The push to a lower carbon world will result in many challenges that will need both financial and technological innovation to solve. The move to electric vehicles (EVs) is a significant part of the push and an area fraught with challenges, as Brady’s Tasja Botha discovered while moderating a webinar recently in conjunction with Reuters titled “The Battery Metals Boom – Meeting the Supply and Demand Challenge”. She interviewed Michael Willoughby of Standard Chartered and John Burba of International Battery Metals about some of these challenges. I recently watched the session and found it extremely interesting. The starting point of the discussion was that by 2030, 30% of all vehicles globally are targeted to be EVs. The problem with this is simply that according to the guests, if you put all known Lithium extraction facilities into production, there will still be a 1-million-ton shortage in that metal created by those EVs and their need for batteries. Michael Willoughby felt that this was a conservative estimate and expects a lot more switching to EVs in the next few years. As John Burba said, he could think of no other commodity in which such a huge shortfall was projected. This shortfall in production ought to be set against current production… continue reading
Continue reading The Coming Shortfall in Battery Metals Could Have Dramatic Implications. This article appeared first on CTRM Center.