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Battery Technology Innovation/Electric Vehicles

As race for energy metals heats up, nickel expected to benefit most from EV revolution – by Henry Lazenby (MiningWeekly.com – October 13, 2017)

http://www.miningweekly.com/

VANCOUVER (miningweekly.com) – Nickel prices stand most to gain from the advent of electric vehicles (EVs), Bank of America Merrill Lynch (BofAML) said on Friday in its latest ‘Global Metals Weekly’ report.

According to the research team, despite China remaining an important driver of market demand, following on from being the secular demand driver for metals in the past decade, a push to make economies greener has given rise to structural demand increases from a range of sectors.

“EVs have been a focal point of late and copper (batteries, wiring, charging infrastructure), lithium (batteries), cobalt (batteries) and nickel (batteries) should all benefit. While we are bullish copper in the medium term, EVs are unlikely to be sufficient, on their own, to drive a sustained bull market.

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VW fails to secure long-term cobalt supply for electric vehicles – by Henry Sanderson and Neil Hume (Financial Times – October 15, 2017)

https://www.ft.com/

An attempt by one of the world’s biggest carmakers to secure long-term supplies of cobalt for its push into electric vehicles has been shunned by leading producers of the metal.

Volkswagen issued a tender last month seeking a minimum of five years of supply at a fixed price, according to people familiar with the process, but struggled to find any takers.

The carmaker put off miners by suggesting a price that was well below current market prices, which have jumped by more than 80 per cent this year, the people said. “They’re being arrogant because they’re automotive and they’re used to doing it,” one trader said. “They completely misjudged the contents of the tender. There’s no point negotiating — it’s not even a discussion point.”

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The Supply Chain Can’t Handle Skyrocketing Demand for Lithium-Ion Batteries – by Louise Matsakis (Motherboard/Vice – October 11, 2017)

https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/

Less than 1 percent of cars worldwide run electric, but they’re increasingly gobbling up Earth’s lithium-ion battery supply. Almost half of these batteries are used in the automotive industry, according to a new a analysis published Wednesday in Joule, the sister journal to Cell that addresses sustainable energy.

The study argues that the world needs to start preparing for an influx of demand for these batteries, which are used in smartphones, electric cars, and off-grid systems, like Tesla’s Powerwall.

“Even before [the lithium-ion battery industry] went into these large sectors like automotive and grid it was growing at like a 20 percent growth rate,” Gerbrand Ceder, one of the study’s authors and a professor of materials science & engineering at the University of California, Berkeley told me over the phone.

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Why the ‘e’ in e-car actually stands for evil – by Lawrence Solomon (Financial Post – October 6, 2017)

http://business.financialpost.com/

Electric vehicles are for city folk. For most rural residents, their role is to give, give, give

Electric cars, the vehicles of choice for the virtue signallers among us, epitomize the confusions and the divisions in society. These vehicles aren’t environmental exemplars, as their touters claim. And they of course aren’t economic. They excel in one area above all: in exploiting rural regions and their inhabitants, mostly for the benefit of affluent urbanites.

Electric vehicles — now a trivial proportion of cars on the road — do benefit the urban environments in which they operate, by limiting harmful vehicular emissions such as NOx, SOx and ground-level ozone.

If electric vehicles ever obtained a broader market, that urban benefit would increase. But it would come at a much greater cost to the rural environment, which electric-vehicle proponents would seek to sacrifice to provide the cities with electricity for charging.

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Cobalt’s Chemistry Experiment – by David Fickling (Bloomberg News – September 28, 2017)

https://www.bloomberg.com/

All batteries are not created equal. The 53 kilowatt-hour pack on a 2008 Tesla Inc. Roadster contains an estimated 38 kilograms of cobalt, a key element that some analysts fear may be running out. The same-sized battery on a 2017 Tesla would have about one-eighth of that, or 4.8 kilograms.

That’s the best reason to be wary of predictions that cobalt is heading toward permanently higher prices north of $100,000 a metric ton. The complex chemistry on which rechargeable batteries depends offers myriad opportunities to economize on any material that gets too costly.

Cobalt is a crucial ingredient for manufacturing most lithium-ion cathodes — the “positive” ends of the cell, equivalent to the nipple atop a conventional AAA battery. Demand for such cathodes is set to soar as the world’s vehicle fleet shifts from petroleum to electrical drive-trains, and as utilities build farms of rechargeable batteries to stabilize renewables-intensive power grids.

