Post by account_disabled on Feb 28, 2024 10:44:35 GMT
Europe's race toward electric cars has a stumbling block: the persistent shortage of lithium, a key component of the batteries that will power the vehicles of the future. The EU's plans to ban the sale of new gasoline and diesel cars by 2035 only cause the search for the material to reach levels never seen before. According to Benchmark Mineral Intelligence, the forecast is that lithium demand will quintuple between now and 2030 to reach 550,000 tons annually, more than double the 200,000 tons that the region will be able to produce. "The entire world market will remain in deficit at the end of the decade," Daisy Jennings-Gray, an analyst at the same agency, told the Financial Times . "Europe will likely be in a tight position in terms of availability and cannot afford any delay in national projects to extract the metal," she continues.
In this sense, the media maintains, the supply problem has been highlighted by the world's largest lithium producer, Albemarle , which has abandoned its plans to extract lithium in Europe after failing to find a commercially viable site. The future of mobility under Asia Phone Number List debate: components are missing to electrify the world, young people prefer public transport and the idea of ending the private car is hovering In fact, Carlos Tavares, CEO of the Stellantis Group – the group behind brands such as Fiat, Alfa Romeo, Jeep, Peugeot, Opel and Citroën – has focused on this point. "We know we need lithium. We know we are not producing as much as we need. Right now we have 1.3 billion cars that run on internal combustion engines on the planet," he says. The manager has stressed that not only lithium can be enough, but the concentration of lithium extraction can bring other geopolitical problems.
Europe, therefore, requires new production techniques to obtain its own lithium. In fact, the Old Continent does not produce chemical lithium for batteries, 44% of the world's supply comes from China . The expected lithium deficit in a market that is already suffering from a global shortage and suffers from high prices of 62,000 dollars per ton (just over 57,000 euros)—more than 5 times the average production cost despite a recent drop—may be capital for European car manufacturers. The challenge of winning the race to China lithium factory lithium factoryREUTERS/Joyce Zhou Without domestic supply, European car groups could find it difficult to compete with China , which is rapidly expanding its electric car industry and making inroads into the European market. One sign of Chinese dominance here is that it controls 60% of global lithium processing — which converts a concentrate produced from brine or ore into lithium chemical compounds, such as carbonate or hydroxide, used in car batteries.