Telsa may have entered the field of mining, directly purifying lithium

Elon Musk chirp Tesla You may get into lithium mining and refining directly and on a large scale because the cost of the metal, a key component in battery manufacturing, has gone up so high.

“The price of lithium has gone crazy,” Musk wrote on Twitter. “There is no shortage of the element itself, as lithium is almost ubiquitous on Earth, but the pace of extraction/refinement is slow.”

The head of Tesla and SpaceX technologies was responding to a tweet detailing the average price of lithium per ton in the past two decades, which has shown a massive increase in prices since 2021. According to Metallurgical Intelligence StandardThe cost of the metal has risen more than 480% in the past year.

There are already deposits of lithium throughout the United States, according to USGS, a division of the US Department of the Interior.

Lithium is valuable in electric vehicle batteries because it represents both Lightest metal and least dense solid. This means that lithium batteries have an extension High energy-to-weight ratiowhich is important when dealing with transportation.

Friday’s tweet isn’t the first time Musk has raised the idea of ​​Tesla mining lithium.

In 2020, Tesla acquired its own rights to a lithium mine in Nevada after a failed deal to buy a lithium mining company, According to Fortune, who was there for “people familiar with the matter.”