It won’t be a shortage in terms of ‘peak lithium’; rather, it will be a game of catch-up with the electric car boom, with miners hustling to explore and tap into new reserves.
Consider the number of battery gigafactories that are being built around the world. We have all heard about the Tesla Motors Inc (NASDAQ:TSLA) facility that will, at full capacity, produce enough batteries to power 500,000 electric cars per year by 2020.
This, as the carmaker proudly notes, is more than the global total lithium ion battery production for 2013. That’s a pretty impressive rate of demand growth over just three years—but this growth also represents the culmination of a sea change in the way we think.