Mining companies in Australia are racing to find the next big reserve of one of the world’s most in-demand metals. Nickel is a critical metal in batteries, and as the world keeps moving toward renewables, more batteries are needed to store energy.
In fact, there’s a strong case that much more of it is needed than lithium — a commodity many people know of, because it is in the name of lithium batteries. But there are a variety of batteries made with different metal compositions and, as Elon Musk puts it, batteries need a sprinkle of lithium compared to nickel.
“The lithium is actually 2 per cent of the cell mass,” he said at a presentation in 2016. “It’s a very small amount of th but it sounds like it’s big because it’s called [a] lithium-ion [battery] , but our batteries should be called nickel-graphite, because it’s mostly nickel-graphite.”
About 50 kilograms of nickel goes into each Tesla battery. A report by the CSIRO shows about five times as much nickel (48,006 kilotonnes) will be needed to meet global demand by 2050 as lithium (8,990 kilotonnes).
For the rest of this article: https://www.abc.net.au/news/2022-08-16/nickel-metal-batteries-energy-race-to-produce-to-match-demand/101334424