Worlds largest lithium deposit found in NV, a state which is 90% government owned, and we're having trouble deciding what to do. Other countries are probably going like - wow, they just found a Lithium mine and they're just going to sit on it... and they are asking us to ramp up production???
The spot price of battery-grade lithium carbonate, trading in Shanghai and serving as a benchmark
I'm not sure why the Shanghai price is being used as the global benchmark without any qualification in this article, because in 2022 China was paying 2x per KG more than the U.S.A. and Europe. Everybody saw a significant increase, but nobody quite like China, where it looks like a bubble.
Prices have come down globally in 2023, but the Chinese price is now much closer to the U.S. and European price.
Regional price index: https://businessanalytiq.com/procurementanalytics/index/lith...
When you look at where the overwhelming majority of lithium batteries are produced, it makes sense to use China as the benchmark (and why it pays more than the US or Europe).
It isn’t obvious to me (although, I am dumb about this stuff) why China would pay more for lithium if they (presumably) use more… wouldn’t we expect economies of scale and all that to make it cheaper for them?
Only if speculators don’t ruin everyone’s fun betting from the sidelines in volumes that outpace the influence of legitimate trade.
Are you implying that stocks are not legitimate trade? That's anti-freedom.
Trading in commodities futures has a point, but it has gotten absolutely ridiculous in scope. The market participants used to be farm collectives, mining companies on the one and large wholesalers and consumers on the other side as a way for both to hedge against price swings... but that's no longer the case. Hell even if you just look at the last 10 years, trading volume has exploded by ~3x (futures) / ~5x (options) [1] - but there is no economic fundamentals (e.g. production amount of farms or raw material mines) to support this, it's all financial mind-fuckery that skims off billions of "fractions of cents per transaction" and redirects them to a select few very rich people.
This kind of predatory leeching has to stop, once and for all.
[1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/377025/global-futures-an...
There's a lot to be said for this position. Here's an NBER study from 2014 on the financialization of commodity prices. There is substantially more volatility in commodity prices than in the underlying production and consumption. Sometimes, what's happening in markets is going in the opposite direction as the real world commodity.
Another related study.[2] Studies agree that the tail is wagging the dog, but there is no agreement on what to do about it.
[1] https://www.nber.org/reporter/2014number2/financialization-c...
[2] https://americanaffairsjournal.org/2019/11/commodity-financi...
Another related study.[2]
Thanks. JFC, that one was mind blowing:
Last year, production increased to 30.2 billion barrels, but these futures markets alone swelled to 541.6 billion barrels, becoming eighteen times bigger than the global physical output.
So, to put it clear: on average, before reaching a refinery, each barrel of oil that ends up there changed hands eighteen times, with each step extracting wealth (in the form of buy/sell price spread) along the way - for zero gain for both the producers and the consumers of the oil. And yet, everyone seems happy with it.
but there is no agreement on what to do about it.
If you ask me personally, the answer is easy: burn the entire thing down and restrict the rebuilt one to actually legitimate market participants (producers, wholesalers and consumers of commodities). The current system serves no real purpose other than to enrich a very few people at the expense of everyone else, which is also the reason why this won't ever happen - the financial incentives and thus the amount of money flowing into corruption and its legal friend lobbying is just too much.
The problem is, you won't get that kind of clear-cut answer from any academic studies or even most political parties outside of the far-left (like me) who criticize it on the very real effort this looting has on poor people and the far-right who tends to focus more on the conspiratorial part. It's in the end a question of political ideology and of how independent science, journalism and politics can actually be when faced with billions if not trillions of dollars of financial interests.
The trouble is, some of the alternatives are worse. Agricultural product buyers who control the path by which products are moved (grain elevators, stockyards, etc.) are in a stronger position than farmers. So they can negotiate prices below the "market" with farmers. There are farmers demanding that the US government require the big buyers (especially Cargill) to use publicly traded markets so they can't squeeze farmers so hard.
There's history here going back to at least 1870 or so.
Time to break them up, then. Monopolies are just as bad when they are consuming entities rather than producing (or selling) entities.
Some of them are natural monopsonies. Can a town support four competing grain elevators? Parts of the food chain are operated by agricultural cooperatives, owned by farmers, to get around such physical bottlenecks.[1] This is a complicated area. Much political controversy, dating back over a century.
The farmer position: [2]
The American Enterprise Institute position: [3]
An intermediate position: [4]
[1] https://www.wisfarmer.com/story/news/2021/01/04/snapshot-top...
[2] https://www.wisfarmer.com/story/news/2023/11/13/farmers-are-...
[3] https://www.aei.org/research-products/report/stop-paying-att...
[4] https://www.politifact.com/factchecks/2019/apr/04/elizabeth-...
Can a town support four competing grain elevators? Parts of the food chain are operated by agricultural cooperatives, owned by farmers, to get around such physical bottlenecks.
Yeah, but that's what solid antitrust policies, audits and enforcement are for - at least in theory. Someone has to play police after all, to make sure that everyone can reasonably participate in any truly free market. The problem is that most anti-trust legislation is more aimed at large, nation-scale corporations and even there, enforcement is lacking, but small, regional monopolies/monopsonies or other threats to a free marked are a complete Darwinist world.
Antitrust isn't a panacea. Sometimes you have to deal with the fact that certain companies are natural monopolies or monopsonies.
