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Keith Phillips, CEO of Piedmont Lithium, as an interesting view: Essentially, will we have enough lithium to meet our transportation needs? Sure. Eventually. Will we have it by the time all these ambitious goals like California’s “no-internal-combustion engines (ICE) by 2035” ? Uh, no.<\/p>\n
\u201cYes, we\u2019ll [eventually] have enough, but not by that time,\u201d Keith Phillips, CEO of Piedmont Lithium (PLL<\/a>), said in an interview with Yahoo Finance Live (video above). \u201cThere\u2019s going to be a real crunch to get the material. We don\u2019t have enough in the world to turn that much [lithium] production in the world by 2035.”<\/em> (Emphasis mine)<\/p>\n
With the average electric car battery requiring roughly 8-10kg of the metal, lithium remains a crucial material in the transition to emission-free vehicles. Growing demand has caused the price of lithium carbonate to nearly double this year alone, and the\u00a0IEA projects<\/a>\u00a0demand to grow by 40 times in the next two decades, with a majority of that supply coming from outside of the U.S.<\/p>\n
The president has called for half of all new vehicles sold by 2030 to be electric, setting aside billions of dollars in the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) to incentivize drivers to make the shift.<\/p>\n
But those same tax credits come with requirements calling for parts and components to be largely sourced in North America, leading some EV makers to push back against the goals on the grounds that they\u00a0are not realistic<\/a>.<\/p>\n
While carmakers like General Motors (GM<\/a>) have rushed to\u00a0secure partnerships with domestic mining operations<\/a>\u00a0in anticipation of the demand, the Albemarle (ALB<\/a>) Silver Peak mine in Nevada remains the only operational lithium mine with meaningful output.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n