start-rant
Lithium while not common is common enough, making up about 0.002% of the crust, but lithium mines aren’t. Supply is driven by demand is relatively inelastic when it requires permitting and large scale infrastructure. Lithium demand tripled between 1995 and 2010, and has tripled again in the last 2 years. There isn’t a single mined material that can keep up with this level of change in demand (unless there are mothballed mines lying around aka gold). Nickel and manganese have the same issue. There are some bigish gold mines, which have suddenly found out that they are actually nickel mines with a side of gold & copper. The good news is that pretty much every proven spodumene reserve is currently undergoing mining licensing and there will be an explosion in production in 3-5 years. Batteries have supply side scaling issues, but we know how to scale.
With current R&D in high silicon batteries, and solid state batteries, the energy storage vale of a kg of lithium is constantly increasing, and obviously it can be recycled. Something like a sodium-sulphur battery would turn all this on its head, but that’s just R&D at the moment.
Now, hydrogen, as H2 is a disaster to deal with. It is either handled high pressure, cryogenic, or both. It is leaky, it causes damage to pipes, and is flammable (and explosive) over a really wide range of mixtures, it burns clear and is hard to scent.
For H2 fuel cells to be mass market that are platinum free because platinum is not common (0.0000015% of the earths crust).
It may be really useful as a heat source in industrial settings, as a replacement for natural gas, but I suspect that it will end up becoming natural gas, H2->CH4 as it’s easier to store and ship.
Another path for hydrogen is ammonia, which could be awesome, but the H2 → NH3 pipeline (at scale) and ammonia fuel cells are well still in the early days.
You will notice that nobody talks about H2->CH4 or H2->NH3 because they whole hydrogen economy thing is mostly a green fig leaf over the natural gas industry and the ‘blue hydrogen’ concept, which is hot garbage.
Now, why would you value Polstar (Geely), BYD, Telsa over GM, Toyota, Volkswagen? Forgetting Musk because he’s just a distraction, history says, that when a core technology changes in an established market, the incumbents die. Paul Krugman, as a economist knows full well why Apple and Samsung destroyed Nokia and Sony-Ericsson, and Apples value is higher than Nokia ever was. It’s not ‘network effect’ BS, it’s not ‘bad management’, it’s the economic trap of trying to move a business that’s optimised for making component A (e.g. engines and gear boxes) of product X (e.g. car) to making component B (e.g battery packs, and motors) of product X (e.g. car). The crown jewels for most car companies are their engine plants, gear box design and manufacture, car assembly, and the design studio and engineering. It is exceptionally rare for a care company to out source these. In the EV future, assembly and design have a lot of value (but you may need different skill sets), but the engine and gearbox side of the business are a liability and will drag down the whole business.
We saw this with Kodak and digital cameras (Kodak were optimised for making film).
We saw it with literally every car company when they replaced horses, trams and bikes.
We saw this with hydraulic excavators replacing steam shovels (which blows my mind).
Now, the other super weird thing is, the new business always seem to be more prosperous than the business that they beat out, especially during the steep part of a transition.
So, why might some people value BYD as 2 x GM, because BYD offers a product that has higher value to the end user (electric cars), and only has to grow what it already does, while GM has to build and sell more (electric) cars, while also down sizing their core competencies, and service a debt on assets that are losing money, and get more money to build up it’s new competencies. They are fcuked.
Oh, and why will EV’s take over? They have more value to the end user and society as a whole. They offer energy independence on a personal and state level, improve the environment at a micro and macro level, are more reliable, and are generally nicer to use.
end-rant