Yes. Hence regulated public utilities, public roads, and railroad regulation.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Onion_Futures_Act
In smaller markets stock trading can turn into a manipulation game completely unrelated to the underlying asset.
Thanks for the link, what a fun story! Was it unrelated to the asset though? The article says
Authority stated that it was the perishable nature of onions which made them vulnerable to price swings.
I'm just an interested bystander in terms of futures trading and the article relates to some studies which seem to find that even in the very decade of that incident, onion price volatility was decreased. So is there any strong evidence supporting that any small futures market can be gamed?
stocks are not legitimate trade?
Most commodity futures are not legitimate trade; i.e. most parties that will never actually possess the commodity.
They're speculation.
That's anti-freedom.
No, that idea is not anti-freedom.
The position you are espousing is not universal outside of dogmatically libertarian circles. Most people have much more nuanced views than simple “trade == freedom, therefore ++trade implies ++freedom” equations.
If the quantities of Lithium need are going to keep going up its better that speculators big up the prices to high levels now than that manufacturers bid up the levels to crazy high later. High prices get people who don't need as much of it to start economizing and let producers expand production to levels they'll need.
People have, from time to time, experimented with banning speculation in commodities like onions in the US. And the wholesale prices of onions are much more volatile than other vegetables as a result. Sometimes commodity traders cause wild price swings and usually lose tons of money with stupid speculation, but more often they act to smooth things out.
1. You have transportation costs. 2. I believe their economy was in a shutdown somewhat so market was askew. 3. If they are the major buyer but lithium being sold to them is monopolistic market structure in its origins then supplier can set the price. 4. They buy lithium in long term contracts so spot price is probably a proxy for whats at the margins as opposed to what the big companies are paying. 5. Speculators.
6. If what the lithium consumers are doing well financially, they are capable of paying more.
China isn't an open market, there is resistance getting Lithium from outside of China into China. Trade needs to happen, some people don't want that trade to happen, Australia had some issues with China last year, Bolivia doesn't really have any ports, port capacity is an issue, speculators might also be bailing out of real estate and their money is now sloshing around in commodities.
Well, I don’t feel as stupid about this not being obvious to me anymore, given that I’ve got at least four competing theories as to why the price is what it is.
Economies of scale aren’t automatic. They only apply to a certain size after which any benefits plateau.
Simultaneously you have demand and supply pressures especially if demand is increasing and supply cannot keep up, pressures due to limited transportation and shipping capacity which was a huge issue over the past couple of years across the board (and probably a bigger driver of inflation than nearly anything other than energy prices), and other costs increasing such as energy prices.
Scale isn't instant.
Why was China paying so much more? Just to ensure they would have enough for their needs?
That's what I'm curious about — everybody went up significantly in 2022, but if China was paying double for imports, then why wasn't everybody else having to pay double as well?
China procures most of their lithium through trade, so they're tapping the same global markets as everybody else.
Where is lithium made versus where is it used.
For example if there was not enough shipping routes to China from where it's made then that could be an issue. Or if their demand was up, and there wasn't enough unloading capacity for lithium (not sure how this is being shipped over there) then there can be price spikes.
I’m not a shipping expert by any means but if any country in the world would have a shipping route to it, surely it would be China no?
They manufacture basically everything and export a ton
Australia is a large supplier of lithium, the world's largest actually. Due to trade restrictions and irregularities arising from disputes, trade between China and Australia wasn't operating normally in 2022. Trade has now mostly resumed and the first bulkers left Australian ports for Chinese ports early this year carrying lithium ore. I suspect the absence of the Australian market meant that Chile could set their prices, and it looks like they set their prices pretty high. Plus, Chile is a longer and thus more expensive trip for any ship, including a bulker.
The high lithium prices in China were the Chinese side of the trade restrictions causing economic pain.
They dramatically increased demand lately for solar production, so they were probably the cause of and epicenter of the global shortage - paying the premium as a cost of doing business while lithium production caught up.
Time to stock up on lifepo4 batteries.
Time to ramp utility scale energy storage. Make batteries while the inputs are cheap.
https://www.pcienergysolutions.com/2022/04/27/how-quickly-ca...
https://www.iea.org/energy-system/electricity/grid-scale-sto...
https://insideevs.com/news/692788/tesla-battery-energy-stora...
(edit: as the cost of renewables approaches sub $0.01/kwh wholesale, storage/transmission/distribution become the primary costs of energy)
How challenging is it to DIY your own lithium battery packs?
How good are you at putting out fire that doesn't mind getting wet?
No need to dissuade people from actually learning and doing things.
It is pretty trivial if you are prepared.
There is no attempt at dissuading anyone from anything. It was a simple question that is pretty pertinent to the process of the task. If the potential of fire is something you're not able to accept, then this would be pretty challenging. If potential fires are not a show stopper, are you prepared for this particular type of fire? If you are, the DIY battery is probably not going to be challenging.
What you find trivial might be too much of an ask for someone else. Because you think it is trivial and demonstrate that you clearly feel it is something you can blindly recommend to someone else on the internet is dangerous arrogance. Sometimes, it is perfectly reasonable for the response to a question to be another question.
thats all fine and well. It just came off as dismissive, snarky, and negative. a very anti hacking attitude - at least to me.
You can use LFP cells (don't suffer from thermal runaway) with a good BMS to avoid this risk.
That's never discouraged me from experimenting before ;)
But in all seriousness, it depends on the chemistry.
Li-ion? - No way I'm building my own!
