Solar's New Important Players: Chevron, Lockheed Martin [View article]
When the Royal Navy dispatched a modern warship with a trained crew to "investigate" an insult to the flag by unorganized or disorganized "pirates" it was not to get into the piracy business it was to show the little guys that you could not poach upon the business of empire without incurring the danger of retaliation. And, if the pirates turned out to be "on to something" then it was the job of the RN to institute a protectorate in the area if there were no one stronger locally to do the job.
The resources deployed by Chevron, for example, are, as this author shows, trivial in comparison to their total, but far from trivial in comparison to the "little guys." The green points earned by Chevron, for example, in California, are very important to its PR image.
I believe that the company called "Less Common Metals" in the UK produces, from Chinese REOs, rare earth oxides, the high purity rare earth metals, which it then processes to produce neodymium-iron-boron and samarium-cobalt alloy powders for rare earth alloy permanent magnet makers to process into magnets by sintering. Less Common Metals is a wholly owned subsidiary of Canada's Great Western Mining group. Another of the subsidiaries of GWMG, Great Western Technologies, Inc., which was originally known as Ovonic Materials, is equipped to make the lanthanum-nickel-cobalt hydride powder which can be processed to make the negative electrode of a nickel metal hydride battery, which battery is today universally used in mass produced hybrid cars such as the Toyota Prius and Lexus hybrids, the Honda Camry and Insight hybrids, and the Ford Escape, Mariner, Fusin, and Milan. I believe that Toyota and Sanyo in Japan also produce their own rare earth metal battery component alloys, and that Rhodia in France makes rare earth metals and alloys. All of the aforementioned metal and alloy makers depend almost exclusively today on Chinese REOs as starting materials. My point is that the technologies to make these materials and end-products is still in existence in the West, but time is running out rapidly. Unless domestic resources such as Mountain Pass are brought (back) into production economics will cause the end-use technologies to permanently migrate to the Far East. The tragedy of this is that the US will shortly thereafter lose the skills it needs to reconstitute such industries. It is foolish in the extreme to allow this to happen when a relatively small investment, an investment that will be repaid many times over, can insure against it.
General Electric's Impressive Entry into the Grid Based Energy Storage Business [View article]
John,
What goes around comes around. In 1966 I did some summer work at Ford (Motor Company) Scientific Laboratories on the alkali metal sulfur, molten salt, storage battery. We looked at all of the alkali metals and concluded that the availability of sodium made it the best choice. Lithium was studied but it was simply not readily available enough to be considered for mass production. As i think about that statement I am amazed that availability was even a consideration, but I think that car company engineering and procurement worked more closely together in those days. To be frank the lack of knowledge of the electrochemistry and reactivity of hot molten salts with container materials was also a big factor. I remember a seminar at the "Sci Lab" in which the director pointed out that the use of NaS batteries for mass transportation was a more practical idea than their use for personal transportation. Lo and behold after only 43 years it may perhaps happen, and I'll bet that in somewhat less than 43 more years a lithium-ion battery for personal ptransportation may well become economcial and safe enough to use. I just don't think that development is going to come out of the bureaucratized operations of budget driven innovation fantasized by the current American government as it supplies its "expertise" in politics to science and engineering.
Great article, by the way. Another definitve overview by you.
Today's, April 29th's, Washington Post has a very good article called "The Volt; Not Ready To Roll," www.washingtonpost.com.... Its conclusion is:
"... we would probably accomplish more in terms of sustainable fuel savings simply by driving less, trading in big cars for smaller ones, and improving existing hybrid and internal-combustion technology.
The Obama administration should refrain from lavishing public money on losing propositions such as GM's Volt -- and let the entrepreneurs keep on tinkering.
If anyone cares to take the time to read your summary article above, and the WP "editorial writer's article" referenced here the only logical conclusion is Game Over.
Note that when the red glare from the lithium investment bonfire dies down it will still be true that China is currently closing the gap between its domestic production of rare earth metals (used, among other things, to make NiMH batteries, and brushless DC motors) and its domestic demand for those metals. One of the reasons is, in fact, the increasing production of those two-wheelers for which lithium ion batteries seem to be too expensive. Another is the increasing production of rare earth based permanent magnets, and the computer hard drives and other electric motors that use them, in general, as the Chinese economy attempts to fill its domestic consumer demand. One day soon, if not already, (lanthanum) nickel metal-hydride batteries will only be able to be made in China due to China's position as the producer of 97% of the world's new rare earths.
Thus the hybrid vehicles in the DOE chart may well be imported from China beginning very soon.
