Elon Musk and his merry band of executive vice presidents had plenty of advice for the mining and metals industry at the company’s Battery Day event in September, where the road map to a $25,000 Tesla was laid out.
How easy it is to mine lithium (just add salt), just how much of it there is in Nevada (enough for 300 million EVs), how to be environmentally friendly (“put the chunk of dirt back where it was”) and, given these facts, why miners haven’t been trying harder.
Since lithium is “just like widely available” and Tesla’s scientists have eliminated other hard to come by metals like graphite (replace it with sand, obvs) and cobalt from batteries (at least in theory), Musk’s prime raw material worry is nickel.
Nickel and dimed
Ahead of Battery Day, in an investors conference call Musk had a big shout-out for all the nickel miners out there, wherever they may be in the world (hopefully near some nickel):
“Well, I’d just like to re-emphasise, any mining companies out there, please mine more nickel. Okay. Wherever you are in the world, please mine more nickel and don’t wait for nickel to go back to some long — some high point that you experienced some five years ago, whatever. Go for efficiency, obviously environmentally friendly nickel mining at high volume.
For the rest of this article: https://www.mining.com/all-the-mines-tesla-needs-to-build-20-million-cars-a-year/