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Peak Lithium? Not So Fast – by David Fickling (Bloomberg News – September 28, 2017)

https://www.bloomberg.com/

Does the world have enough lithium? It depends who you ask.A 2008 study by French researcher William Tahil found there were just 3.9 million metric tons of recoverable deposits globally in mineral ores and Andean salt lakes.

That’s little enough that the world would risk running out as demand for lithium-ion car batteries and utility-scale storage ramps up over the coming decades.

A survey the following year by consultants Gerry Clarke and Peter Harben, though, concluded there was about 10 times that amount. Depending on the other parameters applied, those numbers suggest deposits could provide lithium for anything from a further 100 million cars — about 10 percent of the global auto fleet — to 10 billion or more.

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Electric vehicles trigger search for lithium and cobalt – by Chris Tomlinson (Houston Chronicle – September 27, 2017)

http://www.houstonchronicle.com/

Automakers this summer touted plans to offer more electric vehicles, with Mercedes-Benz announcing it will spend $1 billion to add a battery factory to its plant in Tuscaloosa, Ala.

Ford is investing $4.5 billion in electric vehicle production, Volkswagen has promised 30 electrified models, and Volvo plans to go all electric or hybrid by 2019. Even Porsche will offer a battery-powered sports sedan called Mission E in 2020.

Automakers expect to sell 20 million all-electric vehicles in 2030, according to conservative estimates, prompting questions about where the raw materials will come from to make all of those batteries.

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BHP, world’s largest miner, says 2017 is ‘tipping point’ for electric cars – by Clara Ferreira-Marques and Gavin Maguire (Reuters U.S. – September 26, 2017)

http://www.reuters.com/

SINGAPORE (Reuters) – This year looks set to be the “tipping point” for electric cars, Arnoud Balhuizen, chief commercial officer at global miner BHP (BLT.L) said on Tuesday, with the impact for raw materials producers to be felt first in the metals market, and only later in oil.

“In September 2016 we published a blog and we set the question – could 2017 be the year of the electric vehicle revolution?” said Balhuizen, a company veteran who runs BHP’s commercial strategy, procurement and marketing from Singapore. “The answer is yes…2017 is the revolution year we have been speaking about. And copper is the metal of the future.”

Europe has begun a dramatic shift away from the internal combustion engine, although, globally, there are only roughly 1 million electric cars out of a global fleet of closer to 1.1 billion. BHP forecasts that could rise to 140 million vehicles by 2035, a forecast it says is on ‘the greener’ end.

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Exclusive: VW moves to secure cobalt supplies in shift to electric cars – by Pratima Desai (Reuters U.S. – September 22, 2017)

https://www.reuters.com/

LONDON (Reuters) – Germany’s Volkswagen (VOWG_p.DE) is moving to secure long-term supplies of cobalt, a vital component of rechargeable batteries, as the group accelerates its ambitious shift to electric cars. Cobalt industry sources told Reuters that VW, the world’s largest automaker, has asked producers to submit proposals on supplying the material for up to 10 years from 2019.

Volkswagen, which decided on the strategic shift to electric vehicles (EVs) after it was engulfed in the “dieselgate” scandal, plans to invest more than 20 billion euros ($24 billion) in zero-emission vehicles by 2030 to challenge pioneer Tesla in creating a mass market.

The company, which aims to make up to three million EVs a year by 2025, wants all the cobalt tender proposals submitted by the end of September. “The tender doesn’t actually tell you how much cobalt they want. They tell you how many EVs they want to make, you have to work out the cobalt content yourself,” one cobalt industry source said.

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Russian Nuclear Giant Joins Scramble to Supply Electric-Car Boom – by Jack Farchy and Elena Mazneva (Bloomberg News – September 19, 2017)

https://www.bloomberg.com/

Russia’s state-owned nuclear corporation is joining the lithium rush. After a collapse in the price of uranium, Rosatom Corp. plans to start mining and trading the metal used in batteries as it seeks to profit from the rapid rise of electric vehicles.

“The evolution of the car business is going much faster than predicted,” Kirill Komarov, the company’s first deputy head, said in an interview. “We plan to accumulate the whole integrated line of everything starting from lithium and up to final batteries or even some cooperation with car producers.”