White House Report: GM Volt Is Not Ready for Prime Time [View article]
speculawyer. At $350/kWh a Chevy Volt will need a $5000 battery (16 kWh). It will still may not be competitive, economically, or through performance at $32,000-the estimated price of the Volt with an $11,000 reduction in the current price of the battery-with a diesel VW which already has lower emissions than a Prius.
I am amazed that you think that just because GM chose to bet on a lithium-ion battery that it must be the right thing to do. What do you think of Toyota's bet on the nickel metal hydride battery hybrid which lost money for years while Toyota made money overall? GM has not made one cent of profit in more than 6 years by contrast. GM's game changing mistake was not to go head to head with Toyota at the beginning. It should have continued to make and refine the EV1, which today would be using Axion battery technology, and GM should have simultaneously begun producing a hybrid using the nickel metal hydride battery technology patented by Energy Conversion Devices, the production plant of which was origianlly about 5 miles from the GM Tech Center.
The reason that none of that happened is the short sighted, share price oriented outlook, of GM's money manager executives. GM has been actually bankrupt for years. The government is just the latest in a series of suckers who bet that GM is too big to fail.
Lithium cobalt oxide batteries have been produced commercially since 1991; they were scaled up to meet the demands of laptop computers successfully. There is no guarantee that cobalt or any other technology can be scaled up successfully.
Only politics has driven the lithium craze, not performance, reliability, durability, cycle life, or safety, and it will end when the money needs to be used somewhere else. The lithium clock is ticking down.
White House Report: GM Volt Is Not Ready for Prime Time [View article]
John. I screwed up my math, mea culpa. My lithium carbonate costs are for the entire, 16 kWh battery at $270. This makes the cost per kWh for lithium carbonate equivalent of fine chemicals about $17/kWh, which makes it incredibly obious where the costs are.
White House Report: GM Volt Is Not Ready for Prime Time [View article]
John. The current raw material cost for lithium carbonate at the refinery is $3 a pound. There are 25-30 pounds of lithium salts measured as carbonates in a Chevrolet Volt battery's current design. Therefore the actual cost of the raw materials, unprocessed, is less than 10% of the current cost of the finsihed product. Of course we must multiply that $90 by the cost of producing battery grade electrode and electrolyte chemicals, but I still do not think that we will reach more than $270.00 per Chevrolet Volt battery for "fine" chemicals. Isn't it interesting that to that number we must also add manufacturing costs, additional raw materials, and expensive programmed maintenance electronics costs. I wonder of $500/kWh isn't a fanciful goal after all. it may just be as low as it could possible ever get?
It's amazing that the lithium promoters do not realize that if they drive up the cost of lithium to the heights they imagine they will kill the goose before it lays an egg.
White House Report: GM Volt Is Not Ready for Prime Time [View article]
earwig. I want to add that BYD is a battery company that decided to make cars. Every one else on this planet in the automotive assembly business is trying to be a car company that makes or chooses batteries in order to engineer and produce an EV. I believe that BYD is already a major producer of ICE powered cars in China for the domestic market.
The main competitive advantage of BYD, I think, is that it is always able to switch out a defective battery and study the problem with a view to solving it. BYD can carry out the world's perfect beta test. If there is a battery failure, not caused by the driver, the customer gets a new battery and BYD gets data. BYD is one of if not the world's largest maker of lithium-ion batteries for personal electronics, so its R&D from its vehicles is added value to its research on scale up.
No other car maker has the advantages of BYD in the devlopment of an EV. If there are to be any winners in the li-ion EV race BYD will be one of them almost certainly. Of course they will have to learn about competitive fit and finish, impact protection, airbags, color matching over large surfaces, and so forth, but, they can always hire ex-GM and ex-Chrysler engineers for that.
White House Report: GM Volt Is Not Ready for Prime Time [View article]
John,
Once again you have hit the nail on the head. Li-ion battery technology is not today economical, and no one can say that lithium-ion technology is the final step, or even a good step, at this point, in the devlopment of a practical economcal storage battery. This has nothing to do with either the price of lithium or its availability yet these two factors are repeatedly invoked as market drivers. As you have said and proved above the politicians have conributed mightily to the creation of fantasy battery standards that are on their face suicidal to any hope of the future development of a practical lithium-ion battery.
