Calling any readers with intimate knowledge of the full EV battery supply chain. I need your advice.
I have a saying ‘show me the incentive and I’ll show you the future’. Well around the world, governments are pushing people to switch to electric vehicles with a combination of legal and financial incentives, so it will happen.
I’ve always assumed that governments green flag these futuristic societal changes by simply giving what they think is sufficient notice for the market to develop, deploy and scale the required technologies. The timeframe to scale the EV move appears to be about a decade: some countries quicker, others slower.
The technology for designing and manufacturing the vehicles is obviously already fully available and we can probably jury-rig the infrastructure. I’m interested in knowing if the raw material providers for the battery packs can scale at the same rate.
I recently listened to a fascinating talk by a trusted source who said that the likes of lithium and graphite supply will need to increase tenfold in the next ten years. However, in our entire history, the best humankind has ever achieved in scaling raw material production is twofold in one decade. That appears to be a yawning supply and demand gulf.
Maybe new scalable battery technology will be developed, maybe governments will scale back their incentives, maybe hydrogen will leapfrog EV, maybe new recycling technology will evolve or maybe the price of batteries and EVs will skyrocket.
I’d be delighted to hear from lithium miners, battery producers and EV manufacturers.