Electric Cars Need Lithium. Can Chile Provide It?

The Journal.

The Wall Street Journal

Business News, Daily News, News

4.2 • 5.8K Ratings

🗓️ 16 August 2022

⏱️ 14 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Lithium is a key component of batteries in electric vehicles, and a lot of it is underground in South America. WSJ’s Ryan Dube explains why it’s so complicated to get this metal out of Chile and Bolivia, and what that means for the transition to greener energy. Further Reading: - The Place With the Most Lithium Is Blowing the Electric-Car Revolution - Lithium Prices Soar, Turbocharged By Electric-Vehicle Demand and Scant Supply Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Transcript

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0:00.0	The
0:02.6	Demand for Lithium is soaring across the world.
0:09.2	Our colleague Ryan Dubay has been writing about it.
0:12.9	So Lithium is a very light metal.
0:16.3	It's used for several different things from making glass to in X-ray machines.
0:23.6	It's used in concrete as well.
0:26.5	And it's also used to smartphones.
0:29.0	And one of the things it's needed for the most electric vehicles.
0:32.7	Electric vehicles have begun their ascent.
0:35.3	40 million electric vehicles are going to be sold by 2025.
0:39.3	Everybody's trying to build their electric cars.
0:41.7	Everybody that's in the EV space.
0:43.4	EV market EVs.
0:44.7	EVs.
0:45.7	I love EVs.
0:47.9	South America and Chile in particular have some of the world's biggest reserves of Lithium.
0:53.8	But as the EV market ramps up, getting Lithium out of the region is proving to be difficult.
0:59.0	There's fierce opposition from local communities.
1:04.9	And there's concern about whether enough of the mining profits will remain in the region.
1:09.2	It's all creating a giant bottleneck.
1:11.6	So South America is not, it's certainly not developing the Lithium or the pace that the
1:17.0	world needs.
	...

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