LiFePO4 - can come in nice prismatic cells that are easy to connect terminals with bars (just remember to keep them under compression!). Their failure mode is MUCH nicer than Li-ion.
LTO - these are really interesting to me, and I am really tempted to branch out into this area. They look great from a safety perspective.
Disclaimer: I have installed ~15 kWh of DIY batteries for solar.
It's definitely doable. There are plenty of tutorials out there on the internet. But like others have said, there's plenty that can go wrong if you don't get it right (a fire that can't be put out).
Personally I would consider building one myself, but there's no way I'd keep it in my house (it would be going in a fireproof metal shed at the bottom of the garden or similar). And tbh, that's probably more trouble (and expense) than just buying a commercial one.
How do you know the commercial ones are safe?
I mean, ultimately you don't. And there's always going to be some risk (ideally I'd definitely put any home battery in a fireproof location). But a commercial one is at least likely to have high quality welds, be wired properly, and have some kind of QA procedure overseen by someone who knows what they're doing). If there's a systematic problem with the design you are also likely to get notified via product recall, etc.
For stationary applications like a UPS or a power wall LiFePo4 is pretty safe and easy to set up. LiIon is obviously better for mobile use cases and easier to get used cells for, but it's also a lot more unstable and dangerous.
Don't do it somewhere that you can't afford burning down.
Lithium iron prismatic cells are quite neat if you want to make your own packs. Electric gocart suppliers might sell you cells and bms.
It was really hard to get anyone to sell you cells, like 8 years ago when, I did 4 6kWh packs. It might be easier now.
Check out this discussion from yesterday from just such an effort, regarding the challenges + severe dangers involved:
Just need to buy a billion battery chargers now and plug them in.
12v 100ah was 500 a few years ago. Now under $175 on Amazon.
I bought a 100ah 12v lifepo4 battery on Amazon for my boat motor last year and prices have literally halfed since that time. Crazy to see the rapid change before your eyes.
Any ideas what the best source is for 18650 format LFP cells?
Clickbaiting heading. The price is still 300% compared to the low in August 2020.
I don't find it clickbaity at all. I mean, it makes it sound like the price of lithium dropped massively, but isn't that exactly what happened?
I think the difference is in what a drop is in regards to. A drop of a well established price indicates something has fundamentally changed to make the price go down. A drop from the peak of a large increase that is still far above the previous well established price looks more like something has fundamentally changed to make the price go up, but markets over estimated how much the price would increase. The difference is that the new price, assuming it becomes the new well established price, is lower in one situation and higher in the other. A title implying the former case when it is the latter might fall under the scope of clickbait.
If the price is swinging up and down constantly and there is no well established price, then that is yet another situation which seems different from the previous two and the title might be better off capturing the unsteady nature of the price.
If I make a major story that "X happened three times this year" without pointing out in the title that the historic numbers of X is 2 to 4 each year, it can be treated as a dishonest implication of some trend that doesn't exist. We know many will only read headlines and will not question the implications. This is something worth calling out even when it is over trivial matters to prevent it from being used for more serious matters.
A drop of a well established price indicates something has fundamentally changed to make the price go down.
No it doesn't. Look at any commodity futures prices: they swing wildly for no apparent reason. Fundamentals are only loosely connected to today's prices.
A quick increase shortly followed by a quick decrease of about the same size is a completely different news from a quick decrease without the previous increase.
The article is quite clear on what happened, and interesting too. But the headline is clickbaity.
In that time, global EV sales have increased by over 450%: https://www.iea.org/energy-system/transport/electric-vehicle...
The prevailing opinion was that lithium would stay expensive or go up even more. The price also has not stabilized and may well continue to drop; this is an in-progress update.
Prevailing opinion from whom? Certainly nobody who understands how commodity markets work.
This is all econ 101 level effects, and yet there have been so many articles in the past few years where writers are shocked at what is happening to the prices this week. Or even dumber ones where they project out battery production to 2030 and then compare that to the lithium market today and come to the conclusion that we will never be able to electrify because the lithium market isn't big enough.
I'm personally excited for the point a few years from now when all of the battery plants are online and they overshoot demand and the prices crater. It will be a short but glorious golden age for grid storage, EV startups, and so on until some of the companies go under and others consolidate and the prices come back up to a more sustainable level.
Why is the low of 2020 the right level to benchmark from?
It's not. COVID messed everything up, especially commodities prices.
Don’t worry the media does this to bitcoin and all crypto too
It’s always “crashing”, just magically 1,000% higher from the last time you looked!
Lithium was also bouncing around the usual pump and dump suspects like Wallstreetbets for a while.
Probably, someone with influence lost money buying at the top and is pushing articles to try to recoup their losses.
And it's back to where it was in 2018. Point of the article is commodities fluctuate
Reporting change in price over the course of a year, at the end of the year, is not "clickbait" or even the least bit deceptive.
As famously predicted by Julian Simon back in the 70s and 80s: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simon–Ehrlich_wager
Sorry to burst your bubble, but the article points out it's just good old fashioned speculation in the commodities market! Clearly there was a massive bubble over the past couple of years driven by hype. The spot price is still higher than 2020
Everyone can recognize a bubble once it pops. But the last three years, what you call "bubble" was rational (?) speculation that lithium 1) was going to be needed on a massive scale and 2) virtually all the profitable sources were already being mined.