As I keep saying, myself, accelerated testing as a standard for batteries is nuts. Battery electrochemistry and materials engineering is as much an art form today as a science. The most reliable way to meet a ten year warranty standard for a battery is to test it in real time for ten years! This means that even if the perfect technology were "discovered" today, we would not know it for ten more years! The costs of betting on any one technology to meet this standard for any company are astronomical. You would be betting the company on such a test, and you wouldn't know if you were going to have a failure until the entire 10 years had passed. Batteries are dynamic systems. They change over time. They are being addressed by politicians as if they were static systems, which don't change over time. What doesn't seem to ever change is the use of hype to inflate dreams until they burst.
MolyCorp Issues Letter of Intent For The Purchase Of Great Western Minerals Group; A Rare Earth Play Gets Legs [View instapost]
jmp,
It's a mystery to me, because Lynas seemed to be very highly thought of by Goldman last September,, when, at a conference in Hong Kong I had a chance to talk, separately, with officials of both companies. Lynas looked to me like it had all of its ducks in line at that point.Quite frnkly I thought that the MolyCorp deal was intended to include the use of the Lynas refinery then being financed to be buit in Maylaysia. In fact it was this project that got "suspended" when Goldman took its funding back. It seems to me that Mountain Pass could work either as a mine or as a refinery.If California will allow the reception and transit to the refinery of ores from Australia, Canada, Africa, Idaho, or Montana then Mountain Pass might well become a profit center even without producing from its own ore body. But did Goldman shut down Lynas to preserve its investment in MolyCorp for a reason such as that? I don't know.
On Apr 21 02:41 PM jimp wrote:
> Jack, > Do you have any idea why GS withdrew its funding for Lynas Corp? > > I see you have concentrated on North American rare earth miners, > but do you have any further comments on Lynas?
Lithium Batteries: Nothing But Illusion [View article]
Road Runner I am not a Wall Street Journal reporter; I am not constrained by deadlines or editorial restrictions. I am not trying to win a Pulitzer or a MacArthur Grant. The problem as I see it with everyone's understanding of these issues is intellectual laziness based on education by soundbite and clever phrase. If standard writing skill useage (as defined by you, of course) is your criterion then read Victor Davis Hanson he is a marvelous writer and teacher. I'm writing about my observations of the interactions, during my lifetime, between the "two cultures," and, of course, my observations are based on my experiences.
Axion Power: Time Is Right for Gas Guzzlers to Dual Mode EV Conversions [View article]
To place some of this very cogent arguments in a natural resources availability and future possible availability context, it should be noted that:
1) Lithium is widely distributed in the earth's crust, and so it has joined the group touted as "earth fundamental" by those whose ignorance of mining is profound. In fact accessible deposits of lithium are rare and are mostly in inhospitable places like the alkaline high deserts of the southern Andes. The largest known such deposit, in Bolivia, may well be worthless, because the cost of recovering its low lithium content and then separating that lithium from the very high magnesium content is at present prohibitive to say the least.
2) In general hard rock mining and processing of lithium minerals such as spodumene will be XXX% more expensive than the simple process of separating low magnesium brines; additionally the current discussion of using more common lithium minerals than spodumene ignores the fact that all other minerals are so much more expensive to process and the returns are so much less than for spodumene that such processing is uneconomical at any prices for lithium to be expected in the next generation.
3) Hard rock mining could create an immense environmental impact from the tons of tailings required for 100 kg of useful metal; in any case such concerns will keep any new or expanded lithium production in most countries in the regulatory tribunals for years, and
4) There is today no known way to recycle li-ion batteries into materials that are pure enough for use in new batteries at a price that makes such recycling attractive. Thus, even if politically corrupt countries produce some lithium the rule-of-law countries will regulate the disposal of lithium containing batteries and that fight and that added cost has not even been factored in yet.
Might I also point out that the world's known reserves of lithium, 50% of which are in the "iffy" Bolivian Uyuni desert deposits with their world's highest magnesium to lithium ratio, are just 13,000,000 metric tons, from which last year 2008, 27,000 metric tons of lithium were mined and refined. Compare this to lead, the global reserves of which are 170,000,000 metric tons, of which 3,800,000 metric tons were mined and refined in 2008. Note that no lithium was recycled last year while in the U.S. alone more than 850,000 metric tons were recycled, almost entirely from automotive SLI batteries.More than 50% of US industry's demand for lead is met by recycling right now.
The conclusion is that we know how to make, recycle, and reuse lead and lead carbon batteries right now, and the process is economical. Why then are billions being poured into the black hole of lithium for marginal increases in technology?
Anyone who thinks that lithium production can be ramped up to meet more than a small percentage of what would be needed to electrify even the world's existing fleet (750,000,000 cars and trucks) is wrong unless their perspective is generations not decades.
