Elon Musk Isn’t Keen On Mining Lithium, But We’ll Need More Li-ion Batteries For A Sustainable Future

Earlier in April, Elon Musk had suggested that Tesla could start mining lithium to meet the increased demand for batteries made from the element around the world. But the Tesla CEO has said in an interview with the Getting Stoned Podcast that he isn’t keen on the venture any longer, owing to limited human resource and the complexity of lithium mining and refinement processes.  

Why was Tesla looking into lithium mining? 

“The fundamental governor of the rate at which we can transition into sustainability is the rate at which we can grow the output of lithium ion batteries.”

Tesla’s entire lineup of electric vehicles (EVs) relies on lithium ion batteries for propulsion. Besides building cars, Tesla also provides stationary energy storage solutions such as the Powerpack which can provide supplementary or emergency electric supply to buildings. The carmaker has even scaled up to the Megapack – an energy storage “park” which can provide off-grid electricity to up to 3,600 homes for an hour! 

Musk adds, “There are three pillars to a sustainable energy future – one is electric transport, the other is sustainable power generation, primarily through solar and wind, and the third is stationary battery energy storage.” There’s clearly a global need for a large number of battery packs made from hundreds of lithium cells. But building these cells isn’t easy. 

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“We don’t want to go into the mining industry, or the refining industry, because the limitation is more lithium refinement than it is the actual mining. So you’ve got to take the ore that contains lithium and refine it to get it to battery grade lithium hydroxide and lithium carbonate.” 

In other words, mining isn’t the only issue, extraction of pure lithium from its ore is a bigger concern. Elon elaborates, “It has to be extremely pure, otherwise you have a breakdown in the cell. You can’t have impurities in the cell, because it would cause the cell to fail. So the challenge with a lot of the ingredients in lithium ion batteries is, it’s not the fundamental rarity of lithium – lithium is very common, it’s the most common element on earth – but you’ve got to turn it into battery grade lithium, and that’s where the choke point is.”

For this reason, Musk hopes that lithium supply problems wouldn’t make it necessary for his company to get into lithium mining. It’s also about manpower. “There’s a limited number of smart people, so we can say either ‘work on this problem or that problem’. There’s no magical source of super talented people.” 

Tesla is scaling up energy storage systems 

“The overall goal of Tesla is to accelerate the advancement of sustainable energy,” Musk says. “We want to work on the things that accelerate sustainable energy the fastest.” 

Tesla is in for the long run in the stationary energy storage business. According to Musk, around 3 lakh gigawatt hours of energy storage is needed to fully transition the planet to sustainable energy. This translates to a steady supply of 15 terawatts (15,000GWh) of batteries every year for twenty years to reach that goal. 

Tesla Gigafactory produces lithium cells for EVs and other applications

At the moment, we are far from generating enough batteries for anything other than EVs. According to data from Wood Mackenzie, the global production capacity stood at 600GWh in 2021. Electric vehicles are the primary consumers of lithium ion batteries. 

Also read: 

• Tesla Could Get Into Lithium Mining For Battery Production Owing To Rising Costs

• Haryana Govt Introduces New EV Policy With Discounts For Both Hybrid Cars And Battery EVs

• Kia Installs India’s Fastest Charger Rated At 150kWh, Claims To Charge From 10-80 Percent In 42 Minutes

Global lithium battery production is rising rapidly, and its exponential growth is key to making electric cars more affordable. Closer to home, NITI Ayog expects India’s global demand for lithium batteries to reach 260GWh by 2030. The government has a production linked incentive (PLI) programme in place to accelerate local battery production.