Also, between 2020 and 2023 we have a ~20% inflation, and the price is not yet stable.
and 2) virtually all the profitable sources were already being mined
There have been massive investments in lithium mining over the past few years, especially in Western countries, partly for business and partly for strategic geopolitical reasons. So there's nothing rational about that assumption and I don't think any serious investor made it either because all this is public knowledge among insiders and easily researched. The price spikes are simply based on demand and speculation. Short term there was/is a serious shortage and that's reflected in the price. Also once production of EVs really ramps up, this could repeat. There's definitely no sign of overinvestment in terms of mining and processing.
I was always on the side of "we will figure it out". You can see a question mark after the word "rational", because I recall arguing with very-knowledgeable-and-insider people right here, in HN, that assured that all the high yield and profitable lithium was already being mined, and no significant new lithium will be discovered.
I took my downvotes for saying that if the demand increased, either the supply will also increase or an alternative will be discovered/developed. And now I'm taking my downvotes for remembering that there was no feeling of bubble (although hindsight is always 20/20), but that the price spike was based on very rational (?) analysis.
Its kind of interesting how england as they knew it then really doesn’t exist anymore today thanks to things like hong kong and brexit.
Hong Kong is largely irrelevant to any comparison of England in the 1980s and today, while the largest changes in the country would be rightly put down to the effects of a transition to services, ending of the cold war and membership of the European Union.
Brexit, not so much despite the sound and fury.
"The Simon–Ehrlich wager was a 1980 scientific wager between business professor Julian L. Simon and biologist Paul Ehrlich, betting on a mutually agreed-upon measure of resource scarcity over the decade leading up to 1990."
Interesting. But the club of Rome predicted in the 70ies problems for the first half of the 21st century. And I think they are going to win the bet. Two blogs I can recommend:
1. https://senecaeffect.substack.com/
2. https://ourfiniteworld.com/
Both bloggers I consider extremely smart.
Gail Tverberg, author of Our Finite World, has a long track record of being incorrect. I don't think that she is a credible prognosticator.
Did she ever go back and explain why she was so wrong the first time around with predictions like these?
https://ourfiniteworld.com/2007/07/16/what-is-peak-oil/
https://ourfiniteworld.com/2007/07/16/is-this-a-false-alarm/
https://ourfiniteworld.com/2007/08/06/peak-oil-whats-ahead/
Did she make more cautious predictions going forward, after making such badly failed predictions 16 years ago? If she did, I didn't see it. It looks like Our Finite World is still a drumbeat of predictions about crises just ahead. If she's eventually correct about a specific prediction it will be a case of the stopped clock showing the correct time by chance.
The Analysis section seems to paint a differing picture, one where if you change the variables (commodities chosen and time-scale) either one of them could've won the bet. Do you know of another example?
Reminds me a bit of the Hunt Brothers attempt to corner the silver market.
Moral of the story: markets are dynamic.
This is fantastic news, and means the price of EVs and large utility scale batteries will continue to fall much faster than anyone predicted.
Lithium is <10% cost of a battery. Presumably much less now. Doesn't affect the price of EVs that much yet.
What makes up the majority of the cost?
Other expensive materials in the cathode, manufacturing costs, and the anode are most of the major costs. A visualization:
https://elements.visualcapitalist.com/breaking-down-the-cost...
Lithium is part of the cathode. Looks like it was more like ~20% in 2022, though it may be down closer to 10% now that the price spike is subsiding:
https://thundersaidenergy.com/downloads/lithium-ion-batterie...
Of note: raw materials are now ~2/3 of the total price of a battery cell, because of the continued plunge in manufacturing costs. And it's pretty well distributed across the different raw materials used. That indicates that the price may not drop all that much more without a concerted supply-chain effort.
Maybe not for current chemistry lithium batteries but for batteries in general prices will probably keep dropping as they find different ways to save cost like using sodium instead of lithium. As solar and wind electricity production keeps getting cheaper and more home installations keep happening I think the demand for cheap home stationary batteries will start growing exponentially.
Hopefully we are not far from the tipping point cheap batteries are needed for it to happen though where world yearly electricity consumption growth can be met by renewables alone and we can start closing more and more coal power plants.
Also, The OP asked about EV battery prices, which are about more than the cell, and also include the price of the pack/enclosure, which is 25% of the cost and hasn't budged much in the last few years [1]. Maybe structural battery packs will eliminate this cost completely in the future.
And then there is the reality that most EVs are still being designed and marketed as upmarket luxury cars, and not with the goal of maximizing mass adoption of EVs in the near term.
The market for EVs is the market for higher end new vehicles today. Therefore even as battery prices drop, other factors will probably keep the prices pretty high in the near future.
1. https://cleantechnica.com/2023/12/01/record-low-ev-battery-p....
Profits
Was it <10% at peak price as well?
It's still about 3x the lowest price from 2020. Hopefully the downward trend continues, though.
"I've seen gluts not followed by shortages, but I've never seen a shortage not followed by a glut." -- Nassim Taleb
Over what time scale?
His attention span.
LOL.
Not being glib. I’ve read quite a bit of Taleb’s stuff and it sounds like an observation based on how long he’s been aware of the market.
Usually if he’s talking about history so if he meant some long term based on analysis, I would expect him to call it out.
Thanks for the clarification.
Market based then, and time scales do matter, as we see now with the issue to entire generations in finding affordable housing.
The problem with a market based approach is that when things genuinely do become limited, people substitute or do without. And thus market watchers like Taleb don't notice that something that busted is now fully bust (or has become a luxury item).