The US has more capacity in shut down lead mines than in currently producing ones.
What is the problem? It seems to be that politics has eclipsed economics, science, and common sense.
High Battery Costs for Electric Vehicles Obstructing Semiconductors' Growth [View article]
John, You've made a good point. Imagine a Prius with a small diesel, and/or a Ford Fusion/Milan hybrid with a diesel, and you've got low emission hybrids with 50-70 mpg range and good to excellent performance. My guess is that a Ford Fusion/Hybrid with a nickel metal hydride battery and a diesel 6 would have a range on a 16 gallon tank of 800-1000 miles. Why on earth would anyone want a 40 mile range smaller car with less carrying capacity for up to $10,000 more. Ordinary American consumers when confronted with the choice will pick the Ford product every time for value for their hard earned money. A few elites will buy a Volt to show how green they are, but it will not be their daily used vehicle. That will remain the Bentley, Lexus, BMW, or Mercedes, and the silliest toy of all, the Tesla.
Lithium-ion Batteries: 9 Years of Price Stagnation [View article]
John,
It is not tantalum it is the rare earth "name" metal, lanthanum, that is critical for NiMH batteries. Toyota has been tracking down and buying lanthanum for the last several years. It was not uncommon in China up until just a couple of years ago to see Toyota spot buyers at "artisanal" mining gathering places in Inner Mongolia paying cash for even small lots. When Toyota announced last year that it was going to triple the production of NiMH batteries at its in-house battery facilities in Japan it had originally planned to simultaneously annouce that it would scale up production of Prius type power trains from 1,000,000 per annum in 2011 to as many as 4,000,000 per annum in 2014. However a combination of Chinese domestic supply recapture programs for domestic use and the failure of large mining operations in Australia and the US to look like they would be meeting announced time tables caused Toyota to change its planned announcement. The 1,000,000 per annum by 2011 is still said to be on target but beyond that all is now silence.
The future of batteries is lead/carbon-acid for general, but restricted range, vehicle electrification, NiMH for longer range in hybrid power trains, ICEs for long distance on-road freight and performance-necessary (military), and (hand built) lithium-ion for high performance, price no-object, status vehicles.
Solar's New Important Players: Chevron, Lockheed Martin [View article]
The resources deployed by Chevron, for example, are, as this author shows, trivial in comparison to their total, but far from trivial in comparison to the "little guys." The green points earned by Chevron, for example, in California, are very important to its PR image.
Molycorp CEO: Why Rare Earth Metals Matter [View article]
General Electric's Impressive Entry into the Grid Based Energy Storage Business [View article]
What goes around comes around. In 1966 I did some summer work at Ford (Motor Company) Scientific Laboratories on the alkali metal sulfur, molten salt, storage battery. We looked at all of the alkali metals and concluded that the availability of sodium made it the best choice. Lithium was studied but it was simply not readily available enough to be considered for mass production. As i think about that statement I am amazed that availability was even a consideration, but I think that car company engineering and procurement worked more closely together in those days. To be frank the lack of knowledge of the electrochemistry and reactivity of hot molten salts with container materials was also a big factor. I remember a seminar at the "Sci Lab" in which the director pointed out that the use of NaS batteries for mass transportation was a more practical idea than their use for personal transportation. Lo and behold after only 43 years it may perhaps happen, and I'll bet that in somewhat less than 43 more years a lithium-ion battery for personal ptransportation may well become economcial and safe enough to use. I just don't think that development is going to come out of the bureaucratized operations of budget driven innovation fantasized by the current American government as it supplies its "expertise" in politics to science and engineering.
Great article, by the way. Another definitve overview by you.
Jack Lifton
The Plug In Vehicle Scam [View article]
Today's, April 29th's, Washington Post has a very good article called "The Volt; Not Ready To Roll," www.washingtonpost.com.... Its conclusion is:
"... we would probably accomplish more in terms of sustainable fuel savings simply by driving less, trading in big cars for smaller ones, and improving existing hybrid and internal-combustion technology.
The Obama administration should refrain from lavishing public money on losing propositions such as GM's Volt -- and let the entrepreneurs keep on tinkering.
If anyone cares to take the time to read your summary article above, and the WP "editorial writer's article" referenced here the only logical conclusion is Game Over.
