A First Look at Lithium Ion Batteries (Electric Vehicles)

Electric cars (mobility in general) are part of our future. Demand is growing all over the world and producers now exist in Asia, Europe & North America. It's an emerging market and is yet to mature. This makes it interesting from an investment point of view. But when and how to invest? I'm just going to publish my research here as and when I can be bothered. If anyone wants to contribute with news, ideas, technical info I will be grateful.

Lithium Ion Batteries (Li-ion)

• Provide energy storage, make up one of the key components in e-vehicles, determine to a large degree vehicle range and performance limitations
  
• Key ingredients incl: lithium (carbonate or hydroxide) as well as cobalt, nickel, aluminium, manganese and graphite
  
• Basically ions (charged particles of lithium) flow from a negative electrode (anode) to a positive electrode (cathode) in a liquid medium (electrolyte).
  
• Lithium is used in production of the electrolyte and cathode
  
• Current li-ion types incl: lithium-cobalt oxide (LiCoO) and lithium-nickel-manganese-cobalt oxide (LiNiMnCoO or NMC). NMC takes a leading place in the automotive sector.
  

Apart from lithium both cobalt and nickel are highly prized by manufacturers and NME batteries, which are made out of all three, offer good safety levels with promising energy densities.

For investors li-ion innovation/production is an important area to keep abreast of. Recently prices of cobalt have gone through the roof, this led manufacturers to look for alternatives such a nickel and manganese. Berkeley researchers claim it is possible to build electrodes without cobalt (cleantechnica.com/20...thium-ion-batteries/) which also offer more capacity using manganese for example. So it is important to have a layman's grasp of the technology and ensure knowledge of latest research. It is likely that a variety of different solutions will come online in the next 10 years and the market / physics will decide on the winners.

However, many R&D advances have long lead times to reach production. This makes it unlikely that cobalt will disappear completely from the manufacturing process in my opinion in the near future.

Market Activity

Recently cobalt (Co) has skyrocketed whilst nickel has not increased that much and shows possibility of more growth whilst cobalt looks to be correcting (hard). This is in my view due to

• Development of cobalt bubble unsupported by fundamentals
  
• A shift of fundamentals away from cobalt to other metals such as nickel
  

Does this mean nickel will see continue uptrend at cobalt's expense? The speculative activity in this sector seems to force manufacturers away from the underlying asset / material. Therefore it is imperative to get in early. Again this is an area of very active R&D and fundamentals can change rapidly within limited time, often before uninformed investors can react.

Futures Launching
Another interesting development is the London Metals Exchange (LME) will be launching car battery metals' futures sometime in 2019/2020:
www.cnbc.com/2018/05...-battery-metals.html
This will include cobalt, nickel, manganese, graphite and lithium. As far as I am aware futures are generally released at the top of a bubble (see gold/silver/bitcoin...).
See recent Tesla bubble and research that shows just how overvalued shares were: all due to e-vehicle hype. New tech sectors are rampant with hype. Just look at fang stocks: all hideously overvalued with exception of Google.

The hype in the e-car market is real and is an area that will continue to grow into the coming decade, but e-vehicles is a real manufacturing sector.

Comment:

Here is an update on cobalt. It's difficult to invest or trade in cobalt. Futures are available at LME, but with a lot size of 1 metric ton, which prices me out - too risky! This is for the Big Boys lol. However, there is a strong correlation between spot price and mining stocks. Need to do more research on that.