It's only a matter of time before electrification can be seen everywhere in the world. But, in this video clip from "The High Energy Show" on Motley Fool Live, recorded on April 5, Fool.com contributor Tyler Crowe explains how the massive demand for materials to build millions of batteries will need to be addressed on a global scale.
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Tyler Crowe: When it comes to actual, do we have enough minerals on the planet? The answer is always yes, but the biggest challenge when you're talking about materials is you're talking about, one, how much is it going to cost? Two, how long is your lead time that you have to actually ramp up production? Because bringing on a mine almost anywhere in the world takes several years between evaluation, development, typically involves building roads and all the ancillary infrastructure associated with it.
I'm trying to see if I can pull up. I think I actually had it on one of the slides that we just had. Travis, if you want to pull the slides back up. What we have is when we're talking about electric vehicles and mostly, I guess electrification of everything like we're saying, which in our case involves the use of lithium-ion batteries as your primary storage medium.
It's going to be the next slide after your hydrogen one. This is going to give us a rough idea of what we're talking about when we're looking at materials demand. I understand there's no numbers on here, I can give those to you. Right now in 2020, we'll start with graphite. That was about 141,000 tons were mined in total demand in 2020. By 2040, the estimated demand is going to go to 3.5 million tons.
Graphite is if you do not know in a lithium-ion battery, you have the anode and the cathode. Cathodes tend to be that lithium-ion or tend to be lithium where the anode tends to be a graphite solution, so that's why graphite is such a big thing.
Similarly, nickel demand, it's a conductive material that's used in it. These are the types of things that we're talking about when we're talking about adding demand on materials for electric vehicles. These are 1, 2, what is it? Seven or eight primary metals that we're talking about here. These things are incredibly important because we have to think about them globally.
We were just talking about adding electricity to the grid. That's primarily a U.S.-related topic because electricity is pretty localized. We're not shipping electrons overseas, but specifically, when you're talking about materials, it is a global commodity and we're not the only ones working on it, Chinese demand for EVs is high. Europe demand is high, and with, let's just say OECD nations plus China, we're still only looking at what is that? One-third of the total global population.
So we're talking on very large scales here over the next several 20, 30, 40 years. So if we're looking at investing in this space, I am particularly drawn to materials for the simple fact that it is going to take a long time to meet the demand for these materials, or at least getting the supplies up in time to meet this demand. The more I wrap my head around it, I'm thinking that we're going to be very structurally short on a lot of these materials for the next several years.
