Some sells below were on a forced timescale due to needing cash to buy my house – if I hadn’t been house-buying I’d have chosen to keep hold of Centuras Metals and MLX as I have no doubts about their quality and long-term value versus current prices; and kept even more of Filo and Alphamin (still hold very large positions in both).
Atlantic Lithium (ALL / A11) 39.9p- DFS due Q2/3 2023. Will come with a resource upgrade to somewhere in the region of 35-37mt based on the known drill results. Last year's PFS was based on 30mt and a very conservative lithium price.
At Tesla’s 2023 Investor Day on March 1st the company revealed that its next generation PMSM traction motors would not use rare earth permanent magnets.As stated by Colin Campbell, VP Powertrain Engineering at Tesla, “as the world transitions to clean energy, demand for rare earths is really increasing dramatically and not only is it going to be a little hard to meet that demand but mining that rare earth, it has environmental and health risks”.Key takeaways from Adamas Intelligence: Likely a ferrite magnet powered PMSMTo-date, no perfect alternatives to NdFeBNot all rare earth production is equal when it comes to environmental and health impactsEnvironmental footprint of a motor using ferrite can be worse than NdFeBNdFeB market implications: Expected to be minorThe media and market’s reaction to the news has been largely overblown, speaking to a broad misunderstanding of the NdFeB market’s supply and demand fundamentals.Looking forward to 2035, Adamas forecasts that global demand for NdFeB magnets will triple while global production will only double, constrained by long lead times to bring online new rare earth oxide production.In relation to the magnitude of the expected supply gap, a Tesla-driven demand drop would go virtually unnoticed.
Through strategic partnerships, this plan includes disrupting the People’s Republic of China’s control of the North American REE supply chain through the near-term development of a heavy and light rare-earth processing facility in the US State of Louisiana, subsequent SMCs in Alaska and Canada and the longer-term development of Ucore’s heavy-rare-earth-element mineral-resource property at Bokan Mountain on Prince of Wales Island, Alaska.
In June Bloombergnef cast doubt on its earlier prediction that the cost of buying and running an ev would be as low as for a fossil-fuel car by 2024. More distant targets, such as the eu’s coming ban on new sales of carbon-burning cars by 2035, may not be met. Could the ev boom run out of juice before it gets going in earnest?On paper, there ought to be plenty of batteries to go round. Benchmark Minerals, a consultancy, has analysed manufacturers’ declared plans and found that, if they materialise, 282 new gigafactories should come online worldwide by 2031. That would take total global capacity to 5,800gwh. It is also a big “if”. Bernstein calculates that current and promised future supply from the six established battery-makers—BYD and CATL of China; LG, Samsung and SK Innovation of South Korea; and Panasonic of Japan—adds up to 1,360gwh by the end of the decade. The balance would have to come from newcomers, and being a newcomer in a capital-intensive industry is never easy.The optimistic overall capacity projections conceal other problems. Matteo Fini of S&P Global Mobility, a consultancy, notes that gigafactories take three years to build but require longer—possibly a few extra years—to manufacture at full capacity. As such, actual output by 2030 may fall short. Moreover, manufacturers’ unique technologies and specifications mean that cells from one factory are usually not interchangeable with those from another, which could create further bottlenecks.Most troubling for Western carmakers is China’s dominance of battery-making. The country houses close to 80% of the world’s current cell-manufacturing capacity. Benchmark Minerals forecasts that China’s share will decline in the next decade or so, but only a bit—to just under 70%. By then America would be home to just 12% of global capacity, with Europe accounting for most of the rest....Even if the West’s ev industry somehow managed to secure enough metals and battery-making capacity, it would still face a giant problem in the middle of the supply chain, refining, where China enjoys near-monopolies (see chart 3). Chinese companies refine nearly 70% of the world’s lithium, 84% of its nickel and 85% of its cobalt. Trafigura forecasts that the shares for the last two of these will remain above 75% for at least the next five years. And as with battery manufacturers, Chinese refiners gobble up dirty coal-generated electricity. On top of that, according to Trafigura, both European and North American firms are also expected to rely on foreign suppliers, often Chinese ones, for at least half the capacity to convert refined ores into the materials that go into batteries.Western governments grasp the urgent need to diversify their suppliers. Last year Joe Biden, America’s president, unveiled a blueprint for a domestic battery supply chain. His huge infrastructure law, passed in 2021, set aside $3bn for battery-making in America. The Inflation Reduction Act, which he signed into law on August 16th, also includes sweeteners for the industry, so long as the ores, refined materials and components come from America or allied countries. The eu, which created a battery alliance in 2017 to co-ordinate public and private efforts, says €127bn was invested last year across the supply chain, with an additional €382bn expected by 2030. Most of this is likely to land downstream, helping the West become self-sufficient in the production of finished cells by 2027.That is something. And newfound deposits, better mining technology, cleverer battery chemistry and sacrifices on performance may yet combine to bring the market into balance. More probably, as Jean-François Lambert, a commodities consultant, puts it, the ev industry is “going to be living a big lie for quite some time”.
Of those, CTM and Ecora are currently looking cheap. CTM a bargain at current weakness in price - anything under a dollar is cheap imo. Ecora pays a regular chunky dividend. Although general markets are wobbling on various anxieties so who knows, maybe will get even cheaper.
lots of things currently cheaper but is that as cheap as they go?