According To Tesla CEO Elon Musk, This Metal Is The New Gold

In the popular imagination, lithium is the element that powers EVs. However, as Elon Musk has pointed out, the term “lithium-ion batteries” is something of a misnomer, because they don’t really contain that much lithium. “Although [they’re] called lithium-ion, the actual percentage of lithium in a lithium-ion cell is approximately 2%,” Musk explained at Tesla’s 2016 shareholder meeting. “Technically, our cells should be called nickel-graphite, because the primary constituent in the cell as a whole is nickel.” 

More recently, Musk reiterated the importance of nickel, and made what sounded to some like an urgent plea for more of the stuff. “I’d just like to re-emphasise, any mining companies out there, please mine more nickel,” said Musk during Tesla’s latest quarterly conference call. “Wherever you are in the world, please mine more nickel and…go for efficiency, obviously environmentally-friendly nickel mining at high volume. Tesla will give you a giant contract for a long period of time, if you mine nickel efficiently and in an environmentally sensitive way.”

However, meeting the expected surge in demand for element #28 may not be so easy, because of various supply-side issues. In a recent interview with Kitco News, Michael Beck, Managing Director at Regent Advisors, said he sees something of a “perfect storm” brewing in the nickel trade.

A Tesla Model 3 contains around 30 kilograms of nickel, Beck told Kitco’s Michael McCrae. “Nickel is probably the single most important metal component in battery fabrication. It’s where all of the energy is stored, and increasingly battery chemistries are being refined to allow the inclusion of as much nickel as possible. The more nickel, the higher the energy density of the battery.”

The spotlight on nickel is a recent development. Nickel prices collapsed in 2007, and there’s been little development of new capacity since then, says Beck. “In this intervening almost 12 years there was no material investment in new nickel capacity. The last 12 years has been a drawdown of excess inventory, and that’s coming to an end. The ramp-up of demand is just beginning.”

The long lead time for bringing new nickel mines into production is another constraining factor. “It takes 7 to 10 years to bring on new nickel projects,” says Beck. “So, you have the makings of a perfect storm. You have a baked-in structural deficit for the next 12 years…you have inventories in the next 18 months going down to almost zero. You also have this new demand source that never existed for nickel.”