Incentives are powerful and scale.
"Show me the incentives and I'll show you the outcome." -- Charlie Munger
I think the difficulty of the problem is also important to the outcome.
Yep, I love that quote.
I guess nobody told Energizer.
https://camelcamelcamel.com/product/B01C4PP8FK?cpf=amazon-ne...
My Nest smoke detectors demand these specific batteries. They were all installed around the same time, so they all come due at once, at a cost of ~$200.
How long do they last? Normal lithium ion powered smoked detectors will last 10 years between battery changes.
I think they claim 5 years. I don't keep track of this stuff very carefully but based on how long I've had them and being on my second round of battery replacements, I'd say I got more like 3-4 years. It's not that big a deal in the grand scheme of things, especially when the batteries were cheaper. I just got sticker shock last time I went to buy a set.
Until recently at least, Energizer was the sole supplier of these batteries. You can't use anything else because they have a different voltage and discharge curve, so if you put alkaline batteries in, the Nest will almost immediately complain that they're low. I see there are some mildly sketchy other brands on Amazon now. Not sure if I'm going to take that chance.
That's not lithium ion batteries. That's lithium batteries which are not rechargeable so you have to buy new ones when they run out of charge.
You have enough smoke detectors that it requires 75 - 100 batteries to power them all?
The old Nest smoke detectors seem to use six of those batteries each. That is still a fairly high number of smoke detectors.
$200/$65.89 = 3 packs of 24 AA batteries
Nest smoke detectors take 6 batteries each https://support.google.com/googlenest/answer/9297548?hl=en#:....
72 batteries / 6 batteries/device = approximately 12 smoke detectors (could be 9, 10, or 11)
We have 6 First Alert smoke detectors that are connected together but don't use WiFi. There's 1 in each bedroom and a couple left over for key places.
Using 12 smoke detectors is being very careful to cover every space or a big house. Or both.
I just counted, I have 10. I thought it was 11, and I rounded up. Anyway, the exact math wasn't my point, but that lithium primary batteries are very expensive. Ironically, I just got a price alert that they're down to $46.64, except that when I try to buy them, Amazon says "Sorry, this item is no longer available from the seller you selected".
I don't have a huge house, but it is a 1950s split-level, and is pretty much the opposite of a modern open-plan design. And yes, I'm careful. Following NFPA recommendations, I have a smoke/CO detector in every bedroom, outside every sleeping area, and on every level, which adds up. Better safe than sorry.
That's probably due to long standby times. You could get away with cheap (i.e., Harbor Freight batteries at $20/20 or comparable) if you were willing to change them more frequently.
I'm not sure what the actual scale of difference is between battery chemistries. Perhaps someone with more knowledge will reply and refute me.
CNY per tonne
I somewhat expected USD but i'm not surprised. Times change.
Since the end of the USD as the world reserve currency is imminent, the wisest thing US government can do is promote and favor Bitcoin. It's better to have a world reserve currency that no one controls, than CNY.
Yes, let's run the world economy off a currency that could halve in value if Satoshi Nakamoto finds an old USB drive sitting around somewhere.
I suppose this is a better arrangement than the current system, where they key figures know exactly where the money printer is at all times.
Poe's law strikes again.
I was going to comment about perhaps that's because so much of it is mined in China, but a quick google says China is a rather distant third behind Australia and Chile. The more you know.
China is the leading lithium refiner. The price referenced (battery grade lithium carbonate) is an output of a refinery, not a mine. There are many different numbers thrown around for China's refining share, but they are all significant, typically all > 50%.
Looks like that's because it's trading in Shanghai.
Over half of lithium is refined in China and then sold.
Since those refining costs are in domestic CNY, it makes perfect sense that the commodities price will also be quoted in CNY.
Nothing to do with "times changing", everything to do with country of production. (Most commodities aren't so tied to a single country, which is why they end up in USD.)
Not sure it 'collapsed'. Probably leveraged to undercut oil.
Even at its peak, it barely caused a change in battery prices.
It's going to be really hard to undercut oil by dropping lithium prices, as nickel is a bigger contributor to cost.
Nickel also down in price
Not sure which players could cause huge shifts in both lithium and nickel commodity prices, for the goal of undercutting oil. Especially since standard learning curves deliver huge drops in battery prices year after year anyway. Seems like a futile effort.
future looking electric
Is it sodium battery tech starting to have an effect?
Nope, just good old speculation in the commodities market!
That doesn't exclude sodium batteries as a factor. Quite the opposite imo, since that technology is also highly speculative.
> Is it sodium battery tech starting to have an effect? <<
It's not yet mass-produced at scale or commodified to have much impact yet. The falling lithium price however could make sodium batteries less attractive.
I think it would be highly interesting if physicists/scientists could figure out how to create Lithium in the lab, maybe from Helium -- or some esoteric combination of Helium, Helium isotopes, Hydrogen, Hydrogen isotopes -- and/or energy...
Now that I think about it, maybe it would be possible to make Lithium from a heavier element -- such as Beryllium (the next element in Lithium's period/horizontal row) and/or Sodium (the next element in Lithium's group/family/vertical row -- that is, an element whose properties are the most similar to Lithium).
But, the point is, if scientists or future scientists can do that -- then we can end this Lithium debate once and for all!