Rosatom is the latest company to join a global scramble for lithium projects to supply growing demand for batteries used in electric cars such as Tesla Inc.’s Model 3 and General Motors Co.’s Chevrolet Bolt.

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BlackRock fund bets big on electric future for lithium – by Henry Sanderson (Financial Times – September 15, 2017)

https://www.ft.com/

BlackRock has emerged as a big backer of lithium start-ups, as the world’s largest asset manager bets on the widespread adoption of electric vehicles.

The BlackRock World Mining Trust, which has more than £800m in assets and is co-managed by Evy Hambro, has become the largest shareholder in a handful of small mining companies aiming to produce lithium for use in batteries.

Demand for lithium has surged as the first mass-market electric vehicles such as the Tesla Model 3, Nissan Leaf and Chevrolet Bolt attract buyers. Growing demand for EVs has sparked a scramble to locate new supplies of lithium and prices have jumped about 26 per cent this year, making it one of the best performing commodities.

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Avalon intent to cash in on rapidly rising technology metal demand – by Henry Lazenby (MiningWeekly.com – September 15, 2017)

http://www.miningweekly.com/

VANCOUVER (miningweekly.com) – A whole new world for lithium demand has aspiring technology metals firm Avalon Advanced Metals evaluating its options to cash in on the red-hot industry, with the company patiently advancing three projects in its portfolio that will benefit from higher metals prices.

Just this week, new evidence was provided that the emerging age of the electric vehicle (EV) is approaching faster and at a far greater scale than even recent forecasts predicted, with German automaker Volkswagen announcing its investment of about €20-billion in the space, which could alone gobble up the entire supply of lithium today.

China also dropped a bombshell this week when announcing tentative plans to ban internal combustion engines, which analysts expect will coincide with China’s commitment to an emissions cap by 2030.

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The one big problem with the electric-car movement – by Mark Richardson (Globe and Mail – September 13, 2017)

https://beta.theglobeandmail.com/

Auto makers are meeting government demands to develop more electric vehicles, but consumers don’t want to buy them

Half of Canada may not care – yet – but this week’s huge Frankfurt auto show is all about electrification. If it doesn’t have an electrified engine, or at least the option for it, then it just doesn’t matter.

The auto makers have little choice. Governments are insisting on it. Entire countries, such as the U.K., France, even China, are preparing to outlaw the internal combustion engine. In California and nine other states, and in Quebec, state and provincial laws are calling for huge penalties on auto makers that don’t do their part to save the planet by selling electric cars.

At this week’s show, BMW, Mercedes-Benz, Audi and Jaguar Land Rover promised their fleets would offer electric options for every model, with a deadline of 2020 at the earliest and 2025 at the latest. BMW showed its all-electric Mini, which will be sold in 2019, and a sporty version of its i3; Mercedes showed its all-electric EQA and EQC concepts, and Audi showed its all-electric Elaine coupe concept.

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Carmakers face electric reality as combustion engine outlook dims – by Laurence Frost and Edward Taylor (Reuters U.S. – September 11, 2017)

https://www.reuters.com/

FRANKFURT (Reuters) – European car bosses are beginning to address the realities of mass vehicle electrification, and its consequences for jobs and profit, their minds focused by government pledges to outlaw the combustion engine.

As the latest such announcement on Monday by China added momentum to a push for zero-emissions motoring, Daimler (DAIGn.DE), Volkswagen (VOWG_p.DE) and PSA Group (PEUP.PA) gave details about their electric programs that could give policymakers some pause.

Planned electric Mercedes models will initially be just half as profitable as conventional alternatives, Daimler warned – forcing the group to find savings by outsourcing more component manufacturing, which may in turn threaten German jobs.

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Canada’s Sherritt eyes nickel products for booming battery market – by Nicole Mordant (Reuters Canada – September 11, 2017)

https://ca.reuters.com/

(Reuters) – The rise of electric cars is spurring Sherritt International Corp (S.TO) to consider branching into producing the types of nickel most sought after by battery manufacturers, the chief executive of the Canadian company said on Monday.

David Pathe said Sherritt, which is one of the world’s largest producers of nickel, was studying the economics around building a plant to produce nickel sulphate, a powder-like substance particularly suited for use in batteries.

Sherritt already produces high-grade nickel for use in the stainless steel industry and in sophisticated applications including batteries. The company does not produce nickel sulphate, which consistently fetches a price premium over London Metal Exchange-traded nickel.

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