I think you're right, and I think that Mike Henry is right too....

I think you're right, and I think that Mike Henry is right too. Excluding autonomous vehicles, it's possible that the balance might be struck around 2050 for recycling and lithium pulled from the ground. But it's too hard to know as there are so many unknown variables.

I'm watching Elon Musk's interview, and I'm reminded of Tony Seba's video many years ago about the disruption coming to the automotive sector. Not just that EVs will rule the highways, but that he had never seen a sector more ripe for disruption than car ownership, where you have the second biggest investment most people will ever make sitting idly for 98% of its life.

Elon says it's possible they'll have managed full autonomy within 12 months, and they've already been driving around San Francisco and Austen (I think) in their testing. They've punched out a figure of 10-12 hours a week current car usage, and believe they can get that up to 50 hours per week by using people's parked cars as effectively autonomous Uber drivers and do a revenue share with the car's owner. This is why Tesla can make almost $0 on their car sales but still be sitting pretty for the future.

If cars end up going this way (and I'm sure they will), I wonder what it will do to overall car demand - and hence Li and other EV chemical demand. I think that miners have a reasonable handle on the disruption to their futures that recycling will have (not least because it is being legislated), but I am sure they don't have a handle on the disruptive effect that fully autonomous vehicles will have on the demand for vehicle ownership, because even Elon doesn't have numbers on it and he's the one doing it.

I think this is why a company like BHP weren't interested in the lithium space. They need scale, they need certainty and they need longevity. Potash for example is great because it scales with population growth and will always be needed. I'm not sure when, but car sales going forward are going to be hit pretty hard, and while the totality of the disruption is probably still a few decades away, it is going to hit the sector at some point.

Some people complain about Chris Reed for all sorts of reasons, but to my eye he is a visionary. He's the only miner I know who's moved downstream, not just to end product, but beyond end product. Others invest downstream, but he's the only one I know who pulled up stumps and moved, and ensured the longevity of NMT's lithium unit in the process. When you consider how long ago they started to move it's just really, really visionary.