Oh sure, it may initially cost, like, trillions of dollars to do this in the lab the first couple of times (the history of using particle accelerators to transmute metals is a case study in cost ineffectiveness -- but then, so is the history of early mainframe computers, and so is the history of using rockets to send satellites to orbit) but eventually with continued experimentation, the cost should become cheaper and cheaper...
First you make it work -- then you make it cheap.
You know, the Elon Musk school of business philosophy...
First you make it work -- then you make it cheap... or at least cheaper...
Which was actually, coincidentally, Henry Ford's philosophy -- and that of the early American capitalists (AKA, "The Robber Barons" -- as well)...
Also, I'd put that simple philosophy against anything that anyone could learn in a Harvard, Stanford or Wharton MBA program (*) for $73,440 and one or two years of their life, plus living expenses!
First you make it work -- then you make it cheap...
There's no need to do nuclear chemistry when you can fish it out of seawater.
cheaper
Physics sets fundamental limitations on how much energy you need, which means your lower bound is set by energy prices.
It's not that scarce, it's not something like Polonium.
There's no need to do nuclear chemistry when you can fish it out of seawater.
I would love to see Lithium produced cheaply and efficiently from seawater as much as the next guy -- but tell me, is this a practical reality today?
?
If there's a working Lithium-from-seawater extraction facility fully operating and producing Lithium at scale as of the current date -- then I have yet to see it.
Would you kindly provide a link or links to web pages describing such a facility?
Also, if seawater Lithium extraction is a present-day reality, then why do Lithium mines and mining operations continue to exist?
I don't deny that Lithium could possibly be pulled out of seawater or any other Lithium containing substance for that matter -- but as of the present date, I haven't seen seawater Lithium extraction (like, from the actual Ocean) working and working at scale...
So...
Links please?
But, all of this being said, Lithium extraction from seawater is indeed a great idea(!) -- if it could work and work at scale (and it quite possibly could, in the future!)
You're the one who opened with "it may initially cost, like, trillions of dollars to do this in the lab the first couple of times" for the bonkers lithium nuclear synthesis idea, before moving the goalposts all the way to "If there's a working Lithium-from-seawater extraction facility fully operating and producing Lithium at scale as of the current date -- then I have yet to see it."
The bench process is https://electrek.co/2021/06/04/scientists-have-cost-effectiv...
> First you make it work -- then you make it cheap.
^ We are at step 1.
Some nuclear fusion people are proposing using lithium as an input. Guess where they're saying they'll get it from. https://news.newenergytimes.net/2022/01/08/lithium-lithium-e...
Even with recent price spikes on various component prices, the price of the overall good sold continues its march downwards. BNEF's annual survey showed a 14% decrease in prices (other price surveys will show different results).
https://about.bnef.com/blog/lithium-ion-battery-pack-prices-...
The single component price, even of the component namesake of the battery, does not cause huge fluctuations in the overall cost of the battery due to the small amount of lithium cost in the battery and the substitution possibilities for all the other components.
And there's even a chance that sodium substitution for lithium could be used in a ton of applications soon.
Batteries and renewables are not like oil: a single commodity price fluctuation is not going to disrupt entire economies. They are a much more stable foundation upon which to build an economy.
Thought of mine from 20 years ago is the power available from fossil fuels has been limited since around 1970. Which is it's very price inelastic. And there will never be enough to pull the remaining 2/3rds of humanity out of poverty. The Chinese managed what they did by burning 2/3rd of their total coal reserves in the last 40 years.
But what we're now seeing is the vastly larger availability and price elastic supply of solar and wind power. All this stuff, solar, wind, batteries are getting cheap and commodified. The result is the world economy isn't energy constrained for the first time in 50 years.
Good points. One thing about raising most of the world out of poverty, however, is that even with the current energy mix, it would not take much more fossil fuels, and only raise emissions by 5%. A very recent paper with this (somewhat surprising) modeling:
Commodity prices fluctuate wildly. Fundamentals have very little to do with it.
You're right but it's a bit of both. There was a real shortage, we're just now slowly coming out of it. Prices are falling in anticipation because one can already see the mining capacity that's being added.
Could be. Commodities markets do have lots of speculators with no financial stake at all in the underlying commodity.
Good news for the environment really. Electric cars and storage need to be a lot cheaper to become ubiquitous.
Not that good news
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Environmental_impacts_of_lithi...
Where is the data on lithium production surging? It isn’t in the article, only future projects (they may or may not work.)
https://www.statista.com/statistics/606684/world-production-... shows a significant surge starting in 2017.
https://www.visualcapitalist.com/visualizing-25-years-of-lit... has a per-country visualization of it; look like Australia has a big share of the increase.
If you are like me and found the editorialization a bit much from this article but want to know more I highly recommend The Limiting Factor on YouTube. https://youtu.be/xEY_CMUb8jY?si=1wWmG83NfuBSNeKZ
Another one off that helped me get up to speed with understanding lithium was a guest lecture recently streamed at CWU on Exploring the Origin of Economic Lithium Deposits by PhD Rachel Hampton
https://www.youtube.com/live/inq_ypJeiZk?si=LTQFGR07d-ypiS6_
I guess I should stock up on my meds.
How does this translate to the cost of producing a lithium ion battery?
Is there a good place to track prices for solar batteries? Have a system and considering a battery next year.
https://www.dailymetalprice.com/metalpricecharts.php?c=li&u=...
It looks like it's returning to its pre-pandemic levels. Demand is increasing with EV's so it's still interesting, but possibly less interesting than the title implies.
