Uh-oh. In the pell-mell race to develop lithium-ion batteries for plug-ins, EV's and hybrids, has any automaker taken a hard look at where all that lithium is going to come from? Guess what? Not only are global lithium supplies pretty tight, prices are about to skyrocket.
Right now, all lithium producers around the world are running flat out, and plans are afoot to ramp up production dramatically. But while there's a lot of lithium in planet Earth, I'm told that it's kind of like oil shale: it's there, but it's not cheap or easy to get.
And there are other competing demands for using lithium, like in producing ceramic, glass and aluminum. And for air conditioning systems. It's even used by the pharmaceutical industry for treating depression. Now the auto industry wants to start using huge amounts of it.
"Demand will soon outstrip supply. We're going to see prices spike," Christian M. Lastoskie, Ph.D., of the Department of Civil & Environmental Engineering, at the University of Michigan, tells me. Read full from john-mcelroy