Supply Chain

Industry: Supply Chain Source: BloombergNEF, IEA

Lithium prices started to decline at the end of 2022, but remained roughly 3X higher than prices from December 2021 due to tightness in the market. Over the near-term, Bloomberg expects that “the lithium industry could struggle to meet growing demand from EVs unless new projects are ramped up quickly over the next two years.” S&P Global also expects a tight market in 2023. Over the long-term, the International Energy Agency notes that meeting the rapid growth in lithium (and cobalt) demand will likely require “strong growth in investment to bring forward new supply sources over the next decade”. Automakers, however, are already switching to less cobalt-intensive batteries, so the cobalt supply challenge is a relatively less challenging problem to tackle than the lithium one.

Volta Foundation

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