Tesla CEO Elon Musk is pictured as he attends a production start ceremony at Tesla’s “Gigafactory” on March 22, 2022 in Gruenheide, southeast of Berlin.
Patrick Pleul | AFP | beautiful pictures
Elon Musk tweeted Tesla could enter the lithium mining and refining business directly and at scale because the cost of the metal, a key ingredient in battery manufacturing, has risen so high.
“The price of lithium has gone up to crazy levels,” Musk wrote on Twitter. “The element itself is not lacking, as lithium is almost everywhere on Earth, but the rate of extraction/refining is very slow.”
The Tesla and SpaceX tech boss responded to a tweet showing the average price per ton of lithium over the past two decades, showing a large price increase since 2021. Smart Minerals BenchmarkThe price of this metal has increased by more than 480% in the last year.
In fact, there are a lot of deposits of lithium throughout the United States, according to United States Geological Survey, a division of the United States Department of the Interior.
Lithium is valuable in electric vehicle batteries because it is both lightest metal and least dense solid element. That means batteries made of lithium have High power-to-weight ratioThis is very important when dealing with shipping issues.
Friday’s tweet isn’t the first time Musk has raised the idea of Tesla mining its own lithium.
In 2020, Tesla secured its own lithium mining rights in Nevada after a deal to buy a lithium miner fell through, according to Fortune, which is selecting “people familiar with the matter.”
