Billionaire entrepreneur Elon Musk has proposed that Tesla might have to begin mining lithium, a critical element in electric vehicle batteries, given the skyrocketing prices of the chemical element.
In 2012, a ton of lithium cost $4,450. A decade later, in 2022, the price surged to $78,032 per ton, an increase of more than 1,650 percent. In the single year between 2021 and 2022, prices rose by 359 percent.
“Price of lithium has gone to insane levels! Tesla might actually have to get into the mining & refining directly at scale unless costs improve. There is no shortage of the element itself, as lithium is almost everywhere on Earth, but pace of extraction/refinement is slow,” Musk said in an April 9 tweet.
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