Good News & Bad News, page-174

I think I will rely on groups like BMI who spend 100% of their resources on tracking the battery capacity and raw material requirements to feed those factories.

Though, it's important to consider the following;

1. It takes 5 years for a hard rock mine & 7 for brine project to come on line and produce at nameplate.

2. It takes 2 years to build a battery factory, or 1 year if you are Tesla, and a further 12 months to ramp to nameplate.

3. The battery factories will grow with demand, adding capacity (production lines) as they go, thus cashflow from existing lines will help fund future lines. They not going to build 100GWh up front and wait for demand, but land purchased and physical size of factory will cater for the future lines in their long term planning.

4. Looking at the successful vertically integrated Tesla and BYD business model, its reasonable to assume that many of the other OEM's will follow, allocating a % of their EV strategy dollars to same, via JV's. VW and many others already doing so, and $$ comitted.

My calcs on LCE demand for 2023 are as follows;
- 13 mill EV sales (roughly 11% of total all vehicle type global sales) - 35Gwh of battery capacity is enough to supply 550k EV units. Therefore, 13 mill EV sales / 550k = 23.64 x 35GWh = 827 GWh. 827 GWh x 0.9kg/kwh = 744kt of LCE.

- All other uses of LCE (i.e. phones, laptops, tools, medical devices, glass/ceremics, grease and shite we haven't thought of yet) = 180kt of LCE

= 924kt LCE demand by 2023 from the above sectors.

Of course, I haven't included ESS (home and grid storage) in the above calacs, and this sector could be the dark horse, but not easy to get a see through. Open to suggestions, but would 150kt of LCE demand from this sector be reasonable, noting home storage battery size is approx 10KWh, whereas the South Oz Tesla Grid battery is 100 MWh (100,000 KWh).