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Originally Posted by Street Pharmacist
This is factually inaccurate
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We don’t have anything close to the battery manufacturing capacity yet. And most of that capacity is in the hands of China, which poses major geopolitical risks akin to Russia’s dominance of Europe’s natural gas supplies.
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Yet the speed of the transformation is running into supply constraints and geopolitical headwinds. The supply of the minerals required to make lithium-ion batteries must grow by a third every year this decade to meet the estimated global demand. Tens of millions of batteries will be needed in America alone to meet its ambition to ensure half of all American vehicle sales involve electric vehicles by 2030. And yet its great rival, China, is by far the biggest processor of battery metals, producer of battery cells and manufacturer of finished batteries.
… Indonesia’s dominance in nickel is itself a potential bottleneck. An estimate last year by pwc, a consultancy, suggests that 2.7m tonnes of the stuff will be needed annually for evs by 2035. Indonesia currently produces only 1.6m tonnes, most of which is used for stainless steel. A huge amount of capacity to mine and process the metal is being planned, or under construction
This amounts to a sobering picture. Expanding the battery supply chain to match the enormous global demand for electric vehicles represents one of the greatest industrial challenges ever attempted. Even the current order of bottlenecks in the industry will make it difficult. Pulling it off—for the good of the climate, human health and much else—without the country that, by most measures, dominates the battery industry may very well be impossible.
https://www.economist.com/asia/2023/...oks-impossible
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