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In a nutshell the panelists felt impressed and confident of Tesla's downstream abilities in cars and battery manufacturing and had a lot of questions about their upstream strategies to acquire the amount of processed battery materials they needed for growth plans in the time stated. They felt things like lithium processing and going to anything higher than 10% silicon in the anode were particularly opaque. And they thought statements like now the nickel industry knows we are serious so they will ramp production a fundamental disconnect on understanding what gets mines to ramp production. They tried to be positive, but it was obvious that as much respect as they had for Tesla bringing on the first giga factory, they were having trouble understanding how they would get to 3 terawatts/year or anything close to that by 2030 based on what they heard during battery day.
My personal take is Tesla was purposely being opaque in upstream strategy because they are still doing a lot of wheeling and dealing on this front. I hope to have a lot more clarity on this by years end. One last interesting note, Vivas who used to be on Tesla's supply chain team mentioned that everyone on stage were engineer managers and their were no supply chain people to answer questions on stage. I wish VIvas had got a lot more air time and wish even more that he still worked for Tesla. Gali has a great interview with him if you want to get a sense of how smart and well informed this guy is on battery supply chain.
My personal take is Tesla was purposely being opaque in upstream strategy because they are still doing a lot of wheeling and dealing on this front. I hope to have a lot more clarity on this by years end. One last interesting note, Vivas who used to be on Tesla's supply chain team mentioned that everyone on stage were engineer managers and their were no supply chain people to answer questions on stage. I wish VIvas had got a lot more air time and wish even more that he still worked for Tesla. Gali has a great interview with him if you want to get a sense of how smart and well informed this guy is on battery supply chain.
What is of interest to me would be a set of DD numbers, like the following from Tesla:
1. If we are expecting to build X autos and GWh of storage batteries this year, then we’ll be needing Y tonnes of Ni (NiO / NiSO4 / NiCl2 - doesn’t matter).
2. And we expect to be increasing that at a steady Z percent per year over the subsequent Q years.
Now, with that then a mining firm - or the industry - can present a response.
Has Tesla done so? We don’t know - and correctly so. That kind of showing-of-one’s-hand ought occur only within the most ironclad of NDAs.
1. If we are expecting to build X autos and GWh of storage batteries this year, then we’ll be needing Y tonnes of Ni (NiO / NiSO4 / NiCl2 - doesn’t matter).
2. And we expect to be increasing that at a steady Z percent per year over the subsequent Q years.
Now, with that then a mining firm - or the industry - can present a response.
Has Tesla done so? We don’t know - and correctly so. That kind of showing-of-one’s-hand ought occur only within the most ironclad of NDAs.
I am the one who attempted on SAY to get Elon and team to provide greater clarity on where the battery materials to support their multi Terawatt ambitions was going to come from. Now that we know what they presented, how would you ask a question to tease out more clarity on this issue without crossing the boundary into what should be NDA territory?
Geez, you're tough.
The best results I had as an institutional investor - and, as many know, the extractive industry was my niche as well as my pre-Wall St background - is along the lines of
"Are you willing to share with us some of the details of your contracts with those in the nickel industry? Do you need nickel metal or can you accept nickel chloride? Ni-sulfate? What kinds of force majeure contract discussion have you had? Have current or potential trade tariffs been a part of your conversations?"
You see, you're not coming right out and asking them "How much are you going to be paying for product next quarter?". You're teasing them into divulging material that both is broad and useful, and letting them know you have a knowledge of the indsutry.
The best results I had as an institutional investor - and, as many know, the extractive industry was my niche as well as my pre-Wall St background - is along the lines of
"Are you willing to share with us some of the details of your contracts with those in the nickel industry? Do you need nickel metal or can you accept nickel chloride? Ni-sulfate? What kinds of force majeure contract discussion have you had? Have current or potential trade tariffs been a part of your conversations?"
You see, you're not coming right out and asking them "How much are you going to be paying for product next quarter?". You're teasing them into divulging material that both is broad and useful, and letting them know you have a knowledge of the indsutry.
From the comment section of that video:
Karen Pease 1 hour ago (edited)
The reaction would be cation substitution in hectorites, Na+ for Li+. I'm not sure under what temperature / pressure / etc conditions this would be thermodynamically favoured, or the reaction rates, or really anything. This would be very easy if the lithium were in the exchangable cations between layers (phyllosilicates are well known for having high cation exchange capacity), but my understanding is that it's mainly within the octahedral structure within the core of the planar layers, and not as readily accessible. Normally you process lithium clays with sulfuric acid; the challenge is (as was discussed in the interview) being economically competitive with brine and esp. spodumene at current market prices (at higher prices, it's a no-brainer). In this case, metal cations are not simply replaced by other metal cations, but with H+, leading to the dispersion of the octahedral layers and an amorphous silicon product. Can you do a metal-metal cation exchange under milder conditions? I really don't know... I've got a lot of digging through papers to do.... Certainly nature frequently alters phyllosilicates in all sorts of ways, but....
Karen Pease 1 hour ago (edited)
The reaction would be cation substitution in hectorites, Na+ for Li+. I'm not sure under what temperature / pressure / etc conditions this would be thermodynamically favoured, or the reaction rates, or really anything. This would be very easy if the lithium were in the exchangable cations between layers (phyllosilicates are well known for having high cation exchange capacity), but my understanding is that it's mainly within the octahedral structure within the core of the planar layers, and not as readily accessible. Normally you process lithium clays with sulfuric acid; the challenge is (as was discussed in the interview) being economically competitive with brine and esp. spodumene at current market prices (at higher prices, it's a no-brainer). In this case, metal cations are not simply replaced by other metal cations, but with H+, leading to the dispersion of the octahedral layers and an amorphous silicon product. Can you do a metal-metal cation exchange under milder conditions? I really don't know... I've got a lot of digging through papers to do.... Certainly nature frequently alters phyllosilicates in all sorts of ways, but....
So an 18 minute video where they say they don't know how it could be done. OK.
Xepa777
Banned
Here is a link to the webinar I attended. It is a very worthwhile watch with a lot more detail beyond the summery I wrote yesterday:
I can't find any of the other webinars. Those might require a 2,000 pound membership
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Piedmont Lithium ($PLL.AX) trading is still halted. I think it's because they broke Australian Stock Exchange rules by posting a press release (announcing a Tesla deal) on their web site without informing ASX, but I can't find anything definitive.
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