The Plug In Vehicle Scam [View article]
Finis Lithium
Note that when the red glare from the lithium investment bonfire dies down it will still be true that China is currently closing the gap between its domestic production of rare earth metals (used, among other things, to make NiMH batteries, and brushless DC motors) and its domestic demand for those metals. One of the reasons is, in fact, the increasing production of those two-wheelers for which lithium ion batteries seem to be too expensive. Another is the increasing production of rare earth based permanent magnets, and the computer hard drives and other electric motors that use them, in general, as the Chinese economy attempts to fill its domestic consumer demand. One day soon, if not already, (lanthanum) nickel metal-hydride batteries will only be able to be made in China due to China's position as the producer of 97% of the world's new rare earths.
Thus the hybrid vehicles in the DOE chart may well be imported from China beginning very soon.
White House Report: GM Volt Is Not Ready for Prime Time [View article]
I am amazed that you think that just because GM chose to bet on a lithium-ion battery that it must be the right thing to do. What do you think of Toyota's bet on the nickel metal hydride battery hybrid which lost money for years while Toyota made money overall? GM has not made one cent of profit in more than 6 years by contrast. GM's game changing mistake was not to go head to head with Toyota at the beginning. It should have continued to make and refine the EV1, which today would be using Axion battery technology, and GM should have simultaneously begun producing a hybrid using the nickel metal hydride battery technology patented by Energy Conversion Devices, the production plant of which was origianlly about 5 miles from the GM Tech Center.
The reason that none of that happened is the short sighted, share price oriented outlook, of GM's money manager executives. GM has been actually bankrupt for years. The government is just the latest in a series of suckers who bet that GM is too big to fail.
Lithium cobalt oxide batteries have been produced commercially since 1991; they were scaled up to meet the demands of laptop computers successfully. There is no guarantee that cobalt or any other technology can be scaled up successfully.
Only politics has driven the lithium craze, not performance, reliability, durability, cycle life, or safety, and it will end when the money needs to be used somewhere else. The lithium clock is ticking down.
White House Report: GM Volt Is Not Ready for Prime Time [View article]
White House Report: GM Volt Is Not Ready for Prime Time [View article]
It's amazing that the lithium promoters do not realize that if they drive up the cost of lithium to the heights they imagine they will kill the goose before it lays an egg.
White House Report: GM Volt Is Not Ready for Prime Time [View article]
The main competitive advantage of BYD, I think, is that it is always able to switch out a defective battery and study the problem with a view to solving it. BYD can carry out the world's perfect beta test. If there is a battery failure, not caused by the driver, the customer gets a new battery and BYD gets data. BYD is one of if not the world's largest maker of lithium-ion batteries for personal electronics, so its R&D from its vehicles is added value to its research on scale up.
No other car maker has the advantages of BYD in the devlopment of an EV. If there are to be any winners in the li-ion EV race BYD will be one of them almost certainly. Of course they will have to learn about competitive fit and finish, impact protection, airbags, color matching over large surfaces, and so forth, but, they can always hire ex-GM and ex-Chrysler engineers for that.
White House Report: GM Volt Is Not Ready for Prime Time [View article]
Once again you have hit the nail on the head. Li-ion battery technology is not today economical, and no one can say that lithium-ion technology is the final step, or even a good step, at this point, in the devlopment of a practical economcal storage battery. This has nothing to do with either the price of lithium or its availability yet these two factors are repeatedly invoked as market drivers. As you have said and proved above the politicians have conributed mightily to the creation of fantasy battery standards that are on their face suicidal to any hope of the future development of a practical lithium-ion battery.
As I keep saying, myself, accelerated testing as a standard for batteries is nuts. Battery electrochemistry and materials engineering is as much an art form today as a science. The most reliable way to meet a ten year warranty standard for a battery is to test it in real time for ten years! This means that even if the perfect technology were "discovered" today, we would not know it for ten more years! The costs of betting on any one technology to meet this standard for any company are astronomical. You would be betting the company on such a test, and you wouldn't know if you were going to have a failure until the entire 10 years had passed. Batteries are dynamic systems. They change over time. They are being addressed by politicians as if they were static systems, which don't change over time. What doesn't seem to ever change is the use of hype to inflate dreams until they burst.
MolyCorp Issues Letter of Intent For The Purchase Of Great Western Minerals Group; A Rare Earth Play Gets Legs [View instapost]
It's a mystery to me, because Lynas seemed to be very highly thought of by Goldman last September,, when, at a conference in Hong Kong I had a chance to talk, separately, with officials of both companies. Lynas looked to me like it had all of its ducks in line at that point.Quite frnkly I thought that the MolyCorp deal was intended to include the use of the Lynas refinery then being financed to be buit in Maylaysia. In fact it was this project that got "suspended" when Goldman took its funding back. It seems to me that Mountain Pass could work either as a mine or as a refinery.If California will allow the reception and transit to the refinery of ores from Australia, Canada, Africa, Idaho, or Montana then Mountain Pass might well become a profit center even without producing from its own ore body. But did Goldman shut down Lynas to preserve its investment in MolyCorp for a reason such as that? I don't know.
