LI3 Energy Inc (fka LIEG)

[Dr_Vonschellan]

Tesla Electric semi trucks, huge_lithium_battery_packs.
Yesterday Elon Muck showed us the future for electric semi trucks and it was simply breathtaking click here

Elon Musk is planning for a 500 mile range on these behemoth trucks. If the lithium-ion battery system generates 240 watt-hours per kilogram at the cell-level, then Tesla will need a 12 Tonne battery pushing out 1,000kWh. If the battery per kWh cost is $100 then the battery pack will cost $100,000.

In a perfect ideal world each kWh of power requires 80g of Lithium metal per kWh which translates into 425g of LCE (Lithium Carbonate Equivalent) to produce one kWh in a sterile clean HEPA-filtered testing laboratory. However, after you factor in cycling loss, the lithium purity of technical grade Li2CO3 incorporated into a low-sodium battery grade material with a real world yield of 70% it turns out you would actually need more like 3kgs of LCE to start with for each kWh of required power output.

A proposed Tesla 12-Tonne 1,000kWh battery could then require 3,000kgs or 3.0MT of LCE for manufacturing operations. FYI, 3.0MT at the bargain price of $12,000/MT would cost Elon $36,000 today, but we all know this is going to jump to at least $14,000/MT in 2018.

If our Maricunga NewCo JV produces at the bare minimum for export 25,000MT of LCE per year then we could supply Elon with enough LCE to make (25,000/3) = 8,333 electric semi trucks per year... or a similar number of Fulin Yema electric trucks in China we keep Fulin around.

The Doctor

PS, LPI got some good PR today in Mining Weekly Click Here