Repeat after me: Price Will Save Us
Back in the day, dinosaurs roamed, and the Model S was almost out. I had a special interest in EV conversions. 1 of the vlogs I watched had this idea, 'if we buy into lithium, then lithium batteries as they blow up in popularity, we should make lots of money'
But the argument, 'there really isnt much lithium in a battery, there's loads of lithium, albeit maybe not in good forms(pure lithium go boom).' and so the investment was a poor idea.
That's all this is, people think 'omg lithium ion batteries are the future' lets try to corner the market and then they fail. There will never be a lithium shortage.It's not common like iron or carbon. It's about as common as silicon or chlorine. More common then copper, zinc, nickel.
sounds like they need to invest in some regulatory capture or maybe just all of their competitors, capitalism is only supposed to work like that in text books!
Does this mean cheaper ebikes?
Same thing happened in rare earths. The Mountain Pass, CA mine was shut down, reopened, shut down, reopened, shut down, and reopened since the 1980s, as prices went up and down. Probably will stay open now because rare earth usage is up.
If the bubble implodes, is that the same as saying the bubble burst?
I mean, that's sort of smart isn't it? Wouldn't you rather use someone else's resources instead of your own for as long as you can? Additionally, the deposit becomes a strategic reserve to control prices when needed.
It's not a strategic reserve if you don't develop the capability to timely extract and refine it.
Is there something unique in mining lithium that would be different from other kind of mining that America does? I feel like the capability if needed to extract and refine it within the US exists / wouldn’t be hard to develop over the course of constructing the mine, no?
Also there’s a lawsuit ongoing here with Native Americans suing to stop any mining. I suspect that there’s going to be a lot of pressure to not start a mine because of how destructive they are to the environment. At the same time, I’m pretty sure the mine will happen. However, at that point you want to have the highest price of lithium possible and this is a substantial amount of lithium that would be coming on the market which would counteract any price growth.
Exactly my point. All other extraction industries in America are grandfathered in from before NEPA, before anyone gave a damn that a dead guy from the far past thought the stones were holy. America is paralyzed by its own legal system which can be wielded as a weapon by any bad-faith actor who doesn't want electrification to happen.
Ok now you’re switching your argument from we don’t have the capacity to build mines to NEPA. Except this has nothing to do with NEPA and the tribes weren’t getting anywhere with the lawsuits and constantly losing because of the General Mining Law of 1872.
I’m not aware of any serious challenge to the construction of this mine.
Sure, there may be governmental red tape (eg environmental assessment impact studies and whatnot) but most “no build” laws I believe would be at the state not federal level. Federal environmental legislation itself tends to be quite conservative. There’s an argument to be made the administrative state sets up additional regulations but in this specific case I believe the Trump administration was in favor and the Biden administration never changed course so I suspect the EPA doesn’t have any major objections (not sure if it really passes regulations or if there’s just selective enforcement in favor of the mine)
[1] https://www.nevadacurrent.com/2023/12/07/nv-tribes-will-not-...
I don't think I switched arguments. They are the same argument to me. For example the reason that we don't have enough homes in America is not because we literally forgot how to nail boards together to make a house, it is because we gradually accreted a system where it takes 5+ years to get permission to do it. The bureaucratic capacity to begin building is key, and on the critical path of actual production.
Actually no, we really did forget how to nail boards together. Skilled labor vanished as other wages rose.
Making a new house used to actually cost less than buying an existing one. Today, the calculation has changed, and it is more expensive, mostly because of the labor costs. They're only able to build in areas where there are fewer available jobs so there's no price pressure.
Literally people leaving the skilled trades because job pricing pressure to work somewhere else. I've even met jr developers that used to be electricians. It's going to be hard to "remember" the trades.
Permits are taking 5 years in esoteric oddball projects. The reality is a permit for a SFH takes a few months to get approved, even less for ADUs.
Sorry but the data isn't on your side. The population-weighted time to get a housing permit in California, as the most extremely bogus example, is well over 4 years. This information is available from California HCD's online dashboard.
The driving force behind high construction prices is soft costs and contractor profits. Labor costs in construction have been roughly inline with overall labor inflation across all industries. See https://twitter.com/FactChecker23/status/1730738575292113347...
California definitely has a housing problem and looking at its data is a worst case scenario that’ll skew your perception of what it’s like in America as a whole - this mine is in Nevada not California.
Also, I think the state has taken some positive action against NIMBY legislation but it will be a long fight to undo it. If things keep going SF is likely to run afoul of the build-positive regulations and end up suing the state/developers to fight needing to be in compliance. But again don’t see the relevance of California housing which is a municipal / state level issue to mining in Nevada on federal lands.
From your link:
https://www.agc.org/sites/default/files/Files/Communications...
Wow you're waaaay off. As someone in this industry I am acutely aware of how way off base you are.
Look at answers 4 - 10, the rest of it backs this up too.
I just got a recent permit done in 5 months - plan, submit, approval (submit->approval was 3). ADUs in CA are mandated at 60 days max for approval
Also, outside of CA approvals in some jurisdictions are weeks: https://www.reddit.com/r/Homebuilding/comments/sk3bd2/how_lo...
Sure but housing is a municipal and state level issue while this mine is on federal land. Your argument is maybe relevant to explain why it was 14 years between discovery and being granted approval in 2021 just before Biden took office. But I don’t know the timeline of how long it took to get the approval once filed - do you? Couldn’t find anything online.
