As we previously reported, Sichuan Yahua Industrial Group made an announcement at the end of December that its subsidiary, Yahua Lithium, signed a 5-year lithium supply agreement with Tesla. The contract’s value is reported to be a range of $630-880 million. Yahual Lithium will provide battery-grade lithium hydroxide to Tesla from 2021 through 2025. Here’s a bit more information and commentary on that deal.
We’ve written at length about the vast need for lithium if the electric vehicle market is going to keep growing at the pace it’s been growing at. Lithium is abundant on Earth, but it takes years to set up lithium mines and manufacturing facilities to get that lithium ready for use in a battery, so it’s not a resource issue, but rather a business and investment issue.
CleanTechnica has been digging into lithium and nickel like we never did before. Every revelation or learning session opens up several more questions. This week, I will again be talking with the boys at RK Equity about both metals.
A few weeks ago, one of our writers wrote up a story on the company Standard Lithium and its plan to get lithium for EV batteries in a new, innovative way. Tesla CEO Elon Musk responded on Twitter that he thought the approach had “a lot of potential.”
Following some of Tesla CEO Elon Musk’s comments regarding battery production during the quarterly Tesla conference call for shareholders last week, I decided to have two long conversations with Howard Klein and Rodney Hooper of RK Equity about the EV battery production and mining industries.
China is charging full speed ahead into electric vehicles, on track to sell over 2 million electric vehicles this year, from 1.1 million in 2018. The rapid growth has been driven partly by policy, but increasingly by consumer demand. In the 3rd and final part of this series (check out part one and part two, if you missed them), we look at the ramp up in EV production and battery supply. Will production capacity be able to keep pace with the rapid growth in EV demand?
