 gigafactories will be running by 2025, and perhaps 100 by 2030 who knows? But experts are stating that by 2035 there could be between 200 and 300 gigafactories in operation, if ... there is enough Lithium, Cobalt and high quality Graphite to supply them! Mind boggling!
Also these figures are based on what we know now, but another, better form of battery may have been developed by then?
If Volt can just hang in there, improve its Graphite grade and purity, then there is a real chance that it could become the mid-sized Graphite mining company that it is aiming to be!!!
Of course it is one step at a time for VRC
and the funding issue must be resolved first!
(20min delay)