When to buy...???, page-60

I am aware of battery chemistries moving towards NCM811 which is 80% nickel, 10% cobalt and 10% manganese after NCM 532 and NCM622.
However we are still only talking about the cathode here.
Anodes are still made of graphite and polymer and the electrolyte is still lithium salts.
The cathode only accounts for roughly 20% of a battery pack's weight without the aluminium foiling.

I have done mainly my research on lithium for which the theoretical storing value for a perfect battery is 0.0714g/Wh of pure lithium.
Give it a 20% margin that translate into 6 kg of pure lithium for a 70kWh battery pack.
Which translates into 32kg of LCE.

Seven times that would be 224kg of Nickel, a 280kg cathode and a 1.4t battery pack.
So the 7 times more only makes sense if we are directly comparing pure lithium (or lithium metal) to nickel. 42kg of nickel for a 270kg battery pack.
That's a bit weird though as nobody ever use Pure lithium as a unit of comparison or even in the industry.

But then, down to pure metal quantities, something one has to be careful about is the size of the existing market.
2018 Ni production => 2.300.000 tons
2018 Li production => ~330.000 tons LCE => ~62000 tons Li metal

The nickel market is already huge (almost 40x li) and well established with a lot of uses for it.
Proportionally, increasing the EVs sold in the world will have a much bigger impact on the lithium market than nickel.
With previous figures, adding 2.000.000 BEVs on the road equates +19.6% in worldwide lithium consumption vs +3.6% for nickel.

Obviously, this has to be balanced with the market dynamics around these 2 commodities. Lithium is currently in oversupply whereas nickel is in shortage due to years of low prices driving investment money away.

I'm simply watching this sector with care to see if the market will make the mistake of understimating the volatility of the lithium demand compared to stable commodities like nickel or iron ore.