Your argument would be stronger about the Maine mine but this mine was approved in 2021 and afaik production is ongoing.
The mining is being done by the Chinese as Lithium Americas’ majority owner is a Chinese company. GM has already invested 650M to get access to the mine. This does not seem like the right hill to argue about bureaucratic lethargy. And again, I don’t see how any of this has any relevance as to whether America has the capability to build and run a lithium mine - we do. We may not have refining capabilities (not sure - haven’t researched) but that’ll come online once we have significant mining operations.
At the end of the day, you don’t want to mine too aggressively because you’ll shoot yourself in the foot economically. The US has some of the largest lithium reserves in the world. This mine alone would represent 25% of the world’s current production capacity. Ignoring environmental damage from mining (which is quite considerable), if you bring it online too quickly you’ll lose out on a lot of money which is probably a larger factor than anything else.
Is it really that unimagineable that some people would rather not see this large area of natural land destroyed, and have to live with the resulting externalities of the mine? People who hold different values than you aren't all evil beaurocrats who hate electrification. Many of the folks opposing this mine are strongly for green energy projects in general, but clearly prioritize certain tradeoffs differently than you do.
There's an argument to be made that the tradeoffs are worth it in this case, but you don't seem to be making an argument so much as completely dismissing groups of locals and environmentalists who have a number of valid concerns.
I'd believe that if there seemed to be any analysis of alternatives. The area of the United States that has been completely wrecked for oil and gas is way, way bigger than the area under consideration for lithium extraction.
Because battery tech is evolving fast, and lithium could quickly become far less valuable...
Wouldnt you want to have a motherlode hoarded when supplies dry up 100 years from now, a commodity that fuels advanced avionics?
There is virtually no way we will ever run out of lithium. It is massively abundant. It's just a matter of how much it costs to extract it. And we'll surely have fusion energy/abundant energy in 100 years and it will make the cost of extraction very close to zero.
Yeah it's called a rare earth mineral because the concentration in ore is so low not because there's little of it in total.
It does unfortunately mean that you need to excavate a lot to mine it which is not great for the environment either (even though lithium is currently key to most renewable technologies)
Lithium is not a rare earth mineral. Typical weight fraction in ore is 0.5-8%.
The lithium mine in question is 0.22%, doesn't seem like your range is that typical.
There's also 180 billion tons of lithium in sea water, which is 1.3 million years of lithium at our current usage, and it would require no mining. It only requires electrodes in water with special coating to keep sodium at a minimum, and of course electricity. The coating is the part that's still being worked on, but they have one that that provides a 1:1 ratio of lithium to sodium.
I’m sure the nuclear physicists 100 years ago assumed the same about our fission energy output by today.
The total world energy production in 1920 was about 60 terrawat-hours. Today it's about 29,000. So while energy still costs a decent amount, there is a massive amount of it. And most of it could be fission based if society wasn't dumb.
What do you mean? If you’re referring to lithium battery powered aircraft my understanding is that will never be viable for anything but the smallest aircraft.
What does small mean? We have puddle jumpers (few miles between islands) already in service, like 5-10 miles. I expect it to creep up over time as efficiency slight increases but battery energy increases at the battery moore's law like rate it has. Prices go down and capacity/weight goes up.
I agree it will have limits, I doubt I'll see long flights like 200 miles. But I see no reason it can't improve by 10% a year just like the batteries. I believe the ones in service are using lfp batteries, which are safer than lithium batteries, but also have lower energy density - and these have gone up over time too in energy density.
Construction of the lithium mine at Thacker Pass began in June, and it is expected to start producing lithium by 2026.
There is a (super nutty) environmentalist group and some Native Americans protesting and trying to delay the mine, but it looks like they have so far been unsuccessful at convincing judges, and blockers have been getting cleared out.
I consider myself an environmentalist, so I'm a bit sensitive about descriptions like "nutty environmentalist", but... the group protesting the Thacker Pass mine is weird and I think largely repudiated by other environmentalists. I mean, they're trying to stop the transition to clean energy. These guys advocate for total deindustrialization, return to a pre-agriculture way of life, only as many humans as the hunter-and-gatherer lifestyle can support, and they're... deeply anti-trans?Is this Deep Green Resistance? If it is, the anti-trans thing is a combination of things, one of them being that they view hormone replacement therapy as an unnatural "big pharma" thing that can't survive in their idyllic future where the Earth has a population of 100,000, just like insulin for diabetics. The other is just that they had significant factional splits with thin voting margins, and the faction that kept the name was fighting against another faction that had some transgender members, so "Transgender people are industrialised freaks and/or rapists" was a convenient way to try to expel enough voting members of the opposing faction to seize control of the faction. A lot of the time when you see a random extreme political organisation that's nominally left-wing have a strongly anti-transgender stance, it's because at some point in their organisational past transgender people were casualties in some larger factional dispute.
They should start reducing the population with themselves, obviously
Sitting on it makes sense when something could go up in price long-term. This is probably modern government inaction though.
It could make sense in some very specific situations, but that really depends on the details.
Lithium deposits come in various grades and have different associated costs for extraction. The famous deposits in Bolivia are considered cheap to exploit. The geothermal brines in England as well. Other rock sources might be harder.
IIRC, they aren't sitting on it. They're investigating the environmental impact. Lithium is the worst because it needs a lot of water to mine, but it's only found in arid places. NV rightly asked for an investigation to see what thr impact on the water supplu would be