On Apr 21 02:41 PM jimp wrote:
> Jack,
> Do you have any idea why GS withdrew its funding for Lynas Corp?
>
> I see you have concentrated on North American rare earth miners,
> but do you have any further comments on Lynas?
Lithium Batteries: Nothing But Illusion [View article]
Axion Power: Time Is Right for Gas Guzzlers to Dual Mode EV Conversions [View article]
1) Lithium is widely distributed in the earth's crust, and so it has joined the group touted as "earth fundamental" by those whose ignorance of mining is profound. In fact accessible deposits of lithium are rare and are mostly in inhospitable places like the alkaline high deserts of the southern Andes. The largest known such deposit, in Bolivia, may well be worthless, because the cost of recovering its low lithium content and then separating that lithium from the very high magnesium content is at present prohibitive to say the least.
2) In general hard rock mining and processing of lithium minerals such as spodumene will be XXX% more expensive than the simple process of separating low magnesium brines; additionally the current discussion of using more common lithium minerals than spodumene ignores the fact that all other minerals are so much more expensive to process and the returns are so much less than for spodumene that such processing is uneconomical at any prices for lithium to be expected in the next generation.
3) Hard rock mining could create an immense environmental impact from the tons of tailings required for 100 kg of useful metal; in any case such concerns will keep any new or expanded lithium production in most countries in the regulatory tribunals for years, and
4) There is today no known way to recycle li-ion batteries into materials that are pure enough for use in new batteries at a price that makes such recycling attractive. Thus, even if politically corrupt countries produce some lithium the rule-of-law countries will regulate the disposal of lithium containing batteries and that fight and that added cost has not even been factored in yet.
Might I also point out that the world's known reserves of lithium, 50% of which are in the "iffy" Bolivian Uyuni desert deposits with their world's highest magnesium to lithium ratio, are just 13,000,000 metric tons, from which last year 2008, 27,000 metric tons of lithium were mined and refined. Compare this to lead, the global reserves of which are 170,000,000 metric tons, of which 3,800,000 metric tons were mined and refined in 2008. Note that no lithium was recycled last year while in the U.S. alone more than 850,000 metric tons were recycled, almost entirely from automotive SLI batteries.More than 50% of US industry's demand for lead is met by recycling right now.
The conclusion is that we know how to make, recycle, and reuse lead and lead carbon batteries right now, and the process is economical. Why then are billions being poured into the black hole of lithium for marginal increases in technology?
Anyone who thinks that lithium production can be ramped up to meet more than a small percentage of what would be needed to electrify even the world's existing fleet (750,000,000 cars and trucks) is wrong unless their perspective is generations not decades.
The US has more capacity in shut down lead mines than in currently producing ones.
What is the problem? It seems to be that politics has eclipsed economics, science, and common sense.
High Battery Costs for Electric Vehicles Obstructing Semiconductors' Growth [View article]
Lithium-ion Batteries: 9 Years of Price Stagnation [View article]
It is not tantalum it is the rare earth "name" metal, lanthanum, that is critical for NiMH batteries. Toyota has been tracking down and buying lanthanum for the last several years. It was not uncommon in China up until just a couple of years ago to see Toyota spot buyers at "artisanal" mining gathering places in Inner Mongolia paying cash for even small lots. When Toyota announced last year that it was going to triple the production of NiMH batteries at its in-house battery facilities in Japan it had originally planned to simultaneously annouce that it would scale up production of Prius type power trains from 1,000,000 per annum in 2011 to as many as 4,000,000 per annum in 2014. However a combination of Chinese domestic supply recapture programs for domestic use and the failure of large mining operations in Australia and the US to look like they would be meeting announced time tables caused Toyota to change its planned announcement. The 1,000,000 per annum by 2011 is still said to be on target but beyond that all is now silence.
The future of batteries is lead/carbon-acid for general, but restricted range, vehicle electrification, NiMH for longer range in hybrid power trains, ICEs for long distance on-road freight and performance-necessary (military), and (hand built) lithium-ion for high performance, price no-object, status vehicles.
Best regards,
Jack