Good News & Bad News, page-6684

Indonesia (and the Philippines) has a lot of Nickel. As does Russia and Australia. New Caledonia has always been famous for it. There's no shortage of Nickel availability, in the world.

Indonesia banned exports about 8 to 10 years ago. They wanted miners to develop internal value added industries. If Musk is serious, he might consider an Indonesian gigafactory.

https://www.reuters.com/article/indonesia-mining/update-1-indonesia-nickel-ore-export-ban-to-remain-mining-ministry-director-idUSL4N2DH17Q

Tesla now has a MC of USD382b. You'd think if an EV stage was as important as Musk makes out, he could easily arrange to throw a billion or ten its way.

With falling EV battery prices, Lithium is up to about 12% of the cost of a battery, while Nickel is around 25%. Manganese is 6%, Cobalt is 10%.

Cobalt was the supply difficulty, with 2/3rds of supply coming from a country with a history of human rights abuses. For this reason, it is being developed out of the EV battery makeup. The PLS refinance has come from a recent emergence of large pool funding for ESG approved projects (Environmental and Social Governance). Especially as Ken has developed a net zero carbon emissions plan.

Lithium is the storage material of choice for both EVs and ESS. Improvements are even seeing it outcompete Vanadium for ESS. Sodium is a future competitor but only for ESS. Sodium batteries would be too big for an EV.

An abundance of Lithium in the world, only limited by costs of extraction. Direct Lithium Extraction should be the limiting factor in the future but the costs of doing so, will leave PLS with a very choice profit margin IMHO.

What we are witnessing at the moment is a wrestle between brine versus Spodumene and big industry players versus emerging ones. Spodumene is winning hands down. Eventually demand MUST overwhelm prices.

POSCO JV decision is due within the next 39 days. Tesla battery day in 1 month time. Interesting times.