During the Battery Day held towards the end of September 2020, Elon Musk presented the news of Tesla like the cell 4680 and the new Model S Plaid. However, what was not immediately clear is that during the event there were also two representatives of US companies engaged in the extraction of lithium (Livent and Albermarle).

Lithium for batteries from the land of Nevada

The lithium remains one of the elements key to making the batteries and it is obviously crucial when it comes to making electric cars . What the representatives did not know is that Elon Musk would announce the possibility of extracting lithium from the land of Nevada becoming a competitor.

The same Elon Musk however stated on Twitter that “was not intentional! We just wanted to show that we could theoretically convert the entire fleet of US vehicles to electric using only lithium in Nevada , a single state. Tesla will only mine lithium as needed. We have also found a way to extract lithium using NaCl (table salt) “.

The article reporting what happened is from the Financial Times and also explains some of the moves that Elon Musk and Tesla they could implement in the future. The company allegedly bought land in Nevada of 40 km ² and would also be building the facilities for refining. Despite everything, mining permits could take years.

What the FT reports is the skepticism of those in the industry with the move by the automaker that it would be more of an experiment than a real intervention on the lithium extraction market. One way to make suppliers understand that if they don’t respond to your needs, they could do it alone.

Another way could be to try to give a boost to mining industry (with a view to market expansion for Tesla ) trying to shift the center of gravity from China to the United States considering that the former has the 80% of the market for the production of batteries and related components.