Bill Gates’ investment fund Advance Energy Ventures lately invested$ 10 million in a seven-person start-up with no profit and no guests, Mangrove Lithium.
It’s a niche investment but could have critical counteraccusations for the fleetly growing electric vehicle request, as its authors aim to ameliorate a veritably specific part of the lithium force chain Turning raw lithium into material for batteries.
Lithium is used in batteries for electric vehicles because it’s the lightest essence and has the loftiest charge-to- weight rate, which matters when you’re erecting a battery for transportation. Over the last decade, the number of electric vehicles has expanded fleetly, surpassing 10 million electric vehicles on the road encyclopedically, according to the International Energy Agency. As demand for electric vehicles continues to grow, so too will the demand for lithium.
Growth in the number and size of batteries for electric vehicles will be responsible for further than 90 of the demand for lithium by 2030, according to Andrew Miller, the principal operating officer of Benchmark Mineral Intelligence, a request intelligence company for the lithium-ion battery to the electric vehicle force chain. Demand is anticipated to grow from about metric tons of lithium carbonate fellow in 2020 to2.57 million metric tons by 2030. (Lithium carbonate fellow is the metric used to homogenize weights of different lithium products produced.)
That demand could be hard to meet because not because the volume of lithium is limited, but because there are limited coffers for turning that lithium into a form that can be used by the battery assiduity, Miller said.
Mangrove aims to help remove that tailback.
“Competitive technology to produce battery- grade lithium composites are in high demand,” explains Céline Büchel, a top exploration critic in chemicals, minerals, and mining at request exploration establishment IHS Markit. “ New product capacities need to be erected in order to meet the tremendous demand of battery-powered vehicles.”