Li market16 Oct 2018 08:39
From the Ardea Resources board on Hot Copper:
"Cobalt 27 Q&A with Simon Moores, Managing Director, Benchmark Mineral Intelligence
Battery megafactories have become a buzzword in recent years. What are these factories and why do they have the battery metals industry so excited?
Battery Megafactories was a term Benchmark Mineral Intelligence created back in 2014 to describe any lithium ion battery plant over 1GWh in capacity.
Four years ago, the lithium ion battery industry was a completely different landscape. The industry was highly fragmented with very small battery plants geared to serving the mobile phone, laptop and power tool markets.
That was until Elon Musk and Tesla came along. In the early 2010’s, they introduced the Gigafactory plan to create the world’s biggest lithium ion battery cell manufacturing facility and EV manufacturing hub under one roof.
The plant, at 35GWh capacity, was equal to size of the entire industry.
Currently, the Tesla Gigafactory is at 20GWh of capacity and will produce at least 15GWh of cells in 2018. It will ramp to full capacity by Q1 2019 and produce at least 28GWh of cells in 2019 – an incredible achievement that is two years ahead of schedule.
The crazy thing is that all of these batteries are being consumed in the Model 3 – Tesla never foresaw this.
In fact, if Tesla hadn’t encountered its well-publicised engineering problems in early 2018, the company would have run out of lithium ion batteries.
What Tesla started with its Gigafactory is far more important than the company’s own achievements: it sparked a global race for electric vehicle battery cells that is still in full swing.
In Q1 2015, we had three battery megafactories in the pipeline according to Benchmark Mineral Intelligence’s Battery Megafactories Tracker – we were the only company at the time tracking these super battery plants.
Today we are at 50 megafactories worldwide and have surpassed 1TWh of capacity in the pipeline.
This is an incredible situation that is having a profound impact on the key battery raw materials of lithium, cobalt, graphite anode and nickel.
It has ushered in a new era for 21st century commodities.
How many factories exist today and how many can we expect to see over the next decade?
Right now, as I mentioned, we are at 50 megafactories.
Over half of this new capacity is located in China, with Europe emerging as the second most popular jurisdiction in recent years as Germany’s Auto OEMs seek cell supply security.
The US has been Gigafactory dependent but we expect to see more serious moves from the Korean battery majors in North America. This is especially true of LG Chem, which operates a plant in Holland, Michigan and SK Innovation that has aspirations of building a plant there.
2018 has seen a record number of plants being announced with Benchmark Minerals’ latest data standing at 24 plants end-September. This could easily surpass 30 by the end of the year
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