He has been saying all reasonable projects will be needed for some time. Though and agree, he seems bullish and says next price hikes will be sustained for longer (higher for longer). I guess things have evolved over the past ~2 years on two main fronts;
Lithium-ion will remain the dominate battery platforms for quite some time. What I mean by that, is that there is always a lot of noise regarding different battery platforms, even the different lithium based platforms such as solid state, etc, which may account for a niche in the high end markets.
Due to above said noise re different battery chemistries, 2 years back, there was not a lot of consensus on which would be the preferred application for ESS. However and as that sector has grown since, we have seen lithium-ion emerge as the main player, which has even greater impetus due to second life of cells, meaning the second life cells will be relatively cheap, and therefore crowding out other chemistries.
Whammy two: at the same time the quality of the output has to improve substantially. Yes that was the point of my question regarding recoveries/processing. At present, traditional brine processing methods only achieves ~50% recoveries, how much additional processing will be needed to increase quality, and in particular as Hydroxide grows market share. From a cost and thus sustainability perspective, new (economically but yet to proven) processes are going to needed, which leads me back to my question, at what trade-offs?
Less tonnes, much higher quality at a premium price only exacerbates the oversupply of demand I see coming. So I guess JL is correct, when he said even mediocre projects will get a ticket to the show.
(20min delay)