Thx to @Steve98 for the link WOW...

Thx to @Steve98 for the link

WOW
https://www.energy.senate.gov/publi...?File_id=9BAC3577-C7A4-4D6D-A5AA-33ACDB97C233


The advent of electric vehicles (EVs) and the emergence of battery energy storage has sparked a wave of lithium ion battery megafactories being built. Benchmark Mineral Intelligence is now tracking 70 lithium ion battery megafactories under construction across four continents, 46 of which are based in China with only five currently planned for the US. When I gave my last testimony in October 2017, the global total was at 17. Only one of these battery megafactories is American owned (Gigafactory 1, Tesla). This, however, was the world’s biggest battery plant and fourth biggest battery producer in 2018. Since October 2017, planned lithium ion battery capacity in the pipeline for the period 2019- 2028 has risen from 289GWh to 1,549GWh (1.54TWh) in Benchmark Mineral Intelligence’s February 2019 Assessment. This expanded capacity is the equivalent of 23-24 million sedan-sized electric vehicles. This increasing scale will be a contributing factor to pushing lithium ion battery production costs below $100/kWh in 2019, Benchmark Mineral Intelligence data shows. This figure is long seen as a tipping point for the adoption of mass market EVs. Almost exclusively, these megafactories are being built to make lithium ion battery cells using two chemistries: nickel-cobalt-manganese (NCM) and nickel-cobalt-aluminium (NCA). This means the supply of lithium, cobalt, nickel and manganese to produce the cathode for these cells, alongside graphite to produce battery anodes, needs to rapidly evolve for the 21st century. However, the scaling up of these chemically engineered materials, which are not commodities, is a major challenge for the industry.

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