Yes the truth of that article, is "I missed the boom in lithium" He should have also said sorry to the readers for missing that one.
The 3 largest companies simply cannot fill the gap. You just have to look at how and where they get their lithium from to know that. Sloppy journalism at it's best.
The worst statement, "330,000t" is how much LCE is needed in 2020?
Why? where is the evidence of that? Other uses of lithium apart from batteries will be using about half or 165,000t of LCE.
So this leaves 165,000t of LCE for all the EV's, busses, trucks, home storage, grid storage, MINE storage etc.
Lithium used in batteries varies from some reporters to those that look at the real world...
"Therefore from a purely theoretical perspective, 1000 Watt Hours or 1 kWh of energy, the basic unit of energy we consider for EV battery storage, would require 1000 divided by 13.68 = 73 grams of Lithium metal. This equates to 385 grams of Lithium Carbonate. The theoretical figure of 385 grams of Lithium Carbonate per kWh battery capacity is substantially less than our guideline real-world figure of 1.4 kg of Li2CO3 per kWh"
from ......
http://www.meridian-int-res.com/Projects/How_Much_Lithium_Per_Battery.pdf
So 1.4kg is what is used against the theoretical 385gms. I'll bet the above author used the 385gms and not 1.4kg. Here is why.
As the amount of KWh of battery will change for different types of vehicles, I have assumed 60KWh of battery per vehicle, and the reason for this is that it will give a bit less than 50KWH of actual useage. You cannot completely discharge a lion battery nor fully charge it unless you want to vastly shorten it's number of charges, so the car manufacturers will have some fancy computer technology that tells you your battery is flat when it still has 10-15% charge left. Same for fully charged.
So 60 X 1.4kg = 84kg of LCE equivalent in each EV (car), or 11.9 EVs per tonne of LCE.
The authors 165,000t of LCE is enough for just under 2m EVs, then on top of that we have busses, trucks, home storage, grid storage, MINE storage, Bike batteries, ICE batteries all going Lion etc.
Demand for EVs will be well in excess of 2m by 2020, IIRC china wants that number alone by then.
People are simply not looking at the facts of this disruptive technology and the accelerating speed of the adoption, hence why we are worth billions and are greatly undervalued right now.
(20min delay)