Possible $1Billion valuation on this CRR?, page-381

Automakers go back to the future to secure battery metals:

LONDON, April 27 (Reuters) -
"Henry Ford was right all along, it turns out.After decades of honing just-in-time global supply networks, car companies are going back to Ford’s founding principle of self-sufficiency.Ford’s iconic River Rouge complex in Dearborn Michigan made its own iron and steel, supplied by company freighters from its own iron ore and coking coal mines in Michigan and Kentucky.
World War One had created material shortages and disrupted logistics. Ford’s answer was to take full ownership of the automotive supply chain from mine to product.Auto companies are facing up the same problems today, compounded by the need to go electric, which means creating totally new metallic supply chains.
While Ford worried about iron ore and rubber, his successors are battling supply crunches and soaring prices in key battery inputs such as lithium, nickel and cobalt.If “insane” lithium prices persist, tweeted Tesla CEO Elon Musk, the company “might have to get into the mining and refining directly at scale.”He’s not the only automotive executive thinking about minerals self-sufficiency.

METALS RUSH
Fear of high prices and fear of missing out completely are driving automakers upstream “all the way back to the mines”.Tesla is itself something of a trail-blazer, making no secret of its ambitions to manufacture its own batteries with metal sourced directly from miners.It has future tonnages committed from lithium projects in the United States and Australia and an off-take agreement with Talon Metals Corp’s proposed Tamarack nickel mine in Minnesota.BMW Group has tied up both cobalt and lithium supplies for its upcoming fifth generation of battery cells and will make "the raw materials available to the two battery cell manufacturers, CATL and Samsung SDI," the company said here.

It’s an example of an automaker taking ownership of battery metals from cradle to grave and quite possibly beyond if commercial recycling of lithium-ion batteries takes off.
Volkswagen has moved beyond simple off-take deals, forming an alliance with China’s Tsingshan Group and Huayou Cobalt to mine and refine enough nickel and cobalt to generate 160 gigawatt hours worth of EV batteries.
The battery metals rush is already on and Musk’s tweet inevitably generated a few ripples across the mining stocks sector. Or at least it did before he decided to buy Twitter itself before a lithium miner.

However, the market logic of insufficient supply and elevated pricing means it may be only a matter of time before Tesla and other EV makers start getting into the dirty business of mining the stuff themselves.The biggest headwind to more lithium and nickel supply is capital. New mines cost a lot of money and come with an extended development time of several years.Price volatility doesn’t do anything to reassure traditional lenders and the paper market is still too illiquid to hedge the financial risk.Automakers can deploy a lot of capital. They have already done so at the battery manufacturing stage of the supply chain. Extending that vertical integration into the mines that produce the enabling metals is now becoming a matter of urgency."

https://www.reuters.com/article/metals-batteries-ahome-idINL5N2WO6O7