Good News & Bad News, page-38450

Over the past 5 years, LCE prices averaged ~US$30kpt, which delivered 515,000 tonnes in new supply, assisting downstream deploy ~1tWh of battery capacity in 2023CY.

As downstream battery capacity is forecast to reach ~4tWh by 2030, to supply that capacity, upstream supply needs to grow by 2.7 million tonnes LCE over that 6 year period, 450kt LCE per year. While new supply will be a mix of brine and hardrock capacity, but just for the sake of it, if all that supply was to come from hardrock with an average SC grade of 5.5%, world would need a further 20.52 million tonnes of 5.5% spod over that period, 3.4 million tonnes per year. However, if we include Lepidolite in the mix and 10% of overall hardrock market is sourced from Lepidolite, add a further 4.2 million tonnes to the total, and a further 700k tonnes per year.

IMO, that's a tough ask, given history of lithium mine sector, and right now, how do you incentivize said new supply while LCE prices are hovering around 13kpt, answer is, you can't. We've already seen some marginal new producers shut down, developers and incumbent producers curtailing supply and half decent "new" projects planning to come online in 2025/26 will be delayed, and as for Lepidolite projects, they are the worst of the worst, so I wont go there.