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Lam Yik/Bloomberg
There’s only one thing standing between
Tesla
and world domination—the global supply of lithium. And that’s good news for lithium producers.
When Tesla (ticker: TSLA) held its battery day on Sept. 22, CEO Elon Musk laid out plans to build massive amounts of Tesla-owned battery capacity—enough to make about 30 million electric vehicles by the end of the decade, up from roughly 500,000 in 2020.
Such an enormous increase depends upon mass acceptance of electric vehicles over traditional combustion-engine ones and the creation of the infrastructure necessary to fuel that many EVs. But it will also require a massive amount of lithium to make the batteries those cars will run on—a massive challenge in its own right.
Right now, the world mines roughly 400,000 tons of lithium a year, enough to power 2 million to 3 million electric vehicles, though only a third of that goes