RE: China deal circling.7 Jun 2022 17:26
Prices for the "green metal" have seen an almost 500% increase in the past year, according to Bloomberg.
Sung Choi, a metals analyst at BloombergNEF, told VOA, "The cost of lithium has risen because virtually all automakers have jumped onto producing electric vehicles."
Electric car tsar and Tesla CEO Elon Musk tweeted that the "insane" costs meant "Tesla might actually have to get into the mining & refining directly at scale."
FILE - Tesla CEO Elon Musk speaks before unveiling the Model Y at Tesla's design studio in Hawthorne, California, March 14, 2019.
FILE - Tesla CEO Elon Musk speaks before unveiling the Model Y at Tesla's design studio in Hawthorne, California, March 14, 2019.
That is exactly what China has been doing, and its companies are looking to make sure they don't run out of the metal needed to make lithium-ion batteries – which China, which has the largest EV market in the world, produces 80% of globally.
While more than half of global lithium resources are in South America and Australia, China is scouring the world for new sources of the metal, including in the Qinghai-Tibetan plateau and elsewhere, but increasingly in Africa.
"Africa has recently been in the spotlight with its ample resources in metals," Choi said.
Shenzen-headquartered Chinese conglomerate BYD is in talks to buy six new lithium mines in unspecified African countries, Reuters reported, citing Shanghai government supported publication The Paper. Repeated emails to the company from VOA requesting details of the deals went unanswered.