Lithium & The Future, page-1549

So spent a few hours looking a lithium supply/demand and thought I'd share some preliminary stuff.  I have this in excel form so I can adjust things.  Happy to take opinions and criticism.

Anyhow, the supply side is better known obviously than the demand side.  Supply wise, I have two sources which is similar in their
prediction taking into account the various output coming online.  

	Column 1	Column 2	Column 3
0	Year	Orocobre2	Global Lithium3
1	2012
2	2013
3	2014
4	2015	190000	180000
5	2016	200000	200000
6	2017	235000	230000
7	2018	275000	270000
8	2019	310000	300000
9	2020	335000	340000

	Column 1	Column 2
0	2	http://www.orocobre.com.au/PDF/ASX7Nov16_InvestorPresentation.pdf
1	3	https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/new-lithium-supply-demand-forecast-joe-lowry

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Essentially, 350,000 tons of Lithium carbide (LCE) per year by 2020.

The next question is how much LCE mass (kg) is required per kWh of battery.  There are a number of estimates on this,

	Column 1	Column 2	Column 3
0	LCE(kg) / KWh	Source
1	0.425	Dundee Capital Markets
2	0.840	Reuters
3	0.600	ANL
4	1.300	ANL
5	2.200	ANL (Li anode)
6	0.385	Theor. Limit
7	3.000	Meridian
8	2.000	Meridian (optimistic)

The ANL and in particular the Meridian study are most convincing.  Meridian really think 3kg/kwh due to a variety of convincing issue which you can read in their conclusion.

	Column 1
0	http://www.meridian-int-res.com/Projects/How_Much_Lithium_Per_Battery.pdf

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I'll take their recommended value of 3kg/kwh.  

I then get some figures on EV sales (made up of BEH (battery electric vehicles) and PHEV (plugin hybrid electric vehicles)) from,
http://www.ev-volumes.com/country/total-world-plug-in-vehicle-volumes/

	Column 1	Column 2	Column 3	Column 4	Column 5	Column 6	Column 7
0	Year	BEV (mil)	%PHEV	PHEV (mil)1	All V Made (mil)	EV Sale Share (%)	LCE Demand
1	2012	0.08	0.40	0.05	63.00	0.21	11000
2	2013	0.12	0.40	0.08	65.00	0.31	16638
3	2014	0.20	0.40	0.13	67.50	0.50	27638
4	2015	0.33	0.40	0.22	68.50	0.79	44825
5	2016	0.45	0.40	0.30	70.70	1.05	61188
6	2017	0.60	0.39	0.38	72.60	1.35	81811
7	2018	0.85	0.38	0.52	74.50	1.84	114956
8	2019	1.00	0.37	0.59	76.40	2.08	134167
9	2020	1.35	0.36	0.76	78.30	2.69	179719
10	2021	1.55	0.35	0.83	80.20	2.97	204779
11	2022	1.85	0.34	0.95	82.10	3.41	242602
12	2023	2.20	0.33	1.08	84.00	3.91	286410
13	2024	2.55	0.32	1.20	85.90	4.37	329625
14	2025	3.00	0.31	1.35	87.80	4.95	385109

where, first column and third column are BEH and PHEV totals yearly sales in millions with projections beyond 2016 (quadratic gives the closest fit).  Fourth column is total car sales per year with projection (linear fits best).  Fifth column is the population EV fraction of total annual car sales which gets near 5% by 2025.

The final important column is the LCE in tons required to meet JUST THE EV BATTERY DEMAND.  This assumes a BEH battery average capacity of 36.5 kWh and a PHEV average 14 kWh.  These values come from the ev-volumes source above which is based on current EV battery averages. Using a current CONSTANT baseline of 120,000 tons of LCE for none EV use, this is the supply/demand comparison chart below.

* Note Goldman-Sachs projected that a 1% EV market increase equals 70,000 tons of LCE (I get similar figure..nice check)
* EV growth ALONE (5% by 2025) will use up soak up most  supply.
* Non-EV growth in other industries will result in a short fall assuming 2015-2020 LCE supply growth trend (graph below assumes no growth).
* Fun example!  Gigafactory1 is expect to have 50GWh/year of battery production by 2018.  That's 150,000 tons of LCE.
At full production, it will have 150GWh/year or 450,000 tons of LCE.  Gigafactory is just one of many big projects (the biggest) with most production capacity increasing in China.
* Matt Bohlsen at Seeking Alpha predicts demand of 600,000 tons by 2020.  
http://seekingalpha.com/article/4026752-lithium-miners-news-month-november-2016

Unless the supply side improves dramatically, I can't see anyway of avoiding an increasingly acute Li shortage.